By Jason Snell

January 22, 2024 9:00 AM PT

Two e-readers that made me reconsider why I use e-readers

I’ve been writing about e-readers—Kindles, Kobos, and the like—since the first month of this site’s existence. I write about them not just because I’m an enthusiastic user of the devices in this category but also because I’m fascinated by these strange devices that are so very different from the phones, tablets and computers that fill the rest of our lives.

This month, I’ve been using a few different devices that push the definition of an e-reader to its limits. As a result, I’ve ended up challenging myself to define exactly why I like e-readers—and why I’m not satisfied just using an iPad or an iPhone to read books.

The unlikely contenders

After a somewhat underwhelming experience with the Boox Leaf 2 and a strangely satisfying time with the phone-shaped Boox Palma, I decided to take one more trip to the parallel world of Boox devices, which run Android but have E-Ink displays rather than the traditional backlit screens found in modern smartphones.

This time, I tried out the $250 Boox Page, which has physical page-turn buttons and uses the same screen as the $190 Kobo Libra 2 and $160 Kindle Paperwhite. It was a pretty great experience—with all the caveats that I’ve brought up before when writing about an Android-driven E-Ink device.

When you buy a Kindle or Kobo, you can just turn it on and use it without any configuration beyond logging into your Amazon or Kobo accounts. Android devices aren’t like that—there’s a lot of work to get it the way you want it, including downloading apps and then configuring various extensions that make those apps behave better on the slow-refreshing E-Ink displays.

That all said, if you’re a relatively nerdy person who really wants a device that’s at the same level as the Kobo Libra or Kindle Paperwhite—but with slightly better hardware than both, as it’s got a flush screen like the Paperwhite and page-turn buttons like the Libra—you could be at home with the Boox Page. If you’re someone who wants access to the Kindle store and the Kobo store and the ability to read DRM-free ebooks with another reader (Moon Reader was my favorite, though there are many others), the Boox Page can do it all.

Unfortunately, I started down this Android tablet path largely because I wanted to read other stuff on the same device I use to read books. Think RSS feeds, newspapers, newsletters, and the rest. When it comes to this stuff, it’s hard to get past the fact that apps are built for fast-refreshing phone screens and just don’t work well with E-Ink displays. Even if you configure your RSS reader to be just right, you’ll end up having to jump to a web browser to read stuff that’s not contained in the feed—and the web experience on these devices just isn’t great.

So, while I really enjoyed reading several books on the Boox Page, I’m not sure there are enough good use cases for it. Even if you’re devoted to DRM-free ebooks, you can sideload those to either a Kindle or Kobo via an app like Calibre. I’ve been back on my Kobo Libra for the past few weeks, and it’s nice to have the simplicity, though I sure do miss the flush screen of the Page.

But wait: What if someone could build a device that had a screen that looked like E-Ink but offered full color and refresh rates that matched phones and tablets? Someone did, sort of. Which is why I also spent a little time with the NXTPAPER 11, an 11-inch Android tablet from TCL that claims to offer “an e-book viewing feel.”

It’s weird. It’s a regular Android tablet with a regular tablet screen, but TCL has applied a coating to the screen that feels very much like a Paperlike iPad screen protector. It reduces blue light and glare and makes the display textured like paper. TCL has also shipped Android extensions that let you push the tablet into “reading mode,” which is basically a black-and-white mode meant to ape the look of an e-reader.

It… sort of works? Leaving aside that the tablet screen is so huge that it’s basically a two-page version of a Kindle, when it’s in reading mode and you’re using the Kindle app, it’s a pretty close approximation of the look and feel of reading a Kindle book. At night, the backlighting makes things a bit bright, but there’s a white-on-black mode that’s pretty good.

And, of course, it’s still a regular display—so I read full-color comics on it, and they looked very good. Beyond that, I could pretty much run any Android app I wanted, including RSS readers and newspaper apps, and it provided the substandard iPad experience I’d expect from an Android tablet. (Also, while the NXPAPER 11 had decent battery life for a tablet, it pales in comparison to the low power consumption of an E-Ink device.)

This made me ask myself: Did I really want an e-reader, or did I just want an iPad mini with a glare protector running in a black-and-white accessibility mode?

What do I want, really?

Which brought me full circle. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote:

Backlit tablets just can’t compete with E-Ink-equipped Kindles when it comes to reading in the bright sun…. At night, the inverse applies. My Paperwhite, turned down all the way, is much darker than my iPad’s backlight at the lowest setting. Which means it’s much less likely to disturb my wife while she’s sleeping and I’m reading.

Whether dark or light or in between, I prefer reading on these devices. They never push notifications at me, I’m never tempted to switch over to Twitter or email, and the static black-and-white calm of words on a page evokes the best things about reading a paper book or newspaper.

This was a good reminder of what drew me to these devices in the first place. Namely:

• A reflective (rather than backlit) screen that’s readable in bright sunlight and offers gentle side lighting for use in the dark without being blindingly bright.

• Good ergonomics. A device should be light enough to be held in one hand easily, with dedicated page-turn buttons that don’t require me to do a lot of swiping and tapping just to read a book.

• No distractions. I shouldn’t be able to flip over to social media or read my email or do anything else on the device that isn’t reading text. As my friend and e-reader aficionado Scott McNulty told me, “The more features you add to an E-Ink device, the worse it gets.”

• Great battery life, with the ability to go a week or more without a charge.

In other words, while a $499 iPad mini with an anti-glare screen might be a pretty decent e-reader, it would fail most of these points. Even with anti-glare film, I doubt the iPad screen could match E-Ink’s visibility in bright light or its very low light capability, and volume buttons aren’t placed properly to act as comfortable page-turn buttons. And sure, I could keep my iPad in Do Not Disturb and make sure that no distracting apps were present on it, but would I want to? Am I going to buy two different iPads? No.

So, I’m back where I started. Last year, I read more than 50 books, and probably 99 percent of those pages were read on an E-Ink display. When I put my iPad down at night and pick up my Kobo, I’m saying goodbye to the outside world and focusing on the “printed” page. When I’m reading on an airplane, I’m not worried about draining my iPhone or iPad battery unnecessarily.

Maybe someday, the e-reader will be made irrelevant. But it’s been fifteen years since I bought my first Kindle, and it hasn’t happened so far. E-readers are really good at what they do—and when I say that I’ve tried the alternatives, I really mean it.

By Dan Moren

January 19, 2024 6:07 AM PT

Order up: Vision Pro storage tier and accessory options

Happy Vision Pro pre-order day to all who celebrate!

Whether or not you’re virtually lining up to buy one of Apple’s fancy new spatial computers, you may be wondering what choices will come up during the process. So, purely for science, I went through it to see all the options and tell you exactly what you’ll need to think about.

Put it in storage

As reported last week, the Vision Pro does have storage tiers, and now we know what they are and how much they’ll cost.

Those are roughly on par with Apple storage tier increases on the iPhone and Macs¹, and frankly, when you’re already paying $3500 for a device, a few hundred extra dollars doesn’t seem like quite the same percentage jump. (It’s also worth noting that Apple is, as usual, offering 0 percent financing, meaning you can also pay a low low monthly cost of $324.91 for 12 months for that 1TB model.)

The real question is why you’ll need all that storage. Apple helpfully details its rationale below the tiers:

How much storage you need depends on how you use Apple Vision Pro. More room means you can store more documents, spatial photos and spatial videos, music, and apps, as well as extensive video libraries and large data files.

Over time, you may add more content to Apple Vision Pro, so you’ll want to think about how your storage needs may change.

So, think apps and files that you want to download to the device—spatial photos, spatial video, and movies (especially 3D ones) probably being among the most likely things to eat up data if you’re downloading them to store locally. Good news, though, you won’t have to worry about storage for Netflix downloads.

Keep calm and add on

Once you’ve picked your storage tier, you’re not quite done yet. Apple is, of course, offering AppleCare+ for the Vision Pro, which will set you back a hefty $500 for two years or $24.99 per month until you decide to cancel it. But again, if you’ve paid $3500 for this cutting-edge product, the insurance may provide some peace of mind: It offers “unlimited repairs for accidental damage protection” (at a cost of $29 for accessory damage and $299 for “Other Accidental Damage”) and an Express Replacement Service, so you won’t be without a Vision Pro while yours is getting fixed.

Apple’s also selling a few accessories for the Vision Pro. Though a cover for the headset is included with the purchase, if you’re taking it on the go, you may well want the travel case, which provides a padded shell in which to put the Vision Pro, a strap for the external battery and a cozy little pouch of for your optical inserts. That will set you back a significant $199 (though I imagine it’s one place where third-party competitors will be more cheaply available).

There’s also the $49.95 Belkin Battery Holder clip, which lets you attach the Vision Pro’s external battery to a belt or pants, as well as a cross-body strap if you don’t have a convenient clipping location.

Speaking of external batteries, we know the Vision Pro’s battery life is rated for about 2 hours of general use or 2.5 hours of video watching, but don’t worry: Apple’s more than happy to sell you an additional battery pack for $199.

You can also buy a few of the other included accessories on their own, such as the Solo Knit Band ($99), the Dual Loop Band ($199). You can also buy a Light Seal package ($199), which includes two Light Seal Cushions; you’ll need to use the face-scanning process to get the right size. Light Seal Cushions ($29) are also available separately and come in four sizes: N, N+, W, and W+. (Good news: the cushion attaches magnetically and is machine washable.)

In addition to all those Vision Pro specific accessories, Apple’s also pushing other existing products that it thinks Vision Pro users might want: the Bluetooth Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, a Sony DualSense game controller, the USB-C AirPods Pro, the 30W USB-C power adapter and USB-C charge cable, and, of course, AirTags.

Top of the line or end of the line

Which may of course set you thinking: sure, $3499 is expensive, but just how pricey can I make this thing?

Again, I’m not one to shy away from science, so let’s check it out. (I’m not including extra bands, Light Seals, or cushions, since it should be a while before you wear those out. And, of course, if you need optical inserts, you’ll be adding another $99-$149.)

Hey, still well shy of a maxed out MacStudio or a base-level Mac Pro, not to mention a gold first-edition Apple Watch. So there are definitely Apple products you could spend more money on, albeit perhaps ones with a more proven track record.

Apple’s not likely to detail exactly how many Vision Pros it sells, but it will be interesting to see if it provides any further information at the company’s quarterly financial call in a couple weeks.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

By Jason Snell

January 17, 2024 12:39 PM PT

Artifact’s killer feature was rewriting bad headlines

[Content warning: Old Man Yells At Cloud.]

So Artifact, the news app startup from the creators of Instagram, is shutting down. There’s been a lot of analysis about the issue, and I agree with much of it.

There’s been a lot of cheap and bad “news content” on the Web for ages now, but in recent years, it seems to have gotten worse. In certain areas—I notice it with film and TV coverage as well as sports—a single bit of original reporting is breathlessly rewritten by dozens of sites, turning a juicy one-sentence quote into a thousand-word-long analysis with lots of backstory and relevant on-site links, all with subheads that answer questions Google users might ask. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

For all its boasting about using AI smarts, Artifact didn’t really cut through the noise. Surely an AI content engine could analyze articles and determine which piece was the original and which pieces added very little to the discussion? I’d hope that, eventually, someone will try to counteract this cottage industry of rewriting other people’s scraps for SEO hits with some intelligence that weights the original story over the word salad copycats. (Paging Google—this is supposed to be your area. And Apple News… what are you doing?)

But my favorite feature of Artifact was not its AI-influenced story browsing and categorization. I found it just as weird and off-putting as most other news aggregation apps that don’t allow me complete control over what I see. No, what I loved about Artifact was that you could take a meaningless clickbait headline and have the app read the story and write a new headline based on its contents.

Back in the day, when I learned how to write headlines (for newspapers!), the goal was to give the reader enough information to decide if they wanted to read that article. The Inverted Pyramid started above the story itself, even with key information in a headline and subhead that would let the reader decide if they wanted to bother reading that story.

But in the era of the web and news aggregators, headlines that give away pertinent information have become a lost art. Whole generations of editors have been trained to write coy headlines that will earn a click, even if the people who are clicking will be immediately disappointed by the truth of the story.

What’s most frustrating to me is that once this method of writing headlines is internalized, it’s very hard to break out of the habit. For instance, I subscribe to multiple news sites where you basically must pay in order to read articles… and yet the headlines are still clickbaity! San Francisco Chronicle, when you write, “This Bay Area city has a horrible secret,” I would like to know if it’s my city and if the secret is a serial killer or the lack of a good delicatessen.

This is where Artifact ruled, because its little AI agent would read that story and write a new headline. And if enough people said a headline was clickbait, all other users of the app would now see the AI headline instead of the original. Brilliant.

So let me put this out there to other creators of news apps, aggregators like Apple News but also RSS readers—this is a feature you should knock off. I would absolutely love to be able to see rewritten headlines for news sources that have failed to be forthcoming with factual headlines. Maybe the future of browsing news is an AI-driven service that writes good headlines so that I can make up my own mind about whether I want to read a story or not!

Anyway, I won’t miss Artifact much—but I will miss the perverse joy I felt everytime I had to ask an AI to improve on the work of a human being who has been miseducated about how headlines are supposed to work.

By Jason Snell

January 17, 2024 8:45 AM PT

How I automate Focus Modes to keep distractions to a minimum

I’ve learned in recent years that I’ve become something of a minimalist. I like keeping things simple, preferring glanceable information to alerts that get in my face whether I want them or not. I’ve reduced the number of apps that have permission to bug me, and more recently, I’ve embraced Apple’s Focus Modes to silence the noise.

There were several situations in which I found myself often being bugged, mostly on my Apple Watch, when I didn’t want to be, including when I was working (writing or podcasting), working out, playing a sport, or showering.

I don’t blame the apps that bug me when I’m doing something else—in large part, I’ve asked them to do it. (And as for the ones I haven’t, they will be silenced immediately as punishment!)

As for friends and colleagues who text me, I don’t blame them, either—they’re treating the text message as the asynchronous medium it’s meant to be. But having a text message sitting out there, unanswered, drives me batty—I’ll want to answer it. What’s worse, if I do answer it—usually with a canned reply from my Apple Watch—that reply often serves as a sign that I’m ready to engage in a larger conversation when I’m not. But I’m the cause of the problem, not them, and I need to deal with it.

I’ve addressed these issues using a few different approaches.

I’ve got a bunch of Stream Deck buttons that I press to start a podcast recording session, all of which run some sort of shortcut. I’ve added an additional couple of steps to all of them: when the session starts, I enter a Recording Focus Mode. And when the session ends, I turn that Focus off.

For writing, it’s trickier. I use different apps to write, and I use those apps in other contexts, so I’m largely triggering my Writing mode manually at this point. When I need to stick in my headphones and concentrate on writing, I will generally remember to click that box. I’d love to figure out some other way to automate this, but it may not be possible.

To avoid typing entire conversations by swiping fingers on an Apple Watch while trying to run—it’s absurd, and I’m sure I look absurd when I’m doing it—I use an Apple-built feature. On the Apple Watch, open the Settings app, tap Focus, then tap Fitness.

You’ll see an option to Turn on automatically when starting a workout. Flip this switch on, and you’ll be in a Fitness mode when you’re exercising. When the workout ends, the Focus Mode turns itself off!

You might think I don’t need to turn off notifications when I’m in the shower because how could they possibly affect me in there? But here’s the thing: First, some notifications have the strange effect of dipping the sound playing from my podcast player—as if they’re going to make a noise, but they’re silenced, so they don’t! But the dipping still happens. It’s very distracting.

Also, I leave my iPhone just outside the shower in case I need to skip to a different podcast mid-shower, or back up, or whatever. My shower is transparent glass. When a notification comes in, I can see my phone light up. It doesn’t matter that I shouldn’t notice—I do, and it drives me batty. I suppose I should put it face down, but that doesn’t address the dipping audio issue.

It doesn’t matter, though, because I’m using two triggers in iOS 17 to run shortcuts that solve the whole problem. One of the most underrated features of the Shortcuts app on the iPhone is Personal Automations, which are triggered when the iPhone experiences some specific conditions. As of iOS 17, you can trigger a shortcut when your phone connects or disconnects from a specific Bluetooth device.

So I built a simple shortcut called “DND Toggle” that gets the current Focus status, and if there isn’t one, turns on Do Not Disturb. If there is one, it turns off that Focus Mode. Then, I specified that the shortcut should run every time my iPhone connects to my Bluetooth shower speaker. That’s it! Now, when I turn on the speaker, the automation runs, and my iPhone enters Do Not Disturb mode—which it remains in until I turn the speaker back off.

To address getting bugged while curling, I’m using a different Focus feature. I created a new mode called Curling (it’s got a snowflake icon, how cute!) and scrolled down in the settings for this mode to the Set a Schedule setting. Now, when I pull into the parking lot at the curling club, my phone enters Curling Mode. There’s a custom curling-themed wallpaper (for fun!), but more importantly, my notifications are silenced. When I leave the club, the mode ends. (In reality, it ends when I finish curling, assuming I’ve set a curling workout on my Apple Watch. As detailed above, the act of starting that workout means I’ll be placed in Fitness mode, and when I’ve finished, it’ll take me out of all Focus Modes.)

Now, as I write this, I’m realizing that maybe I could do with fewer Focus Modes since all of my modes are trying to do the same thing and have most of the same settings: let messages from my immediate family through, but nothing else. Maybe simplifying my Focus Modes will be a future project. But for now, I’ve got what I want: I don’t see interrupting messages until I’m done doing what I’m doing. It’s better this way. I recommend it!

By Dan Moren

January 16, 2024 5:43 AM PT

AirDrop security weakness exploited by China

You might have seen a story making the rounds last week that the Chinese government was cracking down on people sending anti-government materials via Apple’s AirDrop feature, having compromised the security of the system.

I wondered, given the transient nature of these interactions, how exactly that was happening—sometimes these stories can be a bit overblown, especially when entities like the Chinese government—which certainly has a vested interested in looking omniscient—are involved.

But as usual, Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin did an excellent deep dive on this issue and helps explain why, yes, this is a real problem:

In 2021, researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another.

The exploit involves the use of colorfully named rainbow tables and relies at least somewhat on the Chinese government’s ability to pre-hash every single phone number in the country, thus making it trivial to use a given identifier and link it to a person.

But, as Goodin points out, Apple has been aware of this vulnerability since 2019 and despite there being options to improve the anonymity, has not made changes to the privacy of this feature. (Apple’s software also apparently keeps logs of prior AirDrop contacts, which is ripe for exploitation if someone gets hold of the physical device—a fact that some security researchers only learned in the course of this story.) Combined with previous AirDrop changes that had negative effects on dissident activity in the country¹ and Apple’s complicated relationship with the Chinese government, it certainly presents an unappetizing picture.

To a certain degree, Apple relies on stories like this staying under the radar. Inaction can be presented as either ignorance or tacit compliance, whereas taking steps to improve the privacy of AirDrop might be construed by Beijing as a challenge to its authority—a stick situation for Apple, given how much it relies upon its relationship with the country for the production of its devices. But Apple also makes privacy a huge selling point of its devices—a subject of ad campaigns, a highlighted section in virtually every keynote—and the company surely doesn’t want to have to append an asterisk to all of those claims with the footnote “Except in China.”

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]