Smartphones

Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones →

Brian X. Chen of NYT:

What Apple is acknowledging is a power management technique in which the iPhone scales back processing power to keep the device running for longer when its battery health is low. Lithium ion batteries have a limited number of charge “cycles” before they can no longer be recharged properly. Apple’s website says the battery loses about 20 percent of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles.

In other words, if your iPhone is beginning to run out of battery capacity, these slowdowns might kick in to keep it running for longer or prevent it from shutting down unexpectedly.

This isn't a ploy to get old iPhone customers to upgrade. On the contrary, this is an engineering decision made to keep your old iPhones running longer.

Engineering-wise, I think Apple made the right decision. But user experience-wise, I definitely think Apple needs to better communicate these limitations of lithium ion technology, especially when an iPhone customer's battery has degraded past a certain threshold.

Every iPhone customer should know the cheapest solution is to replace the battery through Apple for $79.

Industry Trends Tech Strategy

Rumor: Apple to Converge iOS, macOS Apps →

Rene Ritchie:

For Microsoft, shifting to universal apps was a way to shed legacy baggage and encourage support for post-PC devices. For Google, bringing Android apps to Chrome let them tap into native functionality and performance.

For Apple, it lets the massive iOS platform help pull the Mac platform forward.

If true, this would be another classic case of Apple copying an idea where that others have failed to execute.

It's a brilliant idea but the success or failure of this type of move would come down to the nitty gritty details that will affect iOS/macOS developers.

Smartphones Reviews

Two Weeks with iPhone X

Whenever a new technology or big redesign comes along, reactions tend to split between two types of people:

  1. Those who like things just the way they are.
  2. Those who embrace change.

Those in the first group, Apple introduced the iPhone 8. It's for those who like the familiarity and comfort of the same hardware design since 2014. It's for those who want the same iPhone, but better.

The iPhone X is for iPhone customers in the second group. Those who are happy in the Apple ecosystem but are eager for something new.

After using the iPhone X for two weeks, I'd like to share some of my experiences for those who are considering it and highlight some details you probably missed.

Read More

Industry Trends

Technology is like Fashion →

Benedict Evans brilliantly draws parallels between technology and fashion:

There's a common idea that in some way fashion designers get together in a room and decide what the fashion will be next year. That's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding. Rather, they propose what might fit the zeitgeist. Sometimes that's incremental and sometimes it's a radical break - sometimes the pendulum needs to swing from one extreme to another. Sometimes they get it wrong, but when they get it right it captures an age. The New Look proposed that people wanted to move on from the clothes of wartime austerity, and from austerity itself, and that this was a good way to do it, and Dior was right.

I'm reminded of these kinds of shifts when thinking about Facebook and how much it can change behaviours - about how much it can decide what the new thing will be. After all, social media has now moved far past the point that it serves any kind of purely utilitarian purpose. There was a time when instant messaging or the asymmetric feed were simply better person-to-person mechanics than email (as one could argue that Slack is now). Now, though, we're shifting around at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, experimenting with different ways to explore and express our personality and our needs, and so, in a sense, of the zeitgeist. Many of these trends have also expressed the same sense of a pendulum - we swung from the chaos of MySpace to the structured order of Facebook, and then swung again to the fun and exuberance and creativity of Snap (or at any rate that Snap aspires to have). But Snap of course is not the only one - sitting on top of the smartphone, which is itself a social platform, there are dozens of apps and experiences, from GIF keyboards to live streaming apps to animoji, all trying to capture a little piece of Maslow. Social is pop culture. […]

Indeed, when something becomes fashionable, it will inevitably become unfashionable - "no-one goes there anymore - it's too crowded". The zeitgeist changes both of itself and because of your success. So the very fact that any social media company has found a behaviour that people want means that at some point they'll stop wanting it. People stopped wearing the new look, they stopped wearing miniskirts, and they stopped wearing punk. There is always a pendulum.

Technology

We usually imagine that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads an inventor towards a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people or ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors.

—Jon Gertner
Smartphones Tech Ideas

Open Letter to Apple: Sharing Priceless Photos…in Full Quality

Hey Craig [Federighi],

The iPhone is the best and most popular camera on the planet…yet sharing photos & videos in full quality with friends & family is so hard! I wish sharing full-quality photos/videos was as easy as sending stickers to a group chat in iMessage.

I was recently on a trip to Hawaii with a dozen of my childhood friends. 10 of us had iPhones and 2 had Samsungs. We’re all taking photos, with plenty of candid shots, great group shots, and just living the moment. But when we wanted to share each other's best photos on Facebook, we were faced with several options that all have downsides:

  • Send over iMessage — but then everyone receives a downscaled version of each photo and video.

  • Send via AirDrop — (my Samsung friends were getting a jealous about this, lol) but AirDrop assumes all phones are unlocked and within bluetooth range, which isn't always the case. It forces us to take ourselves out of the moment just to make sure all our iPhones are unlocked and ready to accept the AirDrop.

  • Share folders via Dropbox or Google Photos — but not everyone has an account on either of those.

  • Use iCloud Photo Sharing — but not everyone has that enabled. And even if I send them a link to the album, photos/videos are downscaled to lower quality.

I take pride in the quality of photos I take with my iPhone! It’s a shame though that with all these priceless group photos on our phones, we either have to take ourselves out of the moment to coordinate an AirDrop with everyone, or we have to settle with downscaled versions of photos that are meant to last a lifetime.

I feel that of all the companies in the world, Apple is the only company that could solve this elegantly. Hope you take this into consideration!

-Mel

Smartwatches Tech Ideas

"A small-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator, and a Phone" →

Horace Dediu on the possibility of the Apple Watch standing on its own one day:

I think this too is inevitable. The technology trajectories are easy enough to plot. Apple has invested enormously in the silicon that goes inside the Watch and has taken it to new levels of connectivity with LTE, 85% faster WiFi, and a 70% faster processor; all with 50% better power efficiency.

These enable independent voice entry, Siri everywhere, Find My Friends, Maps, music streaming. These breakthroughs are only possible with a new W2 processor which is more powerful than the first iPhone processors.

This comparison is apt: the Watch is effectively stealing usage from the iPhone. At first it took alerts, timekeeping, and basic messaging away. Now it’s taking basic phone calls and music and maybe maps.

It’s fitting therefore to remember how the iPhone was launched; as a tentpole troika: A wide-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone. Today the new Watch is a small-screen iPod, an Internet Communicator and a Phone.

So not only is the Series 3 Watch more powerful than the original iPhone but it is also poetically capable of the same tentpole jobs. But it’s not just a miniature iPhone. It has a new, completely orthogonal attack on non-consumption and market creation: fitness and health. This is a key point. The iPhone was born a phone but grew up to be something completely unprecedented, unforeseen by its creators and, frankly, undescribable in the language of 2007.

The Watch was born a timepiece but it is traversing through the early iPhone and pulling in a new direction all of its own. The fact that we are talking about “Resting Rate”, “Arrhythmia” and “Atrial fibrillation” at a timekeeping launch event indicates that new behaviors will follow and so will the language we’ll use to describe this child-like product once it grows up.

Smartwatches Tech Life

Finally upgraded my first-gen Apple Watch to the new Series 3 with LTE and holy shit, Siri is instantaneous. It even launches third-party apps quickly!

This totally changes the way I think about my Apple Watch. It's no longer just a fitness tracker and notifications hub for my iPhone; it's becoming a voice assistant and computer on the wrist.