Apple needed lasers, and lots of them

Apple needed lasers, and lots of them

About five years ago, Apple design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal.

But they found a way. I noticed this when I first got one of the wireless aluminium keyboards. Very cool.

(via Dan Benjamin)

iPad docking station

iPad docking station

via Cabel:

This is like a brand-new, unexplored universe of “Totally Missing the Point”

Previously.

White House officially responds to software patent petition

White House officially responds to software patent petition

‘Your call is very important to us. Please remain on the line.’

C Spire launches iPhone with different plans for 'streaming' vs 'non-streaming' data

C Spire launches iPhone with different plans for ‘streaming’ vs ‘non-streaming’ data

This is interesting in that it’s a novel distinction: I’ve never heard of a cellular plan with special provisions for ‘streaming’. But it’s also nonsense. There is no such thing as ‘streaming data’. The phrase has no technical meaning.

What most customers considering these plans won’t know is that, at a technical level, there is literally no way to categorise data traffic as streaming or not. Data is data, and ‘streaming’ looks no different to a router than any other kind of download. Do you know how you stream a video on a web page using HTML5? Upload the video file to a server and reference the URL on a page. Same as a download. If you want to offer both ‘streaming’ and ‘downloading’, you use the same URL for both. The browser makes an identical request to the server either way.

The best that this carrier (or anyone) can do is try to figure out which web site the traffic is coming from and classify based on that; e.g., you’re visiting Netflix, so we’ll guess that’s ‘streaming’ –even though you might just be browsing and updating your queue.

The other problem with this method is that the carrier can never know about every web site on the internet that fits their definition of streaming. So they’ll only go after the popular ones. But new web sites become popular all the time, and when this happens, they’ll have to go and find it after it’s already started growing; some customers will have already been using this apparently safe web site when it is suddenly reclassified by the carrier, and then there’s an extra charge, or their connection shuts off, or it’s blocked, or there’s some other unexpected outcome. This is not a good experience.

This page says file downloads are excluded, so there’s that; it doesn’t sound like they’re going based on the actual amount of data used in order to classify streaming. But then we fall further down the rabbit hole:

Listening to Pandora and game broadcasting also counts as streaming.

What the hell is ‘game broadcasting’? This sounds like the kind of surreal language copyright lawyers use to confuse people.

This seems like it could be a nightmare for customers to manage. When you agree to buy a service, you need to know what you’re getting, and you can’t do that if it’s described and enforced with meaningless terms.

But more broadly, this illustrates a larger problem with cellular carriers in the US: they desperately want to remain content providers instead of connectivity providers, by continuing to pretend that things like ‘voice’, ‘data’, ‘text messages’, and now ‘streaming’ are all different things, so that they can convince people they should be charged different prices for them. But to a computer, it’s all just data.

Gruber: Apps Are the New Channels

Gruber: Apps Are the New Channels

Maybe. It makes sense as a logical extension of the iOS App Store.

The question is always, is the content going to be there? Will content providers be inspired to create their own apps? Will people be inspired to buy the device? Or will it be a chicken-and-egg problem, where content providers don’t bother to make apps because the demand isn’t there, and there’s no demand because the content isn’t there?

It doesn’t have to be an instant hit. Apple could run with this ‘TV App Store’ idea, test the waters, and give it time to see if it will build up steam on its own. That might work just fine in terms of being profitable and fun to use. Sure, Apple is happy enough selling the amount of little black boxes that they currently do, and maybe even selling a few more of them, but it really seems like their own measure of success is when they themselves no longer consider it a ‘hobby’. And I think that will only happen when you can affirmatively answer the question: Does it replace your current TV service?

Remember, most people aren’t looking to add yet another thing to their TV experience. The bar to meet here, for the amount of stuff you can watch, is still the one that cable TV has set. It seems like an impossible goal to meet, and yet we have come to expect Apple to do impossible things–so much so that it will be disappointing if they don’t.

Also, look at the state of video apps on the iPad. Netflix is great, but Apple TV already has that. ABC and NBC let you watch currently-airing shows going back a month. CBS has nothing at all. There are a few more premium or obscure networks that have apps, which Gruber mentions. And some individual shows have apps that are just weird amalgamations of ‘popular clips’ and Twitter streams. Yet, the iPad has been out (and popular) for a while now. This kind of support isn’t going to cut it for a TV. Yes, it’s happening, but it’s happening too slowly and too cautiously.

And if you compare video to magazines, as Gruber has, look at how they’ve done: some of them are great, and others are awful, as Marco Arment noted just today:

The newspaper and magazine experience on the iPad is … [that] they’re all individual apps instead of being built into the system reading environment. This can be good and bad: some of these publications, like the L.A. Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The Atlantic, have pretty poor iPad apps. Others, like The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist, are much better experiences …

Content providers are good at making content. They’re not necessarily good at making software.

More concerns I have about this:

1. How do the iPad and the TV work together? Would you have to buy one of these apps twice–once for iPad, and then again for TV? Would there be universal apps that work across both? Is it up to the content provider how they want to handle it? Am I going to have to manage many annoying external subscriptions like with New York Times et al.?
2. How am I going to find stuff? It’s annoying enough already to have to search for TV shows in two places (Netflix and iTunes) on the current Apple TV. Now there’s going to be a third separate place I have to search? Am I going to be able to search the App Store to find an app that contains a specific show?
3. Why would I even want to buy a hypothetical, say, Discovery Channel app, if I only want to watch Mythbusters? Do people frequently watch multiple shows on the same few channels, or do they watch shows across many different channels?

I don’t necessarily think Siri is the answer to any of this, either. A voice interface would be useful, but it shouldn’t be the only way to make sense of a (hypothetically) complex, fragmented interface where content is spread out across many different places with different UIs. ‘Siri, help me find The Daily Show because I just don’t know where to look for it any more…’

Still, all that said: Gruber’s prediction seems more grounded in reality than mine, because you can see the clear path of evolution from iPad to TV. On the other hand, part of the fun of these predictions is in saying something crazy and probably being wrong.

Gratuitous Apple TV speculation

At times it’s almost irresistible to speculate on what Apple’s going to do. At the moment, future TV plans are in question.

Several of the main points of discussion:

Will it have a screen?

I think: yes and no.

I think Apple doesn’t need to sell you a giant screen to go in your living room; and even if they did, they would have a difficult time producing the variety of different sizes for everyone’s needs. This is unlike computer screens, which also come in different sizes, but for different reasons: everyone generally sits¹ about the same distance from their computer. If they want a different size computer screen, it’s because they need to be doing different things with the computer. On the other hand, TVs, more than anything else, need to fit the physical space where they will be located. Proper viewing distance and comfort can require vastly different sizes. It’s impractical to change the space in your home to fit a wrongly-sized TV - what are you going to do, renovate? Move? For a TV? Some people, maybe. Not many.

So you need a fair number of different TV sizes, and the sheer bother of carrying all of that inventory seems… un-Apple-like. And then there are all of the problems Marco mentions once you get into the really big sizes, like delivery and repair. Ugh.

I think the current ‘Apple TV’–that is, the tiny black box which is not actually a TV, but plugs into your existing TV–will continue to exist, for all of the people who need weirdly-sized TVs, or just aren’t going to ever feel like they need to upgrade their TV. Apple can still make money on these people, so why not do so?

But at the same time, if Apple does bring compelling content to the Apple TV–so compelling that you don’t ever need to watch ‘normal’ TV ever again–and you’re in the market to buy a new TV anyway… why not buy one from Apple, if they happen to have one of the most common sizes that happens to fit your needs?

I think they will sell both: a completely integrated TV with Apple software built-in (only available in a very small number of sizes/models), as well as the tiny black box they currently sell that plugs into any TV. I think both will have identical software and content.

What’s the hook?

But clearly, for Apple to make a real TV, and for the tiny black box to be something more than a hobby, there has to be some compelling reason for people to not only want it, but to feel that they don’t need to watch anything else–that it could realistically be their only source of TV.

I think: it needs to have cable.

Cable is what the mass market seems to want. Cable is the reason everyone gives for not switching to Apple TV or Hulu or Netflix or some other such thing full-time: there’s something on cable that still isn’t available anywhere else, and might never be. Cable is like Microsoft Word: it has a million things going on, 90% of which you will never use, but the 10% that you do use is different for every person. Cable is ubiquity in video content, and that is what Apple currently lacks.

So let’s say Apple TV gets cable. But not cable like you’ve ever seen it before. Imagine: for the same price you currently pay for cable now, you get all of the same content–every single show, no exceptions–but all of it is on demand, and with no commercials. There is no more concept of watching something ‘live’²; shows are ‘released’ on Apple Cable at the same time that they ‘air’ on stone-age cable. They remain on Apple Cable for some short period of time (perhaps a week or two) for you to watch at your convenience. (If you miss a show, you can still buy it on iTunes, same as you can now–that’s kept as a separate service.)

Apple Cable is a bit of a misnomer; Apple wouldn’t be providing this to you directly. Instead, you just subscribe to cable service through your local cable provider, the same as you would if you didn’t have an Apple TV. This is the carrot that keeps the content providers happy. Pricing doesn’t change; the ‘basic’ package, all of the premium packages, etc. are all the same. If you already have cable TV, you don’t even have to pay anything extra for this new service. The difference is that now, the cable provider is providing the same content in several different formats, just like they already transmit both analog and digitally-formatted signals over the wire: there’s now a third format, Apple-compatible cable, but it’s the same service.

For people who don’t always want on-demand shows, and enjoy the experience of ‘watching whatever is on’, there could be some kind of ‘live TV simulator’ where you press a button and it will just scoop up all of the shows that ABC released this week and play them on a loop, back-to-back. Even better, it could make Genius Playlists for you based on what it thinks you’ll like, across all of the channels. Or based on different genres.

There’s no box rental. You buy either an Apple Television Set or an Apple Tiny Black Box. You buy that from Apple, and then you own it. There’s no CableCard or special dongle; it works over Wi-Fi or ethernet. If you already have internet, then there’s no extra installation needed. You subscribe to (1) some tier of cable TV service, and (2) internet service–if this is too confusing, your cable company will happily bundle them for you, and throw in a stupid phone you don’t need–and then you can use it with as many Apple devices as you own. If you don’t already pay for cable TV or if you’ve cancelled, well, perhaps this will convince you to come back. If not, you can still use Apple’s products with iTunes and Netflix, if that’s really all you want.

The big unknown here is whether Apple can make the content deals for this to happen. The reason I see it taking this sort of shape is that the content providers don’t have to give up their core business model that they so desperately cling to. Just two concessions: no more ad sales, and no more extra fees for on-demand. True, these are two big concessions, so I don’t know if Apple can pull it off. On the other hand, they stand to regain a lot of cable TV customers they’ve been losing lately. Also, look at iTunes Match–who could have thought that would be possible? iTunes Match still seems impossible!

Why these two concessions? I believe Apple will never allow ads in the user experience, and that that they see on-demand as the only possible way for video to work in the future.³ Take existing cable, change only those two things about it, add a great user interface, and you essentially have the idea that I’m suggesting here. It seems simple and obvious–almost too simple and obvious. In retrospect, many Apple products do seem that way; the only reason we found it so hard to think of them was because we were so limited by our existing ways of thinking, and assuming that huge, fundamental things could not be changed. That important people’s minds could not be changed.⁴ There’s no technical reason this couldn’t happen today, or five years ago–the only thing holding us back is us.

Clearly, Apple is about changing the world through better user experiences. They are not, despite the never-dying hopes and dreams of their fans, about changing the world through lower prices or different business models; just look at how they’ve helped to prop up the monstrous 2-year contract oligarchy in the phone business. That’s why I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that the cable TV business model will go away any time soon, either. Certainly, the content owners will fight tooth and nail against anything that seeks to disrupt their gravy train, as they have been doing. And Apple have shown that they have no problem with the status quo as long as they get a piece of the pie, consumer-hostile pricing or not.⁵

For example: one thing people have wanted for ages is ‘à-la-carte pricing’, or being able to pick and choose which channels you want, instead of paying a huge flat fee for a huge bundle of many channels, most of which you don’t care about. As long as the concept of a ‘channel’ exists, I don’t think we will ever see this. And the twin concepts of ‘channels’ and ‘bundles’ are what gets you paying a minimum of $60 (for many, more like $100) per month. And that’s the toll that the content trolls have set on their bridge, and they don’t seem to be budging.

I could see it work this way. I could see a lot of people buying it. I wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be worth the price to me, but I believe I’m in the minority here; I won’t pay that much for a cell phone, either.

I could also see, and would be tempted to hope for, a more radical, consumer-friendly change than the one I’ve described. Certainly, Apple can conceive of something much greater, and would have no problem building it; it all depends on the content they can get. Content is the constraint everyone has to work within. That’s why I don’t dare hope for more radical change, at least not now. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

What will it be called?

I’m not even going to speculate on this, because I have no model for how Apple chooses these things. Their name choices usually baffle me at first; I thought ‘iPad’ sounded silly, but it’s grown on me.

It does seem, though, that they’ve painted themselves into a corner with their existing ‘Apple TV’ that isn’t a TV. Assuming that they keep the tiny black box while at the same time introducing an actual TV, something is going to have to change with regards to naming. I have no idea what.

Bonus round: OMG inputs and cables and junk!

If/when Apple does make a TV, it will probably have at least one HDMI input, if for no other reason than that you could plug your Mac into one. Mini DisplayPort is compatible with HDMI. Mac Minis still ship with both Mini DisplayPort and HDMI. Apple likes HDMI.

I don’t know if it will have one, two, or some other number of HDMI inputs, but probably not a lot. I don’t think it will have any other kind of input, just like the tiny black box right now has no other kind of output.

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1. Don’t even start on me with these standing desks, you hippies. ↩︎

2. Edit : I guess there would have to be an exception for sports and certain kinds of news programs. The point is that the vast majority of video that is broadcast on TV is pre-recorded, so there’s no reason for it to have a start and stop time that is beyond the viewer’s control. ↩︎

3. And let’s just take the idea of a DVR off the table right now. Everyone should know that the DVR is a bad hack. From a technical standpoint, it’s utterly ridiculous to conceive of taking a recording, broadcasting it to millions of people, and then having every single one of them individually re-record it for later playback–instead of simply distributing the original recording. It’s lunacy. It doesn’t work well. It will never work well. The only reason it exists is because of the content owners’ copyright, and because they won’t agree to anything reasonable, and because this kind of hack doesn’t require their agreement (thanks, Supreme Court). Apple will never make a DVR; you don’t make great products out of bad hacks. ↩︎

4. Wouldn’t you just love to know how some of those negotiations went? I hope some people at Apple got RDF lessons. ↩︎

5. I just wanted to note for the record, for anyone that believes I’m reliably a breathless evangelist, that I don’t actually agree with everything Apple does. But I do try to keep separate what I want them to do and what I expect them to do. ↩︎

You shouldn't be communicating with the phone

You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone

Andy Rubin, head of Android at Google, talking about Siri:

Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.

I like this quote a lot because it has an additional layer of meaning beyond what’s obvious. To Google, the phone (or any device) is just a vessel for using Google services. Google doesn’t want you to use your phone; they want you to use Google through your phone.

Marco Arment: How to bring good design to a platform

Marco Arment: How to bring good design to a platform

I would generalise the headline Marco gave to this post like so:

How to bring good design to a product

‘Product’ means anything that a company produces and people want to buy. A ‘platform’ means something more specific, but I think Marco’s list applies to any kind of product.

If I can extend my tortured grocery store analogy just a little bit more: looking at his list, you could apply the same to Wegmans (as he implicitly applies it to Apple).

This led me to realise something else: people don’t go to Wegmans to buy food. You can buy food anywhere. They go to Wegmans to buy the experience of going to Wegmans. Wegmans is the product.

It actually validates the case for selling a product that is ‘merely’ a platform for selling other products, in an industry where you might not have expected to see it.

Amazon working to remove publishers from book publishing

Amazon working to remove publishers from book publishing

Here’s another entrenched industry fighting change instead of looking for ways to improve upon it. Publishers provide marketing and not much else these days. Amazon knows how to do that just as well, if not better.

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” [Russell Grandinetti, Amazon executive] said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

Very prescient - he realises Amazon isn’t going to keep their current position forever either. You can’t stand still.

First Wegmans in New England opening tomorrow

First Wegmans in New England opening tomorrow

I grew up in Rochester, NY–where Wegmans is based–so this is kind of a big deal to me. I was fairly disappointed to see the state of local grocery stores after moving here to Massachusetts. There’s really been nothing like it here, until now.

At 138,000 square feet, it is larger than two football fields, and the biggest supermarket in all of New England.

Wegmans is obsessively high quality in every detail of their stores - but in Rochester, it’s well understood that you pay a bit more for the privilege of going there (despite the company’s claims otherwise).

Think of what it’s like to shop at a Wal-Mart, and then go to a Target afterwards; now imagine the difference between those stores to be several times more. Now consider: what if you had never been to a Target, and Wal-Mart was all you ever knew?

It’s not that Wegmans is posh; it’s not much like Sudbury Farms, where the pretentiousness is nearly suffocating.¹ Rather, Wegmans has a very friendly and accessible atmosphere; it’s just not cheap, in an industry where cheapness is pervasive in almost every aspect.

Despite the company being known for the fanaticism of its customers, even in Rochester–where the family that runs the company are practically celebrities–lots of people refuse to shop there at all because it costs too much.² Wegmans makes some token gestures to advertise competitive prices on a few things, but they make no serious effort to sway these people.

I like to look at different industries, and ask: what would happen if you took the thing that these companies do, and decided to make it the best you possibly could, and make that the top priority above all else, even above the things that business people are typically concerned with (market share, profits, etc.)? In a lot of industries, such a company doesn’t exist at all, which is sad.

I’m not quite naïve enough to say that any company anywhere meets this ideal; but in groceries, Wegmans seems to come the closest. In that way, they play a similar role as Apple does in electronics.

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1. I usually refer to them as ‘Snobbery Farms’. Their slogan is, ‘Your family deserves the best’, which rings hollow to me. I always envision Draco Malfoy saying it. It’s not enough to throw money around; you have to care about what you’re doing. Compare this with one of Wegmans’ slogans: ‘Food you feel good about’. It’s humble, and it just about sums up everything they do. ↩︎

2. There’s always Tops, the longtime bitter rival. ↩︎