In an unsigned statement, Apple has rebutted Spotify’s claims of unfair treatment by suggesting that it’s the music service that wants to avoid the rules that everybody else plays by. The company also took aim at Spotify’s treatment of artists, though it claimed that the company is “suing music creators” when the truth is, of course, a little more complex.
While Apple’s arguments are largely compelling, especially in terms of Spotify essentially wanting all the benefits of the App Store platform without having to pay anything, this issue still isn’t a black-and-white case of one side right, the other side wrong. Apple isn’t an altruistic company anymore than Spotify is, and even if Spotify is in the wrong here, it still may be time for Apple to rethink its 30 percent rate.
We’re teetering on the edge of an embarrassment of Apple riches. The company’s March event is just over a week away, but with this week’s official announcement of the 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference, many eyes are already fixed on that point, three months from now.
Whatever comes our way in March, it will almost certainly pale in comparison to WWDC, which is probably the most significant event in Apple’s calendar. Yes, the September launch of new iPhones and attendant devices may get more attention, but WWDC is where the company sets its agenda for the year—or years—to come.
Though it’s still a few months away, it’s never too early to start thinking about where Apple may be looking to focus the priorities of its many and varied platforms.
Apple’s just inviting everyone to everything now. On Thursday Apple unveiled its Worldwide Developers Conference site, with the dates we all suspected—June 3-7 in San Jose. So get ready for an interesting keynote on the morning of Monday, June 3!
In many ways, this is an old story. For several years, Apple and Spotify have been jousting over Apple’s App store rules. Apple claims that Spotify doesn’t want to follow the rules that Apple has instituted to protect its users, while Spotify says that Apple is just trying to prop up its own second-rate services rather than straight-up competing.
Who’s right? The truth, it will not surprise you, is somewhere in the middle.
Our long national nightmare is over, you can get a battery pack for your Palm phone: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/3/11/18260713/mophie-palm-phone-battery-pack-charger-keychain
In less thrilling news, Apple has announced an event for March 25th: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/11/apple-announces-march-25-event-video-and-news-services-expected.html
Steven Spielberg has some weird thing against Netflix: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/02/steven-spielberg-theaters-over-streaming-netflix-1202045064/
Jason Snell on Upgrade talks about mean Apple being mean to the people producing its shows: https://www.relay.fm/upgrade/235
Apple is making a Time Bandits series: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/11/apple-time-bandits-series-taika-waititi-director/
Apple is also working on a show with Chris Evans: https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/chris-evans-defending-jacob-apple-series-1202951682/
Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Apple: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18257965/elizabeth-warren-break-up-apple-monopoly-antitrust
Twitter’s twttr prototype: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/twitters-new-prototype-app-twttr-launches-today/
Slack’s mobile apps have a new dark mode: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/11/18260488/slack-dark-mode-ios-android-mobile-out-of-beta
Our thanks to UNTUCKit, makers of great shirts specifically designed to be worn untucked.. With more than 50 fit combinations, UNTUCKit shirts look great on tall, short, slim, and athletic guys of all ages. Go to UNTUCKit.com (http://untuckit.com) and save 20% on your first order by using my code REBOUND at checkout.
Our thanks to Oregon State University E-campus. Want to take the fast track to your career in technology? Earn your computer science degree online from Oregon State University E-campus and tap into unlimited career possibilities in any field. Learn more at http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/rebound.
Yes, the next Coda is so different it won’t even be called Coda.
Frankly, we were worried that developers may have tried Coda in the past, decided it wasn’t for them, and written the app off forever. This new version is so new, it deserves a fresh start.
And then, incredibly, a new Coda arrived on the scene – a reimagined document at coda.io – and we reached an agreement to let them have the name. They’re Coda now. And we’re free to look to the future.
So the next Coda won’t be “Coda”. So what will it be?
The end of an era, but also the beginning of an era! Panic’s software is always excellent, and I expect that this new Coda, by any other name, will smell as sweet.1
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the web, or at least the date that Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal at the Swiss particle physics lab CERN involving the creation of a hypertextual system that would end up becoming the web as we know it today.
The history of web browsers on Apple devices takes a lot of twists and turns. Fortunately, I’ve been around for most of them—in fact, my first magazine cover story ever was in July 1996 about the first big browser war. You might be surprised just how much impact Apple has had on the development of the web itself.
Today Ben Thompson takes apart presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up big tech companies, and then starts to put it back together. It’s a great, in-depth piece and I recommend that you read the whole thing, but I want to call out a little bit about Apple:
…do consumers not matter at all here? Is Senator Warren seriously proposing that smartphone be sold with no apps at all? Was Apple breaking the law when they shipped the first iPhone with only first-party apps? At what point did delivering an acceptable consumer experience out-of-the-box cross the line into abusing a dominant position? This argument may make sense in theory but it makes zero sense in reality.
What is even more striking, though, is that the App Store does have a massive antitrust problem: it is not Apple unfairly competing with app developers, it is Apple unfairly imposing massive complexity and extracting 30% of revenue with its contractual requirement, enforced by App Review, that developers use Apple’s payment mechanism…
The important takeaway for this article, though, is the degree to which Senator Warren missed the point: there is significant consumer benefit both to having preinstalled apps and also to Apple controlling the installation of apps. There is a big benefit to suppliers (app developers) as well: the app market on PCs died in large part due to security concerns, which Apple obviated with the App Store to the tremendous benefit of every participant in the ecosystem. Senator Warren’s proposal would make the App Store worse for everyone.
When I saw Nilay Patel’s brief interview with Warren I had the same reaction—she seems to be suggesting “solutions” to things that aren’t problems, all in the name of sticking it to the big guys. As Thompson writes, “Tech is a means, not an end, but Senator Warren’s approach presumes the latter. That is why she proposes the same set of rules for the sale of toasters and the sale of apps, and everything in between.”
Read through Thompson’s piece and you’ll see him identify numerous areas where giant tech companies could be restrained, including their voracious acquisitions of any company that might possibly threaten them in the future. This is the trick with stuff like this—a lot of people can agree that the tech industry is out of control, but when it comes to legislation, it’s all about the details. Thompson makes a forceful argument that Warren has many of the details wrong.
Get ready… in two weeks’ time Apple will be having an event in Cupertino at the Steve Jobs Theater that will presumably feature new subscription services, including an introduction of its new video service.
Hey readers, Dan here. Never thought I’d see the day when I was sponsoring our own blog, but I just wanted to let you know about my latest novel, The Bayern Agenda.
Simon Kovalic, the Commonwealth’s premiere covert operative, has a problem. The rival Illyrican Empire is trying to make a deal with Bayern, a planet-sized corporation that’s one of the galaxy’s financial hubs. That’s not good for the Commonwealth, and it’s not good for Kovalic. But, to make matters worse, he’s injured on a mission, and command of his team of operatives is handed over to Lieutenant Commander Natalie Taylor…his ex-wife. So now he’s got two problems.
But when Kovalic’s boss tells him that the situation’s even more complicated than they thought, it’s up to him to find the team before they’re all caught or killed. And the problems, well, they just keep coming.
When people roll out wish lists of things they wish Apple would do to its products, they’re often focused on brand new features. We all like new features, sure, but part of me worries that while the focus is on the shiny, the basics–the software that we’re all using everyday–gets ignored. In particular, I’m really ready for Apple to tackle that old standby: Mail.
I know: email’s dead, supplanted by a myriad of other means of digital communication. Except, for many of us, email is still something that we’re unavoidably attached to when it comes to corresponding with people, signing up for accounts, and archiving or doing a to-do list.
Apple expended a lot of effort developing tools in iOS 12 that let us spend less time on our devices by preventing us from using them at certain times. But what about all that time where we are using our smartphones, tablets, and computers? Maybe there are features that can help us be more efficient, and treat our time with the respect it deserves.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
So the other day Robert Greenblatt, the new chairman of Entertainment at Warner Media, where he’s in charge of HBO, TNT, TBS, truTV, and the forthcoming Warner Media streaming service, said something to NBC’s Dylan Byers about Netflix that got people tittering: “Netflix doesn’t have a brand,” he said. “It’s just a place you go to get anything — it’s like Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s a great business model when you’re trying to reach as many people on the planet as you can.”
In the aftermath I’ve seen lots of folks stepping up to defend Encyclopedia Britannica(!) and Netflix. Maybe Greenblatt’s statement isn’t the most artfully worded. If you want to point and laugh, Nelson style, you can. Netflix is wildly successful… it’s not just a brand, it’s a powerful cultural force, the kind that can fill thrift stores after the launch of a show about de-cluttering, when it’s not winning multiple Academy Awards.
But I think I understand what Greenblatt is getting at. In fact, I wrote something similar earlier this week at Macworld:
Apple’s not Netflix and it isn’t going to be. There’s nothing wrong with Apple’s executives having a clear vision about what the vibe of their content should be. For Apple’s video service to be successful, it should be a set of programs that fit a particular worldview. The best networks have an identity and their programmers know exactly what it is.
Netflix tries to be everything to everybody, and spends tens of billions of dollars to do that. So far, as I can tell, Apple’s not going that direction. It needs to choose. Apple’s video service will benefit from a clear brand identity, and if that brand identity is bright, optimistic, and broadly appealing, with standards more like broadcast TV than premium cable, that won’t preclude it from finding an audience.
In other words, unless you spend tens of billions of dollars on original content over the course of a decade—and other than Netflix, the only other player even close to that level right now is Amazon—you can’t be Netflix. Netflix’s target audience is everyone. It casts the widest possible net. It is launching every kind of show and movie, by the dozen, every single week of the year.
Smaller players just entering the streaming market are not going to be capable of out-Netflixing Netflix for years, if ever. Instead, they all need to pick their spots carefully, and spend their money wisely. New streaming services must define who they are, what kind of content they’re going to offer, and market themselves to a specific potential audience.
Greenblatt doesn’t seem to be insulting Netflix to me. He’s praising, or at least acknowledging, that Netflix is playing a different game—and he’s planting seeds now to fend off any comparisons between his streaming service and Netflix later. Nobody’s going to be matching Netflix—not Warner Media, not Apple, not even Disney—for years to come. They will all lose a comparison to Netflix. The only winning move is not to play.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The keyboard that started it all.
This week on the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa floated the concept of a MacBook Hierarchy of Needs, a priority list of features for the next time Apple redesigns the MacBook line, as is rumored to happen later this year.
It’s a fun thought experiment, because it requires you to rank your wish list of laptop features. That’s important, because if I’ve learned anything in this wacky world of ours, it’s that you can never get everything you ask for, so you’ve got to prioritize.
The ATP hosts all made a “good keyboard” their top priority, an idea that would’ve been surprising a few years ago but now is almost a given. Yes, of course, Apple laptops need to be fast and reliable and have great displays and good battery life, but the past few years’ worth of MacBooks have made a lot of people realize the truth: a bad/unreliable laptop keyboard isn’t something you can really work around if you’re a laptop user.
This is why a lot of nice-to-have-features, like SD card slots, have to fall way down the hierarchy of needs. Any feature that can be rectified with an add-on adapter falls immediately to the bottom of the list. You’re stuck with a laptop keyboard forever, and if you’re committed to the Mac and every single Mac laptop that’s sold uses the exact same keyboard, there’s nowhere to run.
Apple’s mistake isn’t that it designed a clever new keyboard that decreases travel while increasing tactile feedback in order to make the MacBook ultra thin—it’s that it made a keyboard without broad appeal and then forced it into all of its new laptop designs. I love Apple’s tendency to make bold design decisions, but as the single hardware vendor on the Mac platform, Apple’s designers have a responsibility to create features that don’t leave users with nowhere to turn. Better to make a keyboard that nobody loves (but everyone can use) than something loved by a quarter of users, met with indifference by half, and despised by the remaining quarter.
If Apple designed a weird keyboard, or mouse, or trackpad for an iMac, it would be annoying, but you could just buy a replacement from a third party. You can add a DVD drive or a SD card reader or any other reader for a media type Apple has deemed uncool via USB. But a laptop’s keyboard is fundamental to its identity. It’s not the place for bold new directions, it’s a place for boring and reliable. Apple and its users are still living down a decision made several years ago now.
It’s a little unfair for me to even attempt to create my own MacBook Hierarchy of Needs, in large part because I no longer travel with a Mac laptop, instead opting for an iPad. But I think that decision says something about my priorities. My iPad isn’t limited to an Apple-supplied keyboard. I can use Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, or a Brydge laptop-style keyboard (when they arrive this spring), or literally any other Bluetooth or USB keyboard I want. It’s a relief.
Still, if I were to rank a hierarchy of MacBook needs, it would start with all the things that users can’t change later, and that are important to laptop users. The keyboard, yes, and also the display. As the ATP hosts pointed out, there’s a possibility that this rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro might actually have a display capable of displaying true native Retina resolution, rather than the scaled default found on all Retina MacBooks.
I might love an SD card slot and a return of MagSafe and for Apple to keep the headphone jack around, but in the end, there are adapters that will bridge those gaps if need be. No adapter will solve the problem of an unreliable or unpleasant keyboard or replace a display. That’s where Apple must supply something that works for everyone—and if the needs of its users are varied, it should offer a variety of products that can fulfill those needs. A one-size-fits-all approach can work, but only if you’re really successful with the choices you make. With the 2015 MacBook keyboard design, Apple missed the mark—and still forced the result into every single new laptop it designed.
Here’s hoping that Apple has spent the last few years coming up with its own hierarchy of MacBook needs, and that it recognizes that it must tread lightly when it comes to the features that its users have no choice but to accept.
Dan’s new book is out: https://www.amazon.com/Bayern-Agenda-Book-Galactic-Cold/dp/0857668196/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1551813978&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
Corning is working on foldable glass just to show Dan: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/05/apple-supplier-corning-foldable-glass-display/
iFixit says Apple has quietly fixed the footlighting issue on some MacBook Pros: https://ifixit.org/blog/13979/apples-2018-macbook-pros-attempt-to-solve-flexgate-without-admitting-it-exists/
Dan would like to thank Dave Nanian for his help. He makes SuperDuper! https://shirt-pocket.com
Apple acquires Lighthouse AI’s patents: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/04/apple-lighthouse-ai-patent-purchase/
Apple has also acquired PullString: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/apple-buys-pullstring-toytalk/
The researcher who found the Keychain bug gave it to Apple despite the company not giving bounties for macOS bugs: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/04/researcher-gives-apple-details-of-macos-keychain-security-flaw-despite-no-mac-bug-bounty-program/
Google also shared a high severity macOS kernel bug: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/04/google-details-macos-kernel-flaw/
A former member of Apple’s legal team was charged with insider trading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/13/sec-charges-former-apple-exec-with-insider-trading/?utm_term=.bc7f7b1e9fca
Steve Troughton-Smith’s Marzipan tool: https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/marzipanify
Our thanks to Oregon State University E-campus. Want to take the fast track to your career in technology? Earn your computer science degree online from Oregon State University E-campus and tap into unlimited career possibilities in any field. Learn more at ecampus.oregonstate.edu/rebound.
And our thanks to Indochino (https://www.Indochino.com) where you’ll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code “REBOUND” and get any premium suit for just $359.
Our thanks also to Legacybox (http://legacybox.com/rebound) the world’s largest, most trusted, digitizer of home movies and photos. There’s never been a better time to digitally preserve your old home movies, film reels, and photos. Go to Legacybox.com/REBOUND to get 40% off your first order!
This week the New York Post published a report that fits into every narrative about Apple’s forthcoming video-streaming service: that Apple, a skittish tech company that’s not used to having its fate determined by content produced by outsiders, has been heavy-handed in providing feedback to the people creating TV series for Apple’s new service.
I believe there’s got to be some truth in there, but this is a more complicated story than perhaps the Post is interested in telling. (Shocker.)
Just as the spirit of Antoni Gaudà pervades Barcelona, Apple is everywhere at Mobile World Congress—and nowhere at all. Apple doesn’t go to industry trade shows, but it’s always present, as a bar for other companies to compare themselves to and differentiate themselves from. Apple won’t say that it does the same (even though I suspect Apple sends employees to Mobile World Congress every year just to look around), but that’s okay—we can do that job for them. So here’s a collection of observations about how Apple relates to the announcements we’ve seen in the last week, both from Barcelona and from Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco.
My office file server still has a lot of free space, but one of these days I’m going to fill it to the brim with old podcast project files. So I’ve been considering what to do to reduce the amount of archival data I’m storing. A while back, Marco Arment told me about his method of dealing with old project files—a shell script that uses the flac command-line utility to losslessly compress the giant uncompressed audio files that take up the bulk of space in any podcast project. The result is almost a 50 percent space savings!
In practical terms, after a few weeks (or in the case of a couple of podcasts I do, a year) I am not likely to need to go back to my original source files again. (And if I do, I’ve got a shell script to decompress all the archived files.) What I wanted to do was create an automated system in which projects would automatically get compressed after a waiting period. Since I store all my files on a Mac mini, I decided to use Noodlesoft’s Hazel to watch my folders and perform the automation using AppleScript.
This ended up being a multi-stage process. First, I needed to set up a Hazel rule that would look at a folder’s age and judge if it’s ready to be archived. This required me to extend Hazel’s functionality via a small script that would check to see if a folder actually contained any Logic projects—and would leave it alone if it didn’t.
This rule set only finds folders modified in the past three months that are not from this year—a weird restriction, but at the end of the calendar year I do an end-of-the-year clip show on The Incomparable, and so I don’t want to bother compressing old projects that are eligible for inclusion in that show. (This way, my Mac mini will have something to do on January 1 every year—namely compressing nine months worth of projects.)
The last item, though, is the tricky addition I needed to make—it runs an embedded AppleScript that looks inside the folder to ensure there’s at least one Logic project inside. That script looks like this:
