Apple Report Card, Early 2024
So, lets take a peek behind the ol’ curtain here at icecano dot com. I’ve got a drafts folder on my laptop—which for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment—is named “on deck”, and when I come across something that might be a blog post but isn’t yet, I make a new file and toss it in. Stray observations, links, partially-constructed jokes, whatever. A couple lifetimes back, these probably would have just been tweets? Instead, I kind of let them simmer in the background until I have something to do with them. For example, this spent two months as a text file containing the only the phrase “that deranged rolling stone list”. I have a soft rule that after about three months they get moved to another folder named “never mind.”
And so, over the last couple of months that drafts pile had picked up a fair number of stray Apple-related observations. There’s been a lot going on! Lawsuits, the EU, chat protocols, shenanigans galore. So I kept noting down bits and bobs, but no coherent takes or anything. There was no structure. Then, back in February, Six Colors published their annual “Apple Report Card”.
Every year for the last decade or so, SixColors has done an “Apple Report Card”, where they poll a panel on a variety of Apple-related topics and get a sense of how the company is doing, or at least perceived as doing. This year was: Apple in 2023: The Six Colors report card . There are a series of categories, where the panel grades the company on an A-F scale, and adds commentary as desired.
The categories are a little funny, because they make a lot of sense for a decade ago but aren’t quite what I’d make them in 2024, but having longitudinal data is more interesting than revising the buckets. And it’s genuinely interesting to see how the aggregate scores have changed over the years.
And, so, I think, aha, there’s the structure, I can wedge all these japes into that shape, have a little fun with it. Alert readers will note this was about when I hurt my back, so wasn’t in shape to sit down a write a longer piece for a while there, so the lashed-together draft kinda floated along. Finally, this week, I said to myself, I said, look, just wrap that sucker up and post it, it’s not like there’s gonna be any big Apple news this week!
Let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news, and then let’s go ahead and add a category up front so we can talk about the antitrust lawsuit, I guess?
The Antitrust Lawsuit, I Guess: F
This has been clearly coming for a while, as the antitrust and regulatory apparatus continues to slowly awaken from its long slumber.
At first glance, I have a very similar reaction to this as I had to the Microsoft Antritrust thing back in the 90s, in that:
- This action is long overdue
- The company in question should have seen this coming and easily dodged, but instead they’re sucking claw to the face
- The DOJ has their attention pointed all the wrong things, and then the legal action is either gonna ricochet off or cause more harm than good. They actually mention the bubble colors in the filing, for chrissakes. Mostly they seem determined to go after the things people actually like about Apple’s gear?
But this is all so much dumber than last time, mostly because Microsoft wasn’t living in a world where the Microsoft lawsuit had already happened. This was so, so avoidable; a little performative rule changes, cut some prices, form a few industry working groups, maybe start a Comics Code Authority, whatever. Instead, Apple’s entire response to the whole situation has been somewhere between a little kid refusing to leave the toy store mixed with an old guy yelling “it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!” at the Arby’s drive through. I’m not sure I can think of another example where a company blew their own legs off because deep down they really don’t believe that regulators are real. That said, the entire post-dot-com Big Tech world only exists because the entire regulatory system has been hibernating out of sight. Well, it’s roused now, baby.
You know the part at the start of that Mork Movie where The Martian keeps getting into streetfights, but then keeps getting himself out of trouble because he knows some obscure legal technicality, but then the judge that looks exactly like Kurt Vonnegut says something like “I don’t care, you hit a cop and you’re going down,” so that the rest of the movie can happen? I think Apple is about to learn some cool life lessons as a janitor, is what I’m saying.
I may have let that metaphor get away from me. Let’s move on, I’m sure there aren’t any other sections here where the recent news will cause me to have to revise from future-tense to past-tense!
Mac: A-
Honestly, as a product line, the mac is probably as coherent and healthy as it’s ever been. Now that they’re fully moved over to their own processors and no longer making “really nice Intel computers”, we’re starting to see some real action.
A line of computers where they all have the same “guts” and the form factor is an aesthetic & functional choice, but not a performance one, is something no one’s ever done before? It seems like they’re on the verge of getting into an annual or annual-and-a-half regular upgrade cycle like the iOS devices have, and that’ll really be a thing when it lands.
Well, all except The Mac Pro, which still feels like a placeholder?
Are they expensive? Yes they are. Pound-for-pound, they’re not as expensive as they seem, because they don’t make anything on the lower-end of the spectrum, and so a lot of complaints about price have the same tenor as complaining that BMWs cost more than an entry-level Toyota Camry, where you just go “yeah, man, they absolutely do.” Then I go look at what it costs to upgrade to a usable amount of RAM and throw my hands up in disgust. How is that not the lead on the DOJ action? They want HOW much to get up to 16 gigs of RAM?
MacOS as a platform is evolving well beyond “BSD, but with a nice UI” the way it was back when it was named OS X. I’m not personally crazy about a lot of the design moves, but I’d be hard pressed to call most of them “objectively bad”, as opposed to “not to my taste”. Except for that new settings panel, that’s garbage.
All that said… actually, I’m going to finish this sentence down under “SW Quality”. I’ll meet ya down there.
iPhone: 🔥
On the one hand, the iPhone might be the most polished and refined tech product of all time. Somewhere around the iPhone 4 or 5, it was “done”; all major features were there, the form factor was locked in. And Apple kept refining, polishing. These supercomputers-in-slabs-of-glass are really remarkable.
On the other hand, that’t not what anyone means when they talk about the iPhone in 2024. Yeah, let’s talk about the App Store.
I had a whole thing here about the app store was clearly the thing that was going to summon the regulators, which I took out partly because it was superfluous now, but also because apparently it was actually the bubble colors?
There’s a lot of takes on the nature of software distribution, and what kind of device the phone is, and how the ecosystem around it should work, and “what Apple customers want.” Well, okay, I’m an Apple user. Mostly a fairly satisfied one. And you know what I want? I want the app store they fucking advertise.
Instead, I had to keep having conversations with my kids about “trick games”, and explain that no, the thing called “the Oregon trail” in the app store isn’t the game they’ve heard about, but is actually a fucking casino. I like Apple’s kit quite a bit, and I keep buying it, but never in a million years will I forgive Tim Apple for the conversations I had to keep having with them about one fucking scam app after another.
Because this is what drives me the most crazy in all the hoopla around the app stores: if it worked like they claim it works, none of this would be happening. Instead, we have bizarre and inconsistant app review, apps getting pulled after being accepted, openly predatory in-app purchases, and just scam after casino after should-be-illegal-knock-off-clone after scam.
The idea is great: Phones for people who don’t use computers as a source of self-actualization. Phones and Macs are different products, with a different deal. Part of the deal is that with the iPhone you can do “less”, but what you can do is rock solid, safe, and you don’t ever have to worry about what your mom or your kid might download on their device.
I know the deal, I signed up for that deal on purpose! I want them to hold up their side of the bargain.
Which brings me to my next point. One of the metaphors people use for iOS devices—which I think is a good one!—is that they’re more like game consoles than general purpose computers. They’re “app consoles”. And I like that, that’s a solid way of looking at the space. It’s Jobs’ “cars vs trucks” metaphor but with a slightly less-leaky abstraction.
But you know who doesn’t have these legal and developer relations problems, and who isn’t currently having their ass handed to them by the EU and the DOJ? Nintendo.
This is what kills me. You can absolutely sell a computer where every piece of software is approved by you, where you get a cut, where the store isn’t choked by garbage, where everyone is basically happy. Nintendo has been doing that for checks notes 40 years now?
Hell, Nintendo even kept the bottom from falling out of the prices by enforcing that while you could sell for any price, you had to sell the physical and digital copies at the same amount, and then left all their stuff at 60-70 bucks, giving air cover to the small guys to charge a sustainable price.
Apple and Nintendo are very similar companies, building their own hardware and software, at a slightly different angle from the rest of their industries. They both have a solid “us first, customers second, devs third” world-view. But Nintendo has maintained a level of control over their platform that Apple could only dream of. And I’m really oversimplifying here, but mostly they did this by just not being assholes? Nintendo is not a perfect company, because none of them are, but you know what? I can play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch.
In the end, Apple was so averse to games, they couldn’t even bring themselves to use Nintendo’s playbook to keep the Feds off their back.
iPad: C
I’m utterly convinced that somewhere around 1979 Steve Jobs had a vision—possibly chemically assisted—of The Computer. A device that was easy to use, fully self-contained, an appliance, not a specialist’s tool. Something kids could pick up and use.
Go dial up his keynote where he introduces the first iPad. He knows he’s dying, even if he wasn’t admitting it, and he knows this is the last “new thing” he’s going to present. The look on his face is satisfaction: he made it. The thing he saw in the desert all those years ago, he’s holding it in his hands on stage. Finally.
So, ahhhh, why isn’t it actually good for anything?
I take that back; it’s good for two things: watching video, and casual video games. Anything else… not really?
I’m continually baffled by the way the iPad just didn’t happen. It’s been fourteen years; fourteen years after the first Mac, the Mac Classic was basically over, all the stuff the Mac opened up was well in the past-tense. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that happened because the iPad existed. Maybe in a world with small laptops and big-ass phones, the iPad just doesn’t have a seat at the big-kids table?
Watch & Wearables: C
I like my watch enough that when my old one died, I bought a new one, but not so much that I didn’t have to really, really think about it.
Airpods are pretty cool, except they make my ears hurt so I stopped using them.
Is this where we talk about the Cyber Goggles?
AppleTV
Wait, which Apple TV?
AppleTV (the hardware): B
For the core use-case, putting internet video on my TV, it’s great. Great picture, the streaming never stutters, even the remote is decent now. It’s my main way to use my TV, and it’s a solid, reliable workhorse.
But look, that thing is a full-ass iPhone without a screen. It’s got more compute power than all of North America in the 70s! Is this really all we’re going to use this for? This is an old example, but the AppleTV feels like it could easily slide into being the 3rd or 2nd best game console with almost no effort, and it just… doesn’t.
AppleTV (the service): B
Ted Lasso notwithstanding, this is a service filled exclusively with stuff I have no interest in. I’m not even saying it’s bad! But a pass from me, chief.
AppleTV (the app): F
Absolute total garbage, just complete trash. I’ll go to almost any length to avoid using it.
Services: C
What’s left here?
iCloud drive? Works okay, I guess, but you’ll never convince me to rely on it.
Apple Arcade? It’s fine, other than it shouldn’t have to exist.
Apple Fitness? No opinion.
Apple News? Really subpar, with the trashiest ads I’ve seen in a while.
Apple Music? The service is outstanding, no notes. The app, however, manages to keep getting worse every OS update, at this point it’s kind of remarkable.
Apple Classical Music? This was the best you could do, really?
iTunes Match? I’m afraid to cancel. Every year I spent 15 bucks so I don’t have to learn which part of my cloud library will vanish.
There’s ones I’m not remembering, right? That’s my review of them.
Homekit: F
I have one homekit device in my house—a smart lightbulb. You can set the color temperature from the app! There is no power in the universe that would convince me to add a second.
HW Reliability: A
I don’t even have a joke about this. The hardware works. I mean, I still have to turn my mouse over to charge it, like it’s a defeated Koopa Troopa, but it charges every time!
SW Quality: D
Let me tell you a story.
For the better part of a decade, my daily driver was a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro. In that time, I’m pretty sure it ran every OS X flavor from 10.9 to 10.14; we stopped at Mojave because there was some 32-bit only software we needed for work.
My setup was this: I had the laptop itself in the center of the desk, on a little stand, with the clamshell open. On either side, I had an external monitor. Three screens, where the built-in laptop one in the middle was smaller but effectively higher resolution, and the ones on the sides were physically larger but had slightly chunkier pixels. (Eventually, I got a smokin’ deal on some 4k BenQs on Amazon, and that distinction ceased.) A focus monitor in the center for what I was working on that was generally easier to read, and then two outboard monitors for “bonus content.”
The monitor on the right plugged into the laptop’s right-side HDMI port. The monitor on the left plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports—this was the original thunderbolt when it still looked like firewire or mini-displayport—via a thunderbolt-to-mini-displayport cable. In front of the little stand, I had a wired Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad that plugged into the USB-A port on the left side. I had a wireless Apple mouse. Occasionally, I’d plug into the wired network connection with a thunderbolt-to-Cat6 adapter I kept in my equipment bag. The magsafe power connection clicked in on the left side. Four, sometimes five cables, each clicking into their respective port.
Every night, I’d close the lid, unplug the cables in a random order, and take the laptop home. The next morning, I’d come in, put the laptop down, plug those cables back in via another random order, open the lid, and—this is the important part—every window was exactly where I had left it. I had a “workspace” layout that worked for me—email and slack on the left side, web browser and docs on the right, IDE or text editor in the center. Various Finder windows on the left side pointing at the folders holding what I was working on.
I’d frequently, multiple times a week, unplug the laptop during the middle of the day, and hide over to another building, or a conference room, or the coffee shop. Sometimes I’d plug into another monitor, or a projector? Open the lid, those open windows would re-arrange themselves to what was available. It was smart enough to recognize that if there was only one external display, that was probably a projector, and not put anything on it except the display view of Powerpoint or Keynote.
Then, I’d come back to my desk, plug everything back in, open the lid, and everything was exactly where it was. It worked flawlessly, every time. I was about to type “like magic”, but that’s wrong. It didn’t work like magic, it worked like an extremely expensive professional tool that was doing the exact job I bought it to do.
My daily driver today is a 16-inch 2021 M1 MacBook Pro running, I think, macOS 12. The rest of my peripherals are the same: same two monitors, same keyboard, same mouse. Except now, I have a block of an dock on the left side of my desk for the keyboard and wired network drop.
In the nineteen months I’ve had this computer, let me tell you how many times I plugged the monitors back in and had the desktop windows in the same places they were before: Literally Never.
In fact, the windows wouldn’t even stay put when it went to sleep, much less when I closed the lid. The windows would all snap back to the central monitor, the desktops of the two side monitors would swap places. This never happened on the old rig over nearly a decade, and happens every time with the new one.
Here is what I had to do so that my email is still on the left monitor when I come back from lunch:
- I have a terminal window running
caffeinateall the time. Can’t let it go to sleep! - The cables from the two monitors are plugged into the opposite side of the computer from where they sit: the cables cross over in the back and plug into the far side
- Most damning of all, I can’t use the reintroduced HDMI port, both monitors have to be plugged in via USB-C cables. The cable on the right, which needed an adapter to turn the HDMI cable to a USB-C/Thunderbolt connection is plugged into the USB-C port right next to the HDMI port, which is collecting dust. Can I use it? No, nothing works if that port is lit up.
Please don’t @-me with your solution, I guarantee you whatever you’re thinking of I tried it, I read that article, I downloaded that app. This took me a year to determine by trial and error, like I was a victorian scientist trying to measure the refraction of the æther, and I’m not changing anything now. It’s a laptop in name only, I haven’t closed the lid or moved it in months, and I’m not going to. God help me if I need to travel for work.
I’ve run some sketchy computers, I depended on the original OEM Windows 95 for over a year. I have never, in forty years, needed to deploy a rube goldberg–ass solution like this to keep my computer working right.
And everything is like this. I could put another thousand words here about things that worked great on the old rig—scratch that, that literally still work on the old rig—that just don’t function right on the new one. The hardware is so much better, but everything about using the computer is so much worse.
Screw the chat bubbles, get the DOJ working on why my nice monitors don’t work any more.
Dev Relations: D
Absolutely in the toilet, the worst I have ever seen it. See: just about everything above this. Long-time indie “for the love of the game” mac devs are just openly talking shit at this point. You know that Trust Thermocline we got all excited about as a concept a couple years ago? Yeah, we are well below that now.
Bluntly, the DOJ doesn’t move if all the developers working on the platform are happy and quiet.
I had an iOS-based project get scrapped in part because we weren’t willing to incur the risk of giving Apple total veto power over the product; that was five or six years ago now, and things have only decayed since then.
This is a D instead of an F because I’m quite certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Environ/Social: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This category feels like one of those weird “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Grading on the curve of “silicon valley companies”, they’re doing great here. On the other hand, that bar is on the floor. Like, it’s great that they make it easy to recycle your old phones, but maybe just making it less of a problem to throw things out hasn’t really backed up to the fifth “why”, you know?
Potpurri: N/A
This isn’t a sixcolors category, but I”m not sure where to put the fact that I like my HomePod mini? It’s a great speaker!
Also, please start making a wifi router again, thanks.
What Now: ?
Originally, this all wrapped up with an observation that it’s great that the product design is firing on all cylinders and that services revenue is through the roof, but if they don’t figure out how to stop pissing off developers and various governments, things are going to get weird, but I just highlighted all that and hit delete because we’re all the way through that particular looking glass now.
Back in the 90s, there was nothing much else going on, and Microsoft was doing some openly, blatantly illegal shit. Here? There’s a lot else going on, and Apple are mostly just kinda jerks?
I think that here in 2024, if the Attorney General of the United States is inspired to redirect a single brain cell away from figuring out how to stop a racist game show host from overthrowing the government and instead towards the color of the text message bubbles on his kid’s phone, that means that Apple is Well and Truely Fucked. I think the DOJ is gonna carve into them like a swarm of coconut crabs that just found a stranded aviator.
Maybe they shoulder-roll through this, dodge the big hits, settle for a mostly-toothless consent decree. You’d be hard-pressed, from the outside, to point at anything meaningly different about Microsoft in 1999 vs 2002. But before they settled, they did a lot of stuff, put quite a few dents in the universe, to coin a phrase. Afterwards? Not a whole lot. Mostly, it kept them tied up so that they didn’t pay attention to what Google was doing. And we know that that went.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a modern case where antitrust action actually made things better for consumers. I mean, it’s great that Microsoft got slammed for folding IE into Windows, but that didn’t save Netscape, you know? And I was still writing CSS fills for IE6 a decade later. Roughing up Apple over ebooks didn’t fix anything. I’m not sure mandating that I need to buy new charge cables was solving a real problem. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure breaking up Ma Bell did much beyond make the MCI guy a whole lot of money. AT&T reformed like T2, just without the regulations.
The problem here is that it’s the fear of enforcement thats supposed to do the job, not the actual enforcement itself, but that gun won’t scare anyone if they don’t think you’ll ever fire it. (Recall, this is why the Deliverator carried a sword.) Instead, Apple’s particular brew of arrogance and myopic confidence called this all down on them.
Skimming the lawsuit, and the innumerable articles about the lawsuit, the things the DOJ complains about are about a 50/50 mix of “yeah, make them stop that right now”, and “no wait, I bought my iPhone for that on purpose!” The bit about “shapeshifting app store rules” is already an all-time classic, but man oh man do I not want the Feds to legislate iOS into android, or macOS into Windows. There’s a very loud minority of people who would never buy something from Apple (or Microsoft) on principal, and they really think every computer-like device should be forced to work like Ubuntu or whatever, and that is not what I bought my iPhone for.
I’m pessimistic that this is going to result in any actually positive change, in case that wasn’t coming through clearly. All I want is them to hold up their end of the deal they already offered. And make those upgrades cheaper. Quit trying to soak every possible cent out of every single transaction.
And let my monitors work right.
“Oh Bubbles, there’s always something wrong with you”
There’s a whole bunch of genuinely interesting stuff going on with smartphone text-based messaging lately. You’ve got stuff about interop, product design, protocols, encryption, “platform ecosystems”, vendor lock-in (good), vendor lock-in (derogatory), standards design, standards maintenance, features vs security tradeoffs, it’s quite the nexus of 21st century tech product design concerns.
However, there is also a doorbuster sale going on at the Hot Takes Outlettm.
So, I thought I would share my foolproof heuristic technique for deciding if an article is worth reading. Here is is:
If the article mentions the color of the bubbles on the iPhone in either the title or the first paragraph, it’s hot garbage.
Something about those bubbles cause otherwise sane people to become absolutely deranged.
“We want to have blue bubbles!”
“Well, sure, the good news is all you gotta do is buy an iPhone.”
“We don’t want to do that! Iphones suck!”
The sheer entitlement of folks to want someone to sell them something, but only on their terms. Like, no? You need to find something valuable to fill your life with.
There’s some really interesting points about encryption and security? But those people don’t lead with the bubble color.
So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish
Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.
I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.
So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.
It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?
It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.
YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?
And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.
Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.
Feature Request: Sick Mode for Apple Fitness
As previously mentioned I got pretty sick in October. I’m also a daily Apple Watch wearer, which means there were two solid weeks there where I didn’t close my rings.
As such, I have a feature request: you should be able to tell Apple Fitness you’re sick.
To be clear, this isn’t because I want a way to cheat my streak back into existence. I mean, I had a pretty good streak going, and it’s irritating to reset that count, but that’s not the point.
While I was sick, it was deeply irritating to get those passive agressive “motivating” messages in the morning about “You closed one ring yesterday, bet you can get them all today, go get ‘em!” No man, leave me alone, I’m dying here. There’s a way to delve into the settings and turn off the “coach notifications”, but I was not up to that. I needed one button I could mash; I’m sick, I’ll let you know when I’m better.
Then, once I got better, all my stats and graphs and whatnot have these huge gaps in them. I don’t want to skip those or leave those out, but I would love to have a way to annotate those with a note: “this is when you had covid, ignore this”. Maybe a different color? Yellow for sick, instead of the usual red, green, blue.
But what really frustrates me is whats going on now. Apple Fitness does this genuinely cool and useful thing where it’ll compute long-term trends and averages, and tell you about it when they change significantly. And so for the last week I keep getting updates about “you have a new trend!” and then it shows me how many more steps I’ve taken this week versus the average over October.
And no shit, Apple Fitness! I basically didn’t stand up for ten days there, I sure hope I’m taking more steps now. What would be valuable is to know what my current scores are versus before I got sick. Am I back to where I was? I should be back to where I was in september, am I?
And there’s no way to ask that question. There’s no way to tell it what it needs to know to figure that out itself.
We’re living in the Plague Years, Apple. Let us tell the computers about it.
Ridiculous Fishing!
Holy smokes! Ridiculous Fishing is back in a new and updated form in Apple Arcade.
The original was a game my kids and I played constantly a decade ago. I still get the background music from the first zone stuck in my head from time to time.
One of the most irritating things about the Apple iOS app store ecosystem is the way apps will just rot, and as the platform moves forward apps that can’t or wont support regular updates will fall away and disappear. (To be clear, I understand why Apple requires developers to keep their apps up to date, I just disagree.. There’s no reason why an app from 2014 shouldn’t be able to run just fine on the same platform in 2023. Heck, with the increase in power of a modern iPhone’s processor, the OS and app store could provision an entire fully-sandboxed VM running the older version of iOS the games were designed for. But I digress.)
However, something Apple is very good at is announcing that they’ve fixed all the problems with a previous product or service, without ever actually admitting that the problems existed in the first place. In a lot of ways, Apple Arcade feels like an apology for how the app store treats games in the first place.
One of the fun things about the service is the number of primal app store games that have come back to life with a + version in Arcade—Osmos, Angry Birds, Stardew Valley, Ridiculous Fishing—it’s like someone looked at my iPad’s homescreen in 2013.
In any case, I’m glad it’s back.
Of course, its not just a “remaster”, but a full-remake, with new graphics, new game modes, more fish. Plus! The updated version replaces the original spoof social network “byrdr” with the even funner “Bik Bok”.
I’ve very much enjoyed re-exploring the old map, re-discovering the weird fishes, and having the same argument I had with my kid before about which guns are the best.
No Contact Non Tracing
Woke up on Friday to a notification that California had quietly shut down their participation in the Apple-Google smartphone-based contact tracing system.
Had to imagine a better microcosm of the fractal nature of the Disaster of the Twenties: faced with a massive epistemological, social, and political catastrophe, Silicon Valley declares that they have a technological solution! Which is then rendered inert by a different subset of epistemological, social, and political issues.
Other than consuming battery in the background, I never got any exposure warnings from that system. Did anyone? Based on tne near-total lack of coverage of the shutdown over the weekend, I’m guessing the oly value this thing provided was some self-congratulatory press releases a few years ago. What a waste.
Q1 2023 Links Clearinghouse
Wherein I go through the tabs I’ve left open on my iPhone over the last couple of months.
After Dark Sky shut down, I kicked myself for not taking more screenshots of the App’s gorgeous and thoughtful UI and data visualizations. Fortunatly, someone else thought ahead beter than I did:
https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Why yes, is IS a dating sim that does your Taxes! “Suitable for singles without dependents”. Incredible.
“The stupidity of AI.” Finally starting to see some blowback on all the VC-fueled AI hype.
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.” Came for the Metaverse shade, stayed for the subtle implications that American suburban life is probably worse.
The thing i am struck by the most from the current “tech stuff”; zuck’s metaverse, everything out of open ai, musk’s twitter, “ai” “art”, etc, etc, is how _artless_ it all is. Just devoid of any sort of taste or creativity, overcooked fast food pretending to be a meal. Plus for that kind of money any of them could have improved the world so much they’d get a holiday named after them, but no.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html
Back in the runup to Star Trek Beyond, Darrich Franich wrote a series at Entertainment Weekly covering all the Trek movies. Probably the best writing on those movies I’ve ever read, the best one might the piece on Insurrection, a very, very silly movie that doesn’t know it:
https://ew.com/article/2016/06/24/star-trek-insurrection-age-hollywood/
Recently discovered this clip of two icons of my childhood colliding: Isaac Asimov on the original (daytime) Letterman show?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=365kJOsFd3w
Finally, XKCD’s Randal Munroe’s grandfathers series of “Disfrustrating Puzzles”:
Break; considered confusing
Currently filled with joy and a deep sense of fellowship about this toot from James Thompson:
To be clear: Thompson is a long-time mac indy mac developer, author of Pcalc and the much-missed DragThing. He is, without a doubt, a Good Programmer.
I love this toot because it’s such a great example of how we all actually learn things in this craft—we aren’t taught so much as we accrete bit of lore over time. Everthing I took an actual class in was obsolete by the turn of the century, so instead I have a head full of bits of techniques, cool facts, “things that worked that one tine”—lore. We can’t always remember where we picked this stuff up, and often it’s half-remembered, context-free. It’s not funny that he was wrong, it’s amusing that he knew something that didn’t exist. How many cool tricks do I know that don’t exist, I wonder?
Mainly this caught my eye, though, because `break` is a statement I try to avoid as much as possible. Not that break isn’t valid—is is!—but I’ve learned the hard way that if I find myself saying “and now I’ll break out of the loop” (or, lord help me, continue,) I am absolutely about to write a horrible bug. I actually made a bad decision about five decisions back, my flow control is all messed up, and instead of breaking I need to take a deep breath and go for a walk while I think about what the right way to approach the problem was.
This is the flip side to lore—I think we all have areas where we havn’t collected enough lore, and for whatever reason we avoid instinctually so we don’t get ourselves into trouble.
Windows layer cake
Really enjoyed this rundown of “old” (vestigial) UI elements hiding in back rooms of Windows 11.
Windows is frequently a deeply irritating system to use, but no one else has ever tried to do what they do—support backwards compatability across a family of operating systems effectively forever.
I’d read 10,000 words easy on all of the UI throwbacks listed in that article; I’d love to know how much “old code” is still running in Windows 11 under the covers. Sometimes backwards-compatable “just” means not taking the old stuff out!
I suspect that a lot of “other operating systems” ability to move forward and cut backwards compatibility comes from know that Microsoft is providing air cover for long term support. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty incredible that software written in the mid 80s for DOS can run basically fine on the new PC I bought in 2019. Unlike, say, the museum of older macs and iPhones keep around.
Mostly, though, i’m just deeply, deeply charmed that moreicons.dll is still shipping on new computers 30 years later.
Happy Trails, Dark Sky
Dark Sky has been my default go-to weather app on my phone for just about a decade now. I loved it.
The genius behind it was the realization that weather forecasting is actually very accurate as long as you don’t go too far into the future or cover too large an area. “What’s the temperature going to be next week?” is a hard question and the answer is going to be wrong. “Will it rain at my house in the next hour?” is still a hard question, but you can get the answer dead on.
Dark Sky started as pretty much just answering “do I need to take a rain jacket with me?”. When it worked, it was like sorcery, frequently correctly predicting the time rain would start down to the minute.
They branched out into longer term “traditional” forecasts first as a separate web app at forecast.io, and then folded that into the main Dark Sky App. They also has a spectacular API for getting weather data that I used on a project a couple lifetimes ago.
But, as these things go, Apple bought them out back in 2020, rolled the fundamental functionality into the new-for-iOS 16 weather app, and then today turned off the backend for the Dark Sky App itself.
So, okay. I know nothing about the financial or personal situations of anyone at Dark Sky, but I have no doubts of any kind that accepting a buy out from Apple in the dark days of mid-2020 was the right call. And separate from the back end tech, the new iOS 16 weather app was a triumphant story for other reasons. Happy endings all around!
But.
The new weather app is fine, its FINE, but it’s very Apple-built-in-app-y. The Dark Sky app hd this fantastic unique design. Cool layout, distinctive symbols, subtle animations, a holdover from the days when iOS apps had a little more zip to them than they do now. I’ll miss it.
And, you know, there’s something sad any time a small company that makes one really nicely made valuable thing that people love decide that the right thing to do is take the buy out. I’m sure I’d make the same call in their place, and it’s easy to over-signify one company deciding to cash out, but— I’m still going to miss that app I used every day.,