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Greg Joswiak:

Life moves pretty fast. 15 years ago today, the world met iPhone for the first time and in a moment everything changed. Many more big moments to come.

Arguably the greatest computing device ever made. Inarguably the best product introduction ever.

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New whitepaper from Apple with a lot of details about how iCloud Private Relay works. Still doesn’t list Apple’s CDN partners for the second relay hop, but that’s obviously some sort of strategic decision on Apple’s part. As the paper makes clear, you don’t need any particular trust in those CDN partners, because they never receive anything that could identify you, or locate you any more precisely than an 800 km² region.

iCloud Private Relay is still officially in beta, but it’s been so reliable for me that I had to check just now that I’ve got it enabled on all my eligible devices.

Speaking of Dieter Bohn, Palm, and yours truly, it turns out Ed Colligan didn’t say what we thought he said about Apple’s then-imminent iPhone in December 2006. Bohn:

All of this context is in service to correcting the record on one of Colligan’s responses. Somewhat famously, a line of his has been quoted over and over — most often by John Gruber at Daring Fireball in a post titled “Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s Head Seems to be Stuck Somewhere.” He quotes the following real-time transcription — which, as it turns out, is inaccurate:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smartphone sector.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

We’ve gotten the original recording of the interview — our thanks to the Computer History Museum, which has received the Churchill Club’s archives after it sadly had to shut down. Here’s the actual exchange, which begins after the Apple speculation.

Colligan’s actual quote: “And so I just would caution people that think they’re going to walk in here and just and do these. We’ve struggled for a few years here, figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out. I guarantee it. So, look, welcome, let’s go for it. We can’t stop all that. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to be, I don’t think it’ll be so easy for everybody, as everybody thinks to enter it. It’s a tough space.”

Not quite as juicy as the original (para)phrasing, but the sentiment is still there. It’s good to have the actual quote on the record now.

Dieter Bohn joins the show to talk about his excellent new documentary, Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone — a history of Handspring and the creators of the original PalmPilot.

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Matt Waller:

I didn’t know entirely what I was getting myself into by making an app on the iPad.

I went in aware of its limitations and tried to think of a little something I could make for myself that would be useful and extremely simple.

Thus I settled on the love song of so many developers, the thing that there is plenty of in the world, and yet which is close enough to our souls that we always find ways to make it our own.

I mean, of course, the to-do app.

I’m an odd bird, so I thought it would be fun to load a to-do app with lots of random and silly things to NOT do, so that I could have a giggle, and check it off for that tiny dopamine hit.

Waller’s post is a great write-up delineating both the pros and cons of using Swift Playgrounds to develop (and publish) an entire app. He also kept a public development journal on Twitter, replete with animated screencasts of the app in-progress.

The app itself is relatively simple, but it’s fun, and it looks and feels quite polished. App development using Swift Playgrounds is clearly nascent, but based on ToDon’t, I’d say the future looks very bright. ToDon’t is $3 in the App Store, and well worth it just to reward Waller for making something fun and documenting his experience.

(Via José Adorno at 9to5Mac.)

Is $550 million a fair price for The New York Times to pay for The Athletic? I don’t know. But just eight years ago, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for just $250 million. Something seems off here. Either Bezos got The Post for a song or The Times bought The Athletic at high tide.

I suspect it’s the latter. Does it make any sense that The Athletic raised $140 million in venture capital? Not to me. They have over one million paying subscribers (including me — I pay $60/year through iTunes) but somehow lost $100 million in 2019 and 2020? I don’t understand that.

The New York Times:

The New York Times Company has reached an agreement to buy The Athletic, the online sports news outlet with 1.2 million subscriptions, in an all-cash deal valued at $550 million, The Times said on Thursday.

The deal brings The Times, which has more than eight million total subscriptions, quickly closer to its goal of having 10 million subscriptions by 2025, while also offering its audience more in-depth coverage of the more than 200 professional teams in North America, Britain and Europe that are closely followed by The Athletic’s journalists.

The Athletic is terrific. Good writers, good design, and a model that supports both national and local coverage. For baseball, they have national writers like Jayson Stark and Ken Rosenthal, but also beat writers for every team. Lindsey Adler, The Athletic’s Yankees beat writer, is terrific. The Athletic’s success is built upon one simple notion: good writers doing good work. No clickbait, no bullshit, and no ads. Let’s hope it stays that way.

David Gelles, reporting for The New York Times:

Ben Smith, the media columnist for The New York Times, is leaving the media outlet to start a new global news organization with Justin Smith, who is stepping down as chief executive of Bloomberg Media.

Ben Smith said in an interview that they planned to build a global newsroom that broke news and experimented with new formats of storytelling. He did not provide details on what beats or regions would be covered, how much money they planned to raise or when the new organization would start.

“There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,” said Ben Smith, who is not related to Justin Smith. “That’s who we see as our audience.”

I’ve enjoyed Smith’s stint as The Times media columnist; it’s the first time that column has been good since David Carr died in 2015. Not sure what Smith is angling for with his idea that targeting college-educated readers is somehow novel, though. That’s exactly the demographic who reads The Times.

See also: Clare Malone’s brief interview with Ben Smith yesterday, for The New Yorker.

Ashley Carman at The Verge, “Podcasters Are Letting Software Pick Their Ads — It’s Already Going Awry”:

The podcast industry is working up to something big; you can see it in the acquisitions. All the industry’s major players have, over the past two years, acquired companies focused on one feature: inserting ads into podcasts.

Of course, podcasting has always primarily depended on ad revenue, so this incoming era has more to do with getting podcast ads to act like the online advertising we see everywhere else. Wherever there’s a website, there can be a targeted ad, and now wherever there’s a podcast, there’s the potential of inserting a targeted ad, too. Whichever company can make that transition happen the fastest, across the most shows, and with the best data, could not only recoup all those millions of dollars in acquisition costs but make more on top of them.

Carman reports on a few cases of dynamic ads gone wrong — a podcast for kids that was served ads for “The Sex Lives of College Girls”, a science podcast that had explicitly opted out from ads for fossil fuel companies being served ads for Exxon and BP — but the whole idea is shit. Even when the “right” ads are dynamically inserted, the ads are inevitably going to be bad. We know how this story ends because we all use the web and can see with our own eyes the quality (and oppressive quantity) of “ad tech” advertising.

Marco Arment, on Twitter:

Old-fashioned podcast ads (baked-in host reads) have had better CPMs, stronger response rates, and higher audience trust than almost any other form of advertising for over a decade.

And large podcast companies threw that world away for … a worse outcome.

Big platforms and ad-tech companies ALWAYS sell us all on a dream.

You’ll make more money!

It’ll be easier!

It’ll be more accessible to small producers!

And it almost never pans out that way. The middlemen siphon off most of the money, and the platforms become monopolies.

Look no further than Carman’s own description of the trend: “getting podcast ads to act like the online advertising we see everywhere else”. I don’t know anyone who listens to podcasts — you know, the actual customers — who thinks that sounds like a good idea. There’s never been a form of advertising more despised than today’s online web advertising.

Ken Kocienda, retweeting Arment:

If I ever get around to making a regular podcast, I would never (ever!) give up the right to choose every single ad. The ads are part of the product.

“The ads are part of the product” succinctly sums up my thinking, and saves me from writing an extended rant. That’s the whole game, the entire reason not to even consider letting some biz-dev “ad tech” company insert ads dynamically into a podcast. The ads are part of the product. I’ve built the entire business model of Daring Fireball around that sentiment.

On a related note, it’s long been fascinating to me that “RSS” is widely considered a failure — a half-forgotten technology that lost its relevance when Google pulled the plug on Google Reader — yet the entire podcast universe is built on RSS. Spotify is gaining some degree of traction with their platform-locked shows like Joe Rogan’s, but the overwhelming number of popular podcasts — including subscriber-only paid shows — are delivered via open RSS feeds readable by any client software. All podcasts clients are, at their core, RSS clients — they’re just RSS clients for audio content, not the written word.

The primary reason for this bifurcation, I’m convinced, is simple: most web publishers never figured out how to monetize full-content RSS feeds, by which I mean RSS feeds with the complete articles, not just excerpts. Putting only article excerpts in an RSS feed makes no more sense than putting only audio excerpts into a podcast feed. People who subscribe to a podcast want to listen to the entire shows; people who subscribe to a website’s RSS feed want to read the entire articles. Don’t overthink it. But without a model for advertising in RSS,¹ most websites — particularly big websites from established media companies — stopped publishing RSS feeds. Podcasts avoided that fate because the sponsorship model, typically with hosts reading the ads, took root across the entire field. It’s a good model for everyone — the hosts earn money, the sponsors get strong response rates, and listeners get ads that are actually relevant to them and not annoying. (According to Apple Podcasts’s analytics, only about 20 percent of listeners to my show skip the ads.)

Trying to move podcasts to web-like “industry standard advertising” is worse than violating the spirit of If it ain’t broke don’t fix it — this is breaking something that definitely works for something we know doesn’t. It’s grift on the part of the ad industry, pure and simple.

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

Intel today unveiled new 12th-generation Core processors suitable for laptops, and as part of the announcement, it claimed that the new Core i9 is not only faster than Apple’s M1 Max chip in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but is the fastest mobile processor ever.

The new Core i9 features a 14-core CPU with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, while the 10-core M1 Max chip has eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. The high-end Intel chip has a max Turbo Boost frequency of 5.0GHz, but power draw can reach up to 115 watts, which is significantly more power than the M1 Max chip ever uses and not ideal for the thermal envelope of devices like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

Intel shared a very basic performance vs. power chart as part of its marketing, with fine print indicating that performance was measured based on compiling binaries with the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite.

If you look at the chart, the Core i9 may well be faster, but it uses way more power than the M1 Max. You could never fit that chip in a design like the new MacBook Pros. This is a chip for big heavy laptops with big loud fans. I’m sure some people like that tradeoff, but folks at Apple will look at these chips and think “Yeah, this is exactly why we divorced Intel.”

Shipping in May, starting at $1,400, the ThinkBook Plus Gen has a 17-inch display with a widescreen 21:10 aspect ratio, and an iPad Mini-sized color touchscreen to the right of the keyboard (which keyboard is thus way off-center). Kinda wild, definitely original.

Monica Chin, writing for The Verge:

First, Dell got rid of the function row. It’s been replaced with what the company is calling a “capacitive touch function row,” which refers to little LED buttons on a flat bar that you can tap to fiddle with things like brightness and volume. Dell insists that this is not a touch bar (but it is, I mean, a bar that you touch to toggle things, so anyone else whose brain immediately jumped to that comparison, you are valid, and I see you), and to that point, they have a fixed set of functions like real function keys. The touch keys were responsive in my brief testing time, and I was never worried about accidentally bumping them like I always am with the Touch Bar on older MacBook Pros.

They’re capacitive, like the Touch Bar, but the buttons are set in hardware.

Another thing you’ll probably notice: there’s no delineated trackpad beneath the keyboard. Dell has outfitted the XPS 13 with what it calls a “haptic ForcePad.” As is the case with MacBook touchpads, this one doesn’t physically depress when you click; it just reproduces the sensation of depressing. I imagine there might be some learning curve to figuring out where you can and can’t click, though Dell thinks muscle memory will make that a non-issue.

This non-delineated trackpad makes for a very clean look, but I feel like I want to know where the edges of the trackpad are. The edge-to-edge keyboard looks cool, too, and brings to (my) mind the 12-inch PowerBook G4 from 2004 — one of the best-looking laptops ever. (The speakers on the Dell XPS 13 Plus are under the keyboard.)

Notably missing? A headphone jack.

Sylvia Varnham O’Regan, reporting for The Information:

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has stopped development of a new software operating system to power its virtual reality devices and upcoming augmented reality glasses, according to two people familiar with the decision. [...]

Meta uses an open-source version of Google’s Android operating system to power Meta’s existing Oculus Quest VR devices. But Meta wanted to create an OS from scratch to power them and future devices, a project that became known internally as XROS. XR is a catch-all term for VR, AR, and mixed reality. In MR, the wearer of a headset could view and use real-world objects, such as a keyboard, to do work or play games in a VR-like app.

Instead, the company has told some staff it would continue to modify an open-source version of Android, which Google developed for smartphones but which other companies have used to power various devices, the people familiar with the matter said. Meta’s modified version of Android, known internally as VROS, powers existing Oculus VR headsets.

Hard to say what this means. Operating systems are hard — there are only a handful of successful ones in the world.

I wonder if this is sort of like the early days of Apple’s iPhone efforts, when there were two competing OS teams inside Apple: a Scott Forstall/Bertrand Serlet-led team trying to shrink Mac OS X down to run on a phone, and a Tony Fadell/Jon Rubinstein/Steve Sakoman-led team trying to scale the iPod’s embedded Linux OS up to serve as a phone OS. Maybe what happened at Facebook isn’t so much “We give up on our own new OS, let’s just use Android”, but more like “Our effort to build our own OS atop Android is working better, let’s go with that one”. Facebook’s Oculus device OS as it stands today doesn’t resemble Google’s Android that runs on phones and tablets. It’s their own fork of Android. I don’t think they’re dependent on Google in any way with this.

Update: Also interesting is that Mark Lucovsky, the leader of Facebook’s XROS team, left the company in November, apparently because he only just then realized that Facebook is a spectacularly shitty company:

Contacted by The Information, Lucovsky said in a text message: “I made my decision to leave Facebook after the 60 Minutes interview [with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen] on 10/4, subsequent readings of the material supplied to the SEC, and the company’s new metaverse-centric focus.”

Facebook cancelled the XROS project shortly after Lucovsky quit.

(Via 9to5 Mac.)

Steven Sinofsky, in a fascinating post on software reliability on his Hardcore Software blog/newsletter:

I created many bugs on my own before Microsoft and learned how to find bugs planted in Microsoft code during my training in Apps Development College (ADC), but I learned about my first commercial bug during my first summer at Microsoft. DanN my lead in ADC shared (JonDe refreshed my memory of the specifics) the story of the infamous “Sindogs” bug in Excel 2.0, which was the first Windows version that shipped with Windows 2.0 about 18 months before I arrived. The bug manifested itself when an important part of Windows, a plain text file with all the system settings, was corrupted — in the file where it was supposed to say “[Windows]” it somehow was changed to “[Sindogs].” Neither the word Sindogs appeared in any code nor did any code write that string, so its appearance was rather mysterious. The bug took days to materialize and was only discovered after Excel testers ran an automated test to create and print charts over and over, for many hours. Eventually, through a significant amount of sleuthing, the team narrowed it down to a bug in drawing code in Windows, which was called when adding arrows to charts then printing them on old-school dot-matrix printers. There was a memory corruption, which changed the contents of the settings file that was in memory before it was saved to the disk. Stories were told about it for years. The Excel team even renamed their file server after the bug, and through Office 97 we connected to the server “\\SINDOGS\REL” (REL was short for release) for release builds of Excel.

Imagine tracking down a crazy bug after the product was in market and trying to figure out what caused it, then multiplying that by all the possible printers, video cards, and programs involved. Looking back, it was an engineering marvel that anything worked at all. In moments of frustration, or desperation, that is what we told ourselves.

Re: the previous item on Facebook purportedly scrapping their ground-up new OS for AR/VR in favor of continuing with the forked version of Android that currently powers Oculus headsets, NBC News has a non-paywalled archive of Businessweek’s 2011 profile of Scott Forstall (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple”) by Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows, and Brad Stone:

Around 2005, Jobs faced a crucial decision. Should he give the task of developing the device’s software to the team that built the iPod, which wanted to build a Linux-based system? Or should he entrust the project to the engineers who had revitalized the software foundation of the Macintosh? In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off.

Forstall led the Mac-centric approach. He commanded a team of fewer than 15 engineers who went to work stripping down Apple’s OS X operating system to see if it would work on a device with considerably less power and battery life than a regular computer. Leading the other group was Fadell, who helped create the iPod. Another boy wonder, Fadell in 2005 had become one of Apple’s youngest-ever senior vice-presidents at 36. The competition, according to former Apple employees, turned explosive, with Fadell and Forstall arguing over talent, resources, attention and credit.

Jason Kottke, linking to the beautiful work of Craig Ward on Instagram:

There is just something so satisfying about meticulously rendering digital artifacts in a physical medium like Lego.

Amen to that.

CBS Minnesota:

The dismissed employees make up about 1% of Mayo’s 73,000 workforce. Officials say while it’s sad to lose valuable employees, it’s essential to keep patients, the workforce, visitors and communities safe.

People released Tuesday can return to Mayo Clinic for future job openings if they get vaccinated.

More like this, please.

The New York Times:

On Thursday, he was told he would need to leave the country, following a 12-hour standoff with government officials at a Melbourne Airport, where he was held in a room overnight over the validity of his visa and questions about the evidence supporting a medical exemption from a coronavirus vaccine. The exemption was supposed to allow Djokovic, a 20-time Grand Slam champion and one of the biggest stars in sports, to compete in the Australian Open even though he has not been vaccinated.

The chain of events represented a startling turnabout for Djokovic, who in a little more than 24 hours went from receiving special, last-minute permission to enter Australia, to boarding an intercontinental flight, to essentially being told by the prime minister of Australia that he was not welcome in the country.

More like this, please.

Fun little profile of Josh Wardle, creator of the web-based word game Wordle, by Daniel Victor for The New York Times:

“I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Mr. Wardle said in an interview on Monday. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.” [...]

The breakthrough, he said, was limiting players to one game per day. That enforced a sense of scarcity, which he said was partially inspired by the Spelling Bee, which leaves people wanting more, he said. [...]

While other games send notifications to your phone hoping you’ll come back throughout the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship. “It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day,” he said. “And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”

I’ve been playing Wordle most days for the past month. It’s nice to see it explode in popularity. It’s fun and simple, and the fact that you can do one and only one puzzle per day is a huge part of the charm. It’s a habit, not an addiction, and feels like a wee bit of mental calisthenics to start the day. (I’ve long done the NYT’s “Mini” crossword for the same reason.)

Don’t know why he deleted this gem from 2015.

Russell Brandom, reporting for The Verge:

An appeals court has paused one of the most consequential parts of the Epic v. Apple ruling, placing a stay on the enforcement of the injunction issued by the lower court. As a result of the stay, Apple can maintain its IAP system as the sole source of in-app payments on iOS, despite the district court’s earlier ruling that the exclusive arrangement is illegal.

The stay, issued Wednesday afternoon, does not reverse the earlier ruling but puts enforcement on hold until the appeals court can fully hear the case, a process that will likely take months.

“Apple has demonstrated, at minimum, that its appeal raises serious questions on the merits of the district court’s determination,” the ruling reads. “Therefore, we grant Apple’s motion to stay part (i) of paragraph (1) of the permanent injunction. The stay will remain in effect until the mandate issues in this appeal.”

This isn’t quite “game over”, but I believe it’s close. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s injunction mandating changes to the App Store seemed to be on shaky legal footing all along. Apple’s own lawyers, for example, seem extremely confident, writing in their motion to stay the injunction:

That injunction — which Epic has no standing to enforce — will not survive appellate review. Virtually all digital transaction platforms employ similar anti-steering provisions (Ex. C), which have been recognized as procompetitive in this novel technological context.

Reporting for The New York Times, Kellen Browning writes:

If the appeals court had not ruled, Apple on Thursday would have had to start allowing companies to include links within their apps directing customers to outside websites where they can pay for those companies’ services or subscriptions. That would have prevented Apple from taking a cut of up to 30 percent on those transactions.

I don’t think that’s true. As noted by several commentators last week, Apple’s motion to stay made clear that they intended to collect their 15–30 percent of purchases made in-app even if forced to comply with the injunction. The injunction requires only that Apple allow other forms of payment processing, including links to the web — not that they aren’t entitled to monetize the platform by charging a mandatory commission. You might say, well, wait a minute, if apps are able to use payment processors other than Apple’s IAP, wouldn’t it be complicated and difficult to figure how to account for and collect these fees? Basically, that’s Apple’s argument. From page 14 of Apple’s motion to stay the injunction:

Finally, Epic suggests that “Apple will not receive a commission” on “transactions that happen outside the app, ... on which Apple has never charged a commission.” That is not correct. Apple has not previously charged a commission on purchases of digital content via buttons and links because such purchases have not been permitted. If the injunction were to go into effect, Apple could charge a commission on purchases made through such mechanisms. See Ex. A, at 67 (“Under all [e-commerce] models, Apple would be entitled to a commission or licensing fee, even if IAP was optional”). Apple would have to create a system and process for doing so; but because Apple could not recoup those expenditures (of time and resources) from Epic even after prevailing on appeal, the injunction would impose irreparable injury.

Basically, Apple’s argument for a stay was that — as per Gonzalez Rogers’s own ruling — they were entitled to collect a commission even on digital content purchases that didn’t use IAP, but that doing so would require significant effort, and if they eventually won on appeal — which, as stated above, they expect to — they’d have no recourse to recoup the costs of that effort. The Ninth Circuit appeals court clearly agreed.

There are a lot of people who really wanted this injunction to stick, under the premise that it would force Apple to open the App Store to third-party in-app purchasing for digital content without Apple taking any cut whatsoever, exactly as Apple has done all along for in-app purchasing of physical goods. That was never going to be the case, even if this injunction had gone into effect. What was the point of the injunction then? you might ask. Good question.

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column for Bloomberg:

And so when Holmes was charged with wire fraud, it was for a mix of investor fraud and patient fraud. “Jurors heard Theranos patients testify their blood-test results falsely led them to believe they had unhealthy conditions,” but found Holmes not guilty on those counts. I don’t know why — I was not at the trial, and I certainly wasn’t in the jury room — but it seems plausible that Holmes was less personally culpable for those tests than she was for her own pitches to investors. But never mind that.

Instead, my point here is that if you do a fake blood test on a patient, you have arguably defrauded him (though Holmes was acquitted of that), but how much have you defrauded him really? Arguably the answer is quite a lot; arguably he is quite badly harmed by thinking he had a deadly disease and taking drastic steps to fight it, or thinking he did not have a deadly disease and missing the chance to fight it. But arguably the answer is $14.95, or whatever he paid for the blood test (I made that number up): You were doing fraud for money, and the money you got from any one patient is fairly small. Whereas the money you got from Betsy DeVos was $100 million.

Dithering is back after the holiday break. If you’re not listening, you’re missing out. Best $5/month you’ll ever spend, trust me.

Tom Parsons has a good interview with Gary Geaves, VP of acoustics at Apple, providing some insight into the design of AirPods 3:

Everything points to Apple taking sound quality very seriously with the AirPods 3, and all of its modern-day audio products for that matter, and the recent launches of Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless and (in a slightly different way) Spatial Audio point to a real push towards higher audio quality. But there’s a catch, as far as I can see it — a bottle-neck that’s been preventing real qualitative leaps in the sound of wireless headphones essentially since wireless headphones came into being. I’m talking about Bluetooth, of course, which almost all wireless headphones, including AirPods, rely upon and which doesn’t have the data rate for hi-res or even lossless audio. I ask Geaves whether the use of Bluetooth is holding back his hardware and stifling sound quality.

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and ... I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

A rare exception to Betteridge’s Law. I sincerely hope Apple has something proprietary in the works, perhaps for AirPods Pro 2.

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Mark Gurman’s lede sentence for his Bloomberg column this week:

After a modest set of device launches in 2021, Apple Inc. is set for a stronger 2022 — with new iPhones, AirPods and potentially a VR headset.

New M1 iMacs in May: almost universally hailed; nothing like them available for PCs. Apple has simply pantsed Intel and AMD, not just on performance-per-watt but performance, period.

iPad Pros with M1 in May: almost universally hailed, nothing like them for Android. (New iPad Mini in September, too.)

iPhones 13 in September: still the best phones in the world; camera better than ever.

Apple Watch Series 7 in October: Series 6 was undeniably the best smart watch on the market, and Apple made something altogether better: bigger screen, significantly better battery life.

14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max: I can’t even.

New third-generation AirPods in October, and hell, they even released a new Apple TV with a good remote control this year. Calling 2021 a “modest” year for Apple device launches is just obstinately cranky. If 2021 wasn’t a great year for new Apple hardware, what year was?

Kelly Evans, writing last month for CNBC:

This may seem like a comical thing to say when Apple is about to potentially sell 40 million iPhones this holiday season, according to Wedbush. But the iPhone is in its sunset years. It has maybe the rest of this decade left before it’s put out to pasture. And all the buzz now is over Apple’s upcoming goggles.

VR headsets will never replace phones. I highly doubt AR glasses ever will either. The iPhone is like the Mac — a 38-year-old platform that is selling better than ever — here to stay.

Bob Lefsetz:

We haven’t had a movie that’s captured the zeitgeist like this since Network. And that may be a better movie, but it’s not as good of a snapshot of life in these United States and the media business.

Do you feel alone? Is life confusing? Does it make no sense? Do you not even recognize our country? Then Don’t Look Up is for you. The truth is we’re shown the fiction every damn day that the center is holding. The media business functions like it’s still the twentieth century while it might as well be the twenty-third. The internet came along and blew the old world apart. It democratized the country. I’m not talking about DEMOCRACY, but democratization. Now everybody has a voice, like the feed of comments scrolling down the images in this picture. Everybody’s got a hater, EVERYBODY! Hell, they want to take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. We’ve become unmoored and the distance has become too far for the rope to be thrown to reconnect us.

See also Frank Oz:

I just do not get it. Someone does something so daring & funny & needed as Don’t Look Up from Netflix and it’s being given mixed & negative reviews! What???!!! It’s our Dr. Strangelove for today! “We really did have it all, didn’t we?” Those words need to be imbedded in our souls!

Bryan Curtis, writing for The Ringer:

One of the coolest things about John Madden is that he was an academic. It was a brief run, but still. In 1979, after Madden quit as head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, to teach an extension course called “Man to Man Football.” Madden’s students had watched football on TV. Now, they wanted to understand how it worked.

Professor Madden stood in front of a board that was like the Telestrator he later used on TV. Madden drew X’s and O’s and carefully studied his students’ faces. “I wanted to see at what point I lost ’em,” he told me years later. Madden was trying to find the most simple way to explain a complex game. He was converting passive football fans into smart fans. For the next 30 years, Madden performed the same trick on TV every week.

See also:

• David Roth at Defector: “Every Sport Could Use a John Madden”.
• Where to watch Fox’s documentary All Madden.

Gina Kolata and Anna P. Kambhampaty, reporting for The New York Times:

Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, noted on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that many new infections, especially in people who are vaccinated and boosted, result in no symptoms or mild symptoms, making the absolute number of cases less important than it was for previous versions of the virus.

“As you get further on and the infections become less severe, it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases,” Dr. Fauci said.

That advice is in keeping with what many epidemiologists have said all along. Despite the daily drumbeat of case counts, the number of positive tests has never been a perfect indicator of the course of the epidemic.

The New York Times itself needs to take this advice to heart. Over the weekend they published a scaremongering story about rising cases in Puerto Rico, but as Nate Silver pointedly observed, only 13 paragraphs into the story did they mention that only 317 people — on an island with 3 million people — were hospitalized for COVID. What’s going on right now in Puerto Rico is a vaccine triumph.

From BlackBerry’s OS services FAQ:

As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022. As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality.

I wonder how many people are still hanging on to old BlackBerry phones. At one point, they truly had a cult following.

It’s also worth noting that there are seemingly no significant Android phones with hardware keyboards. Like none. The iPhone all-screen form factor with an on-screen software keyboard has completely won out.