Take

John Gruber: "In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement"

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

The Magic Mouse is not inherently a pants-on-head stupid idea, or a pants-on-head stupid implementation of that idea. The problem is just that the Magic Mouse wants to be a mouse with a touch surface, touch surfaces want to be planar, ie basically flat, and good mouse ergonomics entail shapes that are not basically flat.

For most people, comfort means fitting effortlessly in your grip. A flat mouse means that your palm is splayed, and if you palm is splayed, your fingers have to grip it by the side. (Or you have to sort of push it against the desk with your hand, which is perilous with any mouse and doubly so with a touch surface one.) This is not usually terribly comfortable, compared to a mouse shape that more readily adheres to the natural way your hand cups and grips, which most mice adopt to some extent, and some do to a quite large extent.

So, is it worth it? It's obviously a trade-off. If what you want to do all day every day is make touch gestures, and they speed up your work, then yes. I love making touch gestures, and have enjoyed touch scrolling on a Magic Mouse when using it on occasion (I don't own one), but I have also had significant trouble performing those touch gestures compared to on a MacBook trackpad, since you often need to exert force not just by performing the gesture, but by steadying the mouse simultaneously.

These properties of the Magic Mouse are reasonably understood within minutes, if not intellectually then at least vividly. It's possible I'm underestimating the proportion of people whose anatomy allow them complete comfort with a Magic Mouse — that proportion, even if small, is likely at least hundreds of thousands of people at Apple's scale — or the probably decidely bigger proportion who just don't care and consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

The Magic Mouse as a first attempt of a mouse that is usably a touch surface for gestures is not bad. The Magic Mouse as the current attempt of such a mouse, nine years in, is rather dreadful. The solution space may have been exhaustively explored behind the scenes, but it doesn't look like it.

Touch surfaces don't just want to be planar, but they want to be horizontal, lest your hand wants to fall off. But there are designs like the Logitech MX Vertical that lean into a certain grip where your fingers rest, unstrained, in a vertical-ish position. How would touch gestures work on such a mouse?

Even if they did, could Apple ship one by default, considering that it would inherently not be ambidextrous? Probably not. (But Apple have shipped multiple mice before.)

So what about the cable then? A mouse is a tool for creative use. A mouse that is well designed for purpose allows that creativity to continue with as few interruptions and restraints as possible. Plugging in a cable is a small interruption. (And feeling the tug of the cable as you move around is a small-to-medium restraint, depending on the cable; compare to an Apple Pencil theoretically being plugged in at the cap to charge, where it would impede mobility and shift the weight quite drastically.) Forcing a minutes-long break is a larger interruption — an interruption that's not hard to anticipate or plan around or assimilate into regular needs to take a break, to be sure, but an interruption nonetheless.

The Magic Mouse is consistent in its vision of putting its projected image of an outwardly considered object first. It chose a hard set of problems to solve. It is an attempt to solve them, coronated by its maker as a flawless solution. What it isn't is a spectacularly good computer mouse. There are plenty of spectacularly good computer mice out there, and there are even more that have leaps-and-bounds better ergonomics than the Magic Mouse.

New needs friends, and progress is often downstream of a few blind alleys. But at this point I'm more than interested what a Magic Mouse 2, that tries to take the learnings of how Magic Mouse has played out in real life and how people's bodies actually work and do something different, would look like.

To just ship the same thing after nine years, with all the flaws that its trade-offs have lead to would be... well, pants-on-head stupid.

Masahiro Sakurai is best known as the creator of Kirby and the driving force and producer of the Super Smash Bros. series. For the past two years, he has posted a series of high-effort, well produced, high-production value videos on game design philosophy, team dynamics and general hard-won experience - everything he wants to spread to current colleagues, coming generation and just about anyone.

Earlier this week, the final video was posted, with a colophon, background story and oral history of the project itself, in the style of all the other videos. It, like every other video, is worth watching in its entirety, but it is humbling to realize that Sakurai took a rare window in his calendar, threw himself into it with his characteristic production mania and spent considerable time and money to make the things he wants to share more accessible and more enduring, and to make games better understood.

In a field overrun by rapacious DLC hawks on one side (who would probably find Sakurai's generosity profoundly stupid) and enduringly immature bullies on the other, it is easy to forget the people who play, design, create and implement games for fun, for entertainment, for an opportunity to partake in an experience in a unique way.

Gaming is a strong bubble, and chances are everyone who would have been interested in this already knows about this, but I implore those who don't to also take a look at a few episodes and see if they don't come away with something worthwhile; they are divided into subject tracks, so you can skip the spline reticulation if you'd like.

Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only! The idea is so thoroughly discredited that “transmissionism” is only used pejoratively, in reference to naive historical teaching practices. Or as an ad-hominem in juicy academic spats.

[..]

Unlike most non-fiction books, textbooks usually are built around explicit cognitive models. For instance, they often alternate between explanations which introduce concepts, and exercises which push students to think about those concepts in specific ways. It’s great that textbooks didn’t choose their cognitive models by accident. That’s an important first step. But it’s not enough: people still struggle to reliably absorb knowledge from textbooks.

This is making something click for me that has always sounded off. The right, and especially the new, anti-woke, née "alt-", right, (but also authoritarian-oriented factions of every stripe), is obsessed with the idea that "things are not being taught anymore". Painting the picture of facts that are then left up to "but we could be completely wrong; what do you think?"

It looks to me as if in what Andy teaches me is known as metacognition in learning science, methods other than sitting there and just patiently absorbing what the person at the front of the blackboard tells you are involved, in the service of actually getting the new concepts and knowledge to be understood.

But taking this in from the outside, or from not seeing it implemented very well, it can turn into a fun-house mirror distortion. A misunderstanding that just because the student should be engaged to enable new learning to occur, and sometimes that even means having some sort of say in what that exercise should look like, that it then means the things to be learned are also fungible or arbitrary or ill-respected. Maybe even that anything but just teaching, unquestionably reading aloud, the raw materials is a dangerous diversion.

Challenging an idea or talking about its validity is a way for curious minds to probe what the idea actually means and to figure out its consequences. Looking at something from the context of another time or culture or set of mores is a way of understanding both perspectives better.

None of this is hopefully news, but the rest of Andy's text is about having to do more than reading to learn something. I've been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I've been doing way too little writing and processing.

Apple: iPhone 16 Pro Battery Replacement (2024)

[..]

Step 6. The center of the repair tray has two slots. Position the repair tray and enclosure onto the battery press with the left slot over the pin as shown. ⚠️ Caution: Move the charge port assembly flex cable out of the way of the roller.

Step 7: Flip down the lever at the top of the battery press to lower the roller onto the battery. Slide the repair tray back and forth through the battery press three times to adhere the battery to the enclosure.

Step 8: Flip up the red lever at the top of the battery press.

Step 9: Position the repair tray and enclosure onto the battery press with the right slot over the pin as shown.

Step 10: Repeat steps 7 and 8. Then continue to step 11.

[..]

Apple (1976):

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Nathan_RETRO (comment):

Apple literally gets in trouble, fixes things by adding fees back, gets in trouble again, and add the fees back. I can't even.

Terry Jones and Michael Palin:

Wife: Have you got anything without spam?

Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

In February, game developers began expressing frustration over Apple Arcade. They pointed out that while the service was initially profitable, Apple had begun decreasing upfront payments and the per-play "bonus pool."

Additionally, the tech giant began to axe projects with little to no warning.

[..]

"We can go weeks without hearing from Apple at all and their general response time to emails is three weeks, if they reply at all," one developer told Mobilegamer.biz.

Some have even called Apple's tech support "miserable" and the worst they'd seen anywhere. Even the QA and update process is frustrating, prompting some developers to avoid updating their games altogether.

Apple does not get games. Apple does not respect developers. Apple ships a dictionary defining the word "symbiosis", but chances are the many Apple employees who understand it are not in a position to effect it.

There is a kernel of a good idea inside the vision for Apple Arcade: pay developers to make games that it would be hard to get made otherwise, and let those games have an instant, massive audience. But while you would have to be as headstrong and independent as Apple to try to chart this course and hold onto it, Apple itself is just too caught up in other factors to make it fly.

These reports are particularly interesting, since the perennial defense of app store-encumbered platforms are to refer to them as game consoles but for apps. Apple Arcade games are headliners flying closer to the Apple brand than other games; they should be getting ultra deluxe treatment compared to App Store apps, and yet it doesn't measure up to the levels delivered by game consoles or independent storefronts like Steam.

Spectacular take on, well, you guessed it.

The section about the OLPC project is especially informative.

I don't design for other cultures, but I've been in plenty of projects where no thought at all is given to how what's being built will be used by the person who will be using it.

All of "enterprise" software is a jousting match of checklists, evaluated only by people who either do not know or do not care whether the product will be of any use whatsoever. (By inference, this extends to most Microsoft software.)

Even with that in mind, it's still surprising how something can go so sideways.

An interesting coda is a comment by what looks like a fellow Swede:

I rarely comment , but had to. My father Lars (RIP) worked for SIDA to develope road construction in developing countries. What he saw was that western aid in Africa always failed by bringing european engineers and their ordinary road construction techniques to their world. It failed because it was dependant on the workers from europe, their machinery breaking down waiting for spare parts for months, and most importantly - that the road built was not the "property" or the work done by the locals themeselves - which resulted in the roads never being used or being poorly maintained after the aidworkers had left.

My dad changed that completely with what he called "labour intensive road construction"... which was; doing away with all the machinery, employing the locals with shovels and wheelbarrows building the road going past their village. Then an elder in each village was appointed "Road Chief" to be responsible for the upkeeping and maintenance of their designated stretch with salary from the aid-program.

This proved to be a very successful model, gaining roads in good quality that the locals considered their road (since they'd built it) and would use and maintain with pride. An example that aid has to be IN CONTEXT with where it is applied.

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.

Legal petitions are live in several countries, and the process of making it an EU citizen initiative is underway.

Compared to the sale of a banana, a cupboard or even a DVD of Liar Liar, many games are complicated enough that it is not necessarily straight-up fraud if they stop working for reasons besides material degradation. But that shouldn't be the last word, it should be a known concern that is carried into the design process and sorted out, to the amount that the technical tradeoffs would allow it.

Margethe Vestager, EC commissioner:

Today, we are opening a sixth [non-compliance case]: we will look into Apple's new business model: the commercial terms Apple imposes on app developers who want to reach end users on the iOS platform. The criteria these app developers have to meet to even be allowed to operate as alternative marketplaces or make apps available via sideloading. And the complex user journey for those users who want to download and install alternative marketplaces and sideloaded apps.

In the DMA, the ground rule is for sideloading apps to be allowed, and to only very minimally be reigned in under very specific conditions. Apple chose to take these conditions and lawyer them into "always, unless you pay us sums of money that are plainly prohibitive for most actors". Apple knew the rules and understood the intent and chose to evade them, in order to retain additional income.

In the App Store Guidelines, as written and period appropriate, the ground rule was for in-app purchases to be allowed only through the App Store's native in-app purchase system, at the penalty of removal from the App Store. Epic chose to take those conditions, break them and lawyer up. Epic knew the rules and understood the intent and chose to evade them, in order to retain additional income.

It is completely fair to look at what Epic did and say "that was kind of a dick move". (I personally think it was kind of a dick move, even as I agree with some downwind consequences.) But any argument that what Epic did was wrong and what Apple did was right hinges on distinctions that do not make sense to me. That Apple's App Store Guidelines are less of a mess of what could charitably be defined as emergent praxis than the DMA is, is a fascinating theory.

Apple seems to treat written law with roughly the same level of respect as the actions that would cause one of its developers to be violently and with prejudice ejected from all its programs. Yes, I know what you're thinking, "regulation bites corporation"; film at 11. (And yes, for that matter, "regulation fails to manifest intended outcome, free of side effects, by sheer will, in the face of a commercial marketplace".)

But Apple has a significantly easier time silently assenting to the qualms of dictatorships than to simply stop reaching into the pockets of customers, many of which have funneled tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most consistently successful high margin product in the history of mobile telephony, or developers who have largely made those devices attractive in the first place.

What does that have to do with anything? Apple has two modes when it comes to compliance: actual compliance and fighting by lashing out. It's not clear to me that actual compliance is always the right way. Apple's prerogative is to participate in the civic discourse, and to push back. Indeed, Apple has even a larger claim than most to have actually shown backbone, wisdom and (dare I say) courage. When Apple fought the FBI order to corrode the integrity of its OS, under the mistaken (FBI) theory that a compromised system would not be compromised if the master key was in good hands, and that the mathematics of encryption cared one whit about FBI, I was appreciative of their stand.

But when Apple chooses to blithely follow along with demands from regimes that do not have free, independently verified and secret elections and are using as much data and intel as they can get to maintain a vast social credit database, all the while taking a new legal framework in the EU as an excuse to a) make a few bucks in ways completely foreign to that framework while b) denying most of the freedoms mandated by it, I worry about the standing of any argument that the reason Apple should be allowed to get its way is because of their moral purity and piety.

The best that can be said is that Apple is as aggressive as it deems allowed within the particular market. The choice of aggression compared to assent seems to have hinged on the DMA being toothless or its enforcement being hapless. Time will tell whether they were right.

John Gruber:

My basic theory is that what the EC has wanted all along is to force Apple not merely open up iOS to other methods of distribution, but to force Apple to allow apps to be distributed through those non-App-Store channels free of charge. But they don’t want to come out and say, flatly, that they seek to forbid Apple from monetizing its IP from all developers on the platform, because that’s so radically anti-capitalist.

The biggest flaw of the European Commission's stewardship of the Digital Markets Act is that the EC's flagship is to do with the fairness and openness of the internal market. The EC couches everything it does in terms of maintaining latitude for EU commercial actors, because that is its purview and purpose. Going back to its progenitor the European Coal and Steel Community, the market was the end goal.

(I am not an expert in trade policies, but I understand there are many such organizations who, in working towards fairer and freer trade in open markets, find exceptions and take actions in individual cases. I'm hopeful all such endeavors will be labelled as "radically anti-capitalist".)

The EC is not the ideal horse, and other multi-billion dollar technology firms are not the ideal cheerleaders. In a world where the phone is the dominant computing device for most people and nearly everything involves it, the case against monopolistic rent seeking and corporatist distribution restrictions should be to protect not only customers but individual freedoms. Nevertheless, the horse has been saddled and does work roughly towards the same goals.

The clumsiness of a legal mandate to force changes in an authoritarian system which itself dictates how millions of people are allowed to express themselves is regrettable, but the regret serves as a self-similar illustration of the discomfort. Apple's squirming, thrashing and whinnying paints a hypocrite's portrait, either incapable of seeing in its own new hardship the impact of its policies on others, or content to reject the notion and scurry off into a smug bubble of faux self-deprecation.

There are still ways Apple, say, in its approach to privacy and compared to some of its competitors, are exceptional. But dying on this hill, to squeeze out the same money that putatively is not the primary driver behind the company anyway, to maintain a ridiculous charade wherein no developers were successful before a distribution model that not uncommonly was a significant downgrade, is just exceptionally stupid.

Spectacular.

I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic.

I am terribly upset that at no point did Panic get the chance to charge Apple $99 for developer tools, scrutinize every byte in their executable and toss it back in their face after Review as being "redundant", since games already exist on the Playdate.

Of course I kid — this is a fantastic achievement and a great post. It's interesting how many programming languages have modes explicitly targeting embedded scenarios these days.

To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must:

• Be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU (or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that’s listed in App Store Connect). [..]
• Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

Apple of 2024: asymptotically approaching reasonableness.

To be honest, the remaining requirements are not as terrible. Sideloading should mean completely open, completely allowed (including from an airgapped computer), for anyone, by anyone. But it's not the notarization that's the main issue as long as notarization is purely technical (which it is on Mac, but isn't on the current iOS DMA plan, where manual review is involved).

Let's list the additional changes that would make this offer something less than sideloading but still ultimately be somewhat palatable.

• No "freedom is for rich, successful people". No limits on "2 continuous years of good standing", no requirements of "1 million annual installs of single app".

• No Core Technology Fee.

  (Dude, you sell tens of millions of phones for $1,500+ and pride yourself on being the margin leader of the entire phone industry, millions of developer accounts for $99 and skim 30% (or sometimes 15%) off of the entire collective App Store revenue. And you operate the entire company on one Profit/Loss statement. You're good.

  No "business unit" will imminently capsize, except possibly PR or Developer Relations from how badly you're screwing all this up so far, but if that's financial, it's not from lack of Core Technology Fee income, it's from people getting fed up with your bullshit and not feeling quite so happy about shoveling money into your gaping maw while you treat them as degenerate freeloaders.)

• A purely technical notarization process without manual review, or at least a shortened process past the first release or so.

...you know what, that's basically it. That still wouldn't make it DMA compliant, since rights in the regulation are still being held ransom, but it's helpful in plotting their movement across the spectrum of possible options.

Putting Phil Schiller in charge of the App Store is going to be a hundred billion dollar mistake that all-told leaves Apple with a pile of legal, perhaps criminal, liability and a raft of draconian regulations around the world that massively compromise the iOS experience. This was clear years ago; it is unimaginable that he’s still calling the shots

Apple of 2024: repeatedly jamming a fork in the wall socket, proudly proclaiming their company policy of not being electrocuted.

Steve Jobs, January 7th, 1997, 18 days after the Apple acquisition of NeXT:

We've got to get the spark back with the developers. [..] We've got to get the developers back. Now, how are we going to do that? What's our strategy to do that?

I'm not going to go back to the Apple ][ days, so we'll start off with DOS. If you're a developer, you can build an app, let's use a metaphor of the floors of a building, you can build an app that's three floors tall, but you can't build an app that's 10 floors tall, because you all read The Mythical Man-Month, what happens is as your software team starts getting bigger it kinda collapses under its own weight, like a building built of wood. You can't build a building built of wood that high. So, let's say you can build a three story app, well, that means if you start off with DOS you're on the first floor, you can deliver a fourth story app.

Well, what we did with the Mac was, we had an OS that was about the same as DOS, but then what we did was we put this thing called the Toolbox on top of it that lifted the developer up to the fifth floor, so that they could write an app like PageMaker and deliver an eight floor app on Mac, because they started at the fifth floor, that they could never, ever, ever deliver on DOS. And that's why all these wonderful apps propelled Apple into this exciting markets over the years.

But, there's a problem now. And the problem is a very simple one. It's called: Windows. The Mac didn't progress much beyond the fifth floor, and over ten years, Microsoft copied it. And now they can offer developers, you know, you squint your eyes, one's a little better than the other in some areas, but you squint your eyes and they're basically both fifth floor. That's not good for us. It's even a little worse. Because they've been a little ahead of us in getting a multi-threaded, multi-tasking operating system underneath Windows. And that's arguably even better for the developer.

So, here's what we have to do. What we have to do is bring out an operating system that's even more advanced than NT. And this is not easy. This is not easy to do because these operating systems are very complex. We forget many times that it's taken NT eight years to get where it is today. Eight years. So to do this, we can't do this overnight. Fortunately, we've got one that's been battle tested and is ready for the challenge. But on top of that, we're going to put something called OpenStep, and OpenStep lets you start developing your apps on the 20th floor. And the kinds of apps you can deliver are phenomenal.

What does it mean to be a platform?

A platform is both its own foundation, the starting point for everything built on top of it, and the collective embodiment of those things.

The original Mac and its line of successors did not invent Desktop Publishing. It provided an environment that was conducive to graphical applications, where you could put up bitmapped graphics, and through the metaphor of windows and zooming and moving around, could render printer quality typesetting. (It had not been completely impossible to produce such typesetting, but doing so while limited to a monospaced 80 column terminal was an arduous process.) The system provided the cultural foundation as well as the technical foundation to put you a few floors up, in Steve's metaphor, and the combination of production-quality, production-ready apps and more and more capable hardware invented and made the industry.

Similarly, the original Apple ][ a few years earlier did not invent computerized spreadsheets. It seems hard to grasp now, but Apple ][ was one of the first instances of a computer and a "user terminal" being co-habitated. This made personally interactive applications possible to a larger degree and within two years, Dan Bricklin had started work on VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet as we know it.

Science describes a Cambrian explosion when all of a sudden, due to an available niche, organisms adapt and change shape on a time scale that is, relatively speaking, overnight. When the right circumstances exist, great things will emerge.

Platforms understand this and seek this synergy. Using the capabilities and the culture and the code in the base, the application can solve problems that it is built to solve in the best way it knows how to. The platform becomes a world teeming with life, with new possibilities, with problems solved in unimaginable ways. Without the world, no friendly, helpful, earnest critters floating freely in unoccupied interstellar space. Without the organisms, the world is essentially dead.

Apple: Update on apps distributed in the European Union

Apple is sharing changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store, impacting developers’ apps in the European Union (EU) to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These changes create new options for developers, including how they can distribute apps on iOS, process payments, use web browser engines in iOS apps, request interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software features, access data and analytics about their apps, and transfer App Store user data.

There really is a lot to cover, and you could spend a lot of time trying to summarize it and still miss things. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

• This is part actually honestly well-meaning, part malicious compliance, part intricate machinery. Many components have all three parts present.

• This has been a long time coming and I'm sure a lot of people have been working very hard for a long time to make these things happen. I appreciate their hard work; particularly I know that untangling assumptions built up over the past 15 years does not come without headaches. If Apple leadership had just designed a less ass-backwards platform, fewer changes, maybe even none, may have been required.

• This is not sideloading in any commonly used term. Particularly with the financial requirements and the Core Technology Fee, it is devolved monopoly. A third-party marketplace is required to have significant amounts of cash on hand, and driven to be able to recoup €0.50 per first annual install of its own marketstore app (which do not get the one million "grace" window).

  On the other hand, there is a sliver of a legitimate point that for aspiring actual marketplaces, being able to provide all the things that such a marketplace should provide. But marketplaces are the answer to a not-locked-down App Store. Sideloading is the answer to a not-locked-down Ad Hoc Distribution; this quadrant is as missing now as it ever was.

• App Notarization is required and includes some form of abridged manual App Review where a bare selection of guidelines, relatively speaking, are applied. (It is possible that this lighter review process is a variant of Testflight pre-release scanning.) Following notarization, the signed app is delivered to the marketplace backend directly.

• Apple is digging in on its world view that no developer can ever be trusted, even directly by a user. Shipping a bug fix update straight to users, without having someone on Apple QA it, is not possible.

• It is not ideal. It is a start. Even when the monopolist is trying to fight back, it is better than the monopoly.

Apple App Store Review Guidelines:

We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

Brent Simmons:

Just like the sixth finger in an AI-rendered hand, Apple’s policies for Distributing apps in the U.S. that provide an external purchase link are startlingly graceless and a jarring, but not surprising, reminder that Apple is not a real person and not worthy of your love.

John Gruber:

After yesterday:

• Apps that wish to link to — or, I think, even tell users about — web purchasing options from within their iOS apps must (a) still offer Apple’s IAP for those items; (b) pay Apple its adjusted 27/12 percent commissions on web sales that come from inside iOS apps; (c) send Apple sales data monthly and submit to audits of their sales; and (d) follow Apple’s stringent design edicts for these in-app links to the web.

It is possible to get absorbed in the question of whether or not Apple does genuinely care about their user's privacy, safety and overall experience. I still think so, because I still think there are bundles of humans with beating hearts working there.

But whether it's true or not, it is irrelevant. What makes more sense to talk about is: does Apple value higher maintaining control? Ever since the App Store was conceptualized, the answer has been yes.

If the top concern was the privacy, safety and overall experience, the solution is straightforward, although not necessarily simple to implement in practice (you know, in much the same way as attempting to thoroughly, efficiently, effectively and productively review every single update of every single app): institute rules that protect the customer.

Allow some leeway, but have a mechanism where if you act in a way that defrauds or misleads the customer, you are liable to be booted off the App Store. With this in place and effectively administered, there would be no point in attempting to mislead the customer. Whether an abuse of In-App Purchases, a particularly malodorous third-party payment system or just shifty behavior in general, it could be chalked up to the same offense. Or, to focus on the positives, an opportunity to throw down the gauntlet and focus on reasoned, respectful behavior, building a community of trust, providing the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Instead, the focus is on the enshrined axiomatic supremacy of whatever the Apple payment solution is. If you find it wanting, and want to do something else, tough noogies. If you built up your own idea, your own product, your own network, your own offering, and wish to make reference to it – better do it under our rules, even when those rules have no parallel anywhere else and even when those rules do not make sense to the common person.

Instead, the focus is on the absence of trust, the framing of the developers who largely built the platform's identity, humanity and success as rogue agents incapable of contributing productively.

Apple already knows that it is a good idea to start out by providing warm fuzzy feelings and work backwards from there, rather than to aim for profit maximalism and sort out the details as you go. But, with apologies to Upton Sinclair, it seems to be difficult to get a company to remember what it knows to be right when their income depends on them not remembering it.

Less emotionally, I think it’s unwise to assume that an organization that has…

• demonstrably and continuously made antisocial and sometimes deadly choices on behalf of billions of human beings and
• allowed its products to be weaponized by covert state-level operations behind multiple genocides and hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of smaller persecutions, all while
• ducking meaningful oversight,
• lying about what they do and know, and
• treating their core extraction machines as fait-accompli inevitabilities that mustn’t be governed except in patently ineffective ways…

…will be a good citizen after adopting a new, interoperable technical structure.

Increasingly I'm of the mind that "social media" has been a net negative. Whatever else it has been, it has also always been a tool for propaganda, for harassment, for distortion. And if you think that's a bit rich of me to say, I invite you to read Erin's article, where the case is made that even if it can be good in the hands of the right steward, Meta/Facebook is not an unwitting or hapless one but an actively terrible one.

The Humane Ai Pin has been announced, a phone alternative trying its best to not be a phone in any way. Humane famously spearheaded by ex-Apple luminaries Imran Chaudhri (with large amounts of the iPhone and multi-touch user experience to his name), Bethany Bongiorno (a Director of Software Engineering from the launch of the original iPad) and counting among its ranks Ken Kocienda (part of the initial Safari/WebKit team and designer of the first software keyboard and typing autocorrect), I'm finding myself wondering what I'm missing.

There's the ambition, the philosophical thrust behind the product itself: people bewitched by apps, addicted to constant impulses be they doom-scrolling or drip-feeding entertainment. The desire to break free of the neck-craning prison of the pocket rectangle is understandable. (It's also been used as a siren song for both Windows Phone and Apple Watch before.)

There's the technological moment in time. AI personal assistants have been available for years and recent breakthroughs in some AI technology means this is probably the first time this type of device could do what it could do with convincing accuracy — remember things, relate them to the current location, time, context — well enough to be basically the only interface, the only contact surface. Not a parlor trick which you can ignore if you want; a small projected readout in your palm aside, talking to it, having it understand what you mean and doing it is it.

The Humane Ai Pin didn't happen by chance and was not lazily extracted from between the couch cushions. A lot of talented people spent a lot of time at it, clearly chasing a deep vision.

So why does it seem so terribly, undeniably off?

There is a precipitous cliff for anything beyond "talking to the magical AI", where viewing photos and videos and managing settings all happen by going to a ".Center" site in a browser. The product site features food delivery and messaging between friends, two things that are well handled by apps today and that look dreadful to handle via voice entry or the projected palm interface, more fit for haikus than menus. But the "cosmos" operating system is leaning into this, supposed to be free of all types of apps. So much for growing pains.

I am not the first to react strongly to this, but I am probably uncommon in my intense dislike for personal assistant AIs, a dislike that obviously flares to new heights in a product so heavily focused on them. The Humane site harps on privacy and trust, but what is private about being forced to live your life out loud; to not be able to jot a thought down silently? Were these things even discussed on a fundamental level during the considerable ideation, or was anyone just seen as the bearer of the bad culture, steeped in the musky scent of old magics?

A little experience can be a dangerous thing. Having gone through a world-changing evolution of how most people interact with personal technology, I understand if people think "in the beginning, they will laugh at you and say that the keyboard will not work until the screen can deliver convincing tactile feedback echoing physical buttons, but look at what happened; the world adapted and we won". I understand if some of the people involved feel a strange mix of regret of what this new technology, and everything that happened in its wake, has wrought, as well as the professional and curious imperative to do it again by taking the next leap, to unwind the next impediment to the machine just knowing what you mean to do by interacting with it.

If walking around in the world but looking at a screen because you're reading something is being absorbed by something else and not being present, then tapping a pocket square and talking to a virtual assistant about the same thing you would accomplish if you had a screen is also not being present.

In the scale of things, what exists is a technological achievement (and taking the recent progress and extrapolating five more years, might be even more so). There's just no compelling reason for anyone to throw the things that already exist overboard to use it and only it. (Maybe if you believe so strictly in the mission of Humane that aligning with it overrides every practical concern and dresses the contortions up in adherence to a more enlightened existence.)

This doesn't sound like an insurmountable issue to me; for it to be a purposeful, focused device, used in addition to other things and also free from the burden, whether catered to or not, of having to be all the other things. But I'm not sure the people who would found Humane would want to go down that road.

Space Black looks nice, but the one I'd want starts at $7,984 (Swedish price) and even an ~82% uplift in Xcode from the M1 Max is still not worth it when I hardly ever feel held back by this chip.

I have no idea what's in store for Monday night's Scary Fast event, and although some have noted the overlap of the curiously late event with Japanese business hours (and yours truly's wee hours) and thus a gaming focus, this is not a prediction of what's to come.

That said, Apple should create a handheld game console.

Why? Because I think it would be a pretty good option.

The highest volume handheld console is the Nintendo Switch, slated for an upgrade before the end of next year, but as of yet running Nvidia's 2015 platform Tegra X1 (the Switch launched in 2017 and even the pre-launch NX rumors focused on a revised and upgraded Tegra X1), true to Gunpei Yokoi's lateral thinking with withered technology.

It has sufficient capability and beautiful games are still being put out for it, but it is also slightly comical that it can't output 4K, HDR or above 60 Hz, or often maintain a respectable, consistent framerate in 3D games. (Tears of the Kingdom was marred by what looks like AI upscaling artifacting in the Zonai shrines and some background set details being low-poly enough for the Nintendo 64.)

The exemplar for the rest of the handheld consoles is Valve's Steam Deck, running a mobile AMD Ryzen "APU" (CPU with integrated GPU) with RDNA graphics, being sufficiently top of the line sufficiently recently that it packs a believable punch. It runs Linux and Valve's Proton layer for DirectX emulation (for Windows titles; Linux-targeted titles run natively with Vulkan or OpenGL) and is able to support a generous portion of the Steam game library, especially now that developers see it as an option.

Beyond the Steam Deck lie a sea of similar portable-PCs-as-game-consoles-with-joysticks-and-buttons of varying capacities, capabilities and outcomes. The Aya brand seems to be at the top of the pack.

Because it's got everything we need

In 2007, during the introduction of the first iPhone, Steve Jobs explained the selection of "OS X" for the platform (deliberately leaving out the "Mac" part of "Mac OS X"), leading in with this:

Why would we want to run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? Well, because it's got everything we need.

Apple itself is in a similar place for a handheld game console.

• It has famously high-performing but power-sipping M-series chips, and a mature software platform to go with it.

• It has a hardware-hugging graphics layer with Metal, along with a series of underdog but steadily improving GPUs that are now capable of ray tracing under mobile device conditions (power, heat).

• It has unified memory, letting the GPU have access to a large amount of working memory, physically close, with a high bandwidth link and shared with the CPU.

• It has a handful of honest-to-goodness AAA games, who are as of recent developments capable of delivering graphics on par with their current, high-end, living room console versions.

• It has high-bandwidth, integrated solid state storage management. Doesn't everything with PCI Express and NVMe support have this? Both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have solutions for working with data right from the SSDs in ways that bypass the file system and caching; loading data from optical media died this current console generation. Doing this from within the same chip as the GPU, there could be great possibilties.

• It has a growing awareness that gaming, while enjoyable on a touchscreen if you do it right and with some games, is also measurably improved with the tactility, precision, feedback and haptics that come from a controller.

• And finally, it does have Apple Arcade, being some sort of "own" or at least exclusive lineup of games. I am not personally acquainted enough with them to know if they're good, but it's a starting point.

Any pretender to the handheld gaming throne would chomp at the bit to have these parts at their disposal. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft or Valve probably would not say no to integrating a thing or two, like the Apple Silicon architecture ARM cores, into their own pipelines.

Vision

What's left is just whether they will do it. Unless there are reveals coming on Monday to recontextualize the past few years, Apple doesn't get gaming. They don't have cultural credibility. From the non-console side, they are laughed at for not making PC tradeoffs (flexibility and performance). From the console side, Apple hasn't made a game.

But, in a handheld console, PC tradeoffs are either irrelevant or likely to hurt. And both Microsoft and Sony were in similar, culturally philistine positions when they embarked on the Xbox and PlayStation respectively. The bigger issue is the bumbling with which they have tried to get into gaming, always doing just the wrong thing, holding parties for getting traction with individual games and extrapolating a golden future that so far has not arrived, instead marking a precipitous drop from the Mac comparatively riding high a few years ago, being passed on the sidelines by desktop Linux, of all platforms. We'll leave the open warfare against one of the two major game engines and one of the biggest game studios and the mutual disenchantment with one of the two major GPU vendors for another day.

What's more important is that their eyes are, as always, fixed on where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. So-called "spatial computing" (AR) and self-driving cars. But there's room for the eternal "hobby" Apple TV, the hardware device, that has also tried to be a living room console, despite not having any standout features other than "running tvOS, UIKit and Metal".

There might also be room for a widescreen handheld console, somewhere between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPad mini, with integrated control sticks and buttons, with better battery life than most handheld consoles, with better performance and graphics than any similarly built handheld console. In a marketplace where there are chunkier devices with worse battery life just to stream games from someplace else, this would be a standout device. And it would actually be something that "only Apple can do".

10 years ago, the first Apple Watch came out, and then and a year later when the second model came out, a common thought seemed to be: why would you spend "good watch" money on something that won't even last as long as a "good watch"? That won't be a trooper, an heirloom, an object that can serve you well, find its way into the hands (or onto the wrist) of someone else and serve them well before it even gets close to giving up the ghost.

Every now and then, you have to get a new phone. If your favorite prior iPhone model was iPhone 5S, that doesn't matter – eventually, events will force you there. There are practical concerns with updating the same thing in perpetuity in a way that doesn't apply to fundamental timekeeping. A modern pocket rectangle has more to concern itself with than the phases of the moon, timers, stopwatch and an hour-minute readout. But things change, looks change, designs change and perfection is fleeting.

So, in a world where all these things are immutable facts, consider this a flag planted at an extreme moment in time. I am holding the 15 Pro in my hand, it looks wonderful and it feels even better in the hand. The minimalism, the simple, the essential, used to describe as few geometric shapes, vertices, inflection points as possible. There is no diamond-cut, chamfered edge; there is a smooth, continuous curve, joining the improbable matchup of titanium and glass. It feels like a pebble. It feels organic, it feels natural, it feels as if water has worn off the harshness over decades.

Does it matter? Is it worth the exorbitant (Swedish) price? It doesn't make my heart (or wallet) do flip-flops. But if that's what you have to part with, it should at least be as nice as this to hold in your hand, since that's where it's going to be for such a long time. I don't know what the trends of fashion and the demands of competition will have done by the time this one has expired and will need to be replaced. Hope springs eternal that its successor will approximate the eternal – the eroded, smooth stone; the continuous curve; the mellowed, the gentle, the kind.

I have never known about John Warnock more than the occasional fact, like "involved in early Adobe" and "did things with early PostScript", but yesterday's news of his untimely passing gave me reason to look further, including reading the 2010 Knowledge at Wharton interview which casts a lot of light on his contribution.

It seems not just an industry executive but a pioneer in historically reverential typesetting (and its intersection with computer graphics) has left us. Sorry for not being curious sooner; pay your respects by marveling at his story and life's work and start with Michael Tsai's roundup, which is where I found the interview.

Point by point, what the provisions in the Digital Markets Act mean.

To the extent that is realistically possible, this is a piece of legislation that plucks the power bestowed upon a few actors from their hands and back into the citizens', the customers', the owners'.

The world is complicated and there are a number of points where the law will force one trade-off to turn into another trade-off. For example, there are the actions affecting the ad market, where the light will fall and land on various actors curiously scurrying away – not the oligopolists themselves (mostly), but the exploitative, get-away-with-whatever-you-can, bonkers actors on the market they created. If they can't do what they do now, I'm not sure they will consign themselves to lives of quiet contemplation and community service. But worrying about whether the cure will be hell is no reason to put off fighting the disease any longer.

I view this as a cornerstone of civil rights and customer rights in the same vein as the GDPR. The EU does not get everything right and are not the foremost authority on how this all should work. But they are in the same place as the United States Government was before passing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. When the corporations involved have decided that they don't feel like doing anything, what else is left to do?

The major technology companies affected by the DMA, to the letter, are acting in self-serving, customer-harming ways because they get away with it. Everyone knows it's unfair. Everyone knows it takes seconds to push a feature flag with the dark pattern or the monopolistic behavior and ages to prosecute. Everyone knows there's no one else between the App Review team and the developer. Everyone knows you can't realistically avoid having many of them in your life, or between you and your bank, friend, employer or government, to the point that anyone attempting a protest is labelled a kook by the same people cheerily asserting that "if they don't like it they should just use something else".

There was another way. This was not inevitable. They just chose not to.

Ars Technica also digs into the specifics of what "readily removable" means.