I find it wryly amusing that the first phone I ever owned with a sealed-in, non-swappable battery -- the iPhone, of course -- was also the first phone with a battery life so short as to warrant the ability to swap the battery. Hence the commercial popularity of battery cases like the various Mophie products. These are particularly handy when travelling, as the need for a phone when navigating foreign climes is greater and access to charging points is less frequent.

That's why, in December 2011, I ordered two Mophie Juice Pack Plus battery cases for the iPhone 4 handsets my wife and I were about to take on a vacation to America. The Mophie models have plenty of fans amongst the TUAW staff, and had received a good review from Macworld's Lex Friedman too, so it seemed like a safe bet. However, unknown to me, the cases were fake, and could potentially have been very dangerous (fortunately, they weren't). I've written the story up to let you know what you should be looking out for and help you to avoid repeating the mistakes I made.

Gallery: Counterfeit Mophie Juice Pack Plus

The tale of the fake

In hindsight, I should have guessed right away, but I'd never heard of fake battery packs before so it simply didn't occur to me. I've heard plenty of stories of other types of accessories being riddled with fakes -- notably, Sandisk SD cards are a common target, and I once bought a 2 GB "Sandisk" SD card that turned out to be rebranded 512 MB fake. (There's an excellent in-depth look at fake SD cards by famous hacker-activist Andrew Huang.) But fake battery packs was a new experience for me at the time.

It wasn't the packaging that should have tipped me off. I examined that very closely after uncovering the true nature of the counterfeits and it was absolutely perfect; high quality glossy cardboard, well printed, with a flap on the front held closed with magnets -- impressively elaborate. I suppose that when the counterfeits are sold in a retail setting, consumers can examine the packaging, and thus will be tipped off if the packaging isn't perfect.

It wasn't anything about the transaction, either. These pseudoMophie cases came from Amazon Marketplace, from a "Fulfilled by Amazon" seller, so the order was packed by an Amazon staff member. I paid £34.99 each for the cases. Now, that's cheap -- around half the price of the Apple Store -- but it wasn't too-good-to-be-true cheap; as I recall, there were several other sellers in the £35-40 range, and the cases were around the £40-45 mark from most online sellers. At the time of writing, Amazon stock is £39.99.

No, what should have clued me off was the poor fit the cases made with my phone. If you haven't seen one up close, the Mophie battery cases consist of one large piece you slide the phone into from the top, then a smaller piece that clips over the top and holds the phone in place. This part sits on the phone's power switch, with a small plastic pass-through button so you can turn the phone on and off.

The top part on my two cases made quite loose contact with the main part of the case, meaning it rocked back and forth a little. Not much, but just enough to cause the occasional spurious power button press. With the case on, a few times a day I would pull my phone out of my pocket, press (usually without looking first) the Home button to wake it from sleep, and find myself taking a screenshot of my lock screen instead as the battery case was simultaneously pushing on the power button. I wasn't particularly impressed.

Other than that, the cases worked fine... at first. After we came back from our vacation, we took them off our phones and didn't use them for a few months. Then I had to travel for work, so I got them back out, only to find they'd both Gone A Bit Strange (technical term there). One of them had developed a loosely fitting USB jack, and I had to fiddle with the cord when plugging it in before it would charge up. The other one wouldn't charge the phone correctly, as if it was flat, even though its own little indicator lights claimed it was fully charged.

Plus, I noticed, both of them had somehow accumulated noticeable cosmetic damage, despite being very lightly used. Mophie cases have a kind of soft-touch rubberised coating over a hard plastic shell, and on my pseudoMophies, that coating had worn off in a number of places.

I still didn't think "fake!" though. I just assumed they weren't very good, and tossed them back in a drawer until I eventually got around to emailing a warranty claim to Mophie, several months later. In fact, I remember glancing over the one-star Amazon product reviews and seeing people complaining about all the problems I had -- poorly fitting cases, problems getting the case to charge up, problems getting the case to connect to the phone, excessive cosmetic wear -- and assuming that Mophie's quality control had gone downhill since the glowing reviews were written. Looking back now, a small number of these reviews mention that they were dealing with counterfeits; but at the time, no-one had said anything like that. One seller even pinned the blame on the iPhone 4S being different from the iPhone 4, which I find rather suspicious.

Eventually, my irritation at being sold what I thought was a couple of lemons overcame my reflexive procrastination, and I contacted Mophie customer support. I did the usual dance of filling in my product serial number and describing my problems, but then had an unusual request come back:

"In order to move forward with your replacement, we need to gather some information. First we need a copy of your receipt. Please reply to this email with a scanned copy. If you purchased your item through our website, we can look your order up internally. If you have not already submitted your mophie (sic) order number, please reply to this email with the number.

"We also need a clear picture showing the product label and serial number on the inside of the product."

(Emphasis mine.)

Slightly baffled -- I'd already provided the serial numbers, so why did Mophie need these pictures? -- I complied, only to receive a terse message back:

"Judging by the serial number, and the label itself, you have two counterfeit devices. As such, we cannot offer you a replacement and urge you to seek a refund through the seller as soon as possible."

At this point I became rather concerned. Poorly made lithium-ion batteries can be quite dangerous, and while there's plenty of no-name battery cells that are perfectly safe the fact I'd been stuffing a blatantly counterfeit product in my trouser pocket was rather worrying. Angry now, I emailed my Amazon seller, but after 48 hours I still hadn't heard anything. I followed up with Amazon itself, and it almost immediately agreed a refund and issued me an RMA to return the cases, saying:-

"This order was purchased from 'REDACTED' and was 'Fulfilled by Amazon'. As we dispatched this item to you directly from an Amazon.co.uk fulfilment centre on behalf of this seller, we can process the return of this item, in exchange for a full refund."

(I have redacted the seller's name as I have no way of knowing if the seller was knowingly selling counterfeits, or itself a victim of an unscrupulous supplier. I have attempted to contact the seller directly for comment, but the details I have are too generic to let me find them, and Amazon would not pass along a message from me. The seller's Amazon Marketplace account appears to be defunct now, although feedback on its profile page indicates it was still trading as recently as November 2012.)

Lessons learnt

So, how could I have prevented this sorry story from happening in the first place?

I contacted Mophie and Amazon UK's press office for comment on this case and to ask them that question directly. I asked what advice they would give consumers when shopping. Ross Howe, Vice president of Marketing for Mophie, said

"mophie takes counterfeits very seriously. In order to try and combat this problem, we have developed a page that solely address this issue, offering purchasing tips to the consumer. Additionally, our internal legal team works to monitor the selling of mophie products by unauthorized retailers, taking appropriate action if it is determined counterfeit items are being sold."

Howe went on to offer consumers the following advice:

• Purchase at mophie.com or one of its authorized partners. The authorized partners page provides a breakout of all approved retailers globally.
• Customers should avoid the 'too good to be true' deals of eBay and the Amazon Marketplace. Even the stores that are "fulfilled by Amazon" are known to sell low-quality knockoffs.
• Sign up for the brand newsletter to receive the latest information on new products and sales.

Suzi van der Mark replied on behalf of Amazon, and of course was keen to stress that buyers are protected (contrary to Mophie's stance of pushing you to its retail partners):

"Amazon.co.uk does not allow the sale of counterfeit items on its Marketplace platform. Any seller found doing so will be subject to action from Amazon including removal of their account. Occurrences of counterfeit products on Amazon.co.uk Marketplace are rare and we have an established process in place which enables third parties including rights holders to provide us with notice of counterfeit product. We respond rapidly to any such notice. Every customer who orders on Amazon.co.uk is covered by our A-Z guarantee and if they do receive counterfeit goods from a Marketplace seller we will provide a refund. For more information on our A-Z Guarantee please visit this link."

The old adage that "a price that's too good to be true means it probably isn't" applies, of course, as Howe says. But of course a clever seller of counterfeits can easily overcome that by simply pricing their goods just below the genuine ones, which was the case with my purchase. If I'd registered the cases with Mophie as soon as I'd received them, I might have been alerted if the serial numbers hadn't matched up. However, I'm guessing the counterfeiters can use real serial numbers (perhaps duplicated from genuine products), as otherwise my initial attempt to request product support would have failed. Other Amazon commenters mentioned that they had successfully registered their counterfeit case with Mophie, which supports this hypothesis.

The bottom line is that I'm not sure there's anything I could have done upfront to avoid being taken in by this, except perhaps paying top dollar from the Apple store. I was lucky that Amazon stood by me and refunded my money promptly, or I would have been out the cost of the goods. In future, when using "market" style reseller services like eBay or Amazon Marketplate, I'm going to pay rather closer attention to retailer terms & conditions, as well as its reputation for aftersales customer care.

Notably, Amazon (at least in my case) offered considerably more protection that eBay offers, in substance if not in policy. Many people have written about the difficulties of getting a refund for a counterfeit eBay purchase; stories abound of people having a rough time from Paypal's dispute resolution system. Probably most famously, Paypal forced a buyer to destroy an antique violin worth $2500 that may or may not have been fake. The seller was out the $2500 and the violin at the end of the transaction.

Still, it could be worse. Counterfeit products aren't just a headache for consumers, either. At least I didn't buy a job lot of fake military grade processors...

I bought a fake Mophie Juice Pack (so you don't have to) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I'm a pretty keen amateur cook; perhaps unusually so (I have a sparsely updated food blog, Objection: Salad!, if you want to see the gory details). However one aspect of my cookery that is probably utterly typical is running low on inspiration for the daily grind of weekday dinners. I've been tried a few things to solve this to this, including recipe apps with "why not make this?" suggestions and food blogs with stunning photography of intricate creations.

But to be honest, after a long day at work, I don't want to think too hard about what I'm making. I usually just want to crank out one of my standby dishes. You probably know what I mean -- the two dozen or so quick meals you've made lots of times before and you know you can always turn to to find something you fancy eating on any given day.

The problem is, I'm forgetful. I do my grocery shopping during my lunch breaks and I often find myself heading out to the supermarket with no idea what I should be picking up. I forget entirely what I've eaten lately or what I haven't had for ages. I've even tried proper week-ahead full-on meal planning, but that is, frankly, not a lot of fun. I don't particularly enjoy being that organised. It feels too much like work. I needed something less formal.

So that's my problem, which perhaps you share. And here's my solution, for your consideration: I created a list in my favorite to-do app, Realmac Software's Clear (you can use any to-do app for this, I just happen to like Clear). That list stores my rotation of standby meals: the ones I know I can cook in a reasonable amount of time, and the ones I know my wife and I will always enjoy eating. That's a screenshot of my current list up at the top of the article.

The trick is, I never mark any of those meals as "complete." I'm not using the app to track what I've done. Instead, after cooking any particular meal, I merely drag it down the priority order to the very bottom (you can do this with a simple tap-and-drag in Clear, which is one of the reasons I really like the app). Then, when I find myself pondering "what am I making for dinner tonight?", I look at the top of the list for my inspiration. That way, I get a natural reminder of the things I haven't cooked in a while. When I cook something new that fits in, I add it to the bottom of the list, so I'm naturally expanding my repertoire as time goes on.

Occasionally, I go a little further, and where I have some specific ingredients to use up before they go off I add extra annotations to the top of the list. That's as close as I get to formal meal planning. I've also added specific one-off reminders of recipes I see that I want to cook soon but know I'll forget about, and sometimes I delete those rather than move them to the bottom if they didn't turn out great or if they were too much work to be reasonably tackled in a weeknight after work. I'm all about the practical compromises.

Since adopting this technique, I've rarely run dry for inspiration, and I've found that there were a surprising number of recipes I cooked once and promptly forgot about that were actually things I wanted to be cooking every few weeks. It's only a small thing -- I'm not claiming this is going to change anyone's life -- but I thought I'd share it with you in in the hope that you might find it useful too.

Lifehack: Use a to-do app for cooking inspiration originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 04 Jan 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you've been living under a blissfully silent rock for the last couple of days, it may have escaped your notice that an annoying bug in iOS means scheduled Do Not Disturb periods don't automatically end. Apple's response was a rather weak KB article that amounts to a shrug and a claim that the problem will "resume normal functionality after January 7, 2013."

[UPDATE: as pointed out by Liam Gladdy in a comment written an embarrassingly short period of time after this story going live, there's something wrong with the reasoning below. The period of January 1st-6th is actually the first ISO week of 2013, not the last week of 2012, so (at least as written here) the explanation cannot be correct. The bug could be related to the ISO week calculation, or it might not; however the working out in this article is definitely flawed in several ways. The blogger responsible has been taken out the back and shot.]

Digging into the problem

I did some manual testing by winding my iPhone's clock forward several years and setting different times to turn DND on and off again. You can replicate this easily by scheduling one minute of DND, changing your iPhone's date and time, and watching to see if DND correctly switches on and then off again. If you try this too, note that you'll get some scary-looking warnings about mail server SSL certificates, not having backed your iPhone up for several years, and some nagging about app updates. It should be safe to click through those.

To me, it seemed that in the years I tested (2013, 2014 and 2015), as long as the "Enable from..." time set in the Do Not Disturb schedule settings fell after midnight on the first Monday of each year, then it would work correctly. Conversely, I would see wonky behaviour (a technical term, there) until that first Monday. A similar pattern was recorded by MacRumors forum poster "stevem1981," who tested all the way up to 2024. Note that he talks about the "fix date" being Sunday, rather than Monday, because he's scheduling the DND after midnight, as he says in the last sentence.

But stevem1981 recorded some weirdness, too; like in 2016, when the bug doesn't occur even though the week starts on a Friday. Or 2017, when the bug happens through as far as January 8 even though the year starts on a Sunday. So it's not as simple as "it doesn't work until the first Monday of the year." More on that in a moment.

This is enough information that we can theorise how DND works, and what is going wrong.

A possible explanation

Firstly, note that the bug is related to DND switching off, not on. The device always moves into DND mode successfully, but never comes back out of it. Secondly, note that the bug occurs when the "Enable from..." time is before the first Monday in the year. That suggests that the way DND works, under the hood, is that when it switches on through a schedule, a timer is kicked off (in some background daemon) in iOS; that timer is responsible for turning DND back off again at the appropriate time. The timer has problems during something a bit like, but not exactly, the first calendar week of the year.

Now, to programmers who've done a lot of work with date and time handling (like me; I write airline flight systems for a living, which require a lot of heavy timezone math) "it's broken during something like the first week of the year" immediately suggests a moderately obscure problem related to the ISO week date. This is a slightly weird definition of the year that you get from many date manipulation libraries by specifying that you want the year as "YYYY", as opposed to the more common "yyyy".

It's derived from an ISO standard that defines the first week of the year as starting on "the Monday that contains the first Thursday in January". Under this definition, the first few days of the year that we write as "2013" are actually counted as being part of 2012 instead; 2013 doesn't begin until Monday, January 7. It's the sort of thing accountants like to use to keep things neat and tidy. Interestingly, January 7 is exactly when Apple says the problem will go away. Ah hah!

So, for 2013, the 1st-6th of January will show as being part of 2012 if the developer specifies "YYYY" in his or her date string, rather than being part of 2013. This means that when DND automatically switches on, it will have a calculated switch off date of sometime in 2012, which is now in the past so it will never turn off. I once made this mistake in my own code, as it's very easy to type "YYYY" instead of "yyyy"; it seems some nameless Apple engineer has done the same in iOS's Do Not Disturb function, but only in the automatic switch off time, not the switch on time part. In my case, the problem was caught in automated testing and never went live. The Apple engineer has been less fortunate.

I'm not the only one who is thinking along these lines. iOS dev Patrick McCarron mooted it on Twitter, and MacRumors forum poster "akac" had the same theory. Charles Arthur wrote the story up for the Guardian and linked to a code sample by Chris Cieslak that clearly reproduces the issue using Apple's NSCalendar and NSDateFormatter libraries.

Apple's response

On the one hand, I feel sorry for Apple. Presumably this issue had gone completely unnoticed until January 1, and even if the fix is merely changing "YYYY" to "yyyy" there's no way it can get a patch written for iOS, run through internal testing to ensure nothing else was accidentally broken, then released to the world before January 7. So all Apple can really do here is say "sorry, but the problem will go away by itself"... whilst also putting a permanent fix into some future iOS release, of course.

On the other hand, Apple's response is rubbish. Coming on the heels of high-profile problems with Daylight Savings in 2010, 2011 and 2012 (plus some oddity with Siri), and most recently Calendar.app crashes if you have an all-day appointment on April 1 2013 (link via Charles Arthur), it wouldn't be unfair to describe Apple's reputation for date and time handling as "rather poor." Seeing as how Apple has basically all the money in the world, and seeing as how bugs like this are quite easily caught with thorough unit testing, you'd hope that this isn't the sort of thing that Apple would put in a shipping release of iOS.

Having allowed this rather silly bug to slip through anyway, I think the least Apple could offer us was some crumb of embarrassment or apology. I'm not expecting or demanding it prostrate itself with wailing and gnashing of teeth; just suggesting a little bit of humility might not have gone amiss here. Instead we get a Gallic shrug of a KB article that blandly says, in essence, "scheduled DND is broken. Stop scheduling it that way." I think that's a poor show, and an example of how Apple's minimal attitude to corporation communication will end up making this a bigger story than it should have been because it simply irritates people.

A possible explanation for the iOS New Year's Do Not Disturb bug originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Big data is, like many trendy IT buzzwords, an increasingly nebulous term. The Wikipedia definition, for example, is rather jargonistic and impenetrable. If you read big data conference information you'll typically see a lot of naked commercial stuff that might be terribly important to bigwigs but perhaps looks a little... dry... for the layman.

Indeed, an awful lot of the hype around big data is very commercial in focus. At its heart, big data is concerned with how modern technology allows us to generate, store and process information on a massive scale. For example, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said in 2010 "there were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing." (one exabyte is a staggering 1,073,741,824 gigabytes.) As is so often the case in human endeavour, a lot of this ends up being about selling people things: think of Google's ad sensing network or Amazon's "people who bought this also liked..." engine, for example.

You might be forgiven for thinking that's not the most logical subject for a high-production-value coffee table book, but that's exactly what creators Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt have produced in The Human Face of Big Data; the book is also available as a US$2.99 iPad app, and all the profits from the tablet edition will be donated to charity.

Through their crowd-sourcing firm Against All Odds and a team of more than 200 researchers, photographers, writers and illustrators, this is a project that aims to illuminate and explain the parts of big data that matter to people who aren't the CTO of a Fortune 500 company.

So we get writeups of earthquake detection systems in Japan; of Shwetak Patel's sensor devices that can accurately calculate how much power each individual device in your house costs (and help inform you about which devices to replace with energy efficient ones); and of Nick Felton's obsessive gathering of personal data from how many miles he walks to how many hours he sleeps each year. We learn about Intel-GE Care Innovation's "Magic Carpet" prototype, which is a passive sensor net woven into the flooring of an elderly person's home that can learn the person's habits and routine and alert a relative or caregiver if it suddenly changes -- say, the person can no longer walk as fast, or starts spending long periods in bed. We hear from researchers John Guttag and Collin Stultz, who processed discarded EKG data of heart attack patients and identified subtle new early warning patterns to improve doctor's risk screening.

It's full of interesting things, then, and it makes a good case that big data could be the first step towards the Internet developing a "nervous system" of sorts; a detailed sensor network generating reams of data, plus the ability to meaningfully process and act on that data in real time. You may now jump to the comment box and make a Skynet joke.

It's worth pointing out that this is a most certainly a coffee table book, rather than an in-depth treatise, and as such it's more about the imagery than it is about the text. Most subjects get only a brief overview of a few hundred words, punctuated by some short essays of 1,500 words or so. This isn't the place to go for a lot of detail on each individual project, although of course most of them are covered in detail elsewhere on the web.

The book is going to be delivered free to 10,000 "key influencers" around the globe, as part of Smolan and Erwitt's mission to "start a global conversation about Big Data, and who owns the data all of us generate it." Indeed, one of their concerns is that most of the conversation around big data is being driven by commercial interests, but it inherently affects all of us -- it is, in a very real way, made of us -- and this book attempts to redress that. It's a noble goal, for sure.

The Human Face of Big Data is available in book form from Barnes & Noble internationally and from Amazon and IndieBound in the US. It costs around $35 and (in my opinion) would make a nifty gift for any CTOs you just happen to have in your social circle. The photography is attractive and enticing, the infographics are informative and in general it's the sort of book you flick through then end up reading half of as one thing after another catches your eye.

The iPad app should be available now for $2.99, with all profits going to charity: water. It has content rather like most iPad magazine apps -- swipe to page through the book, scroll up and down to read each article, tap on various zones in some pictures to drill down into the detail -- that sort of thing.

It's a nice app that uses the iPad Retina display to show off the great imagery from the print book, although inevitably some of the impact is lost in the transition to a much smaller canvas (the book measures 14 x 11 inches). Notably, the book also seems to have quite a bit more content -- partly, I think, because some of the more detailed illustrations like the stunning BibleViz (my personal favorite) won't scale down to the iPad's relatively small screen.

The Human Face of Big Data: an unlikely subject for a great book originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 04 Dec 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Following the recent regulatory approval, UK telecoms operator Everything Everywhere today announced its new LTE service under the new EE brand name. The network is currently running in engineer testing mode in four cities (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and London). With few users to congest the network, EE are demonstrating speeds of as much as 35 Mbps downstream and 21 Mbps upstream, about five times faster than existing 3G services can manage on a really good day. With a tail wind. Downhill.

Before the end of the year, the company is promising a further 12 cities will be live -- Belfast, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Southampton. In all, as many as 20 million people could be sending their "Happy New Year!" messages through EE this year. Which would almost certainly collapse the new-born network, of course, but let's not rain on its parade just yet.

Initial devices that will go on sale "in the coming weeks" include the Samsung Galaxy S III, the HTC One XL, a couple from Huawei, the Nokia 820, and an exclusive on Nokia's not-actually-out-yet Lumia 920. There's also going to be Mifi-style devices and USB dongles, to get older devices online through the new network. EE also teased that "more devices will be announced shortly"; I wonder what hot new LTE enabled device it could be hinting at?

EE will also offer fibre home broadband; it promised to cover 11 million households initally, but didn't share any details about where this would be. It hasn't shared any information about tariffs yet, but I wouldn't imagine either LTE or fibre service is going to be cheap. The company isn't offering pay-as-you-go plans and is advising that existing Orange or T-Mobile customers moving to LTE will need to "agree to a new minimum term on EE."

Everything Everywhere was formed back in 2010 as a holding company following the merger of two existing cellular operators, Orange and T-Mobile. Slightly confusingly, the announcements today form a new customer-facing brand, EE, which will sell only high speed services: LTE cellular and fibre optic home connectivity. The existing T-Mobile and Orange brands will remain in place for the time being. Customers moving from 3G to 4G service will upgrade from the older brands onto the EE infrastructure.

Ofcom's recent decision to approve EE's existing 1800 MHz spectrum for LTE use has effectively handed EE a monopoly on 4G cellular networking within the UK for the time being; everyone else has to wait for a spectrum auction later this year before they can begin constructing networks for rollouts expected in 2013. This first-mover advantage could prove to be a huge competitive edge for EE, particularly if the iPhone 5 turns out to be, as widely expected, A) LTE capable and B) more popular then puppies and kittens combined. That would position EE as the de facto best network for the iPhone 5.

EE's competitors aren't at all happy about this situation; Vodafone said that "(Ofcom) has shown a careless disregard for the best interests of consumers, businesses and the wider economy through its refusal to properly regard the competitive distortion created by allowing one operator to run services before the ground has been laid for a fully competitive 4G market."

EE is accepting pre-release signups now via its website.

Everything Everywhere, Explained: the UK gets LTE originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

On the 25th of July, a shiny iOS remake of the 8-bit classic Spy vs Spy launched on the App Store for $1.99. The next day, the price dropped to $0.99 in a launch sale. On the 30th, it went up briefly, then developer Robots and Pencils announced that "to show our appreciation, we are extending the sale price indefinitely." It remains at $0.99 to this day.

I'm annoyed by this. Now, please note that this is not a complaint about sale pricing per se. As it happens, I bought Spy vs Spy a few hours after it launched (I'm a sucker for a well-done 8-bit remake) so I paid $2; I suppose from a miserly point of view I'm out a buck. I'm fully capable of spending seven times that for lunch without blinking, however, so I can't claim with a straight face that I'm annoyed about the money.

I'm annoyed because Robots and Pencils has just taught me a lesson: don't buy iOS games for $2+ because they'll be cheaper soon. I do not intend this to be any sort of slight against Robots and Pencils, however. If it was the only outfit doing this it wouldn't matter, but the same lesson is being taught to us all, over and over again, by many of the most successful devs in the App Store. For example, it feels like EA puts its entire back catalog on sale for $0.99 roughly every other week. Free App a Day has been enduringly popular for years. Gameloft has regular sales and giveways of its apps. And so on, and so on. It's sale pricing all the way down.

App Store consumer valuations: hopelessly broken?

So here's my hunch: I think the constant sales are training consumers to avoid "expensive" apps, where "expensive" has taken the seemingly ludicrous definition of "anything more than a dollar." Furthermore, I think this will be to the detriment of us all, in the end: devs and users alike.

Before I detail my reasoning, a quick poll: please be honest with me now. How many of you cruise AppShopper's price drops page for bargains when looking for a new game to while away a boring commute? Or how many of you, when someone recommends an iOS app to you, find the first thing you do is load the AppShopper app to check the "price history" section... and if the app routinely goes on sale for less than it costs now, add it to your wishlist to buy the next time it's cheap? I've done both of these things. I suspect many of you have too.

This is perfectly rational, Economics 101 behavior: experience has taught all of us that apps do, frequently, drop in price. If we wait it out, we can save a buck or two, and who doesn't like to save money? Suckers, that's who, and I'm no sucker! With the iOS apps market -- particularly the games bit -- teeming with competition, it's not like the pressure to acquire some hot new release right now is very great. There's always something else to buy, something else that's cheap or on sale. So I think some people (most people, perhaps?) take a wait-and-see approach.

Insidiously, this is self-sustaining and self-reinforcing; once people are trained to wait for sales, devs can only generate revenue when they put apps on sale, which further encourages consumers to avoid expensive apps. And if you're the only dev trying to swim upstream, people will ignore your app forever waiting for a sale that never comes. It's a vicious circle.

For example, consider the case of App Cubby's Timer, an app I liked when I reviewed it recently. App Cubby recently cut the price of the app from $0.99 to free, resulting in downloads going up from 13 per day to around 25,000. That's a not-inconsiderable number of people who, presumably, wanted the app enough to go to the effort to download it but not enough to pay a buck. Now, perhaps Timer's relatively small (but beautifully formed!) feature set meant people were put off. But is that fair? It does one thing well, and it cost a tiny amount of money. Just how much do people expect for $1?

I think near-constant sales and price cuts are at the root of at least some of the "but $2+ is soooo expensive!" world view for app pricing, which is (on the face of it) so utterly counter-intuitive as to be baffling. But it does make sense from some angles, and this is one of them.

Talking to developers and marketers

The acquisition of the Sparrow email client by Google kicked off an extensive dialog between lots of bloggers on the subject of app pricing, App Store economics, and whether or not current "mainstream" pricing clustered around $0.99 leaves enough room for most devs to earn a living or not. Interesting posts from active iOS developers abounded and covered a wide spectrum of opinions; for a few of the more thoughtful, look to App Cubby's David Barnard, Instinctive Code's Matt Gemmell and Instapaper's Marco Arment. It's a problem that's on a lot of people's minds right now.

I reached out to a few folks to gauge what they thought of my hypothesis above.

First of all, I approached Robots and Pencils itself. Company spokesperson Michael Sikorsky declined to comment, saying "I've polled the team of 5 [who wrote Spy vs Spy] and we got back 8 opinions. So, we're not even all on the same page [ourselves]." However, his wife and co-founder Camille did share her personal opinion: "I think Apple screwed everyone by offering games at $0.99. I think our game is easily worth more but it's a race to the bottom dollar in the App Store. And yes, the users' expectations reflect Apple's choice which is good for them but not good for the devs who spend a ton on production."

David Barnard of App Cubby agreed to chat with me and said a few interesting things. Firstly, he urged me not to "lambast" Robots and Pencils for the price cut -- as he said, "They did what worked and are raking in the cash. Better for them to make great money than stand by some sort of principle and lose their shirt." I think he's absolutely right here. Although Robots and Pencils wouldn't tell me directly, I strongly suspect that sales at $2 were simply too disappointing to be sustainable, and the company acted out of desperation. I'd have done the same in its place.

He went on to say:

The thing is, the ship has already sailed on premium one-time pricing on hit apps. Some apps can survive in a niche at a premium price, but as I showed in my post about Sparrow, you still need to rank relatively high even at a "premium price" to make much money.

More and more I just think the App Store has completely shifted the reality of making money on software. Apps that could be hits should try the 99¢ route, and others should just look for other ways to make money. I'll be writing a blog post about this in the next few weeks, but I'm thinking about doing a complete strategy shift for App Cubby. And I'm definitely not going to be working on any new apps without carefully weighing the monetization options.

I'm not sure exactly what the long term solution is, but I'll be thinking a lot more about that as I work on my next blog post.

(Emphasis mine.) It's that emphasized part that most worries me as an iOS user: I have this nagging feeling that there are great apps I could be using, great ideas that devs have in their heads, that will never see the light of day because the dev isn't confident of a return on the investment. We cannot know for sure just how significant that factor is, though it's not hard to find devs who'll admit they've stopped pursuing ideas because of concerns about profitability. Or, as Keith Shepherd of Imangi Studios (Temple Run, Harbor Master) put it, "I think even one year projects on iOS are too risky from a business standpoint."

It's also noteworthy that David isn't specifically talking about games here -- App Cubby's products are utilities.

I also spoke to Brian Akaka, CEO and founder of Appular -- a mobile app marketing and consulting services firm. Brian's experience with App Store pricing goes back right to the very beginning (and before; he was a director of Mac gaming outfit Freeverse before moving to iOS projects), so his insight is particularly valuable:

I have a unique perspective, as I was working with apps on the day the App Store launched in July 2008, and have seen how prices have reached a downward spiral towards free.

While I agree with your idea that the consumer is a culprit in this, I think that the root blame lies with Apple and [the] design of the App Store.

A bit of history: When the App Store opened, no one really knew how to price their apps. As I was working with games at the time, the only points of reference we had was pricing for handheld devices like the Nintendo DS ($20-$45) and casual downloadable games from companies like Popcap (approx. $10-$20 at the time). Prior to the App Store launch, someone at Sega was interviewed who mentioned that the price of Super Monkey Ball would be $9.99. So that's what we charged for our iPhone games. And so it went... we would watch our competitors, and when they adjusted their prices, so did we.

One day someone at Pangea (who was one of the leading iPhone developers in the first year) decided to cut the price of all their games to $0.99. They immediately shot to the top of the charts. And stayed there. I recall a conversation I had with our CFO at the time. He argued that they weren't maximizing their revenue by charging so little. I rebutted him with, "if they aren't making more money at the lower price point, they would raise their price back." Within a few weeks, we had lowered our prices to $0.99 as well. This price drop, combined with some Apple love (they featured one of our games in their TV campaign for "the funnest iPod") got us to the #1 position in the App Store and several million units sold.

Fast forward to 2012, and the situation is worse. The App Store is incredibly crowded and competitive, and additionally Pricing is the one marketing tool (of the 5 P's of marketing) that developers can adjust at a moments notice. This means that developers have (over)-relied on pricing as a tool to promote their app. This leads to frequent price drops, sales, and all kinds of frequent price changes. As you mentioned, this has led to consumers coming to expect that an app will go on sale. And if it doesn't, it's ok, because a similar app will go on sale.

An additional issue is that Apple's App Store has suffered from a huge issue since 2008, which is that it is too difficult for a consumer to find the best, most useful app for what they are looking for. As a result, a vast amount of app sales are being decided by what is on the Top Paid charts, which ranks by # of units sold. Any Econ 101 student will know that you will sell more units at a lower price.

At this time, many game developers have given up on trying to charge even $0.99 for their app, instead going for the "Free to Play" model. As evidenced by the download numbers as well as the headlines and acquisitions by these "freemium"/"social"/"casual" game developers (such as Zynga, TinyCo, Funzio, GREE, DeNA, etc), the consumer will overwhelmingly pick a "free" game versus one that you have to pay for (upfront).

Fixing the problem

Brian was kind enough to continue with three pieces of advice to developers launching an app. I'll take them one by one:

Be realistic, not idealistic. Even if you know your app is worth more than $0.99, based on your time, costs, blood, sweat, tears, failed relationships etc. It doesn't matter. Remember that the market decides the fair price, not you.

There's no getting away from this one. A common problem when economics amateurs consider at what level to price products is getting tangled up in the idea of how much money (or time) it cost to make; but the laws of supply and demand are cold and uncaring. If competitors are selling for $0.99, and your app isn't clearly better than the competitor's offerings, then you're not going to do well selling at $3 -- even if that's what you need to cover your costs.

Look at the competition. Is there a similar app out there? Is it priced at $0.99 (or free)? Then so should your app. Until you've developed a reputation as having such outstanding quality that you can charge a "premium" for your product over competing products, you need to be price-competitive. Even Apple struggled through most of it's life by trying to charge a higher price for its products. Consider being freemium and monetizing off of advertising or in-app-purchases. With thousands of games that are available for free, it's a very rare iOS game that can charge more than $1. Typically these are games with enormous brand appeal (such as Tetris) or are well-known for having something truly unique, such as the best graphics (such as Infinity Blade).

Josh Lehman's post "Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy" made a number of points. Some of them have been well rebutted by David Chartier and Joe Cieplinski, but the one I really liked, especially for gaming, was "Free Apps Are Often A Great Alternative."

In theory, games on the App Store are not fungible; if I want to play Swordigo then 10000000 is not a substitute because it's a different game. In practice, however, for the more casual gamers that make up the bulk of the App Store market I think games purchases are fungible because people just want some entertainment and aren't too fussy about exactly what form it takes. I think consumers looking for a new game probably have a mental shortlist of dozens of "might buy" titles to look into -- the sheer scale of the App Store contributes here -- and one of them is almost inevitably going to be free or $0.99, so the more expensive titles might not even get a look-in to the purchasing decision.

Brian touches on the idea of alternative monetization strategies, like freemium games and IAP. As a gamer, however, I am less convinced than him by either approach.

I'm wary of freemium games because, fundamentally, I believe extensive use of IAP actively encourages developers to adopt bad game design. Many freemium titles work by being attractive at first, then requiring the user to gradually do more and more amounts of boring tasks -- "grinding", in gamer slang -- to progress... unless the user buys, with real money, some sort of bypass option. Think buying Tower Bux in Tiny Tower, or gold coins in Infinity Blade, or the "do the farming for you" power ups in Farmville.

The more boring the grind, the easier it is to lure motivated players into forking out to bypass it. I'm not against developers making money, but I'd much rather pay upfront for a well-designed game that's fun all the way through. I'm not saying all IAP is bad, but I do feel that it's a disappointingly rare dev who can avoid its siren call to the dark side.

Still, I cannot deny that freemium games are very popular, so it seems likely I'm simply on the wrong side of history here. So it goes.

Non-grind-avoidance use of IAP might not be the ticket to riches either. Consider the sad story of Gasketball, an iOS game that released for free with a $2.99 in-app purchase to unlock the rest of the content. It managed 200,000 downloads, and at one point was close the top of the iTunes games chart -- but only 0.67% of customers paid for the IAP. After two years of work, the two developers behind the game ended up homeless, staying with friends while trying to address the reasons the app didn't sell well and recoup their investment of time.

Whither Apple?

Brian's last point was:

Pray that Apple changes the App Store. (Just don't hold your breath). Apple definitely knows the criticism about the way that apps are discovered, and has shown signs of trying to address the issue, from redesigns of the layout, to the purchase of Chomp (a startup focused on app discovery). However, it's important to remember that Apple's main goal is to create profits for itself, not developers. Something like raising the prices of apps will benefit developers, but not necessarily consumers. And remember that the sheer volume of iOS apps is an important selling point for the iPhone and iPad versus other platforms.

So what about Apple? It keeps 30% of all App Store sales revenue, after all. Surely it would try and keep app prices high to make more money?

Well, I'm not so sure. Consider Horace Dediu's deduction that app developers receive $12 for each iOS device sold. That implies that Apple makes $5.14 per device from app sales. Apple never discusses margins, of course, but I think I'm on safe ground if I suggest it makes at least ten times more profit from the hardware sales of the cheapest iOS device. I therefore contend that Apple doesn't have much reason to care about how much software is sold for. Profits from the App Store are insignificant compared to hardware sales.

An alternative viewpoint is that proposed by "revorad" in this Hacker News post. As Joel Spolsky wrote in his seminal post on software economics, "smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements." Some products naturally fit together and complement each other, and wherever possible, you want to try and engineer the market to force down the prices of things that complement your product.

In other words, if you're Microsoft and you sell PC operating systems, you want to create a market with hundreds of OEMs driving down prices of PC hardware; that way, more people can afford to buy a PC and can then be sold your software. If you're today's IBM, you work hard to foster Open Source software, so that enterprise software can be commodized and the market for your profitable consultancy services grows. If you're Google, you release Android to OEMs under permissive, almost-Open-Source licences, so as to commoditize Internet access from mobile devices; then you have a bigger pool of users using Google services, looking at ads and earning you revenue.

And if you're Apple? Well, Apple benefits from a crowded App Store marketplace where developers cut prices to the bone in an attempt to stand out from the crowd. Every single app uploaded to the App Store adds value to every iOS device in existence; every single app a customer buys is another reason for them not to migrate away from iOS in the future.

Apple is certainly motivated to keep the App Store busy, and sales high; these things help iOS stand out from competitors like Android. But it's not motivated to keep prices high. In fact, lower prices for apps help to attract consumers to iOS as a platform, selling more of the hardware devices from which the bulk of Apple's vast profits flow.

The bottom line: I don't think it's likely Apple will do anything of consequence to help struggling smaller devs.

Be the change

So, let's recap what we know for sure:

1. Numerous iOS devs are reporting that they are struggling to make enough money to stay afloat because consumers won't buy "premium" (i.e. more than a buck or two) apps.
2. Apps that cut their prices report very high sales boosts.
3. Apple makes much more money from iOS hardware than it does from its commission on App Store sales.

I believe that points one and two together are rooted in consumer psychology; we're locked into a feedback loop, where about the only way for a dev to get attention is to cut the price of an app, but that only further encourages users to avoid expensive apps. And I believe point 3 means we can't count on Apple to do anything to fix this.

If we don't fix it, I don't forecast doom and gloom. I'm not suggesting devs are going to flee the App Store in droves. However, I do think we'll see less interesting apps and less indie devs, as the excess risk scares away the people who can't deal with it and causes risky ideas to be shelved before they are developed. Meanwhile, the big players like EA and Rovio will churn out mostly bland, risk-adverse titles. I think that would be a shame.

Devs could play a part by sticking to their guns and refusing to lower premium prices, but realistically I suspect that ship has sailed. Another option is greater exploration of what freemium can offer, as this thoughtful post from David Barnard (yup, him again!) outlines. This is where I really do hope we see Apple play a part: I'd like to see more flexible monetization options added to the App Store, including paid upgrades and trial/demo modes.

As for users, the people who ultimately stand to lose the most if the vibrant, lively App Store we all know and love declines? What can we do? I don't see an easy answer, sadly. I'm going to do the only two things I can do: publish this post and hopefully get people talking, and be the change I want to see by buying apps that I want immediately -- not waiting for sale pricing to come around.

Sincere thanks to the people who took the time to respond to my interview requests: Michael and Camille Sikorsky, David Barnard, and Brian Akaka.

Making money in a crowded App Store: it's dog eat dog and Spy vs Spy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The case for this being stupid is well summed up by Peter Cohen for The Loop:

After last night's earnings report, in which Apple exceeded its previous guidance for the quarter, financial reporters quickly noted that Apple missed analyst expectations. But analysts are consistently wrong about Apple's earnings, so why do we put any stock in these people's guesses at all?

Now, whilst it's true that Apple beat its guidance, I don't think that necessarily means everything was rosy. In fact, I think it can be argued Apple did have a disappointing quarter by the best measure we can apply: its own.

"Earnings guidance"

So, what is earnings guidance anyway? We're going to need to understand this to go any further.

Earnings guidance, also known as "forward looking statements", is a comment that the management of a firm makes about how they expect the short-term future to play out. For Apple, it's part of the financial statement for each quarter, containing an estimate of the revenue expected to be made in the next quarter. Internally, it's the culmination of an estimation process that takes in all the various product lines Apple sells.

Guidance is important because, fundamentally, Apple knows an awful lot more about how it's doing internally than any external analyst can hope to. In theory it's the most accurate prediction there can be. However, it also has an Achilles heel.

Imagine if your boss came to you and said "I want you to tell me how well you're going to do in your job for the next three months. If you beat the number you give me, I'm going to congratulate you; if you miss it, I'm going to be mad." You know that your boss is hardly ever in the office and can't tell what you do all day, so doesn't really have any idea about what decent performance looks like. What would you do? You'd lowball your estimate to give yourself more breathing room, of course.

This is what most firms do with their guidance. That's not to say Apple deliberately marks estimates down, which would be a bit naughty. But when faced with a range of uncertainty -- which all predictions of the future must deal with -- it's going to err on the side of caution rather than irresponsibility.

To quote Bullish Cross:

The reason Apple regularly beats its revenue guidance so consistently between 12-18% every quarter is the fact that of any entity, research group, analyst or fund manager, Apple's management is by far the best positioned to know exactly how the company will perform in any given quarter. In fact, Apple probably possesses on the order of 20-30 times more information than everyone else put together.

Being so well positioned, what Apple does before offering it's [sic] sales guidance is it formulates a conservative internal outlook. After doing so, Apple then offers a guidance number that is just about 10% below that internal sales expectation.

Good conservative accounting practices dictates that if and when a company decides to offer guidance on its sales expectations, the company must provide an outlook that is reasonably conservative, consistent and comparable across quarters. The expectation set by the company must allow the average analyst to reasonably infer what is likely to unfold. Both reported financial statements and unaudited financial forecasts must be reported consistently across quarters, comparable across quarters and conservative across quarters.

Thus, Apple ultimately ends up offering a guidance number that is 12-18% below what it ends up reporting. The reason for this is simple. As with any other company, Apple's internal expectations tend to be slightly conservative. So when the company offers a sales estimate that is roughly 10% below its internal expectations, those internal expectations are already slightly conservative leading to the ultimate 12-18% beat.

Apple's historical "guidance beat"

That quote introduced the idea of the "guidance beat": the proportion by which Apple's actual revenue is larger than the revenue it predicted.

Here's Apple's guidance beat, as a percentage of the estimated revenue, for the last few years:

(Data sourced from apple.com and seekingalpha.com.)

Almost three years of beating its own guesses by an average of 19% and never less than 12% -- but all Apple managed last quarter was 3%.

Now, I don't present this data to suggest that anything is badly wrong at Apple. Far from it. I do think there are interesting questions to be asked about these results, as Dan Frommer wrote, but I'm no financial wizard so I'm not the person to dig into those. The bald numbers are that Apple made $35 billion in revenue and kept $8.8 bn of that as profit. These are staggeringly huge figures.

However, I do think the graph above makes a strong case for two linked conclusions:

• Something unusual did happen last quarter.
• Whatever it was, Apple didn't see it coming.

Putting on my Blogger Speculation Hat (a battered trilby with a hand-drawn obviously-fake PRESS badge tucked in the ribbon), I'm going to speculate that perhaps Apple was unprepared for the iPhone sales number.

On the conference call, Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer said "Our weekly iPhone sales continue to be impacted by rumors and speculation regarding new products," as if it was all the fault of us nasty bloggers. This is, frankly, hooey. After five years of annual iPhone refreshes (with one three-month blip, admittedly), there are whisky-sodden Peruvian goat herders who've never even seen an iPhone in their lives who could still tell you we're due a new iPhone in a couple of months.

If that's all it is -- and I see no reason to think different(ly) -- then Apple will recover this ground in a significant sales spike when the new iPhone does eventually ship, of course. It's not lost revenue; it's merely delayed.

As Frommer says, there are other things Apple might be worried about; the iPad has a lower profit margin than the iPhone, and is an increasing proportion of its sales; and if the rumours of a cheaper 7.8" device are true that's only going to get worse. Apple is a luxury device maker so obviously it's at risk to the ongoing Euro crisis, and so on and so forth.

It's not my intention to be alarmist. I don't think Apple had a bad three months. But I do think that dismissing the last quarter with a wave of the "it hit its guidance so nothing else matters" wand is simplifying the story a step too far. Something interesting happened. The question is... what?

Apple's "disappointing" quarter cause for questions, not panic originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's here! Following a surprise announcement in February, OS X Mountain Lion has arrived (to use its full and formal title, sans the 10.8 version number).

Barely a year after the release of Lion, this new OS nevertheless boasts an impressive list of new features. The overriding theme is unchanged from the release of OS X 10.7 before it: "Back to the Mac." In other words, a selective migration of the best bits of iOS to its big brother.

I am not going to attempt to exhaustively work my way through all two hundred plus features and write in detail about each and every one. The plan is to hit the highlights, tell you what's changed, and let you know why that's a good thing -- unless it isn't. In which case, I'll tell you why not. Think of this as the amuse-bouche to Ars Technica and John Siracusa's no-expense-spared tasting menu.

Everyone sitting comfortably? Do you have a tasty beverage and/or the read-it-later service of your choice to hand? Then I'll begin with these basic facts:

• Mountain Lion costs $20, but is free if you bought a Mac after June 11, 2012.
• It's available through the Mac App Store.
• You don't need to have installed Lion -- you can upgrade from Snow Leopard (but only the very last 10.6.8 sub-version) to Mountain Lion directly.

First up: the bottom line

There's some ways in which Mountain Lion is undeserving of big excitement -- or a full-on review. Since OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has changed its process for OS X upgrades; we're now getting vaguely-annual upgrades with healthy numbers of extra features for relatively modest $20-30 costs, rather than the near-biennial major upgrades of the past that cost more than $100.

As such, there's barely a decision matrix for the upgrade; if even a small number of the significant new features will be useful to you, Mountain Lion is a no-brainer. Similarly, the second some hot app you want ships that won't work on Lion, that's a no brainer too (for me, that'll be Tweetbot for Mac, which will be 10.8-only once it leaves public alpha).

So if your question is "is Mountain Lion worth the twenty bucks?" then the answer is "yup." You likely all guessed that, which is why I thought I'd put it up here and not leave you in suspense.

If your question is "what should I expect from Mountain Lion?" then keep reading. Hopefully I'll show you a few things to get excited about. It's a great update.

If your question is "should I install it right now?!" then read the next section very carefully.

Safety first

Apple's routine updates to OS X might have lulled you into a false sense of security. Don't let that happen. This isn't iOS; Macs aren't backed up to an always-on iCloud safety net and Macs can be customised in a hundred thousand ways (yay!), which means there's a hundred thousand ways for an OS upgrade to go wrong (boo!).

I have two pieces of counsel, from someone who's had to recover a lot of data from broken computers over the decades. [If you don't want to take it from Rich, take it from Steve and Erica who have been prepping our readers for Mountain Lion since April. -Ed.]

First, consider waiting, for a few days if not longer. Some nasty problems have been known to slip past Apple's testers and into the wilds, and something you rely on -- some small utility or a printer driver or somesuch -- may not yet be updated to work with the new OS. 10.8 isn't that different from 10.7, so you're unlikely to have significant problems; nevertheless it might be worth looking through the Roaring Apps Wiki to check your apps will still work.

If you make any part of your living with your Mac, upgrade this advice from "consider" to "I strongly urge you to consider."

Second, backup, backup, backup. You should be doing this anyway, but I like to take a second backup before installing major operating system upgrades. On the Mac, my process is:

1. Using Carbon Copy Cloner or a similar app, take a snapshop of my Mac's drive to a USB device.
2. Reboot the Mac, holding down the Option key to make the "select boot device" menu appear.
3. Select the USB device to boot the freshly backed up copy of OS X.
4. Make sure it's all fully working.
5. Reboot back to my normal OS X disk.
6. Disconnect the USB drive, and maybe even your Time Machine drive too.
7. Proceed with the upgrade.

If you follow this process, you can have peace of mind that the upgrade can't permanently damage any of your data.

Spec wars

Not every Mac can have Mountain Lion. As with all of Apple's upgrades, some older hardware has fallen by the wayside and will never advance past OS X 10.7 -- unless some enterprising hackers come up with workarounds, that is.

Specifically, the oldest supported model, by family, is:

• iMac: Mid 2007 (first aluminum-bodied model)
• MacBook (Polycarbonate): Early 2009 (the one with the Nvidia 9400M graphics card)
• MacBook (Aluminum unibody): Late 2008 (the only model there was)
• MacBook Pro: Mid 2007 (the first ones with Nvidia graphics)
• Xserve: Early 2009
• MacBook Air: Late 2008 (again, the first model with Nvidia graphics)
• Mac mini: Early 2009 (and again!)
• Mac Pro: Early 2008 (the second ever model, the first to offer quad core processors; for the first model, you can investigate this workaround)

There's some weird non-linear stuff at work here, with iMacs as old as 2007 working while Mac minis as recent as 2009 don't. Ars Technica suggests this is down to graphics cards that have 64-bit compatible drivers. This theory aligns with the most common distinguishing characteristic of the Mountain Lion-capable models; they are the first of their range to use Nvidia graphics, with the model immediately that came before them using ATI or Intel graphics.

Your Mac will also need a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, although we'd suggest that 4 GB is a more workable amount these days. Apple's spec sheet says Mountain Lion needs 8 GB of disk space, but again it's wise to have some extra headroom. You're also going to be downloading the 4.4 GB Mountain Lion installer from the Mac App Store so you'll need still more disk space to put it in, and hopefully a fast Internet connection too.

There's also a few features that are reliant on specific hardware. AirDrop, which is also in Lion, doesn't work on a few of the older Macs that appear on the above list; it requires a modern Wi-Fi chipset. There is a workaround for Lion machines with nominally incompatible networking, but it's not clear yet if it continues to work on Mountain Lion.

More annoyingly for most people, AirPlay Mirroring has much tighter requirements, because it requires a beefy graphics chipset for reliable realtime encoding, and to create the encrypted video stream that's sent to the Apple TV. It won't work on MacBook Pros before the Early 2011 model or other Macs from before Mid 2011. Our own Erica Sadun has some tips on working around these limitations.

i(can see clearly now the)Cloud is here

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- iCloud

At the WWDC keynote in 2011, Steve Jobs said: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We're going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud." That vision comes a good deal closer with Mountain Lion, which drives iCloud deep into the operating system.

It's almost everywhere you look, in fact. Firstly, there's settings and metadata syncing. A single sign-in with your Apple ID when you first boot Mountain Lion can immediately configure a wide range of settings and preferences in the following list of apps: (deep breath) Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime, Game Center, Safari, Reminders, iTunes, the Mac App Store, and Notes. Phew.

This works exactly how you'd think it would; any of those apps that have content in the cloud, whether from your iOS device or another Mac running Mountain Lion, have access to that content. So immediately after booting 10.8 for the first time, you can pull up Reminders and see your to-do list, or Contacts and see your friends. Your Mail signatures, rules, account settings, etc are synchronized. Any Safari instance can see all the pages open on every other Safari instance -- across iPad, iPhone, or Mac. And so on.

It's... well, it's all very much like iOS, in the best possible sense of the word. Fuss-free and frictionless and, when you stop to think about it, probably how we all wanted these bread-and-butter productivity apps to behave along.

One thing I'd like to put on my wishlist for future iOS/OS X versions: I don't particularly care for the actual apps for either Reminders or Notes. When Apple opened up the fully-featured Event Kit API for working with calendar entries on iOS, it encouraged the creation of an entire subcategory of alternate calendar apps (I'm partial to Calvetica, myself). All of these apps still use the built-into-iOS calendar, so they get iCloud sync for free. I'd like to see similar APIs for the reminders and notes facilities, so that we can see a similar ecosystem of alternate apps for these too.

iCloud isn't just about settings and preferences though...

You got your cloud in my documents

A number of Mountain Lion apps, such as Preview and TextEdit, will offer to store your documents over there somewhere (waves hands vaguely in the direction of North Carolina) and enable you to access them "from anywhere", where "anywhere" really means "a Mac or iOS device signed in to your Apple ID running the same app as you used to create the file in the first place." For example, as far as I can tell, documents synced to the cloud from TextEdit and Preview don't appear to be accessible by any apps on iOS 5 or 6, so that syncing is only meaningful between Macs running Mountain Lion.

(An aside: Apple's website clearly shows screenshots of Pages with the same iCloud support. As I write this iWork still doesn't support Documents in the Cloud, although it seems a safe bet that Apple will push an update to the iWork apps the day Mountain Lion goes live. You also can't see TextEdit or Preview files in the iCloud.com web interface -- only iWork ones are visible. Similarly, though, I can't rule out Apple updating that site when Mountain Lion is released.)

Documents in the Cloud has a very iOS-style interface. In supported apps the normal Open File dialog has an alternate view with a linen backdrop, chunky thumbnails, and a simple one-level-deep-only folder system for grouping files, just like app folders in iOS and Launchpad.

Syncing is done in the background, so you can work with your files even if your Mac is disconnected from the Internet; changes will be uploaded when you next connect. It's certainly simpler than the full hierarchal folder system us Mac users have been accustomed to until now, and it's a very different approach to that taken by cloud syncing solutions that look like a normal folder, like Dropbox and Apple's older iDisk.

Working with Mountain Lion installs on both my MacBook Pro and my iMac, I put Documents in the Cloud through its paces. First, I created a document on one Mac; within seconds, it was visible on the other. Leaving it open in TextEdit on the first Mac, I made some edits on the second. Within a couple of seconds, I saw the first Mac's TextEdit window automatically update with the latest text.

Then I got sneaky. I disabled Wifi on both Macs, and made conflicting edits in both files. When I reconnected them, a dialog window appeared pointing out that my modifications were out of sync, giving me the timestamps of each file, and asking me which one I wanted to keep.

Once I selected my preferred version, however, the other was deleted. If I wanted to keep both sets of edits -- suppose it was a blog post I'd been writing and I wanted to manually merge parts of both documents into one new one -- I'd be out of luck. If I was using Dropbox instead, then I'd be protected in two different ways; firstly, Dropbox's default behavior is to create "(conflicted copy)" duplicate files, so you can retrieve other copies of the file. Secondly, Dropbox maintains version history for all files through its web interface, so you can recover older versions of files. Documents in the Cloud offers neither of these niceties.

Another area where things get less clear-cut is if you want to open a file created in one app (e.g. TextEdit) in another (e.g. Pages). As it stands, you have to open the file in TextEdit first, then save it to the Mac's filesystem. Then open it in Pages again, and save it back to iCloud, but within Pages. Now you have two copies of the file in iCloud and a third on your Mac, all in mutually incompatible silos; you have to manually track which one is the current version.

Similarly, if you download a document from iCloud through the web interface (perhaps to edit it on someone else's Mac or a Windows machine), you have no means to upload it again -- you have to do something clunky such as emailing it to yourself so you can re-add it from one of your own devices. In seeking to make "the computer for the rest of us" simpler for basic Mac users, Apple has perhaps made things more complicated for the rest of us experienced OS X operators.

Documents in the Cloud also doesn't address my biggest gripe with this sort of lightweight app-oriented file system, which is that I can't group together related files of different types (say, a spreadsheet with some financial calculations and a word processor document with the report that summarises the figures). Is this because I'm a stuck-in-my-ways curmudgeon? Yeah, very possibly. Of course, the traditional filesystem is still there (and alternative cloud syncing solutions exist), so we're all free to each make up our minds.

One final note -- Documents in the Cloud support is restricted to Mac applications distributed through the Mac App Store. That's a defensible decision on Apple's part; iCloud gives every user a generous 5 GB of space for free, which is certainly not free for Apple to host, and commercial App Store apps generate some income for Apple to offset that. However, with Apple's sandboxing rules leading to some devs removing their apps from or never putting their apps into the App Store, that could turn out to be an irritating limitation for end users.

isn't really important." "iMessage: because message delivery order

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Messages

As you are doubtless aware, the previously-available-in-beta Messages app is now baked into OS X. It has had some UI re-arrangements and tweaks, but it's not fundamentally different; if you used the beta you won't be surprised by anything you find here -- although it certainly seems to crash less. If you didn't use the beta, it's pretty much exactly what you expect anyway: functionally equivalent to iChat with the addition of New! And! Improved! iMessage support.

Messages has noble goals. It tries to unify your send-short-pieces-of-text-to-friends into one app, whether the friend is using is a traditional instant messaging system (it supports AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, just like the old iChat) or the newfangled iMessage (that semi-replaced SMS in iOS 5). Like most multi-protocol instant messenger clients, Messages does a decent job of to unifying these different protocols behind a neat interface. For example, the indication of which network a chat uses is handled via light grey text in the message field itself, just like how Messages on iOS says "Text Message" or "iMessage" before you start typing.

Video calling is also supported, with all chats having a "start video" button at the top right, with one tiny oddity. For AIM, Jabber, Google Talk and Bonjour, you chat within the Messages interface. But for iMessage contacts, the standalone FaceTime app launches instead.

So far, so good. Messages is somewhat let down by wrinkles in the iMessage backend though, and I don't think Apple has all those problems licked yet.

Consider my initial experiment on starting Messages for the first time. I was already chatting with two of my friends via my iPhone. I happen to know that these two friends have their "caller ID" setting in iOS to be their phone number -- not their Apple ID email address. So when I am chatting with them on the phone, the iMessage servers are routing messages based on that number.

Being a sneaky sort, I started a Messages conversation on my Mac using their email addresses instead. It went wrong in exactly the way I thought it would -- on both my iPhone and my Mac, I now had two separate message threads, both with the same participants. If you don't understand the technicalities of what's going on behind the scenes, this is confusing; if you do understand them, it's still annoying.

In my time with 10.8, I couldn't reproduce the other rare-but-too-frequent ways I've seen iMessage freak out on my over the last nine months -- the missing messages; the delayed messages; the messages I'm told haven't been delivered but have; the messages I'm told have been delivered but haven't; and on one particularly memorable instance the messages that arrived in a different order than how they were sent. However, these are symptoms of issues on the backend iMessage service rather than the client, so there's no reason to believe the release of Mountain Lion is going to change anything. I live in hope that Apple is working behind the scenes to improve matters.

Finger on the pulse: Notification Center

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Notification Center

Notification Center is another of those "back to the Mac" features that was clearly derived from iOS, with a little bit of Growl mixed in for good measure. It's designed to be a unified system for every app that has to attract your attention to something, although the "unified" part is debatable because Notification Center, like iCloud, can only be used by apps distributed through the Mac App Store.

Notification Center is divided into two types of UI elements. The first are the pop-ups that appear when an app is trying to tell you something. Although conceptually similar to iOS, these are visually more like Growl -- small floating boxes that appear in the upper right corner of your screen. On an app-by-app basis, you can either turn these off, set them to "banners" (disappear on their own after a few seconds) or "alerts" (stay on the screen until you acknowledge them), as well as the option to play an alert sound or not.

Thus, you can create tiers of apps, giving the power to interrupt you only to those you value the most. When you really need to focus, you can drag the top bar of the Notification Center sidebar downwards to reveal a "turn all notifications off until tomorrow" setting. This is a thoughtful feature, although I wish it was a little more obvious; I overlooked it throughout most of my Mountain Lion testing.

The second part of the UI is the Notification Center itself, which is analogous to the pull-down display that iOS has. A click of the button in the menu bar icon in the top right corner of the screen, or a two-finger swipe leftwards from the right edge of your trackpad, will slide the whole of OS X to the left and let you peek at a long list of the various alerts and alarms and notifications that your Mac is asking you to see. As on iOS, there's a slightly-too-small close button to dismiss notifications on an app-by-app basis.

A quick aside about that two-finger-swipe gesture -- it feels very natural on a MacBook, where you can place your fingers on the casing of the laptop itself and swipe onto the trackpad. It initially feels a bit weird on a Magic Trackpad, however, as there's no casing to start from. To address this, Apple has made it fairly forgiving of what it considers to be "from the edge"; you can put two fingers anywhere on the rightmost half-inch or so of surface and swipe and it'll work. It feels awkward at first but stick with it and that'll soon pass.

One downside to Notification Center is the dreaded Beepocalypse. As I type this, I have my iPhone and iPad on my desk next to my iMac, where I am running Mountain Lion (with its built-in Twitter client -- more on that later) and Tweetbot for Mac. Every @-reply I receive on Twitter therefore results in four separate notifications. Or at least, it should -- only about 1-in-5 seems to be making it to Notification Center right now, although Mountain Lion isn't live yet so I'm not going to read anything into that.

It's really not clear what Apple could do about beepocalypses (beepocalypsii?). Perhaps future Apple hardware will incorporate something clever like NFC, or leverage Bluetooth in some manner, to sense when devices are close together and suppress extra notifications. That's not much of a solution, however. If my iPhone is in my hand and my iPad in my bag, I want notifications on the iPhone; if my phone is in my pocket and I'm looking at my iPad, the converse is true. Proximity doesn't really tell the devices enough to work out where my attention is, and hence where notifications should go.

Something involving iCloud syncing that removed "read" notifications on all devices when they were dealt with on one would help a lot, although there are still edge cases (such as Twitter notifications that come from mismatched clients). For now, I found that Notification Center encouraged me to re-evaluate exactly which apps were allowed to interrupt me, on which platforms, and in which ways (transient banners versus persistent alerts). I turned a few of the less important but chattier apps off and I've been a good deal happier since.

Notification Center also doesn't interact very well with Growl at the moment. At several points I saw overlaid Growl and Notification Center pop-ups appear on the screen, with one obscuring the other. Growl 2 will enhance support for this scenario, and doubtless we'll see more elegant support as 10.8 beds in and apps are updated, but for now it can get a little ugly, and you might want to move Growl's notifications from the default top-right corner.

One final curious footnote about the Notification Center UI: the drop shadow on the edge of the screen suggests that, on the Mac, Notification Center is "underneath" the main OS display -- whereas on iOS, it's rendered as if it's "over" it. This addresses Jake Marsh's insightful complaint that the use of linen as an "on top" texture in iOS in inconsistent.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Dictation

Yet another fresh-from-iOS feature is Dictation, the Mac's new "take a letter, Maria" feature that promises high quality voice-to-text transcription throughout the operating system.

The first thing to note is that Dictation requires a live connection to the Internet to work. Indeed, as soon as you turn it on (it defaults to off), it warns you that "what you say is sent to Apple to be converted to text." Behind the scenes, it'll be using the same voice recognition algorithms as Siri.

It works in all apps; anywhere you can enter text, you can press the shortcut key (by default you double-tap the Fn "function key") to activate it and talk away. Once you're done, it thinks for moment and then your text appears. Or, at least, some approximation of your text.

So how good is it? I used the built-in microphone on my iMac, so there was no special hardware -- no fancy headset or similar -- and read the start of this section aloud in my mild Welsh accent. This is what came out:

Yet another fresh from iOS feature is dictation the maxim you take a letter Maria feature that promises voice to text transcription.

The first thing to know is the dictation required Connected to the Internet to work. Indeed, as it is usually on it defaults to off, it was you that "what you say centre apple to be converted to text. Quote be home

At that point, it cut me off -- it seems it has a limited buffer size. As you can see, accuracy isn't brilliant for me out of the box, but I've only been playing with it a little so it's had no opportunity to train to my voice yet. Apple claims it will improve with use. I'm also a difficult subject; I have a relatively uncommon regional accent and (even when I'm trying not to) I'm told I tend to talk fast and blur words together.

Let's have another go!

Sorry about the port was the colour of television, teams to invest channel. "It's not like I'm using," case you someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the chat. "It's like my policies are developed this massive drug deficiency."

That's supposed to be the opening sentences of Neuromancer by William Gibson:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. "It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."

It was at this point that I had the idea of taking the output of Dictation and looping it back through OS X's say command to feed it back into Dictation again, then feeding that output into say again, and so on to see what successive voice transcriptions would produce. I'm hoping to get purple monkey dishwasher out of it.

The skybox airport was the colour of television to intimidate shower
The skybox airport was the colour of televisions raising a shower
The skybox airport was the colour of televisions raising a shower

That was with the default Alex voice for the text-to-speech part, which is no longer the best OS X has to offer. Let's try another, using the higher quality "Daniel" UK English voice. This is the same synthetic voice as is used for Siri in the UK, that of voiceover artist Jon Briggs. (Bonus marks to any commenter who knows this quote.)

The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of West Country farmland.
But I'll still likewise just unusual age is still has a look at overruled spread out west country farmer
Well still likewise just unusual ages still have a look at the morale spread out west country file
Well the likewise just unusually you still have a look at them all spread out west country file

I think Daniel speaks rather too quickly for Dictation...!

Despite that bit of fun, I could see Dictation being genuinely useful to anyone who doesn't feel a bit weird talking aloud to a computer (although I still haven't gotten over that), and extremely valuable to users who have difficulty typing due to physical impairment. I would particularly like to see Dictation expanded in the future to allow at least some modest amounts of control of the OS itself, rather than pure text entry; if Siri can send a text message, there's no fundamental reason my Mac can't create an entire email for me, not just the body text.

Dictation currently supports English (US, UK and Australian dialects), French, German, and Japanese. By a non-astonishing coincidence, these are the same languages Siri supports. Of course, if you're needing voice-to-text input in a scenario where you can't depend on your Internet access, Nuance's Dragon for Mac is available for $199.95 and will run on Mountain Lion (although apparently you have to temporarily turn Gatekeeper to 'low' to install it).

Sharing is caring

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Sharing

Hey, look! A new feature in OS X that's been directly copied from iOS! Shocker.

In a roundabout way, though, Share buttons predate iOS and even OS X -- they come from NeXTSTEP, the Unix operating system that Apple acquired in 1997. The Services menu lurking in every menu bar of every app you have on your Mac was an early attempt to civilise the prehistoric Unix pipe (|) and bring it into the GUI age. The idea was to allow any app to generate data in some format (a word, a chunk of text, a file, an image, ...) and allow the user to send that data to any other app that could do something meaningful with it (look it up in a dictionary, spellcheck it, email it as an attachment, upload it to Flickr, ...).

The Services menu has generally skewed towards power users rather than civilians -- it's often filled with barely-coherent geek talk that make it not particularly approachable. The near-ubiquitous Share buttons in iOS are an attempt to further refine the idea by making it more obvious what it does, and to make that functionality more visible. As of 10.8, now they are on your Mac, too.

Every compatible app in Mountain Lion -- including Finder, Safari, Contacts, Notes, Photo Booth and Preview -- has a prominent, always-visible Share button. We can probably assume that updates to the iLife and iWork app suites that add Share buttons will be pushed out via the Mac App Store when Mountain Lion goes live. Clicking this new button displays a small menu of options that are linked to the content you are manipulating. (Interestingly, the 10.8 version of the menu is rather more staid than the jazzed-up iOS 6 version.)

So, if you click the button in Safari, then by default you are working with a link to the page you are on right now; the options that appear are Add to Reading List, Add Bookmark, Email this Page, Message, and Twitter. In Finder, however, you are by default working with one or more files so there, the options are Email, Message and AirDrop. If you select an image file, that menu has two extra options: Twitter and Flickr. Photo Booth has a particularly rich set of options: all the same file transfer methods as Finder, plus it offers Add to iPhoto, Add to Aperture, Set Account Picture, Set Buddy Picture, and Change Twitter Profile Picture.

As you can see, much of the functionality of the Share button relies on having pre-set account details for various online social sharing services. Out of the box, Mountain Lion supports Twitter -- just like iOS -- and adds Vimeo and Flickr. These accounts are configured in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane in System Preferences, where they appear as new account types. Apple says Facebook will be added to this list "in the fall."

As with iOS though, support for Twitter (and, soon, Facebook) goes deeper than just the Share buttons. Once you've added your account, Notification Center will start alerting you to direct messages and @-replies you receive on the service, and will gain a "Click to Tweet" button at the top of its UI that, unsurprisingly, allows you to sent a tweet. Similar features are promised for Facebook, sending status updates and so forth, with an important extra feature: contact synchronization. But again, this won't arrive until the fall, so we can't be sure how well it'll work yet.

One small annoying thing about the Twitter notifications: clicking on them (e.g. on a direct message you want to reply to) opens the Twitter web site. I could find no way of making them open in any native client, not even Twitter's own one. In light of Twitter's recent rumblings about becoming less third-party-friendly, that worries me a little because it feels like a strategy, rather that an oversight.

Another notable downside to this otherwise appealing feature is the lack of third party support. If you use Flickr then you're fine, but if you prefer, say, 500px or Smugmug then you're out of luck. We can theorise that Apple will, in time, expand the sharing functionality to allow third parties to add their own data handlers in there; otherwise, we'll be forever stuck with just Apple's pre-approved choices, which will inevitably miss out some smaller sites that someone, somewhere wants.

AirPlay: video almost everywhere

My thesaurus is exhausted, spent, consumed. I'm going to say it plain: this is another new Mountain Lion feature lifted directly from iOS and grafted into OS X.

AirPlay Mirroring, as Apple is careful to refer to it, gives your Mac the same ability to route its display to a second- or third-generation Apple TV on your network that you already enjoy on your iPad or iPhone. It's absolutely trivial to set up: if you have compatible devices, an AirPlay icon should show up on your Mac menu bar automatically. Click it, select the device you want to mirror to, and you're all set.

AirPlay performed well in my testing, with source and receiver devices on a strong Wifi signal from my Airport Extreme Base Station. As soon as I switched mirroring on, my iMac's desktop was downsized to 1920×1080 (which is itself curious, as I have an older, 720p-model Apple TV), and a mirror of all the windows on my primary display appeared on the TV. The display was a little fuzzy, so in accordance with Apple's instructions I used the Displays pane of System Preferences to set my screen to "best for Apple TV"; this set my iMac to 1280×720. Using the Mac desktop felt fairly smooth, although there was an unsurprising hint of lag on cursor movement. Playing back a high definition MKV video file in VLC looked sharp, but there was some jerkiness to the motion; it also made my iMac run powerful hot after less than ten minutes of use.

Windows on my secondary monitor weren't mirrored, which is probably what you'd expect (and almost certainly what you'd want). Of course, when I quit AirPlay Mirroring, all my windows were now crammed into the top-left of my screen as they had all been resized for the lower resolution. That's a pain.

Apple is probably careful to call it "AirPlay Mirroring" rather than "AirPlay" because it's missing the logical second feature: sending an AirPlay stream to be displayed on a Mac. Perhaps of less interest to owners of portable Macs, but my 27" iMac makes a pretty good secondary television, so I would find that functionality occasionally useful. If you would too, there are a number of third-party tools that you may find useful.

How valuable you find AirPlay Mirroring depends a lot on the sorts of things you do with your Mac. My wife and I have found having an Apple TV quite useful for the ability to easily share photos or videos with each other without huddling around an iPhone; it'd be nice to be able to do that from our MacBooks too. Sadly, both our portable Macs are too old for AirPlay's stringent hardware requirements.

Mac-toting road warriors might get some mileage out of AirPlay Mirroring to deliver wireless presentations. However in my experience you can't rely on projectors in random conference rooms supporting HDMI or DVI input, and the Apple TV lacks VGA output (although adapters are available).

All work and no play means Jack has less skeumorphic UI to endure

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Game Center

Game Center is here. It still has that beyond-tasteless skeuomorphic UI, only now you can make it fill the screen of a 27" iMac if you really want to. It lets you compare achievements and high scores in supported games with a dedicated-to-Game-Center friends list, acts as a multiplayer hub for you to start games from, has in-game voice chat support in supported apps, and supports cross-platform gaming between iOS and OS X. It's not yet clear if achievements or rewards will sync between iOS and OS X versions of games, however; on the Talkcast this week, game publisher Gedeon Maheux said that he's not aware of a mechanism to handle that.

Game Center only works in supported games and as it's brand new there aren't many of those yet. In fact, as I write these words there is exactly one, Apple's venerable Chess; I expect more will appear soon. Dedicated "core" gamers will likely continue to feel it's a pale imitation of Xbox Live or Steam, but for the casual crowd it's perfectly fine. And that's all the news that's fit to print.

Maximum lockdown

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Security & Privacy

For a long time on the Mac malware scene, nothing happened. And then, without warning and despite speculation to the contrary, nothing continued to happen. There are still very few (although not zero!) credible malware threats that target OS X. This hasn't stopped Apple from doing something about it though, which is commendable. [In fairness, the logical time to install security cameras and deadbolts really is before the bandits and looters set up shop in the middle of town, not after. -Ed.] [I agree. I wasn't being sarcastic there, for a change! -RG]

The core change in Gatekeeper is an innocuous-looking setting in the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences. You can set your Mac to run all software; only Mac App Store software; or software from the Mac App Store and "identified developers" by which Apple means developers enrolled in the Mac Developer Program who digitally sign their apps. The default is this last choice, whereas all OS X versions before Mountain Lion were equivalent to the first option.

This new setting confers extra protection. You can be reasonably confident that the Mac App Store has no active malware (or that any malicious app would be extremely short-lived there), so there's not much chance of infection on that front. Signed apps you download from anywhere on the web that are later found to be doing bad things can have their signing key revoked by Apple. This stops them from running on everyone's Macs.

On the face of it, it sounds like that middle option also means that none of your old software works, and that if you want to run just one unsigned app you're stuck having to turn it off. Fortunately, Apple thought of this. Gatekeeper stores a whitelist of apps that, even if they don't have the digital signature and even if you're using the "only run identified developers" default setting, will still run. By default, that whitelist contains every app that is on your system when you install Mountain Lion, so you won't immediately plagued by thousands of "this app is unsafe" messages the minute you upgrade.

If you download a new app, when you try to run it you get a "this app may be unsafe, so I'm not going to let you" message. However, you can get around this with a semi-obscure trick. If you right-click the app and select "Open" from the menu, you get a different dialog that allows you to open the app and add it to the whitelist.

Does this provide any meaningful extra security? Time will tell. If most users immediately switch to the most permissive setting, or if they become so accustomed to whitelisting apps that they don't stop to think before doing it, then arguably Gatekeeper will be of little value.

However, it's noteworthy than you can lock the Gatekeeper setting so it can only be changed from an Administrator account. This means it can provide a useful way to lock novice or untrusted users of your Macs to proven-safe software. System administrators of large Mac networks may appreciate that feature, as will parents and lab managers.

Gatekeeper isn't the only new trick that Security & Privacy knows. A new tab, Privacy, shows a comprehensive list of permissions granted by you to allow apps to access your data -- your current location, your contacts, your Twitter account, and so on. When you first load an app that needs access to this potentially confidential data, you get a notification dialog, and you can choose to forbid the app the access. It's another idea that's came over from iOS.

Some of the permissions are a little bizarre -- it wasn't clear to me why Apple's Pages word processor package was asking for me for access to my contacts -- but all in all it's a welcome change. I was initially concerned that Mountain Lion might start to feel a bit like Windows Vista's bothersome User Account Control nag-dialogs, but even during my first hours it wasn't particularly annoying and that quickly faded as I approved the apps I use regularly.

Everything old is new again

Gallery: Mountain Lion: the TUAW Review -- Safari & Mail & misc

As usual, Apple has also taken the opportunity to make a raft of improvements to the core system apps.

Safari has probably seen the most changes. It's faster, for a start; rendering webpages felt snappier than before. The old school split top bar -- where URL and search box were separate fields -- is gone, replaced by something Apple is calling the "smart search field" which offers unified URL and search string entry. It's a concept you probably recognize from Chrome and modern-day Firefox, although it dates back at least as far as 2008's AwesomeBar plugin for Firefox. It works great, although I'm not a fan of the new graduated blue "load progress" bar that runs in the background of the text field. For some reason I can't put my finger on I found it visually distracting in a way that the old one wasn't.

Tab management has some new options. There's the much-publicised iCloud sync, for one thing; every device signed in to your Apple ID can browse a list of all the open tabs open in any copy of Safari, whether it's another Mac or an iOS (6 or later) device. This is very useful for the "I know I left that page open on my Mac, but now I want to read it on my iPad and I can't find it" scenario.

There's also new gesture support and a new UI for tab selection, called Tab View. I was initially confused by the little button on the far right of the tab bar; it pops up a sort of slide-though-tabs-as-pages interface, not dissimilar to the iPhone's interface. I didn't immediately appreciate why this was any better than simply clicking the tab directly, until I realised that it's intended to be used by gestures.

A two-finger pinch zoom-out gesture, when the page is already at the normal zoom level, switches to Tab View. Two finger swipes left and right moves through your open tabs, and a pinching zoom-in gesture brings the selected tab to the foreground. It's slick, fast and feels natural. It really comes into its own when you have a lot of tabs open and the tab title has become too small to contain useful text.

Mail gets Notification Center support (of course), Share buttons (ditto), and the new "VIP" system, which behaves the same was as it does on iOS 6. You mark a given contact as a VIP, and they then appear in your special VIP Inbox; additionally, any conversation thread in any folder will have a little star (rather than the usual dot) if one of your VIP contacts has contributed to it. It's vaguely similar to Gmail's Priority Inbox feature except that Gmail attempts to guess your important contacts automatically and Apple requires you to select them manually. Depending on how well Google's guesswork does for you, that could be a good or a bad thing.

Mail also has a few other smaller tweaks. One I particularly liked was that clicking on the grey "sort by" bar at the top of any mail folder jumps up to the top immediately, just like tapping the clock on iOS does.

Preview gets iCloud document syncing, as does TextEdit, as previously discussed. Preview can also handle dynamic PDF forms, plus it has the ability to search notes and highlights you add to PDFs. Calendar and Contacts have some new UI elements, including a useful "group" column in Contacts, and they've both been renamed to match their iOS cousins (so no more "iCal" and "Address Book"). Launchpad has a new search field, but I won't be jettisoning Alfred for it any time soon.

Smaller stuff

There's a grab-bag of miscellaneous changes too, including some stuff that's been removed. Web sharing is ostensibly gone from the base Mountain Lion install, having been banished to the OS X Server add-on (which costs an extra $20). This is slightly annoying, as I don't need the rest of the server stuff but I do sometimes use Web Sharing. The underlying apache executable is still installed on Mountain Lion -- I could go to http://127.0.0.1 in a web browser on a fresh install of 10.8 and see the default "It works!" page -- but some parts seem to be missing, like support for the Sites directories under each user directory. I doubt it's anything that can't be fixed with a little hackery.

RSS support is gone from Safari and Mail, Software Update has been removed, although confusingly the menu entry is still under the Apple icon -- it just opens the Mac App Store instead, which is where all future OS X updates will come from. The official X11.app is gone, too, although the project lives on as the open source XQuartz.

Full screen mode has been made very slightly less annoying on multi-screened Macs; you can now choose which of your displays will be used for full screen apps. When you click the "full screen" button, the app expands to fill whichever monitor it's currently on, whereas previously it would always move to the "primary display" (i.e. the one with the Dock and menubar.) People using laptops docked to big monitors will be happy about this.

There's no sign of any more meaningful support, though, like being able to put one fullscreen app on each display; you still end up with one screen full of linen. Unless, that is, you're using a rare app that supports multiple screens in full screen mode -- Aperture is the only one I can think of that does, but it proves that it is a solvable problem.

Unfortunately I was unable to test Power Nap because it only works on very specific Macs -- Retina display MacBook Pros and Late 2010 (see below) or newer MacBook Airs (i.e. the ones that only ship with solid state drives). It promises to do three things while you Mac is in sleep mode: sync your emails and your iCloud data and documents, download updates to OS X (and possibly all Mac App Store apps; the documentation isn't clear), and perform Time Machine backups. As such, it's useful, though unlikely to change your life.

(UPDATE: At almost literally the last second, Apple updated the Mountain Lion Tech Specs page to remove support from the Late 2010 MacBook Air. It now requires a Mid 2011 or newer model.)

Time Machine has gained the ability to rotate backups between drives. Basically, you can now have more than one Time Machine disk attached; Mountain Lion will back up to all of them, seamlessly. This is useful if you want to keep one backup drive somewhere other than your house -- say, at a friend's or your workplace -- as your off-site backup. Online services like Crashplan make that seem a little old-fashioned, but the multiple-physical-disc approach still has value for people with a huge amount of data or very poor Internet connections.

Great OSs stick together

The overall impression I get from Mountain Lion is one of cohesion, on several fronts.

Apple is certainly bringing iOS and OS X closer together, at least superficially in terms of the user interface. Common elements like Notification Center and Share buttons are making these two very different operating systems start to feel like two sides of the same coin. That's a good thing, although I'll change my mind if Apple ever starts bringing the restrictions of iOS over as well. I believe this to be very unlikely, though.

iCloud syncing, both of documents and preferences, also brings greater cohesion to the process of using multiple devices, whether they are Macs or iOS or any combination of the above. As long as app support is there -- which is thin right now, admittedly, but it'll improve -- then access to your data is seamless. Having bookmarks, open tabs, email accounts, and all the rest sync between Macs is much appreciated.

Mountain Lion is certainly a worthy upgrade that, whilst it doesn't contain any life-changing upgrades over Lion, makes OS X a more productive operating system than ever before in a value-for-money package.

Continue reading OS X Mountain Lion: The TUAW review

OS X Mountain Lion: The TUAW review originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 08:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In the conclusion to my Retina MacBook repairability post, I wrote: "on the Internet, it often seems that everything must be compressed to a one-bit image: black or white, triumph or catastrophe, the very best or the absolute worst."

So it goes for the eternal debate over whether the iPad is a "content consumption" or "content creation" device -- a debate given fresh impetus by the new round of starting to sound a bit credible rumors of a 7.85" iPad. The theory goes is that the 10" iPad will be for content creation and the 7.85" one for content consumption, like there's some sort of absolute line in the sand you cross at 9" screen size.

This is, as I am sure you are aware, a debate as old as the iPad itself. "A computer without a mouse or keyboard," went the argument when the iPad was announced, "is no kind of computer at all." Then people started using iPads to write books, paint pictures, make music, and much, much more. Harry Marks recently summarised the position of most of the Apple blogosphere when he dismissed the "iPad is made for consumption" idea as "thoroughly-debunked".

Is Harry right? Frankly, I don't think it's that simple. I think this is another instance of the Internet compressing a nuanced issue down into an ill-fitting soundbite, and I'm hoping to convince you of the same.

Drawing up battlelines

First, we need to define exactly what we might do with an iPad.

The "consumption" part is pretty easy to define -- reading books, browsing websites, watching Netflix, and so forth. Anything with minimal interactivity. I think most people will agree the iPad is fine for these tasks -- you might say the screen could be a bigger for video, the speaker certainly isn't fantastic for music, and you may prefer an e-ink screen for novels. By and large, thought, the iPad is a good choice.

Other apps have a lot of interactivity (so aren't passive, like consumption) but where you aren't making anything new either (so unlike creation). Games are the most obvious example of this, and again, games are enormously popular.

"Creation" is trickier to nail down. We can all agree that writing a novel in Pages or sketching a design in Paper counts. Call that "macrocreation". But what about writing a Facebook status update, or adding an item to a to-do list, or sharing a quick snap on Instagram? Clearly, some content has been created, but these "microcreation" tasks take far less time and effort. Some apps, like Mail, can be used for consumption, microcreation, or macrocreation as the situation demands.

This differentiation is important because any inadequacies of the iPad's input devices will be far less annoying when doing microcreation, so those types of creation aren't less interesting for us to consider. Even if you despise touchscreen keyboards with the nuclear fuelled heat of a thousand suns, you can probably manage to peck out a tweet without killing anyone. As such, I'll be focussing on macrocreation tasks in the rest of this post, as that's where the rubber really meets the road.

Before we dive in, though, a brief survey of the App Store might be illuminating. In the UK's top 50 iPad apps, I counted 41 games, five content creation apps (iPhoto, GarageBand, Pages, iMovie, and Numbers), and four miscellaneous apps. Thinking that content creation apps might be more expensive, and hence skew towards lower sales, I then checked through the first 100 entries on the Highest Grossing Apps list instead, which included the following content creation apps:

• 5th place -- Pages
• 21st place -- QuickOffice
• 24th place -- Numbers
• 37th place -- GarageBand
• 40th place -- iPhoto
• 41st place -- Keynote
• 58th place -- iMovie

So, depending on how you measure, 7-10% of the iPad's top apps are for content creation. I don't think that's a lot, and futhermore, I contend this is representative of people's interests when they buy an iPad -- heavily skewed towards, but not entirely about, consumption.

Why might that be the case?

The iPad's shortcomings as a content creation device

The iPad has one primary input mechanism: a capacitative touchscreen. This compares to traditional computer's two mechanisms: a keyboard plus a mouse (or trackpad or similar pointing device.) As such, the iPad has definite downsides:

• When you're typing, you're hammering your fingers against an unyielding and undifferentiated sheet of glass; this is objectively less comfortable than a mechanical keyboard.
• The keyboard hides number keys and uncommon punctuation on a second screen, making numeric data entry or programming tedious.
• The keyboard takes up more than half of the screen, leaving you squinting at your content through a truncated letterbox.
• When tapping, you're using a squishy and imprecise fingertip rather than a pixel-perfect pointer.
• Finally, the iPad's relatively small 9.7" screen can be a limitation for some tasks.

That's not to say that people haven't successfully written novels on an iPad, or made artwork with it. People have also made sculptures from scrap iron, cityscapes from toothpicks and written novels by blinking their eye. Great content can be produced with even the most awkward of tools, but it's clearly silly to suggest this intrinsically means that all interfaces are equal.

Other creation tasks are less impeded by the iPad. If the primary interaction is with a custom UI made up of buttons -- such as GarageBand or iPhoto -- then the iPad doesn't have many downsides. The screen's a bit small, which can be a pain; I love to see as much as possible when I'm working, which is why I bought a 27" iMac. Still, though, that's usually a minor point.

There's an upside, too: interacting with an app by tapping on-screen buttons feels viscerally satisfying in a way that indirect clicking with a mouse pointer can't quite match. I'm very fond of mind-mapping software iThoughtsHD for this reason; most of my longer TUAW posts start life with me sprawled in a comfortable chair, iPad in hand, noodling away creating a detailed outline., intuitively dragging boxes around to re-order content. My MacBook simply can't bring that sort of ease to that sort of use case.

However, it's worth noting that these kinds of tasks are rather less common that typing and tapping on things. In particular, I don't think it's a particularly strong argument to use GarageBand as some kind of absolute proof that the iPad is capable of Serious Business. I think that for the vast majority of iPad users, GarageBand is a no more than a toy -- not because it isn't powerful, but because what it does is of limited interest for serious creation unless you are blessed with musical abilities. I own GarageBand, like a lot of people; I played with it for a few hours before growing bored and moving on, and I suspect that's like a lot of other people too.

It's also worth noting that some tasks can squeeze without serious compromise into the iPhone's 3.5" screen, let alone the iPad. The popularity of photo editing apps clearly demonstrates this principle. Even the iPhone can be effectively used for content creation, within its own constraints.

The Bluetooth factor

"Ah," you may have thought when you read the last section, "but what about Bluetooth keyboards? Doesn't that solve the typing problem? Lots of bloggers are forever writing about how an iPad and a keyboard is their perfect mobile setup."

It's certainly true that a Bluetooth keyboard helps. For example, I've written chunks of this very post on my iPad, coupled with the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover which I bought after Steve's positive review. I like it a lot.

But it's not without its own downsides; in my own review, I noted that the keys are rather small (my typing accuracy is noticeably lower when I'm using it) and when it's attached to my iPad you end up with a composite device that's barely thinner or lighter than the 11.6" MacBook Air that I would better off using. This is even more of an issue for accessories like the Incase Origami Workstation, which combine an iPad with a full-size Apple Bluetooth keyboard.

There's also difficulties with text selection, cursor movement, and operations like formatting text via button bars. The usual keyboard functions work for jumping around, but when you want to precisely select or move through large blocks of text there's no substitute for a mouse or trackpad. Tapping on the screen, by comparison, feels clumsy and slow (I find the little pause before the cut/copy/paste menu appears particularly maddening when I'm trying to work quickly). It's also tough on the arms to keep reaching up to the screen. "Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical... it's ergonomically terrible," said Steve Jobs in 2010, when explaining why Apple wouldn't launch a touch-enabled MacBook or iMac.

Of filesystems and multitasking

Writers are also peculiar in the demands they place on a device in terms of storage of work: we mostly just need to keep a handful of text files around, one per project we are working on, perhaps some fragmentary notes. There are some huge number of Dropbox powered text editors that are really good at this, which has led some bloggers to declare the premature demise of the user-visible file system.

However, other people have other demands. Some people need to keep tens of thousands of files in a structured archive. An accounts team might store invoices (in a wordprocessor format) with related to calculation records (in a spreadsheet). Pretty much everyone benefits from being able to search all of their files for a given word or phrase, but iOS's Spotlight is closed to third-party apps so it can't see most of your data. Most people need to print stuff from time to time.

iOS is beyond awful at all of these things. Files are locked inside an app; users cannot slice across apps to show, say, all the files related to a specific project, or all the files from May 2010. If you start running low on disk space and want to make room, you need to delete files -- most apps don't support any sort of off-device storage. Someone who used an iPad as their only computer for processing photographs would appear to be completely out of luck once the iPad is full, as the Photos app offers no facilities to help. Printing is fiddly; AirPrint support is confined to a handful of models and other solutions involve having a PC or Mac around to act as an intermediary.

A solution to these problems could take the form of a Files.app for iOS, as Rene Ritchie suggests. Or perhaps Apple has something else in mind altogether -- something involving tagging files and powerful searching functions, say, as proposed in numerous research projects over the years. Nevertheless, it is my belief that until something changes there are significant content creation tasks that the iPad will remain woefully clumsy at.

Battery life

Harry McCracken, who wrote one of the canonical "my iPad is my primary computer" posts, said:

And it was one specific thing about the iPad that made it so useful on the trip: I could use it for ten hours at a pop without worrying about plugging it in. ... I can't overemphasize how important this is to my particular workdays. Even when I'm not traveling, I spend a lot of time bopping around San Francisco and the Bay Area, attending conferences, visiting tech companies, working out of hotel lobbies, and generally having spotty access to power outlets.

So, hands up: who here spends their working life, or their personal life for that matter, "bopping around San Francisco", jumping from conference to tech company to hotel?

There's a quorum of superstar bloggers and CEOs who will tell you the iPad is perfect because it perfectly suits what they do -- they prize portability, battery life, and ubiquitous cellular Internet over all other concerns. These people are not normal, and no matter how big a pulpit they preach from -- no matter how amplified their voice is in the debate -- their argument doesn't extend to most people. Sure, more battery life is always welcome; but for most people it's just one factor amongst many, not the overriding concern. And who knows, maybe one day Apple will finally give us a MacBook with 4G networking.

Multitasking and distraction

Many, many pixels have been expended praising iOS for being a "distraction free" writing environment. It's great, people say, because it's "focused" and has nothing "competing for [your] attention".

I can only assume these people are using some strange version of OS X where the Twitter and email clients don't have quit buttons. On my Mac, I can close all the apps I don't want to see and remove distractions without doing anything as drastic as changing OS. Lion even has a button that can make most apps take up the entire screen, in case one's ADD becomes so bad that one cannot risk glancing at even one small corner of a Finder window.

Meanwhile, like many of the people who use computers, a lot of what I do cannot be served by a single app, which means iOS's weak multitasking becomes an issue. Blogging is fine -- Writing Kit integrates a text editor with a browser, so I can quickly do fact checking or find source links as I write without having to hop out of my app. I presume that's why you don't hear many bloggers complaining about this.

Other tasks are complicated by the way you can only see one app at once and because switching back and forth is relatively slow and relatively laborious (which is why many bloggers have asked for cmd-tab support on iOS.) Try making a calendar entry from details sent in an email, for example -- if the automatic tap-to-make-entry fails you, lots of tedious back-and-forthing between two apps becomes necessary. Try collating data from a dozen disconnected cells in a spreadsheet into a wordprocessor document. Try cross-checking two spreadsheets against each other. Try following a tutorial in a web page about how to carry out a task in your presentation software. Try plagiarising a Wikipedia page by subtly rewording it into a high school paper. And so on, and so forth.

These are all mundane content creation tasks that are much harder on an iPad than on a traditional computer, by virtue of iOS's sandboxed, one-app-at-once nature.

To add insult to injury, not all apps perfectly maintain state when you switch away from them and then back. Even Apple is guilty of this -- if you pull up the "tweet this" dialog in iOS 5, then switch over to Safari to check something in your half-written tweet, when you switch back the tweet draft vanishes. This has enraged me on several occasions.

Content creation is a niche

I cannot prove this, but I suspect for some of the more dedicated Apple pundits the debate about whether the iPad is a content creation device or not has bigger implications. Steve Jobs famously declared that the iPad was the future of computing, that traditional computers would become "trucks" and gradually fade away, left only to specialists.

If the iPad is just a "toy", of course, then Jobs would be wrong; and I think some people are, for whatever reason, emotionally invested in Jobs being right. This is why this argument won't die. Any suggestion that the iPad isn't a content creation device is perceived a challenge to the glorious "post-PC future".

However, there's an aspect to this debate which is rarely touched on, but was brought up by Jared Earle on Twitter recently: some large proportion of traditional computers are also content consumption devices. How many laptops spend their lives on a living room coffee table, used to browse Facebook and Amazon? Of the millions of laptops sold each year, how many are used primarily for the sort of tasks the iPad isn't great at? Surely not that many.

So it's my opinion that we can disconnect these two arguments. Suggesting that the iPad has its shortcomings as a content creation device doesn't imply that it won't be the future of computing, because I think the appetite that most people have for content creation on home computers has been somewhat overstated by people eager to portray the iPad as an underpowered novelty.

Work computers are different, however (and of course make up a lot of sales volume.) I think the iPad has a long way to go before it can supplant the workhorse office PC, but that's a debate for another day.

A choice, with side of compromise

It is my contention that the conclusion to the above analysis must be that the iPad is, at best, a compromised device for content creation tasks. Typing is inherently awkward and pointing is inherently imprecise, and most content creation involves quite a bit of those two things. Adding a keyboard can partly address the typing issue, but you end up with a device that's only minimally more portable than an 11.6" MacBook Air. Compromises.

If you can't afford to buy everything (who can?) and you spend more time reading than writing (most do), an iPad might serve you better than a MacBook. If you're (say) liveblogging an Apple keynote, where typing speed is absolutely paramount, you'll be wanting a physical keyboard, as Mat Honan says. If you're processing lots of photos and video, you'll probably want the CPU grunt of an iMac if mobility doesn't matter or a high-end MacBook Pro if it does. Again, compromises, everywhere you turn.

No device is one-size-fits-all, including the iPad. It's fine to acknowledge the shortcomings of an iPad for content creation, whilst keeping in mind that these are only shortcomings -- not hard limits. What's important is understanding your needs and the ways different devices can fulfil or frustrate them. What's important is the nuance; the shades of grey between the "the iPad is a toy" and "the iPad is the future of computing" extremes.

One-bit Internet: The iPad is/isn't a content creation device originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Rumours that Apple would be switching the next iPhone to a new, smaller connector than the venerable 30-pin Dock connector go back a long way -- as far as iMore's writeup from February. They resurfaced recently following a claim by TUAW's sister site TechCrunch that a source had confirmed this was definitely happening.

Now, I'm not one to put too much stead in rumors -- the Apple rumormill is too fast, frantic, and frequently fictional for that (thanks for the lulz, Digitimes!). But I do believe that if you apply some common sense, and if you see a rumor pop up multiple times, well, it often suggests there really is something afoot. So let's assume there's some substance to the rumors, the spy shots of leaked case pieces are real, and Apple is at least prototyping (if not releasing) a smaller Dock connector. Does this make any kind of objective sense? What will it mean for users? Let's see what we can puzzle out.

Before we begin -- this article contains some supposition on my part about exactly how some existing devices work when plugged into the Dock connector. Apple's official documentation is all locked up behind ironclad NDAs, and none of the OEMs we reached out to were willing to comment off-the-record on the fine details of making peripherals for iPods and iPhones.

Update: after publication of my original article, I was contacted by Brian Klug of Anandtech. He shared with me this picture of an internal iPhone component board, which clearly shows a smaller Dock connector and a bottom-mounted headphone jack. The board picture pre-dates the case leak shown in the picture above, so taken together, each component leak corroborates the other. This makes it more likely the rumors are genuine.

The argument for shrinking the Dock connector

It's pretty clear why Apple would want to do this: to save space inside the device, which it could then fill with goodies like more battery or LTE chips or a stash of powdered unicorn horn. There's an obvious counter argument, however. Surely the Dock connector isn't that big? Can Apple really save enough space to be worth the time and effort?

Well, let's ponder this for a moment, with the aid of some admittedly hand-wavey mathematics. If you (as I just did) take a ruler to the plug part of a Dock connector, you'll find it measures 21 mm ח 2 mm ח 6 mm. (Yes, gentle reader, I used a ruler rather than a micrometer. I'm afraid TUAW's budget doesn't push to precision engineering instrumentation. I also offer no apology at all for using millimetres, which are so very clearly better than the arcane and baffling "sixteenths of an inch" that I cannot begin to describe how ridiculous the Olde World units look to those of us in the metric haven of the actual Olde World.)

Anyway, digression aside, that works out to 252 cubic millimetres, and that's just the volume of the part of the plug that goes into the phone. There's additional space taken up within the handset, of course, by the surrounding metal shield, connection points, and so forth. Hang on to that number for a second.

Now, consider the micro SIM that Apple uses in all current iPhone and iPad models. It's 15 mm ח 12 mm × 0.76 mm -- 135 cubic millimetres. The little tray it sits in adds some size though; on my iPhone 4, that's about 19 mm ח 14 mm ח 1 mm, or 266 cubic millimetres.

Famously, of course, the iPhone 4 was an early device to adopt micro-SIMs; before that, Apple used mini-SIMs, which are about twice the volume (25 mm ח 15 mm ח 0.76 mm). The switch to micro-SIMs wasn't without pain for consumers. I bought my iPhone 4 on launch day, and although I could have had a new SIM with a new contract that day, I couldn't convince my carrier to send me a micro-SIM attached to my existing account for a few days later. Similarly, there were no pre-pay micro-SIMs to be had for several weeks.

By foisting that inconvenience on me, Apple saved something like 300 cubic millimetres, give or take. Again, I am fudging slightly to account for the extra room taken up within the phone by the mechanism the drawer slides into, but for the general point I am making I only need approximate figures.

That wasn't enough, though, but it's OK -- Apple can rebuild it. Smaller. Sleeker. Even easier to misplace. Yes, it's the nano-SIM, coming soon to a phone near you. It's taken Apple since May 2011 to get ETSI to approve the new standard, and it took some horse trading with Nokia, but approve it it has. The new standard is 12.3 mm ח 8.8 mm ח 0.67 mm -- or 72.5 cubic millimetres.

So, let's recap. We saw Apple cause consumers some minor pain by switching to an as-yet-unused standard, the micro SIM, to save about 300 cubic millimetres. We've seen Apple go through a year-long standards fight to shave about another 100 cubic millmetres away (including the space saved with a smaller drawer). Clearly, Apple believes every single scrap of space inside an iPhone is worth working for.

Now let's look at that Dock connector again: 252 cubic millimetres, plus the space for the metal housing within the phone that it connects to. If Apple was prepared to fight as hard as it has to save space on the SIM card, I think it's credible that the potential savings from a smaller Dock connector are also on its roadmap.

Looking at the size of the rumored new connector, it looks like it's around a third the size of the current Dock plug. That implies a saving of something like 160 cubic millimetres from the new design.

How could Apple do it?

If you glance over the Dock connector pinout, you'll see the 30 pins in the existing connector break down as follows:

• 5 pins for miscelleneous ground and reserved wires.
• 9 pins for AV out, in various formats (line-level audio, composite, S-Video, video formats).
• 4 pins for the iPod accessory connectivity (e.g. for add-ons like Nike+, the TomTom standalone GPS, iPad Camera Connection Kit, and so on.) Includes a 3.3 V power line, so the accessory doesn't need its own battery.
• 8 pins originally used for Firewire, now presumably unused on newer devices.
• 4 pins for the USB connection (for both syncing and charging).

It's easy to see that Apple could slim this down to the rumoured 19-pin connector without causing significant loss of functionality, simply by ditching the long-deprecated Firewire and then either some of the older video-out formats like composite or some of the "reserved for future use" connections.

Then, because the new connector would be electrically compatible with the old one, Apple could supply cheap mechanical adaptors that would allow any older Dock cable to accessory to work with the new iPhone.

Standards, standards, everywhere, but not a port to use

One criticism often levelled at Apple's industrial design is that it has never adopted the industry standard micro-USB for the iPhone. If Apple is going to change ports, wouldn't it be a good idea to change to the same one everyone else is using?

Let's examine the arguments in favour, first of all. Micro-USB is inarguably popular; practically every other mobile device now uses it, including other smartphones, Kindles and every iPhone battery case I've ever handled. It can do charging and syncing, and cables are cheap and ubiquitous. It's good for users, who can purchase accessories cheaply and share them between devices; and the reuse angle mean it's also good for the environment.

Update: as several commenters have pointed out, the environmental angle drove the 2010 decision by the EU to mandate that all chargers should be universal, following the voluntary trade agreement by 14 cellphone manufacturers in 2009. However, Apple is already compliant with this ruling. Note that the EU's FAQ explicitly states that "[t]he agreement allows for the use of an adaptor", and Apple have just the thing. As long as Apple issued a similar adaptor for any micro Dock standard -- and there's no reason why it couldn't -- then there would continue to be no need to put micro-USB on the device itself.

Why might Apple want to avoid micro-USB? Because charge and sync is about all micro-USB can do, on the face of it; the accessory support, line-level audio out, and video out features the current-day Dock connector sports aren't possible down a four-wire connector. There's a nascent standard called Mobile High-definition Link which can be used for video out but it's rather clumsy, involving three-tailed pass-through cables on existing Android phones. Note that, unlike with Apple's AV connector, the MHL adaptor cannot draw power from the handset and so has to be plugged into a USB charger to function.

It's possible that Apple could address this by using a software layer to multiplex different data types on top of the USB connection, but that would require rather more complex controllers on either side to unpick the data again and do something sensible with it. In fact, something similar is already in place -- several car stereos, for example, connect to the Dock port via a USB cable, then retrieve music, track data, and other information from it. Multiplexing digital 1080p video streams is a harder problem, however, and even if Apple solves it, it still couldn't maintain backwards compatibility with existing Dock-equipped accessories.

Why not Thunderbolt?

Thunderbolt is a sophisticated interface that achieves never-seen-before bus speeds; 20 times faster than USB2, twice as fast as USB3, three times faster than eSATA. To manage that, no expense was spared on any aspect of the design, which is why the cables alone cost $50, with even more money spent on the chips inside the computer to make all those bits whizz around. Meanwhile, the NAND flash memory Apple uses for the iPhone is about a third as fast as USB2's maximum speed, or less than 2% of Thunderbolt's capacity. Adding Thunderbolt to an iOS device needlessly and greatly inflates the cost of production for absolutely no practical benefit. It's nonsense.

The outlook for gadgets

So, yes, that vexing backwards compatibility angle.

There's no escaping the fact that a new Dock connector will, on the face of it, immediately invalidate every single cable, add-on, and charger you own. There's no escaping the fact that this sucks, either.

For cables, at least we will (presumably) quickly be able to get cheap ones from eBay to replace all our existing Dock USB cables. That's assuming Apple doesn't do anything funky like adopt a standard that is rigidly patent-protected like MagSafe, anyway -- let's all sincerely offer a silent prayer of hope that we won't have to buy every microDock cable from Apple for $19 a pop for all eternity. And of course, chargers that have a USB port will still work if we exchange the cable.

For peripherals the picture looks less rosy. The best we can hope for is that the rumours are correct and we get a 19-pin connector which is electrically compatible with the existing one, then at least Apple could throw us a bone, in the form of a physical dongle, not unlike the new MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adaptor. That would work for most devices, but perhaps not all -- some speaker sets, for example, have a cradle that won't be physically capable of supporting the phone with it propped on a dongle that adds a half-inch or so of height. Devices like Nike+iPod will look a little ungainly sticking even further out of the device. Of course, these adaptors won't be free, and I'm sure Apple won't object to making a little extra scratch from them -- particularly if people choose to buy one adaptor for each of their legacy devices, to save the hassle of moving them around from device to device.

Households with lots of iOS devices of mixed generations will be inconvenienced too. Right now, I have three Dock cables next to my bed -- for my iPhone 4, my wife's iPhone 4, and my iPad. I have one in the office, a couple downstairs that float around between chargers in various rooms when we need it, one at my desk in work, a couple in my travel kit, and two in my car. We're used to being able to use any charger and any cable with any of our devices. A new port means I'll be back to having to think about where and when I might need a cable again, which is going to be a low-level annoyance until I finally snap and order half a dozen cables from eBay. Or, I'll have to buy a handful of adaptors, then keep attaching and detaching them as necessary -- and trying not to lose them when they are detached.

The bottom line

If I were a gambling man, I'd wager that we were getting a new, smaller Dock port on the new iPhone. I don't think it's certain, by any means, but I think it's more likely than not; the reasoning I've outlined in this post strongly suggest to me that Apple has the means, the motive, and the opportunity to put the old timey Dock port to sleep. The work Apple has put in to forcing through the nano-SIM standard shows just how ruthlessly focused it is on space-saving within the iPhone, and the fiddling it has done with micro-SIMs and the new MagSafe 2 port shows it isn't scared to inconvenience us users to achieve these goals.

The whys and wherefores of a shrunken Dock connector (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The guiding principle behind the Unix command line lurking underneath the GUI of every Mac you own is a collection of simple programs that co-operate to enable you to achieve complex tasks. That co-operation part is missing from iOS, due to tight app sandboxing, but the idea of simple, small apps that do one thing well is very much alive.

The latest from this school of design thought is App Cubby's $0.99 app, Timer. It comes highly recommended -- with a 4.5-star average review in iTunes and featured-by-Apple App Store spot. I almost don't need to explain the functionality; a screenshot alone may be enough, although there are some neat, subtle touches that don't immediately meet the eye.

Timer gives you twelve buttons, each corresponding to a distinct count-down timer. Some are pre-filled with values; some are not. Tap on a pre-set button to start the countdown timer for the appropriate time. Tap it again to pause the timer.

Tap the other buttons to enter a one-off custom time to count down to:

Tap and hold on any button to configure a pre-set in that slot, with options for colour (which you can use to visually group timers) and alert tone:

When the timer goes off, your choice of alarm tone sounds and a notification pop-up appears, in the usual fashion:

Like most reminder apps since the edition of local notifications in iOS 4, you don't need to leave Timer running to make the alarm sound.

If the phone is muted, you get a vibrating alert instead. However, note that it does not continue to vibrate -- it's one buzz, and the screen lights up, and then the device goes back to sleep a few seconds later. Similarly, audible alarms play only for a short period -- ten or so seconds, depending on the tone you choose -- before shutting off. Depending on what you want, the non-repeating nature of the alarm could be perfect, or an annoying limitation.

If you don't respond to an alarm, it transforms into a count-up timer instead. When you return to the phone you can use this to see how long it's been since the alarm sounded.

Why this and not any other timer?

I can think of at least two specific scenarios Timer is perfect for.

The first is where you want to time a specific interval over and over again. For example, the Pomodoro productivity technique calls for you to single-mindedly concentrate on a task for 25 minutes, then have a five minute break, then repeat the pattern. Every fourth break, take a bit longer (15-20 minutes). This requires timing the same three intervals over and over -- Timer is perfect for this.

The second activity I've found Timer to be spot-on for is complicated cooking. I have a little standalone digital timer in my kitchen, but once I have a few different elements on the go -- all with their own end-points -- I find it all too easy to lose track of where I am. With Timer, I was able to configure multiple clocks for each element of the meal, and see at a glance if I had time for another glass of wine before I had to remove the chicken from the oven to rest.

Why Timer instead of Siri?

In my case, because I'm still rocking an iPhone 4, so I don't have Siri; but that's a fatuous answer. There's also no way to coerce Clock to track more than one countdown at once on the earlier iPhones that can't access Siri's special area. You can use Reminders, although then you have to do mental arithmetic to work out the end points of your various timers and set a reminder for the corresponding time.

Even if you are using an iPhone 4S, however, you still can't easily get a glance over up to a dozen timers without re-invoking Siri, and setting timers over and over again for the same block of time ("remind me to stir the ragù every 20 minutes" was my most recent use case) isn't as easy as tapping a single button.

Future changes

I spoke with Dave Barnard, of App Cubby. He told me they are already hard at work on v1.1 of Timer, which they are aiming to release "really soon" now they are done with Launch Centre Pro. This version will bring optional names for timers, some extra UI polish (I can't imagine where; it's a very slick app already), and a few bug fixes.

Is it worth the money?

This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Or, more accurately, the $0.99 one, as that's what Timer costs.

On the one hand, there's apps that do this sort of thing for free, and you can get by with the built-into-iOS stuff too. I can't really claim that Timer will change your life.

On the other hand, it's $0.99, and it's legitimately more convenient than the built-in stuff -- or any other timer app I've looked at. It's nice to use, has a nice UI, and genuinely useful. How much time does it have to save you to justify that paltry cost? To my mind, not much at all. Recommended.

Timer is available on the iOS App Store for $0.99, or your local currency equivalent.

Timer: a single-serving iPhone app for timing stuff originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 23 Jun 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last week I wrote a rather, shall we say, "robustly worded" post discussing the lack of upgradability in the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (MBPwRD). This contentious post turned into one of my highest-traffic articles for TUAW ever, and certainly my highest-commented one (possibly helped a bit by Livefyre being the best comment system we've ever had). I am grateful to everyone who took the time to write one of the 192 (and counting) comments on my original post, even the ones who voted for "Gaywood is an idiot!" in my tongue-in-cheek poll. Many of you disagreed with me, and in so doing, raised a number of counter-arguments again and again; I want to dig a little deeper into those counter-arguments in this post and explore some of the issues I hadn't fully thought through when I wrote my first one.

Since my post there has been a wave of great articles around the web exploring the same topic: some decrying the MBPwRD, others asking what the fuss is about. Kyle Wiens (co-founder of iFixit), writing for Wired, boldly dismissed the MBPwRD as "Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable" and OWC asked "was the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display originally a MacBook Air?" Many people, like John Gruber, dismissed these posts because both iFixit and OWC have a financial stake in repairable Macs, leading to an undeniable conflict of interest. Personally, I felt both posts were written from the heart, rather than the wallet, but I urge you to read them and judge for yourself.

Felix Salmon for Reuters picked up on my post and responded, calling the MBPwRD "Apple's strategy of built-in obsolescence." He said:

[This] means that the Apple ecosystem has just closed in much further - while on every previous Pro machine consumers could fiddle around quite a lot, this one is a completely inaccessible box. It's about as far as you can get from the Apple 1, which came as a kit. The control-freakery which started in the operating system and then moved into software is now very much built into the hardware as well.

Matthew Yglesias for Slate dismissed Salmon's argument, however, and defended Apple's alleged price protectionism as part of its "relentless war against commoditization and the total collapse of profits." Meanwhile, Christina Warren, formerly of this parish, kept it really simple: "Screw Upgrades: The New MacBook Pro IS the Future." Garrett Murray shrugged and said "It's just progress, folks," and Andre Torrez waxed philosophical: "I give up... Being cynical about any new bit of technology that doesn't fit into my view of how stuff should work has been a dragging anchor in my life."

Counterbalance

Before we dive into the detailed arguments, I'd like to say some conciliatory things that should probably have been in my original post.

Yes, the MacBook Pro with Retina display has some rather unusual choices: soldered RAM integrated onto the logic board, a proprietary SSD, extensive use of near-permanent glue in the battery assembly and the screen housing. All of these impair repairs and prohibit upgrades, it's true. But each one of these is also totally defendable from an engineering standpoint, if we imagine that Apple's brief to its engineers as "make the thinnest, lightest desktop replacement laptop you can without compromising battery life" -- which is a noble goal, for sure.

The oddball, tiny, bare-board SSD saves considerable space over a standard 2.5" unit. Leaving the optical drive out entirely saves even more space. Even the soldered RAM and the glued battery saves space, because there's no need for housing and slots and reinforcing struts and other gubbins. It might not save that much -- but look at the iFixit teardown again; there's barely a cubic millimetre to spare in there. Apple made every scrap count.

I'm not sure the space saving alone is that significant a step forward. Sure, the MBPwRD looks great because it's a quarter-inch thinner than the standard one, but if we're all honest with ourselves isn't that more about aesthetics than practicalities? It's not like the standard-issue MBP, at less than an inch, was exactly unwieldy to start with. It's not like the Air, which is thin enough to put itself in an entire different product category. Put it this way: when have you ever said to yourself "if only this laptop was a quarter of an inch thinner, then I could fit everything I wanted into this bag"?

But the weight... Ah! Having now played with a MBPwRD, and felt the heft of it (under the watchful eye of the Apple Store staff), I must concede that the loss of a half-kilogram (one pound) of mass is a really useful upgrade. I imagine it'd be more comfortable used in your lap (although maybe the heat it can put out might be off-putting). I'm certain your shoulder would thank you for choosing an MBPwRD after a particularly fraught cross-terminal dash to make a connecting flight. I undersold this point in my first post. Mea culpa.

Plus the screen absolutely rocks my world. I'm not remotely tempted to buy one -- like Marco Arment, I'm going through a period in my computing life where I am uninterested in desktop replacement laptops. I have a 27" iMac, an iPad 3, and a very-much-secondary-computer 2009-era MacBook Pro and I'm perfectly happy with that combination for the time being. However, a brief spell in the Apple Store gawping at a Retina display did make me really, really want a HiDPI iMac.

Oh, finally, one last thing: the MBPwRD has a standard HDMI port right there on the side of it, no awkward dongle needed or anything. Can we all take a moment to say a silent prayer of thanks for this sudden outbreak of common sense?

OK, let's move on.

The Tinkerer's Curse

There is a school of thought that says you don't truly own a thing if you can't take it apart, change some of the bits, then put it back together again. This is particularly prevalent amongst computer nerds, because not so very long ago, these abilities were absolute prerequisites to owning any sort of computer at all.

I am exactly such a person, and this is how I feel about computers, as well as lots of other stuff. It makes me uneasy about the sealed-up buttoned-down MBPwRD, and somewhat less uneasy about the MacBook Air and the iPad -- the latter devices being considerably cheaper, I'm more accepting that they might have a shorter lifespan because I can't retrofit some upgrade that I didn't know I'd need. This mentality has driven me to try custom firmwares on ADSL routers and televisions; to experiment with jailbreaking my iOS devices; to do my own car maintenance; to cure my own corned beef; to shun jarred marinara sauce in favor of making my own.

Sometimes, this sort of thing saves me time or money. More often it doesn't, and that's fine because deep down I'm doing it for fun, not profit. I wrote my earlier post from the gut and off the cuff, and it was largely driven by this sentiment.

Many of you don't share these concerns. Nor should you! I accept that I'm unusual in this regard. I cannot reasonably expect my feelings on this matter to sway many folk. My imp of the perverse wants to ask one question though: if you guys are all so dead set against tinkering, why do our jailbreaking posts get so much traffic?

So, now that I've come clean about my biases, I'd like to address the specific counter-arguments that were repeatedly levelled at my last post.

"This is just progress."

Possibly the most common response. "It's newer and better, this is what the world looks like, get used to it. Apple made it this way because this was the best way to make it. Go away and stop bothering me with your conspiracy theories, you nutcase."

On the one hand, I can see this. As I noted above, this is absolutely an extraordinarily powerful laptop for its size and weight, and Apple couldn't have managed that without making it this way. On the other hand... As Macworld senior contributor Glenn Fleishman put it, 'Glue and pentalobe screws and unnecessary solder are not "tradeoffs that go into product development".'

Put it this way. Let's give Apple the benefit of the doubt and suppose the managers simply told the engineers: "go make the best damn laptop you can." The engineers came back and said "we did that, but there's one thing -- the users can't change the RAM or the drives any more. They'll have to pay us for our premium-rate BTO models instead." I think you'd be very naive indeed to imagine the managers did anything other than give a wide grin and say "that's quite alright, boys. Win/win!"

"I don't care about fiddling with upgrades."

"Pro doesn't mean upgradeable," many people said, "it means powerful. I'm a pro, and I don't want to think about upgrading my computer; I just want to get things done with it."

This is a perfectly valid line of reasoning, to my mind. I'm a software engineer by day, with 20 years experience of bending computer software to my will; when I think "pro" I think of my profession, and the demands we place on hardware -- that we can adapt it to new software, for example. But of course there's legions of professionals -- photographers, video editors, designers, artists, musicians, writers, and on and on -- for whom a Mac is merely a tool. A vital one, but still just a tool, to be used until it wears out and then discarded.

Still, though. My 2009 MacBook Pro has had two drive replacements (from the stock 320 GB to 500 GB when my Aperture library grew too large, and then to a 64 GB SSD), a RAM upgrade (to compensate for Lion's memory hunger), and a replacement battery (the old one simply wore out). Without those changes, I'd probably have given up on it; as it is, it's still rocking along.

None of this was in any way difficult to fit. It's a bit of a dirty secret in the PC industry that anyone with the ability to manage IKEA flatpack furniture or a middling compexity LEGO model can manage most computer modification. Plus, the upgrades bought several years into the computer's life were significantly cheaper years later than if I'd bought them up front, which is an important point that's been overlooked in much of this debate. Like most people, I'm always happy to not spend any more money than I have to.

There's also the cost of some of Apple's BTO upgrade options. When I bought my iMac in January 2012, it came with 4 GB of RAM. Upgrading to 8 GB cost £160 ($251) and to 16 GB cost £480 ($754). Instead, I kept the 4 GB it came with, and bought an additional 8 GB from Crucial for £35 ($55). In the last round of product launches, Apple halved those prices... so it's now charging a mere $250 premium to do a laughably easy task for you. If that doesn't strike you as egregious, you must earn a lot more money than I do.

"I don't know how to repair my laptop, so I don't care about repairability."

The main problem I see with this line of reasoning is that the MacBook Pro with Retina display isn't just harder for you to fix; it's harder for anyone to fix, including independent specialists you may be used to using. Sure, you can always pop into an Apple Store... unless you can't. Some people live hours and hours away from their nearest store; some people live in countries where there are no official stores at all, just a handful of authorized service centers.

With the older Unibody MacBooks (which offer above-average repairability), you could go to Apple, or you could save a good chunk of change going to an independent shop, or you could save even more buying the parts yourself and asking any expert you know to do the work for a case of beer. There was a big market, and markets create competition and keep everyone honest. The smaller that market shrinks, the more Apple can charge what it wants for aftermarket work. That's not in anyone's interests, except Apple's.

Think I'm being alarmist? My MacBook is powered by an aftermarket battery, purchased for less than a third of Apple's price. How many of you would snicker at someone who paid $19 for an official Apple cable, when far cheaper alternatives exist and work just as well? It's the same principle, just for parts on the inside of your computer.

Or how about this: this week, Macworld's Lex Friedman suffered a MacBook/glass of water intersection incident that destroyed the hard drive. Apple quoted him $180 to replace the 500 GB hard disk, generously saying there would be "no labor fee." That's a $100 premium over a $70-80 off-the-shelf part that can be safely fitted in minutes by a total amateur armed with nothing more exotic than a screwdriver. In the end, Lex spent slightly more than Apple wanted and bought an OEM SSD instead, which he successfully fitted himself. In the process, he's significantly upgraded his system. If Apple can charge that sort of fee today, what would it charge if no-one had the choice to go elsewhere?

However, I must concede an important point: it seems likely the MBPwRD won't break very often. It's true that RAM and SSD can fail, yes; but neither thing happens particularly often, and certainly a well-designed SSD should be far more reliable than the spinning mechanics of a HDD. About half the RAM problems I've seen have been due to thermal creep loosening the memory in its slot, requiring it to be removed and replaced ("re-seated", in tech jargon); clearly Apple's soldered-on RAM is immune to this. The new MacBook also represents Apple's final solution to the lousy reliability track record of the SuperDrive.

There's that glued-in battery, of course. It's one of Apple's fancy new ones, but it's still not going to last forever. "1000 full charge and discharge cycles before it reaches 80 percent of its original capacity" and "a lifespan of up to 5 years" (emphasis mine) is what Apple promises you. This battery tech is too new to know if Apple's marketing claims are accurate or not, so it must remain something of an unknown quantity for now.

"I only keep my computers for two years, so it doesn't matter to me."

A valid answer, but perhaps a little short-sighted I think, unless you literally throw the machine away when you're done with it. In my experience, Macs have always enjoyed a rather longer lifespan than PCs; whether through reselling or hand-me-downs or simply clinging to life, I think you'll find far, far more five year old Macs in use today than you would PCs of a similar vintage. Indeed, I know more than one person who has rationalized the higher purchase price of a Mac by saying "it's OK, it'll still fetch a good price on eBay in three years." I think compromised repairability risks eroding this part of the Mac value proposition, by making it more likely that a middle-aged Mac would suffer a failure that rendered it beyond economic repair.

"Apple has always been this way."

I don't agree with this one at all. Apple shipped the first tool-less tower chassis I'd ever seen, in the form of the PowerMac G3 Blue & White; to this day, the Mac Pro has an elegant, flexible design that invites modifications and add-ons. The latest Mac mini design is the most internally-friendly Apple has ever shipped, with simple user access to the hard drives and RAM. All the Unibody MacBooks have been easy to work on too, supporting users who wanted to change drives and memory. The more consumer-ish Macs -- the iMac, the MBA -- have tended to be rather more sealed-up, but the "Pro" models have definitely not.

"I have AppleCare, so repairability doesn't matter to me."

It's certainly true that if you don't mind the expense ($349 for a MBPwRD, as much as 16% of the purchase price) AppleCare provides a fantastic service. I've always been very, very well taken care of when I've had to avail myself of the facility. Still, I (predictably) have two objections to this argument.

Firstly, AppleCare doesn't last forever. It's two years on a Mac, on top of the year you get for free. As I mentioned earlier, my 2009 MacBook Pro is still marching along. Had I bought AppleCare for it, it would have expired by now, but I'll get a year or so more use out of it as a secondary machine before recycling it as a test box for beta OS X versions, or a OS X Server box, or something of that ilk. If I'm spending $3,000+ on a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro today, I'd like to hope it'll still be of some use in three or four years, even if it's no longer my main computer.

Secondly, did I miss a memo somewhere that we all decided that extended warranties were a good deal now? We all scoff when Best Buy tries to sell us warranties on TVs, right? Why is AppleCare any different? Whenever I bring this up, I am rebuffed by dozens of anecdotes of great experiences with AppleCare -- and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I have some myself. AppleCare has replaced my iPad once, my iPhone twice, and paid for two repairs on my wife's MacBook.

But ponder for a moment what AppleCare covers. It's not accidental damage (except for the newfangled AppleCare+, which isn't available in the UK anyway). It only pays for instances where a device stops working in the second or third year of ownership. Shouldn't we be taking it for granted that Apple devices that haven't been accidentally damaged be capable of lasting three years without suffering random failures? Should we really be boasting that Apple sells us insurance for this? If Apple Care is such a great deal, doesn't that mean Apple products break too often?

Oh, and finally, AppleCare doesn't cover accidental damage, and accidents happen.

"It doesn't matter because it's going to sell in huge numbers."

Cannot argue with this one. If I was an Apple shareholder (I'm not), I'd be extremely pleased with the MBPwRD, which appears certain to be a runaway success and pile even more money onto the mountain of bills Apple has tucked away in Cupertino. People vote with their wallets; they voted for the MacBook Air and they're voting for the MBPwRD.

But don't forget -- McDonalds, Justin Bieber, and Windows all sell in huge numbers too. It doesn't make them laudable, tasteful, or, fundamentally, any sort of good idea.

Popularity suggests the retina MacBook Pro is good, for sure -- but it doesn't mean it's flawless. People don't buy the perfect thing, because the perfect thing doesn't exist; they buy the best thing they can, but there's always room for improvement. It doesn't mean we shouldn't stop to examine the pros and cons of the new MacBook from all angles.

"It's just like with cars."

"Cars changed just like this. They stopped being user serviceable and everyone got used to it. Get with the program, Grandpa."

This was an extremely common reply. I also feel it was one of the weaker responses, on numerous levels.

One: practically everyone I know has a story about a dealer franchise ripping someone off in some dubious manner, having used the trust people have in the brand to convince people they need to pay over the odds for basic maintenance or repairs. I don't see anything to celebrate about Apple moving closer to this model.

Two: actually, what happened to cars was that most of the oily bits stopped requiring user maintenance. That's not the same thing. I've set points gaps (rotor gap, to you Americans) and greased nipples and tuned carburetors, and that stuff went away because it stopped being necessary, not because the car manufacturers hid it away behind proprietary screws and glued-on panels. The process for maintaining stuff that still has to be changed regularly -- tyres, brakes, oil, filters, batteries -- hasn't changed much in decades. In contrast, there's nothing about the MBPwRD's innards that makes it any less likely to break or be accidentally damaged than other laptops. It's not magically proof against spilled liquids or electromigration.

Three: the government doesn't keep releasing new roads that make different demands of your car, but that's exactly what happens with computers. As I've already mentioned, I found after upgrading to Lion that my MacBook was struggling with 4 GB of RAM. Unless you think the MBPwRD is literally the fastest computer that will ever exist, the metaphor is fatally flawed.

"I can't upgrade my 50" TV to an 80" model either."

This one is just silly. No-one's complaining about being unable to upgrade their television's size because that's not physically possible. Making computers with upgradable RAM or replaceable drives is physically possible. Citation: almost every computer ever made.

"Apple does say the RAM isn't replaceable!"

In my original post I whined that Apple doesn't tell people that the RAM is soldered. Several commenters pointed out I was wrong, but it took me a while to work out why.

It doesn't say it on the landing page or the tech specs page or the store page. Where it does say it is on the BTO specification page, but only if you click the "Learn more" link next to the Memory section. That's... not exactly obvious, in my opinion.

Similarly, when I was in the Apple Store looking at the MBPwRDs, I overheard two customers ask two different sales representatives about the soldered RAM issue -- "so, I can't upgrade the memory later, right?" Neither rep understood the question, and neither of them could answer it.

I'm still not convinced Apple is doing enough to come clean with people here, or to train its frontline staff. I can forgive this on the Air, but this is a "MacBook Pro", and every MacBook Pro since the line launched in 2006 has had replaceable RAM. It would be perfectly understandable for users to simply assume this one is the same, and feel let down when they discover their mistake too late.

The twist is that being more upfront with shoppers could only encourage upsell to the 16 GB option, making more money for Apple in the process. So I'm sure this is an oversight, rather than due to any sinister motives.

TL;DR

On the Internet, it often seems that everything must be compressed to a one-bit image: black or white, triumph or catastrophe, the very best or the absolute worst. It is my position that the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, like almost everything once you think about it hard enough, is neither. It's an extremely nice laptop with a first-of-its-kind screen and a reparability downside that ranks somewhere between "utterly irrelevant" and "a bit worrying", depending on your prejudices and desires.

Almost 4,200 words later, do I expect any of you to have changed your mind about this? Well, probably not. Confirmation bias is a funny old thing. But if I have made you think twice about the complexities here -- even if I've just convinced you there are complexities where before you saw none -- then please let me know in the comments. If I'm really lucky, someone buying a MBPwRD will be able to make a more informed decision after reading this -- about the laptop itself, or about the BTO options they should be selecting. That's really all I want to happen.

More MacBook Maintenance Malarky: examining the arguments that none of it matters originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Please stop saying it doesn't. Despite it not appearing on Apple's specs page, there is no conspiracy, and Apple hasn't dropped the feature. The MacBook Pro with Retina display has the same combination 3.5mm-analog-and-S/PDIF-digital output port all other Macs have used for several years now.

Thanks to TUAW reader Patrick Perini (and his shiny new MacBook Pro, iCarus) for sending us the screenshot above, and to the Guardian's Charles Arthur for also confirming this to be true.

Attention world: the MacBook Pro with Retina display does have optical audio out originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Here's a list of all the proprietary stuff Apple has shoehorned into the "best Mac it has ever made", the MacBook Pro with Retina display (henceforth referred to as "MBPwRD"), taken from the iFixit teardown:

• Irritating pentalobe screws, which don't stop anyone determined to disassemble their MBPwRD but mean you need to waste time buying special drivers on eBay.
• RAM soldered to the motherboard, as we all suspected. No ability to upgrade it after purchase. I couldn't find anywhere on apple.com that makes this limitation clear to shoppers, either. That strikes me as disingenuous.
• Proprietary -- though removable -- SSD. We can hope for third-party upgrades in the future. Impressively, it's not even the same as the other new proprietary SSD in the new MacBook Air, which is also not the same as the one in the old MacBook Air. Standards!
• Battery glued firmly into the case, making removing it potentially hazardous (lithium ion cells can explode if pierced).
• Battery glued over the delicate trackpad cable, which you run the risk of breaking if you do get the battery out without killing yourself.
• Display assembly permanently fused together, with no protective outer glass sheet. If you have to replace any part of it (e.g. a scratch on the outer surface), you have to replace the entire upper lid, at great expense.

Overall, iFixit gave the machine a dismal 1/10 for repairability.

I don't like this one bit. I didn't care for the MBA's approach to sealed-in no-user-serviceable-parts computing, but I can just about see the justification on a product level when you're talking about a relatively low-cost, low-powered computer aimed mainly at consumers. I can also understand that most of these elements are necessary to achieve the MBPwRD's svelte lines. Removable RAM or a standard 2.5" SSD or even battery screws would all take up more room inside the case.

However, the higher end market feels different to me. My last MacBook Pro saw a little over 2.5 years as my primary computer, and I would expect no less of any computer I was paying in excess of $2200/£1800 for. In that time, I upgraded the memory once, the hard drive three times, and replaced the battery once. None of these options would be available to me with a new MBPwRD. SSDs, batteries, and RAM can degrade or fail in time -- is a $349 AppleCare purchase a hard requirement now? What if I want to keep my MacBook longer than the three years coverage AppleCare offers?

This would be a smaller problem if it wasn't for Apple's upfront upgrade costs, which could be reasonably described as daylight robbery. It charges $200 to upgrade the RAM from 8 GB to 16 GB -- that costs around $85 on the open market. Changing the SSD from 256 GB to 512 GB is $600 (including a modest CPU upgrade from 2.3 GHz to 2.6 GHz). Upgrading from 512 GB to 768 GB is a further $500. Meanwhile, in off-the-shelf land, an entire top-of-the-line 512 GB SSD can be had for $415 today, with 256 GB models around $280.

If this is the price you pay for a thin laptop, I want no part of it. The MBPwRD is 21% lighter and 25% thinner than the corresponding non-Retina-display model. Those aren't life-changingly better numbers, and to my mind, they aren't enough of an upgrade to justify all the features Apple has removed to make them possible. This new laptop isn't a MacBook Pro at all; it's a MacBook SuperAir.

Now the interesting part comes, though: how many people agree with me strongly enough to avoid the MBPwRD? The opposing view: how many will dismiss my concerns and buy the MBPwRD for the (apparently fantastic) display and improved portability? What would have happened if Apple had offered a Retina display on the older, thicker chassis? And worst of all: what do I do in a year or so, if (as seems to be widely expected), the "classic" MacBook Pro disappears and it's soldered RAM all the way down?

View Poll

Responses on this topic: Mashable's Christina Warren offers her take on the serviceability issue.

The contentious case against the MacBook Pro with Retina display originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At yesterday's keynote to the 2012 WWDC conference, Apple made a number of simultaneous moves in its global chess game with partners and rivals. Let's try and unpack what we can of Apple's overall strategy by analyzing the tactical choices it has made.

The biggest loser from yesterday's announcement, clearly, was Google: the new Maps app will bite into Google's traffic and revenues. Mobile is a huge growth area for search, and "where am I and what is near me" is clearly a crucial part of that.

Make no mistakes, though: this isn't a black-and-white win for users. Cartography is a complex area and the devil is in the details: the quality of realtime traffic monitoring (which Apple apparently intends to crowdsource), the up-to-dateness of road layouts, the speed of the pathfinding algorithm.

Apple has much to prove here, even with the cooperation of license provider TomTom. The current beta of Maps in iOS 6 loses Street View as well as public transport and on-foot routing support, all of which Apple has presumably been unable to source alternative partners for (yet). Apple claims that public transport will be added later, according to Macworld editor Dan Frakes, although we don't know if "later" means before or after iOS 6 launches in the fall. Update: according to several commenters below, walking directions are indeed present in the beta iOS 6 Maps app. As I am not in the developer program (and hence not under NDA), I couldn't check that for myself.

Street View could be more problematic for Apple, though, as Google clearly owns all the data outright. This is, of course, why Google spent so much money outfitting cars and even backpacks with expensive cameras. It remains to be seen how much users will care about this. I fully expect a Google Maps app to appear in the iOS App Store, too, so the users who do care will have something to fall back on; albeit something that isn't at such an advantageous position within the OS (more on that in a second). Moving away from Google as the sole provider of geocoding on iOS also means that developers won't be bound by the separate Google Maps API agreement when their apps use location services and display maps.

Oh, and neither the 3D "Flyover" view or turn-by-turn directions will be available to iPhone 4 users (it's in the small print at the bottom), although users of the iPhone 4 and 3GS will maintain their free and paid options for TBT wayfinding. This is another part of the reason I expect Apple to approve any Google Maps app from Google directly -- to mollify any users who miss the old features.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that makers of third-party satnav apps like Garmin were obvious losers too, particularly based on the chat I saw on Twitter during the event, but that remains to be seen (and Garmin gave TUAW a predictably bullish statement). As long as I'm driving places without 3G coverage -- quite common in rural Wales, which I drive through quite often -- or travel to countries where I cannot afford swingeing roaming data charges -- which is all of them! -- there'll be room on my iPhone for a satellite navigation system that stores maps offline and doesn't rely on a data connection. I suspect I am not alone in this (although Dave Chartier of AgileBits thinks I'm in a minority), which suggests satnav app makers like Garmin, Navigon and TomTom will still have a market, albeit perhaps a shrunken one.

I've seen a few comments along the lines of "of course Apple cut Google out; Apple doesn't like to depend on others" but that line of reasoning ignores that there were also winners in the keynote. Siri has been upgraded, offering deeper integration with Yelp, as well as new links to display results from Rotten Tomatoes, OpenTable, and a whole heap of sports data from a currently undisclosed partner or partners. The new Maps app pulls in data from TomTom as well as, no doubt, other suppliers; world-wide coverage for maps, satellite views and traffic data would be logistically tough for even a company as rich as Apple to assemble alone.

So what we see, then, is an Apple that is picking and choosing which companies it works with. It elevates some to premium positions within the OS, whilst demoting others to the comparative hinterlands of an unprivileged App Store app. Why does this matter? What is Google so scared of here that it invested heavily in an entire mobile OS and then (more or less) gave it away to counter?

It's all about Siri, which is the pivot all this turns around, but not for the reasons you might think. It's nothing at all to do with the voice support.

The importance of data sinks to iOS

As a computer scientist, I was trained to think about data flow through systems in terms of sources and sinks. The source is where the actual search query comes from; in the case of a web search entered into the mobile or desktop version of Safari, for example, it's the search box the user types in. The sink is where the search query is consumed and processed; Google, say, or Bing. Then the search results reverse the flow: the search engine becomes the source, and the web browser's content pane becomes the sink. We're not concerned with this secondary step here, however.

Traditionally, ever since web search boxes appeared in browsers, users have been able to select their own sinks. Safari bucks this trend a little by only offering a restricted selection of Google, Bing or Yahoo! on both mobile and desktop (although there are extensions for desktop Safari that address this). Chrome and Firefox, however, allow users to add any search engine they like. This is good for smaller search players like DuckDuckGo, as it elevates them onto a level playing field with the likes of Google. It also means users can write custom searches for, say, Amazon Kindle book titles in one step. There's a lot of flexibility here for users and site owners. I'd argue that this democracy, this absence of hierarchy, was an essential part of the early success story of the web, too -- that any blogger with a domain name was, in a sense, on a par with the largest media organisations in the world.

iOS doesn't offer this flexibility. Mobile Safari has only the three options on offer, the user can't install any extensions to change that behaviour, and custom web browsers from the App Store are second-class citizens on iOS because all web links in other apps will always fall back to Safari. This makes a search engine's presence in that little list in the Settings app really important to its viability on iOS -- which, if we really are moving to a "post-PC world", is really important to its viability overall.

Sources and sinks: beyond web search

The obvious other source to consider in iOS today is Siri.

The importance of Siri is that is aggregates multiple search engines together, but the user cannot choose which ones; Siri itself selects based on the type of query. So restaurant searches automatically go to Yelp, navigation requests to Maps, general factual lookup to Wolfram Alpha, and so on. TripAdvisor, Navigon, and DuckDuckGo are out in the cold because the list of possible sinks is baked into iOS.

This makes Apple a kingmaker in terms of iOS user's web traffic; it can (and just did) cut off longstanding "obvious" choices like Google from vast chunks of traffic whenever it wants. Siri puts lower-rung options like Yelp on an equal or higher footing than Google's search.

This is what Google is scared of. This is why Android exists -- it's an attempt to keep Apple honest. This is also why Google gives Android away -- it doesn't need to make money on Android itself, it only needs it to have a significant enough installed base to use as a lever against Apple. It's a moat, not a castle.

We can only guess at the terms these partner firms agreed to to get a privileged place on the largest (by traffic) mobile platform. It seems safe to assume Apple secured a good deal for itself, though, and likely applied the same hardball bargaining to its software partners as it does in negotiations with hardware component suppliers. It reminds me of the famous adage that a deal with Walmart can be the best and worst thing a small farmer can do -- the farmer get exposure to a massive market, but at terms strictly dictated by a powerful entity that doesn't have the farm's best interests at heart.

This is the commercial argument as to why we might never see the mooted Siri API. There are technical arguments, too; the level of integration Siri demands makes it hard for third parties to integrate to without risking the slickness of the end product. But technical difficulties are always resolved over time. My weak hunch is the commercial argument is strong within Apple, and it's unlikely that Apple will relinquish absolute control over Siri anytime soon; I certainly don't think we'll see it before iOS 7 at the earliest, now, and (I contest) we might never see it. Like the iron grip Apple has over the App Store, this control brings power of significant strategic value, and I imagine it's loath to give that up.

That all sounds rather negative. I should note that this is, generally, what's best for iOS users. Arguably the single biggest factor in Apple's rise to strength over the last decade or so has been its impeccable taste -- its sense of what people want to see. Siri's deep integration into various search providers is key to it working as well as it does.

Still, I find it hard not to be concerned about the distorting affects Apple's concentrated power might have on the online services market in all sorts of segments. So far, Apple has handed out competitive advantages to chosen partners in social (more on that in the next section), search, mapping, restaurants, and cinema bookings. Who knows which ones come next?

Sources and sinks: the post-PC play

Factory-standard iOS is strongly sandboxed, meaning that applications have very few opportunities to bridge data or settings between themselves. One app can't open a file saved from another; the only way to move data around is copy/paste (text and images) or the Camera Roll (images only). This makes the built-into-the-OS services even more important than they would be otherwise, because they are easily the smoothest path a user can choose to move data from source to sink.

As with Siri, though, Apple has absolutely control over these. Tumblr, for instance, cannot offer the user a "post this link" option via the action button in Mobile Safari. Only services blessed by Apple get into the default sharing options, which is why Twitter and soon Facebook get a competitive advantage over other social networks. Users who prefer more obscure sites -- don't forget about the fans of Google+! -- are left out in the cold.

Users can work around this, of course, but it inevitably feels clunky. To share a link on Twitter on my iPhone 4: tap Share, tap Tweet (slight pause, there, probably because of my older iPhone), and enter some optional commentary. To share on Tumblr (assuming I'm not posting by email): tap and hold Address Bar, pause for the menu to appear, tap "select all," pause for menu, tap "copy" and hit Home. Locate Tumblr app, load it up, select Post, select Link, tap and hold on URL field, pause for menu, select "paste" -- and now I can write some commentary if I want. Like I said, clunky, comparatively speaking.

This isn't just for social network sharing, either. It's inherently easier to add a web page to Safari's built-in Reading List than it is to put it in competing apps like Instapaper or Pocket.

Apps can work around the limitations, to some extent. For example, Tumblr offers a Javascript bookmarklet that accomplishes the same task, as does Instapaper -- although Tumblr's one uses popup windows so it doesn't work very well on iOS. One can also post to Tumblr by email, but that's neither as obvious nor as accessible; the process for adding tags to posts isn't very discoverable, for example. Apps can also pass data around via URL schemes but only if the data sending app is explicitly programmed to connect to a specific receiver app.

Apple could, of course, release an API for this, and allow users to permit apps to add themselves to the Sharing menu. It could also add a "default app" bit in Settings to allow, say, all web links to be opened in iCab, or all mail links in Sparrow. Calls for these things to be added into iOS date all the way back to the birth of the App Store but we're yet to see it. It's perhaps something Apple simply hasn't gotten around to yet, or -- and this is just baseless speculation on my part -- maybe something it's not planning on doing. As with Siri, this is an aspect of iOS that puts Apple into an enviable kingmaker position, and maybe Apple wants to hang on to that control. (It's very possible Apple will make an announcement in the future that makes me look stupid for saying that, but hey: nothing ventured, nothing gained.)

I'd argue this is somewhat more toxic to at least some users than the Siri thing, though. This lack of flexibility, of control, of (dare I say it...) openness feels significant to me when I ponder the idea of using an iPad for the majority of my computing tasks. I suppose, in a way, my iPad never really feels like mine. It's rather more like a games console for apps than a computer, which is (of course) a well-worn simile. This makes me feel uneasy.

I must accept, however, that I am a curmudgeon in these regards -- I've been using computers for almost three decades and I came to OS X after a long spell of using Linux as my primary desktop OS. I like lots of control over my environment. I frequently feel like iOS's limitations get in my way. I miss Alfred and the Services menu and having lots of windows open at once. However, I don't think my feelings on this matter represent those of the majority, and therefore I don't think they spell any sort of doom for the idea that the iPad is the post-PC future of computing.

(I do see problems that I believe stand in the way of the mainstream user moving to iPad, particularly for work rather than play; but that's a subject for another day and another overlong post.)

Wrap up

As our own Dave Caolo said, "Begun, these map wars have." Apple's announcements, in aggregate, speak to me of a company positioning itself strongly against Google -- and unafraid to align itself with numerous smaller partners to do so.

I would prefer to see Apple to move to an iOS model that allows more user configuration of the wiring from source to sink, but that doesn't seem to be on the cards. It's possible that it may surprise us with some extra features when iOS 6 is formally released but that seems unlikely to me because such features would only work with developer support, so WWDC would have been the perfect time to announce them.

As we're entering iOS's sixth major iteration without these customization options, I think there's some reason to believe that such openness is simply not part of Apple's plan for the platform. That weakens it a little bit, in my eyes; but many will disagree.

Photo by Lori C. | flickr cc

iOS 6: On partners and partings, sources and sinks, and the dreaded word "open" [Updated] originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

How do you launch a social networking site in this day and age, long after the likes of Facebook and Twitter seized the world? One answer is "micro-social networks": designed with a clear and specific purpose in mind, they can fulfill that purpose better than any of the generalists like Facebook.

Platter is a new micro-social network app dedicated home cooking. It allows you to take pictures of food you make and upload them to show the world, tagging them with the you used ingredients. You can then search through those ingredient tags, finding inspiration for something to make with the ingredients you have to hand. As you'd expect, you can also do the usual social networking things, like follow people whose food you find interesting, and post comments and "likes" on pictures.

"Why do I need this?" you might ask. "I have Instagram and Twitter, Facebook and Foodspotting. Why do I need another app?" Well, the Platter team cleverly identified that in fact none of these apps are exactly what you need if you're a home cook looking to show off. Instagram has plenty of food pics, but lacks the ingredient tagging feature. Twitter and Facebook are more general purpose. Foodspotting is designed around the idea of taking pictures of food when eating out, not for home cooking. Platter is complementary to these services.

To underscore this, it has (as you'd probably expect) the ability to cross-post pictures to Facebook and Twitter. These cross-posts are in the form of links to Platter's attractive web interface (self-promotion alert: that's my own Platter page), from where you can drill down into individual pictures. This web view feature is already fuller-featured than Instagram's pared-down approach, as you can navigate from users to pictures and back again, and the Platter team are planning on expanding this further in the future.

Gallery: Platter, the social network for keen cooks

Technically, Platter works pretty well. It's been developed by a small team of five people (for both iOS and Android versions) alongside their day jobs, and early on there were some rough edges that betrayed the app's homespun origins -- the occasional layout glitch or failed post. Subsequent patches have mostly fixed the problems. There's still the odd interface quirk -- I didn't find it particularly easy to navigate through the app at first, and sometimes tap targets seem to be frustratingly unresponsive -- but nothing too annoying. I couldn't test the Android version, but I must at least note that it has one -- so your Android-toting friends aren't left out in the cold.

There are some usability decisions that are quite refreshing, too. There's no fancy/hackneyed (delete according to your biases) photo filters, for one thing; if you're suffering from Instagram Fatigue you may find this a relief. The app also doesn't enforce a trendy square crop on photos; when users view your images, they'll see the aspect ratio you took them in, giving you the flexibility to compose shots as you see fit. However, note that the layouts in-app often use square thumbnails, which can result in some weird cropping. Of course, the app can import pictures from the Camera Roll as well as take them live, so if you'd prefer you can use any app already on your camera to shoot, crop, and post-process images. Image compositing app Diptic seems to be a particularly popular choice.

Platter's approach to tagging us also interesting. Unlike Twitter or Instagram's free-form approach, the ingredient tags are set by the system, and you can't add to them yourself; this promotes a clean hierarchy of tags that isn't littered with duplicates or misspellings. However, so far, the tag names are resolutely Brit speak rather than American orientated; so it's "coriander" and not "cilantro", "aubergine" rather than "eggplant", "courgette" over "zucchini". My Colonial cousins may find this jarring. Update: a full complement of US-style food words have now been added to Platter's ingredient tags.

As for the actual content, the food, I've definitely found Platter to be inspirational. Not only on a "what can I make with this level" but also simply from a presentation point of view. And it's particularly good to know, when looking through pictures, that these are all shot at home in an amateur's kitchen. Looking at professional dishes on Foodspotting inspires me to eat; looking at amateur dishes in Platter inspires me to cook.

Platter is also building a fun community. The developers of the app are all very active on the network, commenting on dishes and running competitions. There's a sub-type of user who delights in naming their dishes with the most groan-inducing puns you can imagine, such as my personal best, "steaks on a p(l)an(e)".

Chatting with Platter

I spoke with Will Hodson, director of Platter, about the future plans for the app.

How did the idea for Platter come about?

"Platter occurred to me as I developed another project with Channel 4's 4iP scheme. They were looking for ideas that could drill down into people's food habits; I thought of something like food Twitter... but didn't want to share it with a media giant!"

What sort of team put Platter together? Is this a full time thing, a sideline gig, or what? How many of you are there, what are your backgrounds, and how long did it take?

"Platter was co-founded by me and four developers. Most of us are fairly recent Cambridge graduates, working in software and programming. I met these guys as a client for another job, was struck by their competence, and we all got on."

How do you feel the launch has gone? Are you finding a good audience?

"Our press coverage is a testament to the appeal of the concept. We've been featured or recommended in all UK broadsheets as well as Evening Standard and Stylist. ABC News in the US recently named us as the number two app for food photos in the world (just behind Instagram).

"Launch has gone well. I wanted to give this a serious food-loving hardcore and we have it. Our featured cooks read like a who's who of British food blogging: we have two of MSN's Most Influential Foodies on board, a Masterchef Finalist and most of London's top bloggers."

Some of the food bloggers Will mentioned include Food Urchin, Gin and Crumpets, Meemalee and Leluu. I forgive him for not mentioning my own sparsely-updated food blog, Objection: Salad!, which has won precisely zero awards from MSN's Most Influential Foodies. It must have slipped his mind.

What are your immediate plans for the app? New features? US localisation? Bugfixes?

"We are in discussions with investors now. There are big plans afoot. First, expanding tags to cover dishes' influences as well as their ingredients. So if my dish inspires you to try something similar, you can tag my influence in your photo. This is almost a new currency of approval in social media. It also means communities can form around cookbooks and suppliers, taking Platter way beyond Instagram into food-specific functionality. Second, we'll open up our website for logged-in use. It will also enable curation of one's favourite dishes. And third, we'll look to put down some roots in the States.

"Finally, we are looking into Instagram integration, via a similar solution to that used by Foodspotting -- users post pictures to their Instragram feed with a special hashtag, and we pick that up and re-post the picture to Platter."

You lead on both iOS and Android at once. That's somewhat unusual. Was that tricky to manage? Did it definitely bring in more users than if you'd led with one platform at a time?

"Android was fine to develop for because our Android guy has been fantastic. Marketing it has been a nightmare however. If you type in Platter on Google Play, it assumes you mean 'Plate'. So it's tricky to find our app. You'd expect better from Google. We're still committed to the Android App but most users are on iPhone."

Anything else you'd like to say to our readers?

"We've got this far with no budget and limited time, yet we've still established Platter as a great place for food photos. As we push out to embrace more home cooks making fantastic dishes around the world, Platter will become the place you go to decide what to eat."

I can't say any more than that, really. One of the privileges of writing for TUAW is being able to help smaller apps find a wider audience. I've really enjoyed Platter in the six or so weeks I've been using it, and I wish it every success for the future.

You can download Platter for iPhone for free from the App Store.

Platter: novel photo-sharing social network for keen cooks originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: I made a mistake about Instacast's support for notifications in the original draft of this article. Please read my corrections at the end. My apologies, readers. --Rich

The release of Instacast v2.0 ruffled some feathers recently. Vemedio, publishers of the popular podcasting app, have taken the unusual step of switching business models with the new release. The old version of the app cost US$2.99; now it's $0.99 for the basic version, with an in-app purchase (IAP) to upgrade to Instacast Pro for a further $1.99. However, several features that used to be in the v1.0 app, like push notifications (update: see note at end of post) and the ability to re-order podcasts in the list, have moved to the Pro version. This means existing customers who upgrade to the new releases have to pay again to access them. (I'm going to dub this tactic the Instacast Maneuver.)

Unsurprisingly, this hasn't gone down too well with some longtime customers, who feel they are being unreasonably double-dipped. Angry one-star reviews for the latest version are accumulating in iTunes -- although, to be fair, they are far outnumbered by positive reviews by people who like the new interface.

I think this is an interesting story, and it ties into something I've been meaning to write for a long time about the non-intuitive meanings of "ownership" in our increasingly on-demand all-digital world.

"It's only two bucks!"

One of the most common reactions to the criticism is that it really isn't much money and, basically, people should stop whining. As accurately stated by Harry Marks, we spend more money than this on bad coffee without blinking. Software upgrades of OS X cost $29, and Windows or Photoshop (amongst many others) can cost hundreds of dollars -- does two bucks matter?

Certainly, I think it's absolutely fair to say that it's not a lot of money to anyone who can afford an iPhone or even an iPod touch in the first place. We're talking about devices that cost hundreds of dollars -- thousands when often-mandatory cellular contracts are added on. But...

Between my iPhone and iPad, I have at least 250 third-party apps. Many of those were free, but if just a fifth of my apps dinged me $2 via the Instacast Manoeuvre, I'd be looking at $100. That's not chickenfeed to me and it probably isn't to you either. So it's my contention that even if you think $2 for Instacast 2.0 is fantastic value, there's still a debate to be had here about value to the end user. If, like Seth Clifford, you don't love Instacast but merely think it "sucked the least of all the [podcasting] apps"; well, then that conversation takes on a different tone.

"Support the devs"

A similar argument commonly advanced to silence critics is that Instacast is a written by a small dev who needs the money; if you like the app, is it going to kill you to pay a little more for a new version? This is the angle the Vemedio company blog takes and it's certainly one I have some time for. Instacast isn't a top-tier app; many iOS users don't care about podcasts and most of the those who do are satisfied by Apple's built-in support. By definition of what the app does, Instacast is chasing a quite small niche of users and it shares those users with a number of high quality competing apps.

So Vemedio needs to establish a regular income stream, hopefully enough to support the firm and permit future development of the app. Presumably, the users want that, so surely it's churlish of them to complain about being asked to chip in a few bucks?

The problem is that many of them feel ripped off. Firstly, Vemedio took the unusual step of moving existing features into the extra-cost Pro version of the app. That's a questionable decision. Secondly, because of the App Store rules, there's no way for Vemedio to charge upgraders a reduced fee; it's all or nothing. Which brings us to...

"It's all Apple's fault!"

The App Stores both Mac and iOS restricts developers to well-defined ways to make money from their software: charge upfront, charge via In-App Purchase for add-ons, and/or charge subscriptions for ongoing services. Notably missing, as veteran Mac developer Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster has written extensively, is any sort of paid upgrade option.

Imagine you're GadgetSoft and you've just released WidgetThing v1.0 to great acclaim. All ten of its main features are popular. You have some great ideas for how to expand and improve it, but it's going to take a good chunk of time and effort to do so. At the end of that effort, you'll be able to release WidgetThing v2.0 with five new features in only one of two ways: as an in-place upgrade, meaning all your existing customers get it for free. Or as an entirely new app, in which case your existing customers have to pay all over again.

Economics theory tells us that WidgetThing v2.0 should be priced for new customers according to its 15 features, but priced for existing customers according to the extra five features it has over v1.0. It has different values to those two groups of customers, so should have different prices too.

Apple, for whatever inscrutable reason, doesn't let app makers do this. Charging longstanding customers full whack for upgrades is likely to be perceived as gouging; giving them upgrades in perpetuity for free is no way to run a business. Inevitably, some app makers simply won't bother. Chances are there are some fantastic v2.0 or v3.0 apps that have never left the drawing board because the developers simply couldn't justify it economically.

But why is it so bad to just give updates away for free? Isn't that a bit greedy? The answer is...

The race to the bottom

We only have ourselves to blame.

Picture the dawn of the App Store back in 2008 as a group of users in the middle of a big circle of developers. No-one knew how much to charge for anything; these were untested waters, an entirely new business model for consumers and creators. Nervous developers stepped up and pitched price points and users started buying apps. The savviest developers watched each other like hawks, nudging prices up and down in response to each other -- but mostly down, and down, and down.

About nineteen metaphorical seconds later, the nervous circle had turned into the bellowing hustle of the NYSE's trading floor, with everyone hollering lower and lower prices until many apps hit rock bottom: $0.99. The average price of an app today is $2.00, and the modal price is surely the dollar-store low water mark. Look at the initial iTunes reviews of any app costing more than three bucks and someone will inevitably call it expensive.

We know that many apps lose money; I have my doubts about the survey those results were drawn from but I think the general conclusion that only a lucky few devs make serious money from the App Store is a pretty common sense one. The race for the bottom -- the race we all subconsciously encourage whenever we held out to buy a $1.99 app in case it goes down to $0.99 in a sale -- means devs of even moderately successful apps are often left struggling for revenue.

Is it any wonder developers need to resort to every method they can think of to make ends meet?

The workaround

Surely this is all a storm in a teacup. Why can't existing users of Instacast v1 simply not upgrade to the new version?

Well, Apple doesn't make that very easy. There's no way to mark a specific version as "unwanted" in the App Store upgrade screen. If you accidentally hit Upgrade on that app just once, there's no way back -- unless you have manually extracted a backup of the older version of the app from iTunes, which is less likely than ever in this era of iCloud-powered backups.

Worst of all, you have to resign yourself to never again using the Update All button. If you don't have many apps, it might not be that much of a bother to manually upgrade, one by one, every one except Instacast. Other people, however, have hundreds of apps (I'm one) and receive dozens of updates a week (yo). Particularly given the App Store app's baffling habit of kicking you out to the home screen after each press of the upgrade, it quickly moves through tedious and into downright irritating.

The bigger picture

So far I've mostly been talking about Instacast, but the issues I'm describing affect more than just that one app.

Consider Tweetie, Loren Brichter's beloved Twitter app. I paid for Tweetie twice -- once for version one and again for version two, at a cost of $2.99 each time. I was delighted with each purchase, as Tweetie was easily the best-of-breed Twitter client at the time. Until, that is, Twitter bought it, relaunched it as "Twitter for iPhone", and eventually "blessed" it with dubious UI decisions and ads (later withdrawn) and more ads. From the second I upgraded from Tweetie to Twitter, the app I'd cherished and paid for (twice!) was gone, with no easy way to get it back.

For another example, consider the recent rumors that Rock Band for iOS would be shut down. EA claim this was "an error", although how that's possible is yet to be explained (particularly given this entry in the company FAQ which has since been removed).

Looking beyond iOS, EA is also famous for disabling online support in its console games, sometimes for games as little as seventeen months old. Once the servers are turned off, the entire online portion of the game stops working. The game you paid for is gone for good.

These tricky issues of ownership aren't even just about software. Sony removed the OtherOS feature from PlayStation 3 consoles after it emerged that people were using it as a jailbreak vector. A firmware update appeared, and boom -- just like that, my PS3 could no longer run Linux (and unlike many people, I'd actually installed Linux on my PS3). I could refuse the update, as long as I never wanted to play another game online. Not a great choice.

There are almost endless examples of these, and things are only getting more complicated as companies think of new ways to use and abuse the power that over-the-air updates and digital downloads give them over consumer purchases. Sooner or later, someone is going to push the envelope too far, and we're going to have some juicy class-action lawsuits over it. Until then, caveat emptor.

But let's return to the matter at hand -- the Instacast Maneuver. I think it arose from the limitations Apple has imposed on the App Store combined with the sometimes precarious finacial situation that some app devs can find themselves in. Vemedio are far from the only developers in this situation, so I am sure other app devs are watching how this goes closely as they ponder if they will follow along this path.

Overall, though, I have to come down against Vemedio on this one (update: please see the update below.) Not for the use of In-App Purchase itself; I think that was a fairly reasonable way around the lack of paid upgrades on the App Store. What I can't get away from the moving of features, including big ones like push notifications, away from the normal version and into the Pro. I've already bought a version of Instacast that does push. I don't think it's right to charge me, or anyone else, twice for that feature.

Update: I have accidentally propogated a common misunderstanding about Instacast, for which I must beg your forgiveness, reader. V1 of the app didn't have true Push notifications; it used local notifications only for some basic alerting. As several of my commenters below and Raphael Fetzer on Twitter have pointed out, the more dynamic Push notificaitons in Instacast Pro are genuinely new. I am grateful for the correction. Vemedio has also announced since this post was drafted (but before it went live) that the forthcoming Instacast v2.0.1 will make Smart Playlists available for free, i.e. in the base-level, non-Pro version of the app. Finally, the In-App Purchase upgrade to Instacast Pro is currently on sale for $0.99.

In light of these changes, I humbly withdraw -- and apologise for -- my criticism of Vemedio above.

Instacast pricing raises hackles: are apps bought or rented? [Updated] originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 May 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Update: See discussion of the ITU's "sliding scale" of 4G below. Commenters have pointed out that since 2010 the standards organization has acknowledged that 3G evolutions can reasonably be called 4G. References to 4G vs. IMT-Advanced have been clarified.

In a rare move of capitulation to a carrier, Apple caved to pressure from AT&T and made a controversial change in iOS 5.1 last week: an iPhone 4S on AT&T now reports a "4G" network rather than the old 3G signal. This change has been expected since October of 2011, but that doesn't mean it was uncontroversial.

Reactions to the switch were mixed. Some people suggest that the terminology is largely meaningless anyway, so the relabeling doesn't matter; a wireless standard by any other name will still download as sweetly. Others were affronted by Apple failing to stand firm and stop iOS being infected by AT&T's marketing pixie dust.

Some easily swayed folk even took to Twitter to congratulate Apple on delivering a 4G upgrade to their existing handsets, apparently not understanding that this change is nothing other than nomenclature. The iPhone didn't get any faster in this update; all that changed was the graphical indicator on the phone.

So who's right? I suspect it's probably obvious, but I'm in the "this is wrong and annoying" camp, and I think the people on Twitter overjoyed at an upgrade they didn't get are supporting my point. I'm going to set out my argument; please feel free to wade in in the comments and make your opinion heard if you disagree.

A small disclaimer

In order to give you some context around what has happened here, I'm going to briefly summarise the history of how wireless communications standards are created. This necessarily involves some alphabet soup, I'm afraid, as everyone in the wireless game dearly loves their TLAs (three letter acronyms), ETLAs (Extended Three Letter Acronym), and DETLAs (Doubly Extended Three Letter Acronym). Bear with me, or if it gets too much, skip the next section.

Readers with experience in this area will notice me glossing over all sorts of details. I'm just trying to provide enough background to make the rest of the story comprehensible, but if you think I left out anything important, please leave a comment and tell me.

For clarity, note that I am concentrating on GSM and its derivative technologies, and omitting the various CDMA flavours used by Verizon and Sprint in the USA and a modest number of other wireless firms world-wide. Suffice it to say that the roughly the same standards process happened on the CDMA side of the fence.

Standards & speeds: a brief history of wireless

There is a famous quote misattributed to Albert Einstein which goes like this: "you see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

Since the first analog wireless telephones appeared in the 1980s (retroactively called "1G"), there have been many attempts by various bodies to design standards for the non-existent cat. The idea was for everyone to be using the same cat; that way, manufacturers could exploit economies of scale. This would mean cellphone companies could make fewer models that worked in more places in the world, infrastructure vendors could manufacture interchangeable cell towers and radio stacks, and end users could move their cellphones between countries or between operators within the same country.

As Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko were yakking on brick-sized Motorola DynaTacs connected to 1G networks, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute were looking ahead and developing Groupe Spécial Mobile, which would later be renamed Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). GSM was by far the most successful second-generation wireless (2G) standard. Even as consumers were becoming familiar with the technology, however, the next global standard -- Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) -- was being developed. This time, the process was world-wide (as opposed to GSM, which was developed by European companies) and led by the International Telecommunication Union or ITU. The ITU is the United Nations agency charged with coordinating standards for digital communication among all member nations.

Lather, rinse, repeat: as gadget blogs filled up with brand new 3G handsets in the early 2000s, the ITU pushed on and defined target goals for next-generation networks to hit. These were defined in a standard called IMT-Advanced, which was finalised in 2008. (The standards process churns slowly; the actual specification for IMT-Advanced was finally adopted early in 2012.)

IMT-Advanced specified some aggressively high targets for bandwidth: 100 megabit/sec downloads when the mobile device is moving fast (e.g. in a car) and 1 gigabit/sec when stationary or moving at a walking pace. Even Apple's mighty new hardware interface standard, Thunderbolt, can only manage 20 gigabit/sec -- and that has a wire. IMT-Advanced, the true successor to 3G technologies, is what we originally thought 4G would be... but 4G turns out to be a marketing sticker rather than a technical standard.

Where the rubber meets the road

The original IMT-Advanced standard put out by ITU wasn't a fully fleshed-out, technically implemented solution. Rather, ITU standards are sort of like aspirational goals for technology vendors to achieve. While ITU's busy brains were drafting the IMT-Advanced standard, telecoms companies and consortiums like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project were beavering away on new solutions like LTE and WiMAX. The first generations of these technologies didn't meet the requirements for IMT-Advanced, but new versions known as LTE-Advanced and WiMAX Release 2 will eventually hit the numbers.

Meanwhile, of course, mobile vendors have mouths to feed so they need to keep selling us shiny geegaws. We saw lots of intermediate standards pop up between vanilla UMTS 3G and true IMT-Advanced. I've already touched on current generation LTE and WiMAX, which were new technologies; these come in between 3G and 4G, but closer to the latter. There were also a few "UMTS-on-steroids" solutions developed, such as HSDPA and HSPA+. Again, these enhance data speeds over and above what the initial versions of 3G could offer, but far short of the requirements for IMT-Advanced -- and rather closer to 3G performance than they are to "4G."

An iPhone 4S on HSPA+ has a maximum theoretical download speed of 14.4 megabit/sec; that's just 1.5% of the speed that IMT-Advanced demands of 4G. The new iPad with LTE tops out at 73 megabit/sec; fast, but still only 7.3% of the original target for IMT-Advanced ("4G").

All this has happened before

These intermediate standards are a replay of what happened with 2G. Initially, GSM's data component, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), could only offer a paltry 9.8 kilobit/sec of data speeds -- no one saw mobile data coming when GSM was being laid down, so it wasn't a priority. When smartphones started to appear and it became clear this wasn't enough, but before 3G standards were anywhere near complete, we saw mobile vendors design and deploy High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) and then the torturously-named Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE). HSCSD boosted download speeds to 57.6 kilobit/sec and EDGE as high as 386 kbit/sec.

This led to EDGE often being referred to as "2.5G", as it was said to be a halfway house between 2G and 3G. Apple coded the original iPhone OS releases to communicate to the customer if they were on a GPRS network (with a dot) or a EDGE one (with an 'E') -- the difference is significant, and the user has a better experience if he or she knows what performance to expect before using the device.

Enter the marketers

Following this pattern, we could reasonably expect the faster-than-3G slower-than-4G standards like HSPA+ to be called "3.5G", or even "3.1G". Some people do that, but it wasn't enough for the marketing departments at some big cellular operators.

It's always easier to sell things to people when you don't have to make them read a post as long as this one before they understand what they are buying, and it's even easier still when you've taken the last number and turned it up one louder -- hence digital camera's megapixel myth. AT&T and Verizon were quite keen, to say the least, on warping the term "4G" to apply to these new 3.5G standards.

So they did just that, without as much as a by-your-leave, starting in 2008. Sprint Clearwire was the first to jump the 4G hurdle, then Verizon and Metro PCS, and eventually T-Mobile (branding similar HSPA+ technology to what AT&T now offers in the iPhone 4S as "4G"). None of these networks met the IMA-Advanced speed threshold, nowhere near it -- but that did not stop the carriers from taking advantage of the lack of a technical standard for "4G" to gain some branding bonus.

There are any number of Android handsets supporting HSPA+ that now are branded and marketed as 4G; last year's Samsung Focus S continued this into Windows Mobile 7. Now Apple has joined in, in a surprising move, seeing as how it is normally lauded for being immune to carrier interference.

Update: As commenters have correctly pointed out, in 2010 the ITU let out a heavy sigh and acknowledged what carrier marketing had already done to confuse the marketplace. The organization allowed that 4G, while not formally defined, might as well be used to refer to upgraded 3G technologies like HSPA+ rather than only to the IMT-Advanced superspeed standards. Since 4G has no official meaning within the standards process, one can't say authoritatively that the indicator is technically wrong; only that it is decidedly confusing.

Make no mistake -- what's happened in iOS 5.1 on the iPhone 4S is an AT&T change only. If you're anywhere else in the world, on any other network, and enjoying a full-speed HSPA+ download to your iPhone 4S, the indicator will say "3G" and not "4G." Only AT&T gets this treatment (so far).

Even worse, Brian Klug of Anandtech discovered that even plain-jane UMTS 3G reports as 4G now -- so the new "4G" indicator can't even be used as a meaningful guide to when you are getting HSPA+ speeds. It just means you're on AT&T's network and you're getting better than EDGE speeds.

The disappearing "Enable 3G" slider

That's not the only thing that changed in iOS 5.1/iPhone 4S settings to suit AT&T, as it happens.

The "Enable 3G" toggle in Settings.app has disappeared for AT&T customers on the iPhone 4S too, despite having been present in previous versions of iOS. This switch allowed device users to force the phone off the 3G network and on to the older EDGE standard; this was used for a couple of reasons, including improved battery life or getting "lifeline" data service in highly congested cell environments. Older iPhones demonstrated noticeably better power performance on EDGE versus 3G.

This is another piece of carrier politics in action, in my opinion. AT&T wants to clear customers from its old 2G/2.5G networks as fast as possible, so it can potentially close down old cell sites and prepare to re-use the cell bands for something else. As such, it's not in the company's interests to allow customers to disable 3G data altogether, as that binds them to the 2G/2.5G network.

I should note that this customisation isn't exclusive to AT&T iPhone 4S units, however. I use Three here in the UK, which (unusually) has no 2G network of its own; it rents 2G capacity from a rival operator to fill in coverage holes, and runs a (pretty substantial) 3G network of its own. This means that customers with "Enable 3G" set to off cost Three money, as they are effectively roaming onto a secondary network for all their data. I can't remember when I last saw this slider in my Settings.app, but it was some time ago.

Granted, I've never been terribly eager to use that on/off switch anyway. I've occasionally used it to try and eke out the last 10% of my battery, but it's not a setting I've found much reason to toggle. If this adjustment is going to put a major crimp in your iPhone usage, please let us know.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, I've convinced you of one of two things in this post. Either a) you are affronted that AT&T's marketing folks can redfine the capabilities of the iPhone 4S like this or (more likely) b) you just don't care very much about technical definitions and think I'm talking rubbish -- or perhaps c) you skipped over most of the article on your way to the comment box to tell me I'm a nerd.

Let me put it another way: until last week, an iPhone 4S on AT&T showed 3G; today, it shows 4G instead, even though the speed hasn't changed. That's highly confusing to users, which is the exact thing Apple is supposed to be great at never doing. On those grounds alone, this is an objectionable change. Even worse, Apple now sells an iPhone 4S that reports itself as 4G and an iPad that's directly marketed as 4G... but the iPad's download speeds are five times faster than the iPhone's. Obvious!

I can certainly understand that Apple wants to show users whether they are connected to a vanilla 3G network or a fancy HSPA+ one; the speed difference is considerable. Other handsets (like my ancient 2006-era HTC Tytn, which runs Windows Mobile 6) handle this by switching the network indicator to 'H', analogous to the 'E' that iOS shows for EDGE. I think it's disappointing that Apple made this change, particularly as we've all been so positive in the past at how it has successfully resisted carriers' habits of fiddling with things.

Hat tip to Jon Silva for the image

Faux G: New "4G" indicator on iPhone 4S is the tip of a standards iceberg (Updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software.

The rumourmill has been busy lately with claims that we might get "Retina display" Macs soon -- and of course, a Retina display iPad 3 on March 7, probably, maybe, definitely. For an example of the sort of speculation, consider Bjango developer Marc Edwards, who tweeted: "Retina 27" Thunderbolt display: 5120×2880 = 14,745,600 pixels. 4K film: 4096×2160 = 8,847,360 pixels. Retina iPad 3: 2048×1536 = 3,145,728 pixels". This prompted me to dust off my Retina display iPad post from a year ago and revisit the mathematics I applied there to dig a little deeper into what a Retina display Mac might entail. Is Edwards right -- would a Retina display Thunderbolt display really need almost 15 megapixels?

Isn't this all just marketing?

Before I launch into a long-winded diatribe ("surely not!" -- everyone who's ever read any of my other TUAW posts), I need to address a surpisingly common point of view. Some people say that as "Retina display" was a term Apple made up, it can mean whatever it wants it to mean. If Apple wanted to, the theory goes, it could just declare the current iPad to be a Retina display and be done with it.

I think this argument is asinine. Firstly, although Apple invented the term out of whole cloth, it does offer a definition: "the Retina display's pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels." That has meaning, and if Apple were to weaselly dilute the definition for the sake of marketing some future product I think we should absolutely hold its feet to the fire.

Secondly, this isn't just about Apple. High DPI screens are starting to appear on other devices, like this Android tablet from Asus. The precise phrase "Retina display" might belong to Apple but the advantages of high resolution screens do not. As this is an emerging trend across the whole industry, it behooves us to strip away the marketing pixie dust and take an objective look at what this technology can offer.

Defining "Retina display"

So what does it mean to say that a screen's individual pixes are indistinguishable? The launch of the iPhone 4 and the first Retina display was, of course, accompanied by a jump in the screen resolution from 480×320 to 960×640 -- from 163 pixels-per-inch (ppi) to 326 ppi. This in turn lead many people to label some arbitrary resolution as "Retina display" -- typically 326 ppi itself, or 300 ppi. The latter number is a common rule-of-thumb baseline in the print industry for "photo resolution".

It's not that simple, however.

Hold a small-print book at arm's length. Notice how it's hard to read the text. Now bring the book up to a few inches from your nose. Notice how much easier it is to read now. Clearly, if Apple is defining a "Retina display" as "one where users can't see the pixels" then any discussion of whether a given display qualifies or not needs to take into account the distance between the screen and the user -- and that differs according to the device. An iMac on a desk, a MacBook in your lap, and a hand-held iPhone all have different viewing distances.

So, how do we determine how small a pixel has to be to be bordering on invisible? To answer this we need to think about subtended angles.

Consider the following scenario:

The viewing angle in this diagram, a, is called the angle subtended by the inter-pixel spacing, s. Whether or not a given detail is too small to be discerned by the eye is down to the size of this angle. This is how the size of an object is related to the viewing distance -- as you move an object of a given size closer or further away from the eye, so the size of this angle changes. Conversely, at given distance, a larger object will also subtend a bigger angle. The size of the image on the retina is intrinsically derived from the object size and the viewing distance, linked by this formula:

So what subtended angle is too small to see? The average person has 20/20 vision. This was historically defined as the ability to read letters on a standard eye chart that subtend 5 arcminutes of angle (an arcminute is 1/60th of a degree). What does that mean in pixel terms? Consider that just about the smallest legible fonts, Tinyfont by Ken Perlin and Tiny by Matthew Welch, uses five pixels of height (including descenders for Tiny) for each letter. This suggests the smallest resolvable detail for an average eye is around one arcminute. Indeed, one arcminute is an accepted value amongst academics for the resolution limit of a typical human retina.

Retina-ness of Apple's current displays

With the data above in mind, and applying the mathematics from my previous post, we can take some typical viewing distances for different Apple devices, combine it with the screen size and resolution, and calculate how close the screen comes to the definition of a Retina display we have arrived at above.

You can view a Google spreadsheet that shows the details of how this data is calculated.

Update, 2012-03-02: I've had quite a bit of feedback that many people sit closer to their devices than I do. I'm not sure if it's personal preference, or because I've used multi-monitor for many years (my 27" iMac is flanked by a 26" Samsung monitor, so I have to sit a little way back to fit it all in my vision). Either way, I've added a few rows to that spreadsheet that aren't shown on the table above to reflect these scenarios.

Update 2, 2012-03-04: The original version of the above table contained an error; I had forgotten that the screen sizes of the MacBook Air 11", 13" and MacBook Pro 15" are actually 11.6", 13.3", and 15.4", respectively. I used the wrong version in the calculation. This has now been fixed. This changes some of the pixel-per-inch figures slightly.

Just for fun, I threw in a couple of non-Apple devices for comparison -- a 50" TV at a distance of six feet, playing back a Blu-Ray and a DVD; and the announced Asus Transformer Prime Android tablet, which has a 1920×1200 display.

This table shows some things that surprised me.

Firstly, it shows that Apple's definition of Retina display aligns quite closely with my mathematic derivation. The iPhone 4 screen at a typical distance of 11" is just barely above the threshold for a Retina display. I believe this justifies my methodology.

Secondly, it repeats my previous conclusion that a pixel-doubled iPad running at 2048x1536 is easily enough definition to count as a Retina display -- even at a 16" viewing distance, which is on the close side from my experimentation with an iPad and a tape measure. Similarly, that Asus tablet is a Retina display too.

It also shows that many current Mac displays are a lot closer to Retina display levels than you might have thought. The 27" iMac at a distance of 28", a 17" MacBook Pro at 26", an 11" MacBook Air at 22" -- these screens all have pixels small enough to border on invisible.

Furthermore, the 480×320 iPhone screen is notably worse than everything else Apple makes today, at 53% of a Retina display. Even the second-worst 1024×768 iPad screen has finer detail at 61%. The worst Mac display is the 24" iMac at a distance of 28", at which distance its pixels are one-third too large to be individually indistinguishable.

Finally, this also shows why BluRay looks so good. On a largish TV at a shortish distance (50" at 6'), a 1080p image is at 92% of Retina level, whereas a DVD is a downright poor 36%.

There are two very important points here.

The first is that in order to achieve, or even handily exceed, the threshold for a Retina display, Apple does not need to double resolutions on most of its displays. Far from it. It would suffice to boost a 27" Thunderbolt Display from 2560×1440 to something around 2912×1638. (But note that there could be image quality issues from this -- see "The pixel doubling argument" below.)

The second point is that people shouldn't get their hopes up for how much better a Retina display Mac would be compared to the current offerings. The iPhone 4 was a huge step forward from the iPhone 3GS mostly because the 3GS's screen was comparatively poor. Existing Macs have much better screens to start with, so any improvement will be much more modest.

Looking beyond one arcminute

From the above, you might think that there is hardly any reason to Apple to change anything, because the benefits of higher resolution screens are so modest. But clearly HiDPI mode exists, and specialist medical imaging screens are between 508 and 750 ppi. What's the benefit to these high pixel densities?

The answer is that our definition of the limits of human vision -- details that subtend an angle of one arcminute -- is rather simplistic. There's a lot more to think about when considering how real human vision interacts with computer display technology, including atypical viewing distances, different sorts of patterns, and so forth. Reading words, for example, is possible at smaller sizes than reading random letters, because your brain has more context to guess at the characters. Your brain is a sophisticated pattern matching tool and it will use information from the surroundings to try and interpret details your eyes can't quite make out clearly.

Here's a number of test patterns for you to try this out on your own display. If you want to try this on an iOS device, you need to get the appropriate file for your device -- iPhone or iPad -- and save it to the Camera Roll. This is because iOS will helpfully try and zoom and pan images but we want to ensure that one pixel in the test image takes up one pixel on your display. Once you have them in the Camera Roll, view them full screen through the Photos app with your device in the portrait position. If you compare your Mac, iPad, and iPhone, you should see quite a difference in how well each screen performs.

The pixel doubling argument

Rene Ritchie for iMore makes a solid argument for why an iPad retina display must be pixel-doubled -- i.e. 2048×1536 -- and not some intermediate resolution (just as was the case for the iPhone 4 before it). Anything else means every single existing app either has to re-scale art assets -- resulting in a fuzzy display -- or let them appear at a different size on-screen -- resulting in usability problems as the tap targets are resized. This is because every single existing iPad app is hard-coded to run full screen in 1024×768.

The situation is fuzzier on desktop, however. Apple's current displays already vary between 92 and 135 pixels-per-inch. Users are more tolerant of UI element resizing, within reason.

Consider the 109 ppi 2560×1440 27" Thunderbolt display, and let's suppose Apple wanted to Retina it up. It could up the resolution to 4192×2358 -- which works out to 178 ppi -- and achieve a display with finer details than the iPhone 4. This is one-third less pixels than the native pixel-doubled resolution (which would be 5120×2880). UI elements would look proportionally larger -- but no more than they do on the 24" iMac display today, so it wouldn't look clumsy or odd.

Update, 2012-03-02: David Barnard of App Cubby wrote a great followup post with some mockups comparing a 27" 168 ppi screen in HiDPI mode (at a resolution of 3840×2400) and the current 109 ppi one. He also makes an interesting point that he find Apple's more dense modern displays harder to use:

What you should notice is that the text and UI elements are physically smaller on the current 109ppi iMac than they'd be on the hypothetical 84/168ppi 27″ iMac. This may be frustrating to some users, but I actually prefer my old 94ppi 24″ Cinema Display to any of Apple's higher PPI displays. I like that the system default 12pt text is larger. The sacrifice is in the usable workspace, and that's a matter of taste. I've been hearing from more and more people on Twitter that the 11″ Macbook Air is surprisingly usable with OS X Lion, even though the workspace is a scant 1366x768 pixels.

Wrapping up

Hopefully, I have convinced you of several things in this post.

• "Retina display" carries more meaning than pure marketing.
• The definition of what is, and what isn't, a Retina display must consider viewing distance.
• The improvement you'd see from a Retina display Mac is significant, but less than the improvement the iPhone 4 offered over the 3GS.
• A 2048×1536 iPad would be a Retina display and would look quite a bit better than the current model (but, again, be less of an improvement than the iPhone 4).

Still not convinced? Sound off in our comments!

I'd like to thank fellow TUAWers Brett Terpstra and Erica Sadun for helping me with the Retina Tester graphic.

Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math (updated) originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's announcement of Mountain Lion included many promised new features, including a stronger focus on the Mac App Store than ever before. Two significant new features, iCloud document syncing and Notification Center, are only accessible to App Store apps, and the new Gatekeeper security tool will include a setting to lock a Mac down so it can only run software purchased from the App Store.

All this has (probably inevitably) got people wondering if this is the first step towards a version of OS X that will only run programs from the App Store -- a world where indie developers who cannot or will not use the App Store as their distribution platform will be frozen out altogether.

I think that's an unlikely end state (making my headline fully Betteridge compliant), and so do some prominent indie developers, but I also think the issue is worth examining.

A brief recap of the App Store

When Apple added the App Store to iOS in 2008, it was a revolution in more ways than one. For the first time, we had a major general-purpose computing platform where software developers could not freely distribute their work to a wide audience; a platform where users could only purchase and download approved programs from a central, controlling authority. This wasn't a new idea -- gaming consoles have been using this "walled garden" model since the earliest Atari and Mattel consoles -- but it's the first time it had been applied to a device that some might consider a successor to the personal computer. So powerful and successful was this idea that we had to invent neologisms -- "jailbreak", "sideload" -- to describe processes that we had taken utterly for granted for the first thirty-five years of personal computing.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the App Store is bad. Although it undeniably introduces new restrictions on how we use our expensive devices, the upside is a frictionless user experience for discovering, installing, upgrading, and uninstalling apps that had never been seen before outside of console gaming. Coupled with Apple's economically viable micropayments infrastructure, this spawned a sprawling "appconomy." Hundreds of millions of users spending billions of dollars on apps from millions of developers; a fluid, dynamic software market the like of which the world has never seen the like of which.

Back to the Mac

In early 2011, Apple brought some of these principles to the Mac with the release of the Mac App Store. Like its iOS ancestor, this also promoted app discovery and management -- but with one key difference: it's not the only game in town. OS X on the Mac still has its traditional ability to download and install software from... well, anywhere. The Mac App Store also brought some restrictions to what an App Store-purchased app could do, but nothing too onerous. At the same time, it offered access to Apple's payment processing engine, meaning indie devs could spend less time looking after financial transactions and more time cranking out great code (at the cost of the familiar 30% "rake" of Apple fees). Everybody wins.

Many developers found that their users quickly moved to accept and then prefer the Mac App Store. Reports of great success with their early releases were plentiful. For example, graphics manipulation program Pixelmator grossed $1 million in 20 days after announcing it would be an App Store exclusive. The authors of the Sparrow email client were very happy with the App Store. Other success stories abounded.

Confined to the sandpit

For the best part of a year, everything was happy in App Store land... but as of March this year, Apple was going to require all App Store apps to run in a "sandbox" (although this deadline was recently extended to June). This means, amongst other limitations, that each app's access to the underlying system is sharply curtailed, to the point where an app can only read and write to approved directories within the user's home folder -- and it requires explicit permission to do even that. An app has to specify which "entitlements" it needs (specific system permissions and capabilities) to get its work done; Ars Technica's book-length Lion review by John Siracusa has a great sandboxing section examining how this is managed.

This set of restrictions affects many existing apps for the worse. Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory reported that the company successfully ported xScope (after having problems with a bug relating to symlinks in home directories). He noted, however, that some apps would never be effective in a sandbox; the example was Panic's Transmit, an FTP client, which requires wide filesystem access and probably couldn't be meaningfully ported to the App Store under the sandboxing rules.

Hockenberry also told me that two other pieces of popular Iconfactory software, CandyBar and IconBuilder, could never work with sandboxing. The former modifies system files and the latter is a Photoshop plug-in.

Some developers, seeing the sandbox writing on the wall, are being forced into difficult decisions regarding their App Store offerings. Manton Reece of Riverfold Software has announced that his ClipStart video library tool will be withdrawn from the App Store altogether because of incompatibility with sandboxing.

This is particularly troublesome for users who have already bought the App Store version of his app; Reece cannot easily identify them to give them an upgrade to a non-App Store version, nor can he offer them new versions of the app within the App Store's framework. To his enormous credit, Reece is willing to "honor Mac App Store receipt files" -- presumably via a tiresome manual process -- and provide extra serial numbers for customers migrating to new computers.

For similar reasons, and with similar problems for users, Atlassian Software's SourceTree is also leaving the App Store.

Even apps that don't seem to require system-wide file access can fall foul of sandboxing. Any sandboxed app can open any file anywhere on the system via the File > Open menu, because the sandbox presents the standard OS X dialog window to the user with special elevated permissions. But Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, father of the image editor Acorn, tweeted "just discovered you can't use AppleScript to tell (sandboxed) Acorn to open an image it hasn't opened already."

All this has provoked some understandable bad feelings. As Red Sweater Software's Daniel Jakult forcefully put it, "Shame on you, Apple. Your developers shed blood, sweat, and tears to succeed on the Mac App Store. Now you drop them with misguided policy." Jakult elaborated on his position in a blog post where he outlined the changes he'd like to see made to sandboxing to make it more workable for everyone.

Mountain Lion

Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X, will add further fuel to the fire. It adds a new security system, Gatekeeper. On its highest setting this will only allow programs downloaded from the App Store to run. This isn't the default, however; on the out-of-the-box medium setting, the Mac will run apps from the App Store and those digitally signed by a process carried out between the dev and Apple.

This process doesn't cost the devs anything (beyond their existing $99 annual developer membership fee) and doesn't restrict what the app can do. It is designed to offer a halfway house solution between the locked down App Store and the anything-goes wild blue Internet. After all, Apple might not have a malware problem today, but that could change in the future. Finally, Gatekeeper's lowest setting allows all apps to run unfettered -- just like all previous versions of OS X.

It's possible that Apple planned this split approach all along -- although if so, it was rather mean-spirited to not start off requiring sandboxing for all App Store apps. Yanking the rug out under existing apps isn't good for developers or users. It seems more likely to me that these changes are the result of a genuine strategy shift within Apple, or possibly the sandboxing/entitlements infrastructure was simply not fully baked enough in 10.7 Lion to permit most apps to work with it effectively (including those using Apple's own AppleScript interapplication framework).

Still, after a somewhat winding road, we're arriving at a good place with Mountain Lion. Users who don't adjust the default setting will be able to run apps from the App Store and elsewhere with a degree of malware protection, and devs can distribute apps that fit the App Store's slightly simplistic model there whilst also distributing signed apps via other channels. Great, right? Well, I still see a few problems with this.

Mixed feelings about the App Store

Firstly, as it stands, every third-party app on your Mac today won't run on Mountain Lion, as they are not digitally signed. This means if you upgrade you're going to be plagued with "this app is not trusted" messages (you can enable Gatekeeper on OS X 10.7 to get a taste of how annoying this is). If you have a lot of apps -- particularly older apps that might not ever receive digitally signed updated versions -- this might become the Mac equivalent of Vista's hated User Account Control prompt. If so, many existing users might end up turning Gatekeeper off altogether, rather defeating the point.

The second problem is the ongoing FUD being generated around the Mac App Store as a result of the ongoing painful process of enforcing sandboxing. Apple has twice extended the deadline to switch it on -- it was originally last November. In the mean time, I and other Mac users I've spoken to have found ourselves holding off on App Store purchases, or actively sought out non-App Store versions of apps, to avoid getting into a state where we have a licence for an app that is removed from the store.

The third issue is commercial pressure. What if, in the future, users come to view programs not on the App Store with disdain for missing features or even outright suspicion at a perception of lower software quality? So far I don't think this has happened, but it's a possibility in the future. If sales outside the App Store begin to drop, devs will come under a covert pressure to move to distributing their wares via Apple. They might then face an unpalatable choice between dwindling sales or neutering their programs to comply with sandboxing.

App Store only APIs

With Gatekeeper and app signing, Apple seems to be proposing a three-tier system -- App Store apps in the first tier, digitally signed apps in the second, other apps in the third. In theory, apps in tier two and three are equal, but the ones in the App Store are limited by the sandboxing requirements.

It's not that simple, however. A subtlety arises from the existence of features that are only accessible to the App Store apps. Two big new parts of Mountain Lion -- iCloud document syncing and Notification Center -- are described as being only useable to App Store programs. This widens the gap between the first and second tiers, particularly if the hunches of a few developers I spoke with are right and Apple continues to make marquee OS X features App Store-exclusive.

Now to be fair to Apple, there is a big mitigating factor, because both of these services use server-side resources Apple has to maintain with no direct income. iCloud, for one, clearly relies on cloud storage to work and cloud storage doesn't come cheap.

Notification Center is more puzzling. At first, I thought it worked primarily like Growl -- in other words, it was a way for an app already running on my Mac to bring something to my attention. Fellow TUAW writer Chris Rawson and Iconfactory's Craig Hockenberry told me I was wrong, so I dug deeper and talked to a few developers. Anand Lal Shimpi's investigation showed that, in the current developer beta, Mountain Lion has two types of notifications -- local ones, that can be sent by any app, and server-side push notifications, which can only be associated with App Store programs.

Jonathan George, CEO of Boxcar, told me that for his company the push notifications are far preferable, even on OS X. On iOS, any app that wants to notify the user arbitrarily (except Apple's apps like Calendar and Mail, which can use private APIs) needs server-based push notifications as a workaround for the lack of always-on backgrounding.

It initially seemed to me that this is less important for OS X. Consider my Twitter client, which is always running on my Mac. It's checking every few minutes for new messages and can send a ping to Notification Center without any external servers. This, however, can take a few minutes -- a server-side push is realtime, or at least, really really fast. This is clearly better for some types of apps than local-based notifications coming from a polling loop.

So what about App Store-only?

To come back to the question I opened this piece with: could/would Apple mandate, in a future release of OS X, that the App Store would be the only game in town for getting software onto the Mac?

Well, perhaps "could" is the wrong word. Apple certainly could, but I think we're a long way away from a world where most users would approve -- and for those who are comfortable with it, they'll be able to switch Gatekeeper into full-on paranoia mode and achieve the same end.

Furthermore, if Apple was planning it for the future, I don't think we'd have seen Gatekeeper's middle setting introduced at all. The mere existence of this feature underscores that Apple is serious about giving users some extra malware protection via code signing without mandating the App Store. Indeed, Panic's Cabel Sasser asked an Apple representative about this when he was briefed on Mountain Lion and he reported that "for what it's worth, they told me point blank that they value independent apps and do not want them gone."

This code signing option is not only a technical solution, but also grants indie devs working outside the App Store a veneer of respectability that might help make some less experienced users more comfortable doing business with them.

There's also the question of professional-level software. It seems rather unlikely that the Adobes, Avids and Microsofts of this world would be happy to hand 30% of the sales of high end programs like Creative Suite or Office to Apple, as would be required if these apps were put in the App Store. Do those companies need OS X more than Apple needs them? It's debatable, but it's a game of chicken Apple would perhaps be wiser to stay away from. It's not dissimilar to the row about in-app purchases under iOS and apps like Kindle, and Apple lost that one.

A tale of two app stores

I think Apple, in simultaneously watering down the existing App Store via sandboxing and giving a non-App Store mechanism for developers to bless apps, has created a segmented market. It seems to me we're going to end up with the App Store populated by smaller apps from smaller developers (who will find the support of Apple's payment processing infrastructure compelling) and larger but relatively simple apps for which sandboxing doesn't chafe too much.

Meanwhile, we will hopefully still see a vibrant indie dev scene outside of the App Store. Indeed, by enforcing sandboxing, Apple might have just given the alternative channels a lifesaving boost... but by locking key OS X features up to only be accessible to App Store software, it's simultaneously making it harder for non-MAS indie devs to compete. It's too early to tell which of these factors will come to dominate over the others.

This is assuming, of course, that Apple sticks by its guns. The slipping schedule for essential sandboxing suggests Apple is perhaps a bit uncertain or conflicted about the way forward here and maybe we will see sandboxing significantly relaxed or expanded before it becomes mandatory.

I'll end with one piece of wild speculation, because I'm a blogger and because I'm under my House of Crackpot Theories quota for this month.

If an existing sort-of-an-app-store service like MacUpdate took Apple's digital signing certificate and ran with it, it's not impossible we could see an Unofficial App Store emerge. One which requires digital signing of all the apps, and offers developers a payment processing and download hosting service, but does not require sandboxing or unpredictable app approval processes. I think Apple's sandboxing policy may create a gap in the market by wilfully narrowing the scope of the App Store. I don't know if that gap is big enough for someone to wedge an entire new product into, but I'd throw money at anyone who's willing to try.

The author would like to thank everyone who helped compile the information in this article: Jonathan George, Craig Hockenberry, Chris Rawson, Erica Sadun, Anand Lal Shimpi, Fraser Speirs, Steve Troughton-Smith, and the other devs I spoke with off the record.

Does Gatekeeper point the way to an App Store-only OS X? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's new AirPort Utility 6.0 for OS X was released yesterday, bringing over the slick UI from its pre-existing iOS version -- but as my colleague Chris reported, it also removes access to a number of features in the process. At the same time, Apple are still hosting downloads for the older version of the tool which still has the full feature set. Predictably, there's been some indignant fallout from this admittedly curious decision, but what sorts of features are missing, and should you care? I loaded up the old and new version of the tools side-by-side to see what I could find out.

Here's the "Wireless setup" page for my AirPort Extreme under the older AirPort Utility:

And hiding under that "Wireless Options..." button, you get more settings:

Here's the corresponding page on the newer tool:

And under the "Wireless Options..." button:

We've lost access to quite a few settings there:

• Multicast rate
• Transmit power
• WPA group key timeout
• Wide channels option

The page where you define DHCP server options is rather better laid out in the new version. Here's the older one first:

And the newer, which folds in some settings like NAT enable and port mapping which were hidden behind other tabs in the older UI:

But again, there are options missing -- you can no longer specify a DHCP message or set an LDAP server. And the tiny scrolling lists for DHCP reservations and port maps that show only two lines at once are laughably inadequate. I have eight mapped ports, and reading through them to find one I want to adjust is unnecessarily difficult in this new UI.

The Logs and Statistics section of the old tool is completely missing too, and that has helped me out of a few jams. In particular the signal strength graph is useful:

This is really handy for tracking down that one stray device on your 802.11n network that is dragging you down to 802.11g speeds, or for working out where to best position an AirPort Express to get that extra signal boost you need. You can get some information via a tooltip in the wireless clients list in the main screen, but it's not exactly obvious, and it doesn't convey how things change through time:

Also missing from the logging facility is the ability to configure a remote SNMP server to collect and collate logs from lots of AirPort devices to a single central server.

It's not all bad, though. The new UI has this really handy topography display which shows you how your network is plugged together:

For example, this is telling me that my living room AirPort Express isn't connected to the AirPort Extreme via Ethernet, like it should be -- it has a dashed line instead of a solid one. It's also telling me it's offline, presumably for the same reason.

Disk Sharing seems to have lost the ability to set a Windows workgroup and allow/disallow guest access:

The new AirPort Utility is also missing the printer sharing tab altogether, although it might just have become entirely automatic as the old screen mostly only displayed a list of connected printers anyway:

This extra "Options..." screen is also missing from the new tool:

So we can no longer set the metadata for the AirPort device's location (useful for larger-scale installations in offices, where there may be lots of access points used at once) or set the status light to blink on activity.

The old tool also offers support for RADIUS authentication of clients which is absent from the newer software:

Some people are reporting that MAC address access time control is missing. It appears to be functionally intact, just re-arranged. Old tool:

New tool:

IPv6 settings are also entirely absent from the new AirPort Utility.

So in summary, then, unless you're a systems administrator for a complex office install with multiple AirPort devices and demanding technical requirements, you're probably not going to notice the missing bits in the the new AirPort Utility. And if you are...? Almost as if it's acknowledging the missing bits and pieces, Apple is hosting downloads for the old and new versions of Airport Utility side-by-side. There's nothing stopping you from installing both on your Mac, and it's absolutely fair to say that the features I've noted above are missing are entirely advanced ones that are of little interest to normal home users.

As well as configuration features that are missing, support for older stuff has also been decreased in AirPort Utility 6.0. The 802.11g versions of the AirPort Express, which was on sale from 2004-2008, and pre-2007 AirPort base stations simply don't work with the new tool at all -- the device doesn't appear in the management UI. The new tool requires Lion, so Snow Leopard or Windows users are out of luck (yes, the old version is available for Windows, to my surprise). And one final limitation: the new version of the tool locks you out when it's upgrading firmware for any device on your network, as Chris noted yesterday. That's not exactly something you do every day, though.

It seems unlikely that you are going to care very deeply about these changes, and if you do, you can easily get the older version of the utility. Still, though, I think it's both peculiar and curious that Apple is requiring users to choose between a nicer UI and access to the full feature set of their AirPort devices. It's as if AirPort Utility 5.5 is now "AirPort Utility Pro" and AirPort Utility 6.0 is "AirPort Utility Home". It just seems so... uncharacteristically inelegant.

Have you noticed any other missing features that I've overlooked? Please leave a comment!

In pictures: AirPort Utility 6.0's missing features originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness Breweries, was involved in a drunken argument about which of Europe's many game birds could fly the fastest. Unable to settle the argument even after consulting a well-stocked library, he commissioned a new reference book that would be filled with the sort of facts that people routinely argue about over beer -- the fastest, furthest, most expensive, largest, and so forth.

Thus was Guinness World Records born, and it has continued to this day. Last year it announced that Microsoft's Kinect was the "Fastest Selling Consumer Electronics Device" ever. The Xbox 360's motion-sensing controller sold an impressive eight million units in its first 60 days on sale.

However, let's look at some other numbers relating to another consumer electronics device you may have heard of -- the iPhone 4S. The 4S was announced on October 4 and went on sale on October 14. Leading up to this, we know that iPhone 3GS and 4 sales were down based on the widely circulated rumours of the 4S release. So we know that most of Apple's iPhone sales for the quarter would have happened after the 4S was released.

We also know that Apple sold 37 million iPhones in total in the fourth quarter of 2011 -- in other words, from October 1 to December 31. Furthermore, survey firm Consumer Intelligence Research has produced credible analysis that suggests that 89% of those 37 million sales were of the iPhone 4S model. This is corroborated by the high average selling price of the iPhone reported in Apple's quarterly earnings report. An average of $659, above the iPhone 3GS and 4 price points, suggests that the majority of sales must have gone to the more expensive iPhone 4S models.

Finally, we know that Apple sold four million iPhone 4S handsets in the first three days it was available. Oh, and that there's 78 days between the date the iPhone 4S went on sale and the end of Apple's quarterly reporting period.

So to recap: the Kinect holds a genuine world record for selling eight million devices in 60 days. The iPhone 4S definitely sold four million devices in three days, and went on to sell as many as 33 million devices in 78 days. It seems extremely likely that somewhere between those two numbers Apple comfortably eclipsed Microsoft's 60-day sales record.

The only fly in the ointment I can see might be Guinness World Record's definition of "consumer electronics device." I'm not sure if cellphones are included, or if they perhaps have their own category. Several media sources such as the Telegraph took care to point out that Kinect outsold the iPad and the iPhone 4, which suggests that these devices were considered as part of the same category. If so, come the publication of the next volume of the Guinness World Records book -- the 2013 edition, due towards the end of this year -- we can expect to see Apple take Microsoft's place as the record holder.

Will the iPhone 4S overtake the Kinect as the fastest selling consumer product device? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science behind the hardware and software.

Several sites -- including TUAW -- reported yesterday that 80% of all smartphones AT&T sold in Q411 were iPhones, based on AT&T's quarterly earnings report. On closer inspection, however, there's a subtle but important detail that we overlooked in AT&T's wording. It reported "9.4 million smartphone sales" but "7.6 million iPhone activations" (emphasis mine).

So, consider the following series of events. Alice buys an iPhone 3GS back in 2009 on a two-year contract. In late 2011, she treats herself to a new iPhone 4S -- that's both a sale and an activation for AT&T. She gives the 3GS to her husband, the long-suffering Bob, who can finally ditch his flip phone.

Bob needs service though. His "new" 3GS is locked to AT&T -- unlike in many other countries around the world, most American carriers won't voluntarily unlock even out-of-contract handsets. Even if it were unlocked, though, it's not compatible with either the CDMA networks used by Verizon and Sprint, nor the oddball 3G frequencies used by T-Mobile USA. Finally, AT&T refuses to support iPhones on its pay-as-you-go GoPhone plan (although if Bob read TUAW he'd know he could work around this). So, with no other choices, Bob rings up AT&T and starts an iPhone contract so he can use the old handset as more than just an oddly-shaped iPod touch.

At the end of this process, AT&T has closed one new sale -- but counted two activations, one for Alice's new iPhone 4S and one for Alice's old iPhone 3GS in Bob's name. This means the 7.6 million activations includes some double counting, and can't directly be compared to sales.

We reached out to AT&T's Seth Bloom to confirm whether our reasoning was true. He said "You're right that activations are a bit different than sales -- and activations includes things like gifted iPhones as you suggest." However, he also added that "In this quarter, the number of activations from things like gifted iPhones doesn't change the math much. We aren't sharing a number, but gifted phones is a relatively small portion of total activations."

How much might a "relatively small portion" be?

Let's revisit those numbers: 9.4 million smartphone sales and 7.6 million iPhone activations. Suppose that 10% of all those iPhone activations were to used handsets. In other words, out of all of those brand-new iPhone sales AT&T made in the last three months, about one in ten of them (a virtual cookie to any commenter who spots why I had to say "about" there) were made to a person who a) already had an older iPhone and b) then proceeded to sell or give that handset away to someone else, who reconnected it back to AT&T's network. That would mean that AT&T activated 6.84 million new iPhones and 760,000 old ones. In turn, that means that the iPhone took 73% of AT&T's overall smartphone sales. The other 27% will be split between Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7.

More generally, we can plot a graph of how the iPhone's market share changes as a function of the recycle factor or the proportion of activations which went to reused handsets:

If we revisit AT&T's statement we can also see that "82 percent of postpaid sales were smartphones." This means, remarkably, that unless 25% of iPhone activations went to reused handsets (which seems unlikely in light of Bloom's comments) then over half of all contract phones AT&T sold were iPhones. This story is repeated on Verizon too.

The bottom line is: Apple kicked all kinds of posterior in the smartphone market during the last three months of 2011. Can it continue to do so in 2012? It might not be able to maintain quite this stupendous a lead. The timing of the iPhone 4S launch (in autumn, versus the previous summer iPhone introductions) likely boosted sales by causing some greater-than-usual pent-up demand. Supporting this hypothesis, Tim Cook admitted that sales of the older models waned between July and September. It'll be fascinating to see what this massive quarter does to the overall smartphone market share of iOS versus Android in the coming months.

AT&T's iPhone "sales" versus "activations": Doing the Math originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The "iTV" rumourmill -- speculation that Apple will be releasing a full-size television, screen and all -- is back to full speed again. I've long been skeptical about this possibility, but even I have to concede that we reached the "no smoke without fire" level some time ago. The rumours are too numerous and too persistent to not have some sort of substance to them.

Nevertheless, there's a few aspects of the most frequently repeated speculation that don't make sense to me; I'll explain which ones, and why, below. Want to add your own voice to the discussion? Jump into our comments section!

The future of video distribution

The big-picture issue that drives many of the rumours is the coming battle over how we, the viewers, will receive and pay for television content.

On the one hand, we have the status quo: "conventional" broadcast and subscription TV (over the air, cable, digital terrestrial or satellite). Pay TV income today is about $300 billion world-wide, with about $100 billion of that in the USA alone; that's a roughly equal split between advertising and subscription fees.

It's a highly incestuous market, in which content producers and content delivery firms are often owned by the same parent companies or bound to each other in complex webs of cross-licensing deals. However, cable TV firms acknowledge the tough times ahead as their business models are placed under threat by the wave of Internet based streaming. Still, though, no one's going to be keen to place the current huge incomes under any threat without some clear payoffs to a new business model.

And then there's the other hand. There's a common view that existing services like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and other "over-the-top content" streams are glimpses of the future. A future where people pay for the individual shows or episodes they want and watch it whenever they choose, rather than being restricted by channel packages and schedules. If that's to be the future, though, there's massive uncertainty over how the giant media companies can get from here to there without going broke in the process. Smoothing over the disruption of a $300 billion industry isn't easy. Making turkeys vote for Christmas is even harder.

Will Apple be part of the efforts to push this change through, or will the Apple TV remain a "hobby"?

Apple TV vs "iTV"

Much of the recent speculation has focused on Apple's alleged plans to expand its existing Apple TV set-top box into a full blown screen-and-all television. I'm going to call this mythical device "iTV" here, for clarity, although I doubt it would ever ship with that name because that might cause confusion with UK broadcaster ITV.

I must confess, the idea of the iTV doesn't make much sense to me.

First, the big downside as I see it: Apple TV is, famously, barely more than a "hobby" for Apple because of low sales -- but a $1000+ premium HDTV is necessarily going to be a far harder sell than a $99 add-on. Plus, people simply don't change their living room TVs as often as they change most other gadgets in their life.

What are the potential upsides, though? Firstly, remember that most of the (slightly breathless) benefits that are being attributed to the iTV -- cord-cutting, disrupting existing pay TV business models, iTunes streaming, and so forth -- are just as applicable to the Apple TV as the iTV. Hence these are not reasons for Apple to create an iTV. It could tick all those boxes with some new Apple TV software or a new hardware version. The list of unique-to-iTV features is non-zero but makes for a far less compelling product.

Second, cabling. It's true that wiring in a TV isn't simple at all -- in fact it's one of those complicated areas of tech that Apple seems to delight in turning upside-down. However, I have reservations about Apple's ability to revolutionise here because people (I contend) expect to be able to plug all sorts of stuff into their TVs. Can you imagine a successful iTV that shipped without multiple inputs for component, HDMI, composite, and so forth? A TV which didn't allow the addition of a games console or a DVR or (shudder) a VHS player for the (double shudder) family's home movie collection? But if a TV has all those ports, how can it be any simpler to set up or use than existing ones?

Second, UI. I've used a few brands of HDTV and it's probably fair to say the on-screen displays are often workmanlike at best. Apple could bring some slick polish to this area. But... how often do you use these screens? Personally, I tweak the brightness levels on my TV a few times a week to account for changes in the ambient light level. That's about it. I don't think most consumers use these interfaces often enough to muster any wallet-opening enthusiasm about what they look like.

Third, AirPlay. Something that happens quite a lot in our household is for one of us to be viewing content, on a Mac or an iOS device, and want to share that with other people in the room. The ability to seamlessly shunt videos, pictures, and audio onto a television via AirPlay is extremely useful for this (although the lack of baked-in AirPlay support in OS X is a puzzle). However, it relies on the television already being on the right HDMI input. It would be more useful still if the AirPlay client was built into the TV itself so you could use it regardless of what was currently showing, or even if the TV was in standby. This is why we suggested that the Apple TV is a compelling accessory for the iPhone and iPad.

Does all of this add up to a solid set of reasons to junk an existing HDTV and buy an Apple iTV? I'd say not -- not for most people, anyway. The benefits are just too slim. Apple might find it an easier sell to target people who don't yet have an HDTV, but that by definition will be the less affluent and least tech-focused consumers; that's not a great market segment to pitch a premium device at. Apple could negate some of the disadvantages if it launched a cut-price device, but with margins generally pretty thin in the mainstream HDTV market it'd be left not making any money -- in which case, why bother?

Another minor point to finish off with: having watched someone wrestle a 27" iMac out of an Apple Store and across a 10 minute walk to his car recently, I'm not convinced Apple retail stores are really set up for such large-box purchases. Yet retail is such a significant part of Apple's success story that it's hard to imagine it being sidelined for iTV sales.

However, I could be wrong; Apple's a lot smarter than I am, so maybe it's found a compelling angle I've overlooked. Or perhaps the rumours are half-right, and Apple is going to revolutionize the world of video distribution -- but via the Apple TV, rather than an iTV. What forms might that revolution take?

The UI challenge

If over-the-top is to be the future of TV, there is a significant challenge coming regarding how that content is organised and presented to the user. Existing "browse" type UIs, whether the genre-based structure of iTunes or Netflix or the channel-centric nature of a traditional pay TV set-top box, don't really scale well to having hundreds of thousands of titles for a user to choose from. I'm also dubious about any "search" type UIs that rely on the user hunting-and-pecking an on-screen QWERTY keyboard via a remote control with an up/down/left/right block. It simply feels ungainly and awkward to me. Steve Jobs famously said he "cracked it"; do we really think he could be talking about something so kludgy?

One possible answer is to rely more heavily on personalised recommendations, rather like Amazon or TiVo. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to see this become an area Apple looks to innovate in -- perhaps by acquiring a startup, as they did for Siri. But no amount of recommendation smarts can hope to ever fully replace the search box, which will always require the user to somehow enter free-form text.

The Boxee Box solves this problem with a two-sided remote; the upper surface resembles the sparse Apple remote, with just seven buttons: up/down/left/right, select, play/pause, and menu. The flip side has a micro-sized QWERTY keyboard. It's alright, but the keyboard is tricky to type on and isn't backlit, presumably for battery life reasons. It's consequently very difficult to enter text in a dim home theatre room.

So how can Apple drive this forward, then?

The iPhone as a controller

Many people believe that iOS devices will be the answer. As they are blank slates for software to project a flexible and changing UI upon, the reasoning goes that they are perfect for this. They can display a five-way pad for basic UI navigation, transport controls during playback, and switch to an on-screen keyboard when that's a better choice. The existing Remote app for the iPad/iPhone that works with the Apple TV is a good example of this context-sensitive control.

This solution isn't without its charms, but I have some reservations. For one, there are households with more people than iOS devices -- particularly those with young children. If your son or daughter wants to watch cartoons, are you really going to hand over your iPhone so they can turn the TV on? Are you going to be happy to buy a $300 iPod touch to go with your $99 Apple TV?

Secondly, there's a growing demand these days for so-called "two screen viewing"; the TV showing a movie or program, viewers each with a smartphone in hand or computer in lap -- perhaps checking Facebook during ad breaks, or doing quick IMDb lookups to answer "who's that guy?" queries (I must confess, I do this a lot). Some broadcasters are starting to pick up on this and launch companion apps, such as the deal between Sky TV and zeebox; sporting leagues like the NBA or MLB in the States already produce such 'sideview' apps, and third parties like Yahoo's intoNow have similar capabilities.

iOS devices, of course, don't have deep multitasking. Are you going to be satisfied with having to switch away from your Twitter app halfway through writing a tweet so you can channel hop, mute an annoying advert, or -- even worse -- pause playback when the doorbell rings?

Also, you can't use an iOS device as a remote control without looking at it, because it's a flat sheet of undifferentiated glass. If you don't think that's a problem, next time you watch TV for an hour, make a point of always looking directly at the remote before every single button press. It sounds minor but it's surprisingly annoying.

Moreover, if you watch movies in a darkened room then your iPhone will default to eye-searing brightness levels. It's long annoyed me that the "adjust brightness automatically" setting doesn't go far enough in either direction.

For this reasons, whilst I accept that an iOS device can be a useful ancillary controller for a home audio-visual setup, I don't think it can be a compelling primary controller.

Siri

Much fuss has been made about the possibilities of using Apple's Siri voice-recognition technology for TV control, both for and against. I see upsides and downsides.

There's no doubt that voice recognition could be compelling for the "I want to watch the latest episode of Breaking Bad" use case -- in other words when you turn the television on knowing exactly what you want to do. It also appears that Siri's recognition engine is easily sophisticated enough to cope. Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox already supports this sort of thing, and is reasonably successful at it.

As with the iOS-device-as-controller scenario, however, there are some ways in which Siri would be a step back from a traditional remote control. Again, next time you watch TV, try speaking each command aloud as you press the button. "HDMI one... Volume up... Volume up... Volume up... Channel down..." It feels ridiculous and clumsy.

There is one use case I see where voice control is superior -- "pause playback so I can deal with this emergency." If the dog just knocked your New Yorker all over your cream carpet, not having to fumble for the remote whilst also running for a towel and shouting at the hound is useful. Apart from this, though, I simply don't think Siri for routine television UI navigation is compelling.

There are physical downsides also. Kinect's voice control only works because it has a good quality directional microphone built in to the sensor bar, which is always placed near to the screen. Siri, of course, is on a device you naturally speak in to and hold at close range. Building a pickup into the body of an Apple TV might not work very well, as people often tuck them into AV racks where the sound would be muffled. Having a small microphone on a wire would be ugly, and requiring the user to talk into an iOS device would incur the disadvantages covered in the previous section. An iTV could solve this problem, of course, by integrating the microphone into the housing of the device.

Overall, although I could see a place for Siri, and although it seems to attract a lot of attention from bloggers, I'm not sure it's the most interesting part of the puzzle. I think the really juicy stuff is: what would we watch on an iTV?

Content sources

Along with the user experience difficulties, Apple faces commercial ones if it is to push iTunes streaming as a mainstream alternative to (as opposed to supplement to) existing pay TV solutions like cable and satellite. Namely, content.

So far, the Apple TV has been a slightly odd halfway house. The primary focus of the device is undoubtably iTunes content, but iTunes doesn't have everything. There's some limited concessions in the form of baked-into-the-OS apps for Netflix and NHL/NBA/NFL streaming, as well as some Internet services like Youtube, Vimeo, and Flickr. Compared to the wide variety of streaming services out there, though, this is just a drop in the ocean.

The big question here is whether or not Apple will open Apple TV up with an App Store for streaming content. On the one hand, it seems to make perfect sense. It seems unlikely that, going forward, we are going to have one source to rule them all for over-the-top content. Most content producers and distributers are keener on controlling at least some of the customer relationship via their own apps. So we have current episodes on dedicated apps like HBO Go, the BBC's iPlayer, or Hulu whilst older archival content appears on Netflix or Amazon Video.

If the content players won't simply put everything they have into iTunes (perhaps because they are afraid of giving Apple too much control), why not allow them to ship their own apps for the Apple TV? This approach seems to be working OK for other iOS devices. Apple could mandate in-app payments and take a cut from them, exactly as it does on the mainstream App Store, so it'd make some money too.

If Apple wanted to do this, though, I think it already would have done. The Apple TV is five years old and it's been an iOS device for almost 18 months now. So why might it not want to open the platform up? One explanation I can think of is that it doesn't want the user experience to be fragmented.

Consider the Boxee Box. Boxee does a reasonable job of aggregating content across many of its sources; so, for example, if I do a search for Memento I might see a single result that offers me multiple ways to watch the film: a premium streaming service like Vudu, perhaps a free ad-supported service, and the DVD ISO stored on my file server (I love that film). But, crucially, Netflix content is not aggregated outside the interface of Boxee's dedicated Netflix app, so it doesn't appear in search results. Similarly, even though Vudu content is reachable from the generic Boxee UI, the actual Vudu app has a nicer experience that does a better job of highlighting new releases and sale titles.

I suspect, eventually, Apple will buckle and we'll get an App Store for the Apple TV. I certainly hope so, at least. It'd be a much more useful device.

I don't think that shipping apps for iOS and using AirPlay to stream them to an Apple TV is a really convincing answer to this problem, either. Many of the disadvantages listed under "the iPhone as a controller" apply to this model, plus battery life becomes an issue from the constant Wifi streaming. Do you really want to have to routinely put your phone on charge before you can settle down to watch a movie?

There's also little clarity about the fundamental business model. So far, we have iTunes, Vudu, and the link with the pay-per-episode model, bolstered with season passes, while Netflix, Hulu and others have a monthly-fee, watch-all-you-want model. The latter model might be more comfortable to consumers as its basically how pay TV works today.

There are rumours going back to 2009 that Apple is seeking to adopt a subscription plan. However, Reuters reported recently that Microsoft scrapped its online TV subscription business before launch because it couldn't agree a price with content providers that matched the price it felt it could charge consumers for the service. There's certainly a large discrepancy between the costs most people will pay for a monthly cable subscription and the cost of a Netflix or Hulu Plus account, for example. Dan Frommer speculates that unless the large content companies agree to simply make a lot less money than they do at the moment -- and why would they? -- this is going to be a huge roadblock to subscription-based service offering fresh content.

International iTunes

As a native of Britain, I am painfully aware that iTunes video content outside the US is drastically truncated -- an issue that sometimes doesn't receive the attention it deserves from the often US-centric tech blogs. Even worse, Netflix only works in the US, Canada and UK. TV shows are only available in six countries, and even movie rentals are only available in 50. By comparison, the iPhone is available in more than 120 countries. The bottom line is, the Apple TV isn't anywhere near as attractive a device around the world as it is in the US.

If Apple is going to fulfill the grandiose dreams many people have for it to revolutionise video distribution, it's going to have to get to the bottom of this somehow. I don't mean to gloss over the stupendously complex world of international distribution rights for TV shows and movies, but for it to still be so poor five years after the product launched suggests Apple isn't giving this matter top priority. That won't do at all. There's a lot of world outside America's borders.

Wrapping up

I think what the future holds is cloudy and far less obvious than many people are painting it. Yes, the sheer volume and persistence of the rumours surrounding Apple's ambitions in the TV market make it likely that something is coming... but from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look clear-cut that Apple are going to change the world again, either.

To finish up, I'd like to return to the famous quote given to Walter Isaacson by Steve Jobs; that Apple had "cracked it" regarding the future of TV. Less attention has been paid to this followup statement by Isaccson in an interview with CNet (thanks to Yoni Heisler for pointing this out to me):

Q: How far along were they on the TV? Did you get any indication of that when talking to Jobs?

A: They weren't close at all. He told me it was very theoretical. These were theoretical things they were thinking about in the future.

Apple's plans for your living room: On Apple TV, "iTV", Siri, and all the rest originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 15 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Apple's announcement of Thunderbolt on Feb 24th was greeted by excitement, as Mac users became aware of the tantalising possibilities of this new high-speed port. There's lots of things Thunderbolt can do that were simply not possible before -- driving multiple external displays from a single port, "docking" a laptop to a selection of external ports via a single cable, expanding a laptop with high-performance desktop graphics cards.

Then there are applications that older standards like Firewire and USB simply aren't fast enough to cope with, such as capturing uncompressed 1080p video or very fast external drives like RAID arrays or sold state drives. Our own Chris Ward went so far as to ask if Thunderbolt could foretell the end of the line for the Mac Pro as we know it, by allowing a Mac mini sized chassis to be endlessly exapanded via external Thunderbolt-connected peripherals.

And yet... ten months later, if you go to Apple's store and search for 'Thunderbolt', you'll see just 11 products, three of which are Apple's own ultra-expensive Thunderbolt Display (plus its VESA mount) and the official Thunderbolt cable. There's three LaCie BigDisks, at $500 for 1 TB and $600 for 2 TB, or $900 for an ultra-fast SSD unit. There's four types of Promise Drobo-like RAID boxes, starting from $1150. Finally, there's a Promise Thunderbolt-to-Fibre-Channel adaptor, for $800 (Fibre Channel is an multi-gigabit enterprise-grade communication protocol used to connect with storage-area networks like Apple's Xsan, among other applications), allowing Thunderbolt-equipped machines to participate in distributed video workflows.

None of these are remotely mainstream devices. The 2 TB LaCie disk is almost twice the price of an equivalent eSATA/Firewire model, at $329, which will be just as fast using eSATA as it is Thunderbolt.

So where are all the devices that normal humans might want to buy? Has Thunderbolt arrived as more of a damp fart?

My research for this post started when I was considering an iMac purchase. I'm not keen on Apple's official SSD pricing, because a top-of-the-line aftermarket model (twice as fast) is available for about $150 less. If possible, though, I'd also like to avoid the work of swapping my own drive in -- I'm sure I'll spend half my life trying to remove dust from the inside of the screen afterwards. Logically, I thought to myself, I should be able to buy some sort of reasonably priced Thunderbolt-connected drive bay that would be just as fast as an internal drive, right?

Wrong. Such a thing doesn't exist. The only thing close is the $900 LaCie model I mentioned above, and it's a whopping $500 more expensive than the OCZ drive I am considering. No-one is offering a cradle you can put your own drive into. Nor can you buy... well, most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, actually.

There's been plenty of promises from third parties, to be sure. Sonnet, in particular, has announced a broad range of exciting products, such as an Expresscard/34 adaptor (pre-order now, ships by December 14th). With that card cage, lots of expansion options open up (like eSATA ports). However, Sonnet's PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis, which will connect any normal PCIe x16 card -- like a high-performance graphics card -- and the RackMac mini Xserver -- which will convert a Thunderbolt-equipped Mac mini into a 1U server -- won't be available until "early January."

Another raft of devices were announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September of this year, but manufacturers were long on promises and short on firm prices or ship dates. Blackmagic's HDMI capture device is available now, but that's a rather specialist piece of kit with a hefty $300 price tag. Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock (a dongle with Thunderbolt on one end and USB/ethernet/etc. on the other) won't be out until "spring 2012" and has no suggested price. mLogic's mDock looks interesting, but the company doesn't even have a full website up so we couldn't contact them for any updated information on when it might ship.

Even Apple itself hasn't showed much follow through for Thunderbolt devices. We've got the Thunderbolt Display, with its extremely handy forest of ports which are ideal for laptop users working on a desk. The 27" 2560x1440 screen is certainly sumptuous, but at $999 it's a pretty specialised device -- and there's nothing else on offer.

So, almost ten months after Thunderbolt was announced, its initial high promise is still mostly unfulfilled. TUAW reached out to several of the manufacturers mentioned above but frustratingly none of them would comment about why the peripherals have been exceedingly slow to ship. I have theories -- Thunderbolt remains highly expensive to implement and purchase, for example. Consider that a single Thunderbolt cable costs more than an entire eSATA-equipped drive dock.

Also, despite Apple's high Mac sales of late, and all current Mac models (except the Mac Pro) coming suited and booted with at least one Thunderbolt port, there can still only be a few tens of millions of Macs out there with it. In the grand scheme of things that isn't a substantial install base for OEMs to target, compared to (say) the sheer volume of PCs with USB ports. Hopefully we will soon see Thunderbolt ports on PCs, which will help address both of these issues by giving OEMs a wider base to target and bringing some volume to manufacturing to bring prices down.

For now, though, Thunderbolt's strong early promise remains mostly unfulfilled.

Thunderbolt devices are still irritatingly thin on the ground originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I hoped would be an interesting blog post about what I feel this means about Apple and our relationship to technology. I see an interesting link here between Siri and the heavy-on-the-texture UIs of Apple apps like iCal and Find My Friends.

Even before the response from Apple was published, it seemed more likely to me that this wasn't so much a case of Apple pushing a political agenda as it was a limitation of Siri making it look that way. Indeed, if anything Apple seems to have a a liberal, rather than conservative, political agenda -- for example, it donated $100,000 to the campaign to keep gay marriage legal in California in 2010. But, really, all this is incidental to what I was thinking of writing.

Then Adam Engst wrote a great post at TidBITS that stole my thunder by pre-empting most of what I had to say! The gist of his argument is as follows: that the problem with Siri is that, although it looks very much like sorcery at first glance (and although Apple carefully presents it that way in its advertising), it really isn't. It's just another computer program like all the rest -- and like all the rest it comes with limitations and drawbacks and bugs and issues. It doesn't help that the chattery nature of Siri -- the jokey responses, the easter eggs, the sly film references -- create a substantial facade that it really is a facsimile of a real person. But that's all it is: a facade.

Sometimes that facade cracks. For example, we've seen problems because of cloud failures -- or, indeed, if you have no data signal on your phone to communicate with the Siri data centre then it simply stops working. In the case of the searches for abortion-related matters, the problem appears to simply be a lack of information in the backing databases that Siri draws upon, like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. I'm sure that this is only one of many such gaps in Siri's knowledge, albeit a highly politically charged one. For example, Siri's address lookups are resolutely US only, despite it being supported in many other countries (such as my native UK) and Yelp having a perfectly reasonable database for it to use.

Where I'd like to go further than Engst does is by drawing comparisons between Siri and Apple's recent trend towards so-called "skeuomorphic" UIs. This is the extensive use of real-world textures and imagery to underpin an app's functionality. Think of iCal on Lion, Calendar on the iPad, Game Center on iOS, or Find My Friends on the iPhone -- with leather bits, and little torn edges, and faux piles of poker chips, and stacks of pages in the corner of the screen.

I have a vehement aesthetic objection to the look-and-feel of most of these apps; I find them pointless, distracting and, frankly, a bit twee. This is merely my own tastes, though. Thinking more objectively I also have a practical objection. I believe that skeuomorphic UIs create false models of interaction. For example, in iBooks there is a stack of pages on the corner of the screen; a swipe across that stack turns the page. Seems logical enough, right? But the same stack of pages in Calendar for iPad on iOS 4 was not swipeable. It looked the same -- and clearly a real-world stack of pages can be turned -- but Apple seemingly just missed this feature out.

You might think that it's no big deal for Apple to implement that, and indeed the feature turned up in iOS 5 -- but I would humbly suggest that this is a hole with no bottom. The same stack-of-pages decoration still isn't swipeable in Contacts, for example. Look at iCal for Lion -- look at those little torn edges across the top of the page, where the virtual remains of last months page are seemingly left behind. Why can't I tear them off with my mouse and clean them up? That's exactly what I'd do with a real calendar that looked like that.

And even if Apple somehow made a UI that has almost every interaction a reasonable human being might expect of it -- a tall order, but let's suppose -- it's still only going to feel like a sheet of glass. As Bret Victor's fantastic essay on interaction design brillianty demonstrates, "pictures under glass" are never going to be anything more. If you can't smell the leather, or feel the grain, why make it look like leather in the first place?

Getting back to my original point, I see a link here. Skeuomorphic UIs resemble physical objects, but they cannot hope to emulate the myriad ways we have to emulate physical objects -- so they are always doomed to disappoint on some level if we let ourselves be fooled. Siri presents itself as a real person, a sort of "auditory skeuomorphism" if you will. But short of passing a Turing test one day that, too, is doomed to always disappoint. Sure, it looks like magic -- but so did the Wizard of Oz until Toto pulled back the curtain. Never forget that there's wires and gears back there making it work, or you'll be surprised when the abstractions leak.

Footnote: let's look again at Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris's statement to the New York Times. She said "[t]hese are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks."

I think it is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, I'm rather cynical about Siri's "beta" nature; I agree with Macworld senior contributor Glenn Fleishman, who wrote, "If you're advertising Siri as a feature, it's not beta." On iPhone 4S launch day, I spent ten minutes in an Apple Store enduring a low impact sales pitch from a Genius and he didn't mention the "beta" word once. Nor does it appear in Apple's TV spot. But then again, Gmail was in beta for six years; I'm not even sure I know what beta is supposed to mean any more, and I write software for a living.

Still, though, it seems to be that Apple are suggesting that as long as Siri has "places where we can do better" it'll be in beta. Well, hmmm. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure how -- short of some sort of Skynet-level breakthrough in AI tech -- Siri will ever be finished. With a field as complex as natural language processing, there's simply too much that can go wrong -- too many ways for humans to innocently throw a spanner in the works with their rich and wonderful languages. I do wonder if perhaps that statement to the Times was just a teensy bit rushed so Apple could nip the story in the bud. Not that I'd blame it for that, but it struck me as an interesting point nevertheless.

Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I'm a bit of a shutterbug, so Photo Stream is something I was really interested in when it was announced as part of iOS 5's feature set way back in June. Frictionless, automated sending of photos from my phone to my computer? Sign me up!

Of course, as is too often the case with Apple, the nitty gritty of how this would work wasn't explained in any detail -- particularly for Aperture, which often takes a back seat to iPhoto when Apple is showing off its apps.

Hopefully, this article will answer all your questions about how these two products interact. If not, please leave a comment pointing out what I've overlooked.

Before we start, some basic housekeeping. Photo Stream isn't going to appear in your Aperture at all if you don't first upgrade to v3.2. You'll also need OS X 10.7.2 or later, and iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You'll also need to go to the iCloud pane in your System Preferences and make sure that "Photo Stream" is ticked (thanks to commenter 'kootenayredneck' for the reminder). If you've done all that, you're all set.

Accessing Photo Stream within Aperture

This is Photo Stream's marquee feature: snap a photo with your iOS device and have it show up on your Mac.

It's easy to do, though it comes with one small wrinkle. In Aperture, go into Preferences | Photo Stream and tick the appropriate boxes. The caveat is that you can only have Photo Stream active for iPhoto or Aperture, not both at once. Turning it on in one app turns it off in the other.

With that setting in place, a Photo Stream entry should appear in your Aperture Library list.

Clicking on this will show you all the photos in your Photo Stream, which you can look through. You can't make any edits, however, until you import them into your library:

Clicking "import photo" brings the photo into your library and allows you to do all the usual range of Aperture adjustments to it.

Note that the Photo Stream implementation on your iOS devices will only be active when they are connected to a Wi-Fi network. If you only have cellular 3G access, no photos will be transferred in either direction. However, don't forget that tethering creates a Wifi network. In a pinch, you could use an iPhone to create a tethered network and connect a second iOS device to it. That would give the second device full Photo Stream access.

Note also that "Automatic Import" means Aperture is constantly copying Photo Stream pictures to your Aperture library. It creates a series of Projects, one per month. As long as you start Aperture at least once per month and once per 1000 photos, this guarantees you can never lose a photo placed in Photo Stream.

Non-destructive editing

Here's a neat trick that isn't immediately obvious. If you take a photo on the iPhone and use the new built-in photo editing features of iOS 5, when you bring the photo over to Aperture the edits are preserved as edits, in the usual Aperture master-and-version-file manner. So you can choose to change them as you please, perhaps replacing iOS's rather crude "enhance" wizard with Aperture's fine-grained adjustments.

I would very much like to see this functionality available to third-party devs. It'd be great if the likes of Instagram and Camera+ were able to save clean copies of their filtered output without cluttering up your camera roll with duplicate versions. Of course, as those filters aren't directly comparable to Aperture's, that would only be possible via a single image file that is basically just two JPGs stuck together -- whereas I imagine the native Photos app is doing something more sophisticated.

Putting photos into Photo Stream from within Aperture

By default, when the third checkbox in my first screen grab above is ticked, all new photos imported into Aperture are automatically added to the Photo Stream by default. More on this "feature" in a second. If you untick that box, you can still manually choose to add specific versions by dragging and dropping them within Aperture to the Photo Stream entry in the navigation tree.

However, before you go adding files en masse, remember that by default everything in the Photo Stream is going to be downloaded to all your iOS devices; that there's no way to delete images from Photo Stream except for a full purge; and that Photo Stream only deletes images when it's holding more than 1000 pictures or after 30 days.

This can add to create quite a headache. It means that if you pull 400 1.5 MB JPG shots into Aperture, it's going to immediately upload 6 GB 600 MB of data to iCloud. If you're not on fast, unmetered Internet, that could be at best inconvenient (as it'll choke your Internet connection up for a prolonged period) and at worst expensive (if you go over your ISP's bandwidth cap). It's then going to download all of those photos, albeit at an "optimised resolution" to each of your iOS devices, exacerbating the problem. Testing on my iPhone 4 and iPad showed that Photo Stream optimised images are around 500 KB each. Continuing our example, then, if you have an iPhone and an iPad that's a further 4 GB 200 MB download for 10 GB 800MB of bandwidth used overall. (Thanks to commenter 'IhatePundits' for catching the mistakes in my mathematics.)

This can also lead to problems with your iOS devices running out of disk space, which then has knock on effects that can start deleting app data you wanted. Overall, it's probably a good idea to leave "automatically upload imports to Photo Stream" to the iPhoto-using casual shooters. I'd go so far as to question Apple's decision to enable this feature by default in Aperture.

RAW files and Photo Stream

The problems with Photo Stream and bandwidth start to look much worse when you examine how it handles RAW files.

According to the Aperture documentation, how RAW interacts with Photo Stream isn't immediately obvious -- but it is very important that you understand it. If you send a RAW file from Aperture to Photo Stream -- either automatically via the "import all" checkbox, or manually -- and if that RAW file has no edits applied, then it's the full-sized original RAW that ends up in Photo Stream. On the other hand, if it has had edits applied then Photo Stream ends up holding a JPG copy instead.

This surprising handling also applies to RAW files imported to the iPad via the Camera Connection Kit. This is a common workflow for me when I am travelling, as I typically do not bring a laptop. Several times a day, I import all the images from my cameras into my iPad, partly for proofing but also partly for backup purposes. It's not unusual for me to shoot 15-20 GB of photos on a week long vacation (I'm very much a statistical photographer).

With Photo Stream enabled, this means I'll be choking up the hotel's Internet connection for hours on end as well as making my iPad run slowly as it manages the upload process in a background task I cannot control or suspend. In my experience, hotel Wi-Fi isn't either the fastest or most reliable, so this could become quite hard to manage. Even at home, if you're on metered Internet, you could easily (and accidentally) chew through multiple gigabytes of your bandwidth allocation.

Note, however, that as Apple states here, RAW files (like full resolution JPGs) are never delivered to iOS devices. If you put a RAW file onto the iPad or if you tell Aperture to add one to Photo Stream, it's an around-500-KB optimised JPG that ends up synced onto the other iOS devices.

Most irritating of all is it is that unlike in Aperture, the Photo Stream option for iOS doesn't have a "download all photos but do not automatically upload new ones" option. It's on/off only. So I have to micro-manage the setting depending on whether I'm using my iPad to import photos from my camera en masse (in which case I want it disabled) or work with iPhone snapshots (when it has to be enabled).

There's also a subtle interaction with the "automatic import" setting in Aperture. Files brought in like this are managed copies, i.e. with the master file living inside the Aperture library. If (like me) you maintain your Aperture library file on a small laptop drive and use external reference masters held on a network share or a larger external drive, then allowing Aperture to import a lot of RAWs through Photo Stream may cause you to suddenly run out of room on your laptop's drive.

Now, it's only fair of me to note that if you are in the luxurious position of not caring about upstream Internet bandwidth, then there is an significant upside to this -- cloud-based backup of your photos. Even if you managed to lose your camera, your memory cards, and your iPad, up to 1000 RAW files are still safely in Photo Stream ready to be pulled into Aperture when you get home. There's definitely perks to this system, I just wish Apple had given the end users a little more control because we don't all live in Infinite Bandwidth Land.

Remember also that Photo Stream storage does not come out of your main iCloud disk space allocation (the 5 GB you get free or any extra you pay for). That's admirably generous of Apple -- a full stream of RAW files could easily be 10-20 GB depending on your camera.

Photo Stream and Apple IDs

One final note. I've seen a few professional photographers around the web getting excited about using Photo Stream as a sort of low-rent proofing service -- for example, to consolidate work from multiple cameras tethered to laptops onto a single workstation back at the office where another member of staff is compiling picks in real time, or for a supervisor to keep an eye on pictures taken on a shoot in real time.

Remember that for this to work well, you're going to need a lot of bandwidth at the shooting site -- particularly upstream bandwidth, which is often not that fast on low-end and medium range Internet connections.

It also requires all the different devices and Aperture installs to be connected to the same Apple ID. Depending on the setup you are contemplating, that might not matter at all, or it could be a significant limitation.

Deep dive: Aperture and Photo Stream, how do they work? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech -- a prominent market research firm and a powerful figure on the Scrabble board -- today released its latest "smartphone OS barometer" report, and it has some noteworthy conclusions in it about the British market. Specifically, the report claims that in the 12 weeks ending 2nd October 2011, iOS market share in the UK was 18.5% whereas Android was more than two-and-a-half times that -- 49.9% of all new smartphone sales. Apple's share at this time last year was 32.9%, compared to 28.8% for Android. In the US, Kantar's numbers show an even stronger tilt in Android's favour: 66.4% Android, 21.5% iOS.

Beyond the head-line grabbing Apple-vs-Android story, there is other interesting data in the report. In the UK, 69.1% of all phone sales in the last 12 weeks were smartphone sales -- and 43.8% of the population now own a smartphone. It also has the interesting tidbit that HTC does rather better out of Android sales than Samsung (44.8% of all Android phones are by the former, and 37.9% are the latter). Internationally, Samsung is a long way ahead of HTC.

I need to address one common criticism of many market share comparisons. It goes like this: while Apple quotes its volumes in terms of units sold to end-users, many Android OEMs quote units shipped to distributors and resellers instead. This skews figures against Apple because it means unsold handsets languishing in stock rooms around the world count as "sold" stock.

Kantar Worldpanel's methodology doesn't work that way. Rather, it gathers material from interviews with volunteers who have agreed to be tracked. It "conducts over 1 million interviews per year in Europe alone," which is certainly some substantial data gathering.

A second issue people often bring up when discussing market shares is carrier availability. In the US, the iPhone was (of course) only available on a single carrier until relatively recently. This factor doesn't affect the UK market. All six of our mainstream carriers have been selling subsidized iPhones since the release of the iPhone 3GS, and all six also offer Android handsets as part of their ranges. It's a level playing field.

I spoke with Dominic Sunnebo, the author of the report, and asked him for more information on Kantar Worldpanel's testing methods. He told me:

In order to generate the insights you have seen published we have a longitudinal panel of demographically (age, gender, region & ethnicity) representative individuals in each country: for example we track 15,000 people in the UK, 20,000 in the US, and 26,000 in Brazil. We interview the same individuals every 4 weeks, to see if they have had any change in their mobile ownership e.g. new phone, new tariff, new network, etc. The day/date of these changes are recorded, and these figures are then collated into time periods e.g. "12 weeks ending 03rd October 2011" (as in our latest report). As it is the same individuals we interview each time, this also allows us to accurately track switching between brands, OSs, networks, etc.

Now, there is an important mitigating factor to Apple's seemingly poor numbers, specifically the iPhone 4S launch timing. We know that Apple phone sales dipped throughout the last few months as people waited for an updated iPhone, followed by explosive sales of the iPhone 4S. It seems sensible to expect Apple to regain some of those market share points in future reports from Kantar Worldpanel. Given the size of the gap between Android and iOS, though, it's difficult to imagine it closing completely.

The report also mentions that consumers in the UK are particularly price-sensitive to smartphones, preferring to choose a lower-end handset on a free-with-monthly-plan pricing to higher end phones where a purchase price is charged. This, of course, was a market Apple was not addressing at all until the iPhone 4S launch just a few weeks ago, at which time the iPhone 3GS became "free." If Kantar's analysis of consumer preferences is correct this should also give Apple a boost in the future.

It's also debatable just how much market share matters. As Charles Arthur says in the Guardian, Apple's relatively low market share in the computer market hasn't stopped it from making a mind-boggling amount of money. If you could be the CEO of a company that makes all the widgets or a company that makes all the money, which would you choose?

The opposite point of view, proposed by Henry Blodget of Business Insider, is sometimes referred to as "the Highlander Principle" after that film's famous line "there can be only one!" Technology platforms always converge onto one dominant platform, goes the reasoning, as developers concentrate support on the OS with the greatest numbers of users and users flock to the platform they are most familiar with and has the widest range of apps available. Certainly, this happened in desktop OSs, with Windows maintaining its two decade stranglehold to this day. Therefore, Blodget surmises, iOS is doomed and Apple "FANS" (his article was sub-edited by cAPTAIN cAPS lOCK) are clinging to a dying platform.

Blodget ignores significant areas in consumer technology, however, where the Highlander Principle hasn't happened at all -- such as mobile phone OSs at any point in history up until now, or games consoles, or even social networks (which should be more vulnerable to network effects than most -- and yet Google+ and Twitter and Facebook all co-exist). Blodget even concedes that as so many modern apps are cloud-based, the strength of the "platform" in a modern smartphone OS is somewhat diluted. Yelp is still Yelp, whether you use its iPhone app or its Android one.

Meanwhile, to muddy the waters further, Android users are far more thrifty than iOS ones. Even if Android outsells iOS forever, this factor means devs could easily make more money on Apple's platform.

It remains far from clear what the future holds. To my mind, the question isn't whether Apple is losing ground to Android; that seems pretty certain, at least in the narrow terms of the numbers of handsets sold. Rather, it's: what sort of handsets are they?

Some amount -- perhaps most -- of the sales that Android is picking up comes from thrifty consumers buying low-end phones and not spending a lot of money on apps. It seems a deliberate part of Apple's strategy to leave that part of the market unaddressed -- consider that the cheapest pre-pay iPhone in Britain is an astronomical £320 ($510) for an 8 GB 3GS. That may or may not be the right strategy in the long run.

Smartphone wars: Android "has half of the UK smartphone market" originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Similarly to my previous notes on the iPad 2 launch, here are a few things I noticed about Tuesday's event that were too small to deserve a post of their own.

On it being the iPhone 4S and not the iPhone 5

The iPhone 4 is the best selling smartphone in the US. The iPhone 4S presents a solid upgrade over last year's model in several key areas: raw speed, camera performance, and the new Siri voice-recognition technology.

And yet, many pundits are disappointed. For a typical example, consider Henry Blodget's post at Business Insider. There's even talk of a company-wide Apple "fall from grace" by Zach Epstein at Boy Genius Report. If you want more where that came from, there's a good round-up of opinions from professional analysts by Charles Arthur at the Guardian. Wall Street was somewhat unhappy too, with Apple shares dropping during the announcement but ultimately rallying to finish down a modest 0.6%. Meanwhile RIM shares dropped to a yearly low, so it seems Wall Street is more skeptical about Apple's competitors than it is about Apple itself.

Clearly opinions are mixed. Plenty of people are simply happy, like Dan Frommer and Marco Arment. Others, like MG Siegler (warning, NSFW language), are saying that analysts and pundits "do not understand" Apple and that the backlash is idiotic. And yet... I've spoken with as many family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and Twitter followers that could tolerate me blathering on about Apple again, and I've paid particular attention to the non-technical ones, the normal folk, the not-geeks.

Many of them, not all of them but more than half, are slightly negative. They've told me they're "lukewarm" on upgrading, that they are "looking at Android" more seriously, that they were "underwhelmed" by the announcement. One friend waited at the end of his contract for a few months but might stick with his 3GS now. Another wasn't sure if the iPhone 4S was worth the money over the iPhone 4.

So do these naysayers have a point?

Let me talk for a moment about how I feel. It's my considered opinion that the 4S represents a relatively modest upgrade over the iPhone 4. Having slept on it I've decided that the approximate £275 ($450) it would cost me to upgrade my unlocked 32 GB iPhone 4 is too steep a price to pay for the benefits the 4S would bring me -- but I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. iPhones are expensive devices usually tied to expensive two-year contracts and I don't really want to buy a new one every year.

I'm also not convinced Apple can make enough of them for everyone to upgrade every year -- consider how long it was into 2010 before you could stroll into any Apple store and have much hope of finding an iPhone 4 on the shelf to buy. I don't think Tim Cook is losing any sleep because I've decided not to upgrade. Also, looking back, the iPhone 3G wasn't that big of a step forward from the original iPhone (3G chipset, same internals) -- and the 3GS wasn't a huge improvement over the 3G (faster chipset, slightly better camera). Apple's model here is evolutionary changes and I think it's perfectly comfortable with many users being on an "every other" upgrade cycle. It helps a lot that old devices continue to receive new versions of iOS, of course.

But! It's important not to lose sight of the fact that value is in the eye of the beholder. Particularly keen photographers, the visually impaired, frequent international travellers: these people will get more value from the iPhone 4S's new features and so find the upgrade cost more reasonable. And also there's (sadly!) plenty of people out there with deeper pockets than I have, who'll care less about the money.

Still, though, there's certainly a lot of people out there for whom the absence of a new chassis design for the iPhone seems to be a major problem. Haters gonna hate, as always, and certainly bold "Apple has lost its way! Doooomed!!" headlines will garner cheap pageviews, but is this anything more than that? [Does anyone remember the 3GS update being called disappointing as well? - Ed.]

I do wonder if, perhaps, Apple's cone of silence has gone a little too far in recent times and started to work against it. Perhaps it needs to do a little more to calm down the runaway speculation that proceeds one of these big announcements, maybe via some controlled and anonymous leaks. Otherwise these tedious backlashes (and the backlash-backlashses of people criticising the "whiners") will continue. Then again, as Apple continues to print money with everything it makes, it'd be pretty justified in not caring one whit either way.

There's also the risk from competitors to consider. Apple is in approximately-annual refresh cycles, so we can assume we're not getting any more iPhones for at least nine months. Does the iPhone 4S take it far enough ahead of the pack of Android, Windows Phone 7, and other smartphone platforms to stay relevant over that timeframe? Certainly, there are crowd-pleasing features that Apple lacks, such as larger screens and LTE or WiMax 4G network access. But again, I keep coming back to the fact that the iPhone 4 and 3GS were selling extremely strongly right up to the eve of this announcement, and they lacked these features too. They matter to some people but I don't think they matter to most.

There are two bottom lines here. The first is that for most folk the 4S probably represents a bigger step forward over the 4 than the 3GS was over the iPhone 3, and certainly more than the 3G over the first iPhone -- and yet all those models were huge success stories. I think the 4S will end up doing just fine, a point that even Blodget concedes. As I write this a few hours after pre-orders began, we have the usual stories of websites crashing under huge demand and cellphone operators warning they are running out of stock -- although of course it's how sales go in the first months, rather than the first hours, that really count.

But the second point is: no-one actually knows, unless they have a crystal ball hidden away (and I know of no superstar bloggers who win the lottery every week, so that's doubtful). It's possible (but I think unlikely) that Apple committed a strategic gaffe, it's possible (and I think more likely) that the iPhone 4S will sell strongly for the year to come. All we can do is watch and see.

Carriers

Two things of note in the US carriers part of the announcement. Firstly, Sprint will not be getting just the iPhone 4S but also the 4, which will doubtless help it sell into the middle market as well as the top tier. And the iPhone (in any flavour) is still not available on T-Mobile US. This is probably because the 4S, like previous models, still doesn't support the 1700 MHz frequency band, which T-Mobile uses for its 3G service.

Siri

Without a doubt, Siri was the most impressive part of the presentation; a real example of what Apple does best. High technology, sure, but tempered with a real depth of thought put into the usability and usefulness of the new features.

One open question about Siri is when its language support will improve. Ominously, Apple states that "Siri is available in Beta only on iPhone 4S and requires Internet access. Siri may not be available in all languages or in all areas, and features may vary by area. Cellular data charges may apply." Surveying the various international pages for Siri suggests that, at least at launch, it will support English (US, Australian and UK), French and German. However, on all the other iPhone 4S pages I looked at, Siri isn't mentioned as a feature. Bafflingly, this includes other English-language countries such as Canada and Ireland, plus Japan, Spain, Mexico, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark. Of course, it is clearly marked as "beta" and Phil Schiller promised more languages would be added without promising which ones or when. This will inevitably dent sales of the 4S in many countries, as Siri is a banner feature for the new hardware and a big part of the reason to choose a 4S over an iPhone 4.

Another improvement I'd like to see made to Siri in the future is an API to allow arbitrary apps to plug into it. For example, if I tell Siri "show me the way to go home" I want it to load CoPilot rather than Google Maps. This seems like one of those things Apple naturally fills in later; it couldn't do anything before the announcement, of course, without giving the game away as to how deeply integrated Siri was. However it could introduce UI problems as presumably the user would need extra configuration screens to manage exactly which apps would be triggered by various Siri actions.

That same footnote on the Siri page also says "requires Internet access." We never did find out exactly what that big data center Apple built was for -- given that iTunes content is mostly stored in CDNs and iCloud is implemented on top of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2 platforms.

I'm speculating that at least some of that data center's huge processing capacity is for Siri, and that at least some portion of Siri's sophisticated voice recognition works in the cloud. Presumably not all of it, otherwise it won't work when you are in a weak signal area; but consider what happens when you dictate text to the Siri software. It reads the text back and asks you to confirm that you are happy with the transcription. This is a classic setup for machine learning algorithms, and I think perhaps that each time you teach Siri a correction for a word it is uploaded to the cloud and, eventually, downloaded to everyone else's Siri implementations. There's very few effective ways to build a phoneme database of all the world's dialects and accents, but this would work (for a fascinating look at how Google solved the same problem, look at the history of GOOG-411).

If my rampant and baseless speculation is correct, this means that Siri is a huge, powerful, learning network with nodes all around the world. Hopefully it'll never become self-aware, eh?

On the iPhone 3GS, the iPod touch, and fragmentation

The 3GS is still available on two year contracts for the foreseeable future. That means it'll still have nominally up-to-date users well into 2014, six years after it was introduced. That's a very long time in cell phones -- take a look at PCWorld's "best phones of 2005" for a reminder of how long.

This may be challenging for devs to cope with because it widens the performance gap between the best and worst models they might reasonably be expected to support. This isn't the same fragmentation problem as Android faces, as the 3GS will run iOS 5 so the software is the same. Nevertheless, it might introduce problems, particularly for games developers. We've already seen some "iPad 2 only" and "iPhone 4 only" games here at TUAW and this trend might accelerate in the future, leaving 3GS owners out in the cold.

However, in an unusual move Apple didn't upgrade the iPod touch to the same A5 CPU and powerful GPU fitted to the iPhone 4S. Smaller games devs might therefore prefer not to allocate resources to making games take full advantage new faster chips. As Apple said itself at the event, the iPod touch is very significant in the games market. App developers writing performance-sensitive apps will have to ask themselves some tough questions about how to best optimise those apps over the coming year. (I'd speculate, incidentally, that this was a move to ringfence A5 production capacity for the iPhone 4S and prevent component shortage. Apple is working hard to ensure the iPhone 4S is as widely available as possible).

Also, at least here in the Europe, the 3GS is still very expensive without a contract -- £329 ($510) in the UK. Despite Tim Cook's talk of how Apple only has 5% of the entire phone market, it seems to have not yet decided the time is right for an aggressive push into the pre-pay market, and for that they are going to have to sell a much, much cheaper iPhone. The time might never be right for them to do that. Trading profit margin for market penetration isn't a common Apple tactic.

Conclusion

Apple is a big, secretive company. Which means the best time to figure out what is on its hivemind is when it makes bold, public moves like launching flagship products.

I'd say that the iPhone 4S announcement shows a company confident in its existing products, willing to stick with an existing chassis design and risk disappointing a few people with sky-high expectations. It shows a firm still pushing the envelope in unexpected and imaginative directions, a firm that can "innovate at the margins" as Jason Kottke puts it -- instead of a bigger screen or thinner phone, we got revolutionary voice technology. It shows a vibrant company that, even in the wake of the tragic loss of its most prominent genius, is still fascinating to watch and a pleasure to purchase things from. I will continue to enjoy doing both.

Notes on the iPhone 4S announcement originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Amongst the frenzied speculation that tomorrow's media event will see new iPhones and the end of the iPods both Shuffle and Classic, there's also been some lower-key talk of a possible "iPod touch 3G", designed to sit halfway between the iPad 3G and the iPhone. I must confess, this makes very little sense to me. Here's why.

First problem: the hardware

Chris Rawson and I previously went back and forth on the differences between the iPod touch and the iPhone. It comes down to two things: the addition of the cellular technology stack in the iPhone (the baseband chip, antenna, and larger battery to power it) and the use of a few lower-cost components in the iPod (particularly the screen, chassis, camera, and RAM).

So if you graft the cell stack onto an iPod touch, what you actually end up with is physically indistinguishable from a low-end cut-price iPhone. Packing in that extra hardware dictates sacrificing the iPod's slim chassis and most of its price advantage. There's nothing left to distinguish it from the iPhone product range any more. This runs counter to Apple's normal strategy, which is to leave very clear gaps between product lines and avoid losing sales to analysis paralysis.

Now, perhaps I'm just being pedantic here. So what if the hardware is really just a diluted iPhone; what's in a name anyway? Surely the thing people are really getting excited about is the idea of a cheap data-only plan, just like the iPad has. Well, I'm not sure it's that easy, unfortunately.

Second problem: the carriers

The iPad has enjoyed enthusiastic support from the cellphone carriers despite Apple mandating its unusual and remarkably cheap data-only no-commitment plans. I claim that the iPod touch would have at best a lukewarm reception and more likely a downright hostile one.

I've spent a fair bit of time with cellular network industry insiders over the years and if you get talking to them a common view of the carriers' opinion of the future quickly emerges. The carriers are all deeply, deeply scared of what is usually referred to in telco slang as "carrier commoditization": the idea that the less attached the users are to a service the easier it is for them to move to competitors. This introduces severe downward pressure on prices -- great for users, not so great for the shareholders. GigaOM has a good essay that discusses carrier commoditization in detail.

What the carriers desperately want is to preserve the status quo. They want to offer dozens of overlapping plans with confusing naming schemes, thus ensuring as many users as possible are on the wrong plan for their needs. Either users don't have as many bundled discount minutes, messages and data as they use, and pay overage charges; or they select a bigger bundle than they need and overpay that way; or, when contract renewal time comes around, they stay with their current provider out of laziness or sheer confusion. The carriers want long contract terms to lock customers in and reduce churn. The carriers want to promote their own brands as much as possible, which is why so many non-Apple handsets have carrier-specific apps and carrier-specific logos all over them. The carriers want to own the user and anyone who stands between them and the end-user is to be feared and, if at all possible, avoided.

Data-only no-lock-in plans like those designed for the iPad threaten this business model. With fewer competing numbers to baffle consumers with, it becomes far easier to shop around between carriers and compare prices. Without artifacts like your phone number tied to the carrier, it becomes trivial to move between operators -- in the same way as a webmail email address makes it easy to change your home ISP without having to tell everyone that your bender.bending.rodriguez@planetexpress.com email address no longer works.

The wide carrier support for the iPad can be explained because -- quite obviously -- no-one out there is ditching their normal phone contract in favor of an iPad (well, except perhaps for Dom Joly.)

Of course there are also Mifi-type mobile hotspots, and even the awkwardly weird ZTE Peel -- but these devices also can't be reasonably combined with an iPod touch to replace a phone, because they can't receive incoming calls when they're switched off (and they have awful battery life to boot). As such they are "secondary" devices that allow the carriers to extract a second modest monthly fee from a customer who's almost certainly already carrying a phone with a premium contract attached. That's fine, but the second these cheap data plans start taking a bite of the lucrative contract market will be when the carriers drop them like a hot potato. That's exactly what a data-only iPod touch 3G on an iPad-style data plan would be.

Apple managed an end-run around the carriers with the iPhone. It brings in high-value customers by the metric ton but those people aren't customers of the network -- a Verizon iPhone is the same as an AT&T iPhone, so the customer belongs to Apple, not the carrier. Have no doubt that this sort of thing induces deep conflicts in the carrier's management and sleepness nights for the senior staff. It's my belief that support for an iPod touch 3G would be a bridge too far for them.

But perhaps I'm wrong about this too, and maybe either one carrier (perhaps a hungry third-tier company like Sprint) will bite the bullet or maybe enterprising hackers will figure out a way to make iPad SIMs work in an iPod (expect Apple to make at least a token effort to prevent this, to placate the carriers). What next? Who's going to buy this?

Third problem: the users

Who needs just data on a mobile device, and doesn't care about voice or text messaging? I think there's less of a market for this mythical device than many people believe.

There are people who already have a phone, of course -- say, folk who are locked into a contract, or have a phone provided by work, but would really like to also have an Apple device with mobile data access. I can't deny those people must exist, but are there enough of them to justify a device mostly designed for them? It seems unlikely to me.

It's not hard to find tech bloggers who will tell you they "hardly use voice calls any more" -- I'm one of them, in fact. It's a rare month that I use more than 50 of the thousands of free minutes that come bundled with my unlimited data iPhone plan. So surely ditching the voice (and maybe even SMS) parts of our plans to save a few bucks makes perfect sense, right? We can always use Skype or Google Voice to make those few remaining calls.

I'm not so sure. It's true I rarely use voice but I still need it around for actual emergencies -- in case of car breakdowns, or accidents, or sudden illness, or an airline misplacing my baggage. These are exactly the times when I need the highest level of reliability from my voice service. However, at no point in my years of using it has Skype ever struck me as a service that has the highest level of reliability. As the Skype website itself notes, "No emergency calls with Skype. Skype is not a replacement for your telephone and can't be used for emergency calling."

I can't comment on Google Voice -- because it's only available to US citizens, which is a very good reason that you can't rely on that either. Even if you are willing to trust a VOIP service, it's still no use when you have only a borderline GPRS nine-point-eight-kbit data connection, or if you're traveling and don't care to pay your cell operator's horrifying data roaming fees.

The bottom line here is that I feel that even if (for some people) voice communication isn't frequently used any more, that doesn't mean it's not important -- any more than house insurance isn't important because your house hasn't caught fire recently.

Wrapping up

So, that's why I think an iPod touch 3G is highly unlikely, tomorrow or in the foreseeable future. Think I'm an idiot? Hit the comment form below and tell me so. And whether you agree or not, be sure to join us for our liveblog of the media event where we'll be covering the fun and frolics!

And now for the inevitable weaselly footnote where I cover myself in case it turns out Apple is smarter than me.

The thing I think we could see tomorrow that will scratch many people's itch for an iPod-with-data is a pay-as-you-go iPhone. In fact, here in Europe we've been able to get the last few iPhones on a no-contract basis (at a hefty upfront premium, of course) so this wouldn't be a radical shift in policy for Apple. We can also get tariffs with tiny numbers of voice minutes but generous data allowances, which is a basically a back door to the same end-point -- a no-contract iPhone that the user can move between cheap plans on different operators as easy as swapping a SIM card. But, please: no-one tell the carriers, or they'll catch on and stop offering these plans! In any event, this would be a significant change on the part of the US carriers, so we'll see if AT&T and Verizon can ante up and offer some appropriate plans -- and Apple can ship a "world phone" handset that works on all the US networks.

Why the iPod touch 3G makes no sense originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The long-awaited Boxee for iPad app went live yesterday and quickly rose to the #13th most popular free app for iPad. Simultaneously, Boxee released a new firmware version for the Boxee Box set-top media player, v1.2, with some new Apple-friendly features like AirPlay and AFP support. We've gone hands-on with all the new functions.

Airplay for the Boxee Box

Probably the biggest news for me isn't the iPad app at all -- it's Airplay support for the Boxee Box. This is something I've been hoping for ever since our own Erica Sadun started to help reverse engineer the AirPlay protocol, eventually leading to her AirPlay receiver software for OS X BananaTV.

You need to enable AirPlay first, as it's an "experimental" feature. Turn on your Box, go to the Settings page, and navigate to Network > Servers and tick "Enable streaming from iOS devices". Immediately, "Boxee" should show up in your Airplay settings in compatible iOS apps.

In fairly brief testing, I received somewhat mixed results. Photos, Videos and YouTube worked fine sent from my iPad 1 and iPhone 4. Video playback was slightly laggy, but no more so than when using an AppleTV or any other AirPlay receiver. The Boxee remote is capable of basic transport control -- play/pause works with video content, as does the d-pad for fast forward and rewind. It doesn't, however, do next/last picture when the Box is showing photos, nor can you start or stop slideshows with the remote.

Sound was less successful. The native iPod app on both my iOS devices detected the Boxee Box, but I had several instances where the stream got "lost" -- the device thought it was sending it to the Boxee but no sound came out. I also had one crash which required me to hard-reset the Boxee. On the other hand, when it did work it worked well -- and in a neat touch, the Boxee activates its sound visualizer during music playback to give you something to look at. Spotify also didn't work at all, I couldn't convince it to make any noise. I had the same problem when trying to stream audio from iTunes 10.4 on my Mac to my Boxee Box.

As this option makes the Box appear to be a normal AirPlay client, all iOS apps that support AirPlay video and audio streaming should work with it, notwithstanding crashes on Boxee's end. Note that it also isn't listed as supporting the new iPad 2 mirroring mode in iOS 5, although we weren't able to test that. Again, however, this feature is clearly advertised as being experimental.

Streaming content from your network to the iPad

On to the iPad app itself now, then, and the first big feature is the ability to stream arbitrary audio and video content within your network to the app. My first big disappointment: this is really just a lukewarm rework of Air Video. Like all these streaming apps, the Boxee version needs an intermediary computer that consumes the video content and converts it into an iPad-friendly video stream. I had initially hoped that the Boxee Box itself would be able to fill this role, so I wouldn't need to leave a computer switched on for it to work. No such luck in this release.

For the iPad app to work, then, the Boxee Media Manager (BMM) has to first be running on a Mac or PC on your network (minimum supported OSs are OS X 10.5 or Windows XP). Very similarly to how Air Video works, the BMM has a minimal UI that allows you to select which folders of content will be visible to the app. Switch to the iPad, and your content is there, presented in a reasonably attractive UI.

Now, there are downsides. Like all of these pieces of software, there's a quality drop from the conversion process. That process also creates lag -- it takes a few seconds after pressing Play before you see any video, for example, and trying to fast forward to a particularly point in the video rapidly becomes quite frustrating.

Compared to more established solution like Air Video the Boxee app has several other important drawbacks. It offers limited customisation, whereas Air Video lets you fine-tune the conversion process to trade off lag, quality, and network bandwidth. Even worse is the lack of support for not-on-local-network streaming. With Air Video, wherever you are in the world, you can enter a PIN into the app and all of your content will stream out of your home connection, across the internet, and down to your device. Boxee cannot do this. On the other hand, if you don't have pretty significant bandwidth both at home and wherever you are, this often ends up looking pretty ropey anyway so (at least for me) this isn't a killer feature.

Finally it's worth pointing out that the Boxee Media Manager app has no hardware acceleration so has to do all the video conversion heavy lifting on the CPU alone. This translates to a lot of heat, a lot of fan noise, and video playback that might be jerkier than it has to be if your Mac's CPU isn't particularly powerful.

Of course, Boxee is free, but then Air Video is only $3.

One last note: if you really, really like Inception, a trick presents itself: when playing back media, the Boxee player itself has AirPlay support. Which you can then direct to a Boxee Box for those dream-within-a-dream moments. Well, in theory; in practice, this just resulted in gray screens and lockups whenever I tried it. It's a silly thing to do so that doesn't strike me as a significant problem.

Social integration & Watch It Later

That's not the only trick up the Boxee app's sleeve, however. Boxee has long supported social integration to its server-side accounts, with two key features. These are visible as soon as you load the Boxee app.

Watch It Later is rather like Instapaper for video. You install a special bookmarklet in your web browser. Whenever you find yourself browsing to a video you don't have time to watch right now, click the bookmarklet. Next time you load the Boxee iPad app (or turn on your Boxee Box) all those videos will be arranged in order for you to catch up on.

The social integration is similar, but it's for videos other people post. You link your Boxee account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Any video link that any of your friends post will be collated automatically and, again, presented for you to skim through and catch up on. If like me you often browse Twitter in quick bursts where you rarely have time to watch videos, but you never remember to go back and look them up later, this can be a really useful feature.

Looking to the future

I chatted with Andrew Kippen, Boxee's vice president of marketing, as I was composing this review. I asked him how he thought the launch had gone and what Boxee's short- and longer-term plans were to develop the software.

TUAW: Any thoughts on how the launch of the app has gone? Was it well received?
AK: Really well received. We're #13 on the App Store for Top Free Apps -- not bad for 24 hours.

TUAW: Any immediate plans for bugfixes or changes?
AK: I think we'd like to smooth out a few things in the first time experience and we're listening to forums/Facebook/Twitter/Email to hear how things are going for people -- mostly all positive, but we're hoping to squash any bugs that come up quickly.

TUAW: Why can't Boxee Media Manager run on the Box itself -- am I right in thinking there's not enough CPU grunt?
AK: It's something we're going to work on. We wanted to get it out there for Windows and OS X, before we baked it into the box. Always good to get first reactions so second effort has everything people want.

TUAW: I've seen some crashes using the AirPlay streaming (which is perfectly understandable, I know you've worked to a reverse engineered standard and it's clearly marked as experimental) -- will this improve in future releases?
AK: Yep -- obviously there's only so much we can test with early access users (~200) vs. the tens of thousands that are using the app now.

TUAW: Will Boxee Media Manager be getting GPU acceleration anytime soon? It runs my poor MacBook Pro pretty ragged right now!
AK: It's something we want to support. Just working to find time & resources to make it happen.

TUAW: Longer term, where is the app going? Are you going to add the plethora of options contained in Air Video, for example? Any plans to support outside-the-local-network streaming?
AK: Lots of plans for where we can go, but you'll have to stay tuned for that.

The bottom line

In this launch, Boxee has presented us with some experimental-but-cool stuff (AirPlay), some genuinely neat new stuff (social features in the Boxee iPad app), and some promising-but-needs-work stuff (media streaming to the iPad). In any event the app and the Media Manager software are both free, so you've nothing to lose by giving it a go.

Gallery: Boxee Box v1.2 and Boxee for iPad: hands on

Hands on with Boxee for iPad and Boxee Box v1.2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The appearance of the MacDefender trojan back in May provoked a lot of back-and-forth between various tech writers (including your humble correspondent). Was this a sign that the good times were ending? That the Mac platform would come under ever-fiercer attack from malware authors? That soon we'd all be running resource-sucking virus scanners and a-fearing every link we clicked?

Well, in a word: no. It wasn't. And I've got some science to prove it.

A primer on "malware definitions"

If you're unfamiliar with the concepts at work here, it'll help to understand my results if you know exactly what a "malware signature" is. The primary way a malware scanner works is to examine files on your computer -- sometimes all files (the so-called "deep scan" approach, which usually takes hours) and sometimes only specific files that are known to be targeted by viruses, trojans, and other malware. Scanners also usually stay running in the background and scan each and every file you open and program you run right as they load, as an extra level of always-on protection. This last mode is what often causes computers to feel sluggish after you install anti-malware software.

So what does this "scan" thing entail, exactly? Glossing over a lot of technical details, the scanner will run the file it is examining through a hash function of some kind. This is a sort of ultra-strong fingerprinting algorithm that creates a unique identifier for the file (a 'hash') that can definitively match data or code segments. The malware definitions list is a catalog of hashes that have been generated from known malicious files; if a file on your system matches one in the list, then boom, You've Got Malware.

An example of XProtect's signatures for MacDefender.

For this setup to have any value at all, it's crucial that the definitions list is kept up-to-date. Things can move fast in the malware world; new threats emerge suddenly and (even more insidiously) malware authors tweak their existing programs to have a different signature, making them undetectable by the scanner. These "variants," as they are called, result in a rapid cat-and-mouse game between developers of malware software and developers of malware scanners.

This is what happened to Apple back in early June. The MacDefender trojan prompted Apple to start aggressively pushing out updates to its own in-house malware scanner, XProtect. This, in turn, prompted hackers to start releasing new variants of MacDefender that bypassed the new check, then another new check from Apple, another new version of MacDefender, and so on. Many commentators wrote long posts with varying degrees of pessimism and optimism about how this would end. Would the hackers win and Apple be overwhelmed, or would they be defeated by Apple's vigilance?

My methodology

Two months ago, I tried to come up with a way that we could answer that question definitively.

I wrote a small script to download Apple's malware definitions file every hour and permanently store each unique version. I started this script running on June 2nd, capturing version 2 of the file; since then there have been 22 further versions, each adding new malware definition signatures to the scanner. I now have all that data at my fingertips.

Before I show you what I've discovered, let's consider what this script hasn't taken into account. It's not really measuring how much malware exists for the Mac, of course. It's measuring how much malware Apple has identified -- whether MacDefender related or not (there is other malware listed in the file, like OSX.HellRTS.) However, I think that's not too useless a metric: we know that Apple put considerable effort into staying on top of the situation with MacDefender, sometimes releasing updates to the definitions file just hours apart. We can also assume that Apple, with its world-wide support staff, can do a better job than anyone else at keeping its ear to the ground for new threats. It seems reasonable to assume that the state of that XProtect definition file is a good proxy for the state of Mac malware in general.

Results

The following and graph shows the number of unique malware variants listed in the file as each new version was released.

There are two occurrences where the graph goes down, i.e. a new version of the file lists fewer definitions than the older version. This happened when Apple found two new variants, wrote signatures for them both, then later found a single signature that covered both variants. My script records this as a variant "disappearing" because there are fewer signatures overall. It doesn't mean that protection actually decreased.

Analysis

For a period of several weeks, we see the rapid cat-and-mouse game predicted by people like Ed Bott. Variants of MacDefender appear at the rate of about one a day, and we see a corresponding update of the XProtect definitions file once or even twice a day also. This keeps going until we reach the 21st version of the definitions file, which detects 15 distinct variants of MacDefender (labelled OSX.MacDefender.A through to OSX.MacDefender.O) using 12 different detection signatures.

And then... nothing. No new updates to the file since the 23rd of June.

There are two ways to look at this. It's possible that the malware kept coming, and Apple either failed to notice it, or just gave up trying to keep up. If that were true, though, we'd expect to still be hearing about it, both in the general press and from TUAW's contacts throughout the Mac ecosystem of developers and support staff. But we've heard nothing.

The other option, then, is that the malware has stopped evolving. The MacDefender authors gave up trying to issue new variants, and nobody else has (so far) taken their place. The Mac malware scene is... well, if not dead, then asleep. Stunned. Pining for the fjords.

I stand by my earlier cautionary note. There's no magical protection against malware in OS X -- there's solid engineering, but that's not infallible. All computer users, regardless of OS, should remain vigilant: don't run software from untrusted sources, don't fall for web browser popups screaming that you have viruses, think twice before entering your iTunes or online banking or email password into an unfamiliar website.

Still, for now, I think Mac users who were worried about MacDefender can partly relax. The wolf is still not at our door.

Footnote: regarding Lion's version of XProtect

The recent release of Mac OS X 10.7, Lion, appears to have brought some changes to XProtect as well as overall enhancements to OS security. The URL that is probed for new malware definitions has moved (from here in Snow Leopard to here in Lion) and the file itself contains quite different signatures -- there are signatures in each version of the file that do not appear in the other. Furthermore, although the Snow Leopard version lists MacDefender.A through to .O (15 variants in all), the Lion version only lists .A and .B. The .B definition list, however, contains many more signatures. It doesn't necessarily mean that XProtect doesn't detect as much malware as it did before.

My guess would be that the new OS has brought with it internal modifications to how XProtect works that has caused these changes. Again, however, I do not feel that this invalidates my results. Snow Leopard remains a supported OS that will still have a large install base for some time to come, and (we can assume) Apple will continue to release security updates for it in as timely a manner as it ever did -- including XProtect updates.

Mac malware 'explosion' missing in action originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Suppose you're at at your desk with a MacBook and an iPhone. You want to check cinema screening times at your local multiplex and the weather forecast so you'll know if you'll need a jacket or not. Which device do you reach for?

If you choose the MacBook, you'll need to go to a cinema listings service and enter your zip code to find your multiplex, then repeat the process on a weather tracking site (unless your Dashboard already includes appropriate widgets for that data, in which case it's one keystroke away). On the iPhone, you just load a couple of apps, which know where you are so can show you the local data automatically.

This exact scenario happened to me earlier, and I surprised myself by reflexively reaching for the iPhone, without thinking. Somewhere along the way it started to feel like the logical device to use for this sort of thing.

Now, this is a highly trivial example. Safari and Firefox on the MacBook can do location sensing via Wifi positioning, for example (although few websites support this), and sites can also try and guess your location based on your IP address (although I've found that to be occasionally quite inaccurate). Local information services like cinema listings will also typically offer to store your location for future use, so the search becomes a one-time thing. Stick with me, though; I'm going somewhere with this.

Think about the bigger picture. Go back a few years, and computers typically had just two input devices: a keyboard and a mouse. Some of them would also have a webcam and a scanner, but you'd only be using those occasionally and for well-defined specific tasks (mostly "Skype" and "scanning", respectively.)

Now think about the input methods on an iPhone 4. The keyboard and mouse have been replaced by a touchscreen, of course. You've got front and back cameras too, similarly to the scanner and webcam. But wait! There's more!

• It has a GPS chip, of course, so it can tell where it is (bolstered with some clever battery-saving aGPS too.)
• It has a magnetometer-based compass, so it can tell which way it's pointing (and sense any magnetic fields.)
• It has a gyroscope and acceleration meters, so it can tell when you move it -- and in which direction, how far, and how fast.
• It has an ambient light sensor to adjust screen brightness according to your surroundings.
• It has two microphones -- one for your voice, and one purely for background sounds for noise-cancellation purposes.
• It has an orientation sensor so it knows which way up it is.

And that's just the iPhone itself, before we consider additional hardware like Nike+. When compared to almost all the proceeding technology in the thirty-something years since the Apple II kicked off the personal computer revolution, the iPhone has an extraordinary number of ways to perceive the world around itself. In turn, this leads to huge possibilities for apps in the future that can do a much better idea of anticipating our needs based on our surroundings and, in turn, feel far more personal than the "personal computer" ever did.

Perhaps the simplest examples are apps that use device rotation to change the entire UI to something different. The iPod app, for example, switches between CoverFlow selection and the more traditional UI. Calvetica shows day and month views in portrait and week planners in landscape mode. WeightBot allows daily weight entry in portrait view, then goes one stage further -- with a summary view when you turn the device counter-clockwise and a graph of your weight loss (or, in my case, lack of weight loss) when you turn it to landscape clockwise. Another simple example is Instapaper and its option to change to a muted white-on-black color scheme when your phone's local clock indicates it's night-time.

More sophisticated is the use of the various motion sensing circuitry for games like Rage, which allow players to aim their guns in the game by moving their devices around. Spin the same tech another way and you get 3D panorama photography apps like 360 Panoroma. Here, you move and tilt your phone in a complete circle and the app uses the camera to build a complete image of your surroundings -- and then also uses the same tilt sensing to let you view the photos, panning the picture as you pivot on the spot.

Take this idea to the next level and you get augmented reality, which is probably the poster child for sensor rich computing at the moment. Combine the motion tracking with the camera feed and, as the user waves their phone around, show them the camera view but with extra bits added. Star Wars Trench Run (sadly no longer available in iTunes) superimposes TIE Fighters on whatever you are looking at and allows you to shoot them down. Less frivolously, the AR mode in the Yelp app is a very intuitive way to get your bearings when navigating to a restaurant.

Yelp is far from alone. There are lots of augmented reality apps for the iPhone that do all sorts of things -- translate foreign languages, give metadata on live events like gigs, even create floorplans of your house.

This trend isn't limited to smartphones either. Hasselbad's H4D-200MS digital medium format camera has a clever new feature called True Focus. The photographer sets a focus point, perhaps a model's eye, and then software in the camera watches the scene. As the photographer moves the camera around to change the composition, motion sensors in the camera body feed back to the software which adjusts the focus setting to compensate, keeping that point in perfect focus. By using the motion sensors the camera can do a better job of staying on-target than traditional autofocus subject tracking.

But what about the future? I think we've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities. However, one key drawback with iOS is the relatively limited multitasking means some of the more wacky ideas of third party devs aren't possible.

For example, consider the rather dizzying possibilities of Tasker, an Android app that can engage a childlock for all apps except a few games when you are at home and the time is before 9pm. Or sense when you are at your parents' house in the boondocks and disable 3G altogether, so your phone doesn't hammer its battery flat trying to hang on to weak signal. Or set the phone to mute all notification sounds between 11pm and 7am, except for calls from numbers in your phonebook. Or any one of a million other possibilities, all of them ways to leverage your phone's knowledge of its surroundings to make it adapt to you, rather than the other way around.

Another interesting idea was suggested by Dan Frakes, MacWorld's senior editor: put an unlock code on your iPhone that is automatically disabled when you are at home. It turns out this is possible today for jailbroken iPhones with CleverPin, but of course this sort of deep system modification isn't possible without jailbreak tools.

We can only hope that Apple will do more to embrace the possibilities of sensor rich computing in future iOS versions and give developers more flexibility to access these features. We've all seen how iOS 5's Reminders app offers location-aware popups (e.g. "remind me to put my lunch in the fridge when I arrive at the office"), and we know Apple is patenting location-aware traffic warnings. It would be very nice for all of us if Apple would open this up to third party developers, so they could set an app up to perform some pre-arranged task like a notification alert when the phone is next in a certain location.

I hope to see something like this in future iOS versions, because I think there's still a lot of ideas that no one has had yet. What awesome uses of sensor-rich computing do you like in your apps, and what would you like to see in the future?

Sensor-rich computing: the quiet revolution that started in your pocket originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I have a longstanding audio quality problem with iTunes -- but iTunes Match will finally resolve it for me. Hurray! Hopefully this post will help others in the same situation.

It all starts with the sad fact that I'm a perfectionist idiot about audio quality, so I still buy CDs and rip them myself using Apple's lossless codec -- I can't quite bring myself to (usually) pay more on iTunes for a lower quality file. The lossless codec achieves about 50% compression, yielding files about three times larger than the iTunes Plus 256-kbps AAC setting that most people rip in and the iTunes Store uses. It is, however, a complete bit-for-bit copy of the original CD.

Note that its not so much that I can hear the difference; more that I don't drive myself mad wondering if I can. I have occasionally, but admittedly not often, picked up the odd rough-sounding cymbal splash in iTunes Plus files when listening on decent headphones; but I am by no means one of those audiophiles who believes in spending thousands on speaker cables and $2000 on a power cord that defies the laws of physics. Still, though, by using only Apple lossless audio codec (ALAC), I know that I can avoid even thinking about sound quality issues. That's the appeal for me.

Even if you're unconvinced by my reasoning here (and I admit it has more to do with my own eccentricities than strict logic), there's another reason to prefer ALAC format ripping -- down the road, if I have to change to alternative music formats, I won't need to rip the CDs again. I can turn the ALAC files back into pure WAV format and then transform them into any other format without any further loss of quality. I do this occasionally when I want to put more music on the USB stick that I keep plugged into my car radio, which will play mp3 and WMA files but not AAC. In contrast, running a lossy encoded format file like AAC through the encoding process to another one like mp3 results in a really muddy, horrible sounding file.

However, whilst ALAC is fine for use on my Mac where disk space is cheap and for streaming around my house's Ethernet network where bandwidth is plentiful, it's not really much use for syncing to my iPhone, because it's too darn big. I'd prefer to compromise quality a little on the iPhone in order to fit a decent amount music in and because I mostly listen to the iPhone when walking the dogs or in my noisy day-job office, neither of which demand the highest fidelity.

Sadly, iTunes really doesn't want to work with me. It has the "convert higher bitrates" option, which is teasingly close to what I want, but it's irritatingly locked to only output 128 kbit/sec AAC. That really is too low -- I can definitely hear annoying compression artifacts. So, for a long time, I've been maintaining two iTunes libraries. One is full of ALAC and I use it for playback in the house; the other is full of AAC and I use it to sync my iPhone with. Hence, when I rip a CD, I have to rip it twice (or do a second pass of conversion from the ALAC files to AAC), and if any track names, album art, or other metadata need adjusting, I need to adjust it twice. This is tedious and annoying.

Enter iTunes Match, which might just solve this problem for me at a stroke. I'm hoping it will allow me to rip once as an ALAC file, and upload that converted file to iCloud. Apple says that:

[A]ll the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality -- even if your original copy was of lower quality.

which implies to me that even ALAC files going in come out at the lower quality 256 kbit/sec setting. I wouldn't even need to cable my iPhone to iTunes to get new music any more, let alone rip CDs twice or juggle multiple iTunes libraries. For $25 a year, I'm in, although it seems that we'll be waiting until 2012 to get iTunes Match in the UK.

Although this problem is fairly obscure, I have seen others people post about this problem from time to time (one, two, and many of the comments below). I hope this post will reach those folk and prompt them to look at this little side-effect of iTunes Match more closely.

How iTunes Match solves my obscure downsampling problem originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

What? Another iOS photo sharing app? No, wait, keep reading! The just-released Piictu app (official site, iTunes) has some new tricks to show you.

Piictu's big idea is to treat the photos you post not as the traditional timeline view we associate with blogs and apps like Instagram, but rather as a series of conversations, each on a certain theme.

Suppose I post a picture of my dogs, Daisy and Jake. Any of my friends who see that -- or anyone on the service as a whole -- can then post a picture reply to that photo, perhaps of their own dogs, or some other pet. Someone else can post another reply, and so on. Piictu groups responses together to encourage an ongoing conversation.

The power of this simple idea is perhaps best demonstrated by this photo thread pictured in the second half of this post, where an impromptu multiplayer game of tic-tac-toe took place between several of Piictu's beta testers.

Continue reading Piictu puts the fun into iOS picture sharing

Piictu puts the fun into iOS picture sharing originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In accordance with Betteridge's Law of Headlines, I believe the answer is a resounding "no."

The unusually virulent meme quickly spread around the Mac blogging world that iMessage will kill SMS as we know it and, going one stage further, to characterize iMessage as "an attack" on the carriers. John Gruber of Daring Fireball went so far as to say he would "cancel my SMS plan as soon as this ships."

But hold on there a second. Is it really that simple?

Continue reading Will iMessage kill wireless carriers' SMS revenues?

Will iMessage kill wireless carriers' SMS revenues? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Short of time? Intimidated by a huge sprawl of WWDC news? Here are the most important things for iPhone users to know about what changes we'll be seeing in the fall when iOS 5 is available for our phones.

1. iCloud

Probably the biggest change to how we'll use our iOS devices going forward, iCloud is the glue that binds it all together. It has a number of big features of its own: buy music on your iPhone and copies of the same songs will appear on your Mac and iPad, for example. Work on a Pages document on your Mac, and the same file will be available on the iPhone. iCloud also shows a simple list of all the apps and music you've purchased, so you can easily re-download things you've already bought but deleted.

iCloud also plays an important supporting role in many of the other features iOS 5 brings to the table -- I'll highlight them as we go through the following sections.

2. PC free

No more cables! With iOS 5, your iPhone will be able to sync your iTunes content over your Wi-Fi network and download new iOS updates on its own without having to connect it to iTunes first. Plus, iCloud will automatically back up important content on your iPhone -- such as game saves and photos -- once per day. When you get a new phone, a quick sign-in with your iTunes account will have it automatically downloading the last backup. Now, more than ever, the iPhone can claim to be a post-PC device.

Continue reading Seven things iPhone users should know about today's announcment

Seven things iPhone users should know about today's announcment originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Last week saw a major new product announcement from Google: the new "Google Wallet" will allow people with compatible mobile phones to use them to pay for goods and services in shops with a simple wave of their hand. This follows a number of in/out/in/out/shake it all about rumors that this "NFC" stuff might be included in the next iPhone. So what is NFC and why should you care? Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and I'll explain.

Continue reading What Google and Mastercard's new mobile payment system could mean for iOS users

What Google and Mastercard's new mobile payment system could mean for iOS users originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 30 May 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW's Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science that lie behind the hardware.

The contentious subject of Mac security has been back in the news in recent weeks following the emergence of a fake antivirus package called MacDefender (also known as Mac Security and Mac Protector) that managed to steal a number of users' credit card details, and a new piece of "crimeware" called Weyland-Yutani BOT which allows non-technical hackers to easily create password grabbing webpages that specifically target Mac browsers.

This prompted a fresh round of "the Mac is under attack! Malware will drown us all! Exclamation!" blog posts, followed by the usual backlash against them. On the alarmist side, Ed Bott wrote "Coming soon to a Mac near you: serious malware", predicting doom, gloom, and dogs and cats living together.

The case for the defence was eloquently made in an article entitled "Wolf!" by Mac uber-blogger John Gruber where he simply collected assorted "Mac malware is inevitable" quotes from prominent analysts... going back to 2004, and all clearly unfulfilled in the sense of widespread attacks or exploits in the wild. Bott responded with a thoughtful post where he made a more reasoned case that malware for Macs really is inevitable in the long run, regardless of how inaccurate previous predictions have been.

So who's right, and who's wrong? Is it time to run to the hills or are people just sounding the gong of panic unnecessarily? In this post I'm going to try and dive a little deeper into the issues surrounding Mac malware, hypothetical and real, and separate the headlines from the facts.

Continue reading Malware, Macs, and crying wolf: Doing the math

Malware, Macs, and crying wolf: Doing the math originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 14 May 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Back in February, Apple began enforcing App Store rules regarding requiring in-app purchases of e-books in addition having options outside the app. Sadly, today that has caused the people behind iFlowReader to shutter their business because "Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible for us to survive." Users of the e-book reader app are being warned to back up their data carefully, or they might lose access to the content they have purchased through it.

Previously, apps like iFlow Reader were able to sell content for the app only via non-App Store purchases. For example, with Amazon's Kindle app, you can use the Mobile Safari web browser to purchase books via your Amazon account. Apple doesn't take its usual 30% cut of these transactions. The new rules mean that developers wouldn't be allowed to do this. All such business would have to go via the in-app purchase API, using the user's iTunes account and with Apple taking 30% of the money. Existing apps apparently were given until the end of June to change how they work or face removal from the store.

UPDATE: Companies are not required to only offer in-app purchasing, but they are required to offer it as an option and, according to section 11.13 of the T&C, must price the in-app purchase the same as or lower than purchases made outside the app. In effect, this does mean that most purchases are likely to move to the in-app model and incur the 30% surcharge. Customers will presumably prefer to carry out the smallest number of steps to make the purchase, which is the in-app model.

I speculated in February that Apple's change could cause some popular apps to flee the store. We know that Sony's Reader app was rejected, that Readability had to shelve its native app (it later released a web app) and that TinyGrab also abandoned plans for an iOS app.

Continue reading iFlow Reader calls it quits, abandons App Store

iFlow Reader calls it quits, abandons App Store originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 11 May 2011 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.