And now, we wait. Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is over, and with all the announcements comes a broad understanding about where Apple is taking iOS and macOS over the next year. But there are still a few lingering questions that Apple didn’t, or couldn’t, address at WWDC.
Kudos to Microsoft: the company’s upcoming overhaul of its avatar system for Xbox opens up a ton of new customization options to ensure that you can really reflect yourself in your avatar. That means adding options like wheelchairs, prosthetics, and gender-neutral clothing.
Also in the mix are new body types, a ton of new clothing options, and even more props. Basically, it seems like if you can imagine it, you can make it happen.
What will the productivity computers of the future look like? Assuming that we’re all not going to be working on spreadsheets on our smartphones in 10 years, it’s a real question, and it’s one that Microsoft and Apple are approaching in strikingly different ways. Last week at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple gave us a clearer indication about which way it’s heading — and the choice is a bit of a gamble.
In a rare move, Apple CEO Tim Cook dished–albeit vaguely–about Apple’s plans in the self-driving car space during an interview on Bloomberg TV:
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in an interview on Bloomberg Television on June 5. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.”
“We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects,” Cook said in his most detailed comments to date on Apple’s plans in the car space. “It’s probably one of the most difficult A.I. projects actually to work on.”
Cook specifically says that autonomy is a “core technology” but is also careful to point out that he’s not confirming any sort of product direction at the present. Which prompted this sort of response from Apple analyst Neil Cybart:
Cook won't say it, but I will.
Apple is working on core technologies for self-driving cars because they want their own self-driving car.
Strategically, I can see where Cybart is coming from. Apple is a company that doesn’t invest a lot of money and effort–and from all indications, Project Titan is not short on either–into anything that it can’t turn around into some sort of product. And in general that means something that it creates and sells directly to the consumer, not something that it licenses to other companies. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be working on building the underlying technologies first.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I am here for this, as the kids say.
I’ve read a bunch of the Christopher Priest run of Black Panther and very much enjoyed it; have yet to really dive into Ta-Nehisi Coates’s more recent stories, but they’re high on my Marvel Unlimited list. Chadwick Boseman was really great in Captain America: Civil War, and I think this will be a fantastic dive into the character for those who aren’t familiar with him–which is probably a lot of people. Plus, such a fantastic cast: Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Sterling K. Brown, and so many more. Looking forward to this immensely.
Moreover, with the recent success of Wonder Woman, here’s hoping that Black Panther will confirm to studios that big blockbusters featuring women and people of color are worth making, in the only language that those big businesses seem to understand: profit.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Six Colors is sponsored this week by Linode. But in a real way, it’s brought to you every week by Linode. The server that runs this site (as well as The Incomparable) is in Linode’s Dallas data center, one of nine spread around the world.
Linode lets you get up and running with a hosted Linux server in seconds. The tools are easy to understand, and you get to choose your resources and your Linux distro. There are charts to tell you what’s going on with your server, from CPU to network transfer, so you can make sure nothing is out of hand. And if you’re worried that having a dedicated server on the Internet is going to be pricey, don’t be—Linode plans start at just $5 per month.
Linode guarantees 99.9% server uptime, so my server is reliable and available. It’s great for hosting databases, running a mail or Git server, operating apps… or even running a tech blog and podcast network.
Great piece by Johnny Lin about scam iOS apps, including an amazing “VPN app” that’s full of misspelled words and outrageous “free trials” that actually lead to exorbitant charges:
Buried on the third line in a paragraph of text in small font, iOS casually tells me that laying my finger on the home button means I agree to start a $100 subscription. And not only that, but it’s $100 PER WEEK? I was one Touch ID away from a $400 A MONTH subscription to reroute all my internet traffic to a scammer?
The App Store is huge. There are always going to be people trying to rip off users. It’s up to Apple to police its store and root this stuff out before its customers are bilked.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Today at the Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple made some major announcements about improvements to its offerings to the podcast world.
As mentioned in Monday’s keynote, the Apple Podcasts app—which is almost certainly the most popular method of listening to podcasts in the world—is getting an overhaul in iOS 11, including a new interface as well as some changes to how podcasts can be structured. This comes in the way of extensions to the feed format podcasts use to list their available episodes.
New extensions to Apple’s podcast feed specification will allow podcasts to define individual seasons and explain whether an episode is a teaser, a full episode, or bonus content. These extensions will be read by the Podcast app and used to present a podcast in a richer way than the current, more linear, approach. (Since podcast feeds are just text, other podcast apps will be free to follow Apple’s lead and also alter how they display podcasts based on these tags.)
Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order—”start at the first episode!”—or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important.
I’m excited by these changes because, yes, some of my podcasts are seasonal and are best consumed from the first episode onward. I’ll be adjusting my own podcast feeds to take advantage of Apple’s extensions as soon as it makes sense to do so.
The other big news out of today’s session is for podcasters (and presumably for podcast advertisers): Apple is opening up in-episode analytics of podcasts. For the most part, podcasters only really know when an episode’s MP3 file is downloaded. Beyond that, we can’t really tell if anyone listens to an episode, or how long they listen—only the apps know for sure.
Ooh, podcast analytics coming for Apple Podcasts. And a new podcast feed spec with seasons and better title handling. ðŸ‘ðŸ‘
Apple said today that it will be using (anonymized) data from the app to show podcasters how many people are listening and where in the app people are stopping or skipping. This has the potential to dramatically change our perception of how many people really listen to a show, and how many people skip ads, as well as how long a podcast can run before people just give up.
While Apple’s Podcasts app is the most popular one around, it’s not the entire market—so statistics from Apple can’t be used as the source of truth for how all podcast listeners behave. But I suspect it will be used as a proxy for the larger podcast world, since it will be the largest source of listener data around.
That was one of the more subtle messages coming out of Apple’s annual WWDC keynote this year. The company had plenty of eye-catching announcements, like the new HomePod speaker and a space gray iMac Pro, but buried among the myriad capabilities of the upcoming iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra updates are a collection of features aimed at protecting users’ privacy by targeting annoying web ads.
The real goal for Google appears to be not just blocking ads sold by other digital suppliers besides Google, but to undermine third-party ad blockers, which stop Google ads along with everyone else’s… It’s hard to build a coalition in favor of annoying ads. And publishers would be guaranteed a revenue stream, either through charging consumers for an ad-free experience, or from the ads themselves. So the policy aligns the interests of virtually everyone on the web content side. Improving Google’s bottom line and crushing anyone who tries to compete is just a nice side benefit.
The current web advertising world is brutal for readers and publishers alike. But is Google riding in on a white horse to save the web, or just using its leverage to prop up its own core business? This is a complicated story, and needs to be approached with skepticism and scrutiny.
Pirate Joe’s, which for more than five years celebrated its status as an unauthorized importer of Trader Joe’s products with a blend of cheeky humor and David-versus-Goliath determination, closed its doors at 12:01 a.m. Thursday after a protracted legal battle with the American corporation.
Trader Joe’s is resolutely an American store, apparently, despite being owned by Germans. For non-Americans, Trader Joe’s is a grocery store that’s largely populated by store brands (rather than name-brand products), with good prices and frequently good quality. My family doesn’t do more than a fraction of our shopping at Trader Joe’s, but there are many items in our pantry that we only buy from Trader Joe’s.
I just love the idea that some dude in Vancouver loved Trader Joe’s so much that he set up a store and began reselling items bought across the border in Washington, like a reverse-bootlegger from the era of prohibition.
He would fill a cart with the items he needed and then have companions pay at the cashier — the most sensitive part of the expedition because it was where he most risked being spotted. In ads on Craigslist, Mr. Hallatt recruited “day laborers” for $25 an hour.
Alas, Pirate Joe’s is now dead. And while Trader Joe’s should probably consider expanding into Canada, Target remains an object lession in major American stores failing in the Great White North.
Way back in 2010, when the iPad first debuted, I called it the third revolution of computing. It was an opportunity to start fresh, without the 30 years of baggage of the personal computer–to build a new device that was simple and easy to use, the same thing the Mac tried to do back to the PC back in the ’80s.
So it’s more than a little amusing to me that, of the many features announced for the iPad in iOS 11 this week, the most welcome have ended up being the ones seemingly pulled from the very devices the iPad was trying to leave behind.
That’s not to say that there isn’t an iPad spin on these features–it’s not as though they’ve been lifted whole cloth from the Mac and dragged and dropped onto the iPad. But it turns out that maybe, just maybe, Apple got some of these things right the first time around, and that the company didn’t need to reinvent the wheel when it came to the future of computing.
This week, we learned that Apple’s much-rumored smart speaker is real, and it’s called HomePod. Now the wait begins—six months until it ships in December. But while we’re waiting, Apple’s still tweaking the product and getting it ready to launch.
Sure, a few of us lucky souls were able to listen to a HomePod at Apple’s developer conference, but nobody outside of Apple has talked to one or picked one up. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s because this is a product that’s not finished yet. Apple doesn’t want to publicly commit to a feature and then realize it can’t ship it; the product as the company conceives it today may not be the product that ends up in customers’ hands in December.
watchOS 4 provides an option that kills the honeycomb Home screen of apps. You can change that screen to display apps in a list rather than a grid. Grid View is still activated by default, but anyone looking for something different can switch to List View.
There’s way more here, so it’s totally worth a read.
One interesting piece of news this week: WebRTC, a set of technologies that allow web developers to built media-driven web apps for functions like videoconferencing and audio chat without any plug-ins, is going to ship in Safari for iOS 11 and a few versions of macOS. (The first rumblings that this might happen were back in January.)
This is exciting for a few reasons—I use Chrome to play Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, because Roll20 relies on a bunch of WebRTC stuff. But the big one is that two web apps designed to make podcasting easy also rely on WebRTC. That means right now, they only work on Chrome and Firefox, but in the near future it’s possible they could also work on Safari.
Now, there are a lot of potential show-stoppers here. Is Apple’s implementation somehow different from Chome’s, in a way that could perhaps break the web apps Cast and Zencastr? Or will it be easy for Cast and Zencastr to welcome Safari users?
Most importantly, if WebRTC is supported on iOS 11—and everything I’ve heard so far says it is—this suggests that I could record a group podcast entirely on an iPad or iPhone, including a local recording, using Cast or Zencastr. That’s a big stride forward for people who want to use iOS devices for podcasting.
I don’t want to jump for joy just yet, but the signs are encouraging.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I may have a bit of a smart speaker problem.
My kitchen has an Amazon Echo, my office an Echo Dot and a Google Home. A new Echo Show is due to join them in a few weeks. As someone who’s hip-deep in the Apple ecosystem, that might make the newly announced HomePod seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve found myself hesitant since the device’s introduction earlier this week.
Let’s caveat this whole shebang by reminding all of us–myself included–that it is super early in the process here. The device shown off at WWDC is, by all indications, far from complete. Nobody got to so much as touch one, and the most that folks seemed to get was a sound comparison test. A lot can change in the six months before this product ships, and we’re likely to hear way more about it in September.
But, all of that aside, what keeps me from giving my wholehearted support to the HomePod is the product messaging. It seems clear to me that this device was designed with music first. That makes sense: Apple’s relationship with music is well documented, and they’ve been down this road before with the late iPod Hi-Fi. As Phil Schiller mentioned during the live episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show this week, what’s changed is that the company now has an incredibly deep bench of audio engineering talent that it didn’t have a decade ago. (Not least of all because it spent a few billion dollars on a little company that makes audio equipment.)
I have faith that the sound will be great. It may very well compare favorably with my Sonos Play:1’s, if early reports are any indication. It will certainly provide better sound than any of those other smart speakers.1
But here’s the thing: it’s not the speaker part of the HomePod I’m hung up on–it’s the smart part.
Because the HomePod seems to be all about music, with the rest of those smart features positioned more as afterthoughts. While music is certainly an important part of my everyday life, I’ve grown attached to the smart capabilities of those other devices.
Siri’s good enough at some of the things that I use those smart speakers for–setting timers, getting weather forecasts, and (mostly) playing music–but going beyond those core competencies falls apart fast. It still doesn’t respond well to a lot of general queries (to be fair, neither does the Echo; the Google Home is the clear winner there–no surprise as it’s backed by the Google search engine). In my house, Siri is third-in-line for any voice-based query that doesn’t directly relate to Apple devices.
Siri may very well be sufficient for what you want to do with the HomePod, but after six years, I’ve found myself concerned about the seemingly slow pace of development. I’d hoped for major improvements to the voice assistant during this week’s keynote, and instead got an improved voice and some meager additions to SiriKit.
And with Siri as the brains and, more or less, as the OS for the HomePod, it doesn’t instill a lot of confidence. As it stands right now, the HomePod is more of an accessory than a platform. And a platform is what I want out of the device. Third-party developers should be able to extend the capabilities, as Amazon has done with the Echo, whether through an expansion of SiriKit or a full-fledged SDK. I think this is a big area of computing going forward, and I want to see Apple commit to it.
I believe that’s possible, too. One thing jumped out at me during Apple’s presentation: the HomePod is powered by an A8 chip, the same processor which powered the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and is still found in the fourth-generation Apple TV. That’s a lot of power for a speaker, and while I’m sure the audio enhancements that Apple is doing in the HomePod requires some power, I’d be surprised if it couldn’t be harnessed to other ends.
In the end, it’s that promise that gets my attention with the HomePod and sways me back towards the idea that I might actually buy one–the promise of future potential.
Not to mention feeding my smart speaker addiction. (Come on, like I’m not going to write about an Apple smart speaker? Really?)
Full disclosure: I’m not even remotely an audiophile. I listen to music on my Echo all the time, like an animal. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Jason Snell got to try out the HomePod: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/06/ears-on-with-the-homepod/
He’s also got a wrap-up of Apple’s announcements: http://www.macworld.com/article/3199787/wwdc/wwdc-2017-keynote-taking-it-all-in.html
Bozoma Saint John is reportedly leaving Apple for Uber: http://www.blackenterprise.com/news/apple-music-bozoma-saint-john-leaving/
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Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Monday was a big day for the iPad. Apple introduced new iPad Pro models, and the unveiling of iOS 11 revealed a major focus on iPad productivity features.
As someone who frequently uses an iPad to get work done—in fact, I didn’t even bring a Mac to WWDC this year—the announcements on Monday made me happy. I can’t wait to spend a lot more time using the 10.5-inch iPad Pro and iOS 11. But in the meantime, I do have a few lingering questions…
How does the 10.5-inch iPad Pro compare to the old 9.7-inch model and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro?
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is dead. The classic iPad screen size is now only available on the fifth-generation iPad introduced earlier this year. Instead, Apple has created an iPad Pro with a larger screen while trying to maintain the weight and general feel of the classic iPad.
I was able to use one for about half an hour yesterday, and without holding it up to a 9.7-inch model, it certainly didn’t feel any bigger—and was still noticeably smaller and lighter than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro I tote around most of the time.
In most cases, a mobile device’s dimensions getting bigger wouldn’t be great news, but the new iPad Pro is taller by .4 inches—and that means that the Smart Keyboard and any other keyboard accessories built for it will have room for slightly wider keycaps. The old 9.7-inch iPad Pro was a little bit too narrow for full-sized keys, but this new model should be better. And the larger display means the on-screen keyboard will be more comfortable, too.
The new iPad Pro’s screen isn’t just bigger, it’s got more pixels—at 2224 by 1668, it’s larger than the 9.7-inch’s 2048 x 1536 resolution. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t chosen to include a higher-resolution display that would match the 2732 by 2048 resolution of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.
In the end, I suspect that the 10.5-inch iPad Pro will be a nice upgrade for users of the 9.7-inch model, thanks to that bigger screen and slightly taller dimension. But it’s good that Apple has chosen to keep the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro around, because that model still has a larger screen with more pixels.
How fully baked is iPad multitasking?
The most dramatic changes in iOS 11 all seem to relate to multitasking on the iPad. The classic iOS home screen Dock has been given an upgrade, featuring more apps (including apps suggested dynamically by Siri) and the ability to drag apps out into Slide Over or Split View. The old many-cards multitasking window is gone, replaced with a view that’s a set of tiles reminiscent of the view when you zoom out of a web page in Safari, mixed in with a strong Mission Control vibe from macOS. A new version of Slide Over, which features an app window floating over another app on the side of the screen like an overgrown picture-in-picture window, opens the possibility of running three apps at once.
In the half an hour I spent with an iPad Pro running an early version of iOS 11, I came away impressed. This isn’t a small revision designed to nudge iOS across some imaginary goal line: this is a whole set of features that have been rebuilt to interoperate, all in service of making it easier to flow from app to app. Dragging apps around was smooth and fairly intuitive; the only time I ran into a problem was when I tried to dismiss an app running in Slide Over—I ended up having to transmute it into a Split View, then slide it off the screen from there.
That’s almost certainly a bug, which makes an important point: I would expect that some aspects of the iOS 11 approach to multitasking to shift over the summer as Apple gets customer feedback and rethinks some of its decisions. But what I have seen so far makes me feel that this is a feature that’s extremely well thought out and implemented.
How big a paradigm shift is the new Files app, really?
Every time you star to read a story about how Apple betrayed the simplicity of the iPad this week by recreating the macOS Finder in the new Files app, close the window and move on with your life. That’s a really bad take.
The fact is, if file browsing is a Pandora’s Box for iOS, it was opened a couple of years ago when Apple introduced the iCloud Drive app. That app provided a system of files and folders that iOS users could browse and act upon. The genie’s been out of the bottle for two years, at least to a limited degree.
Also, I’d dispute that the addition of Files is any sort of Pandora’s Box. Unlike the Mac, where Finder sits at the heart of the computing experience, Files is an app that you only see if you choose to open it. People who don’t need to think in terms of managing files will never need to use it. But for those of us who do have workflows that require managing files, Files should allow us to stop fighting the operating system and get down to business.
I have a bunch of questions about the details about how Files works and what its limitations are, and I suppose we’ll learn a lot more as the summer progresses. I wonder how different cloud-storage providers will choose to integrate with Files. I’m curious about how drag-and-drop and Files will interoperate. I wonder where the files in the “On my iPad” folder live, and if this new app will make it easier to load files from external devices or network shares or files dragged in from a Mac via iTunes. It’s all in the details, but the big picture is promising.
How awkward or not-awkward will new two-hand gestures feel?
One of the cooler features in iOS 11 is its embrace of two-handed gestures on the iPad. You can drag an app icon with one hand while flipping through pages on the home screen with the other hand. You can select one app with one hand and tap with the other to add additional apps. This is next-level multitouch support, and it has the potential to be pretty powerful—but also pretty confusing for the uninitiated. How Apple manages that trick, so that people won’t accidentally trigger these figures and end up lost and confused, is going to be something to watch.
There are also ergonomic issues: To use two-handed gestures, your iPad can’t be in your hands. So these are gestures primarily intended for iPads that are on a table, in a case, in a lap, or otherwise someplace where you’ve got both hands free to manipulate data. That’s limiting, but it’s also freeing—these large devices are far more likely to be put into situations like that, and if you consider a future with even larger iOS devices, two-handed gestures should become an even bigger part of the interface story.
Still, this is a first step—and it may be a little weird to start. I look forward to seeing how people react to the gestures and how natural they feel.
It matters to some more than others
Yesterday I was sitting with a couple notable Apple writers and they were taken aback with the device I was writing my article with—a 12.9-inch iPad with the Brydge keyboard. I’ll grant you, at first glance it’s easy to get confused about what device I’m using. It looks like a MacBook Pro, but it’s not. It’s an iPad and a clip-on Bluetooth keyboard.
But once they realized I was working on my iPad, the larger issue was that they both didn’t really understand why. And I realized, this is an interesting area where the Apple world—which is often viewed as monolithic from the outside—is actually segmented in a few interesting ways. Those of us who work on the iPad are a loud, passionate group—but there are many people who would just prefer to use a MacBook. I don’t think these positions are necessarily in opposition—not every Apple product is for every person, and that’s fine. But it was an interesting reminder that even among my peer group, there are plenty of people for whom the progression of the iPad as a productivity device is an interesting story, but not one with any personal impact.
Fair enough. Whether you’re an observer or someone who is actively involved in using the iPad Pro, this has been pretty good week—and the road to iOS 11’s release promises to be an interesting ride.
