512 Pixels

This week on Connected:

Stephen was right, Angela is gone, Myke has a theory and Federico is automating his TV.

We get into Apple Retail, the iOS 12.2 beta and talk about the future of AirPods.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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Not great. Not great at all.

As I foretold during our yearly Connected predictions,¹ there has been a major change to Apple’s leadership webpage: Angela Ahrendts is leaving Apple.

Here’s a bit from Apple PR:

“I want to thank Angela for inspiring and energizing our teams over the past five years,” said Tim Cook. “She has been a positive, transformative force, both for Apple’s stores and the communities they serve. We all wish her the very best as she begins a new chapter.”

“The last five years have been the most stimulating, challenging and fulfilling of my career. Through the teams’ collective efforts, Retail has never been stronger or better positioned to make an even greater contribution for Apple,” said Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president of Retail. “I feel there is no better time to pass the baton to Deirdre, one of Apple’s strongest executives. I look forward to watching how this amazing team, under her leadership, will continue to change the world one person and one community at a time.”

Ahrendts is in the press fairly regularly for her role at Apple. Just a couple of weeks ago, Vogue Business had a feature about her and her work, which included a massive overhaul of Apple’s stores, and overseeing the company’s 70,000 retail employees.

To pick up the mantle, Apple is turning to Deirdre O’Brien, who has been Apple’s SVP of People for some time. Again, Apple PR:

Apple today announced that Deirdre O’Brien is taking on new responsibilities for Apple’s retail and online stores in an expanded role as senior vice president of Retail + People, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. After five transformative years leading the company’s retail and online stores, Angela Ahrendts plans to depart Apple in April for new personal and professional pursuits.

In her expanded role, Deirdre will bring her three decades of Apple experience to lead the company’s global retail reach, focused on the connection between the customer and the people and processes that serve them. She will continue to lead the People team, overseeing all People-related functions, including talent development and Apple University, recruiting, employee relations and experience, business partnership, benefits, compensation, and inclusion and diversity.

“At Apple, we believe our soul is our people, and Deirdre understands the qualities and strengths of our team better than anyone,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “For more than three decades, she has helped keep Apple focused on serving customers and enriching lives. She’s an exceptional leader and she’s been a vital partner to our retail teams around the world since the very beginning. I am thrilled to work alongside Deirdre in her new role, and I know our 70,000 retail employees will be, too.”

From where I sit, this announcement feels unexpected, and I have a lot of questions about how a single person can oversee Apple’s HR and Retail operations.

Sure, Retail is the company’s largest division, but I am concerned Retail is losing a full seat at the table, so to speak. Not everyone agrees, though, and it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

However surprising this move may seem, part of me is glad to see it. While Apple’s stores are more beautiful than ever, they have become chaotic and overwhelming. Part of that is due to Apple’s growth in the decade since I hung up my Mac Genius t-shirt, but I think a lot of it has to do with the changes Ahrendts and her team put into place. I think Apple has gone too far down the form-over-function route in its Stores. A Genius Bar may have been bulky, but it worked to gather people more effectively than a bunch of uncomfortable backless chairs in the “Genius Grove,” for example.

I’m not saying all of Ahrendts’ changes were bad, or that she ruined Apple Retail. I just think some of the changes made under her leadership seem at odds at what customers want from the Apple Store.

My assumption is that under O’Brien, Apple Retail will stay more or less the same, but I do hope that with new leadership comes a reexamination of what makes Apple Stores great, and what makes them frustrating for so many.

But hey, she has to be better than John Browett, right?

After rolling out the new label on some Android phones, it looks like the iPhone is next in line. Here’s Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Devices in certain areas are displaying a “5G E” icon instead of LTE, but as the “E” suggests, this is not real 5G. No iPhone that exists right now is capable of connecting to a 5G network, nor is AT&T’s network 5G at this time.

The “E” stands for Evolution, a new brand name AT&T is using for some parts of its LTE network. According to AT&T, 5G Evolution reaches a peak theoretical wireless speed of 400Mb/s, which does not match 5G data transfer speeds and is in fact the same as traditional LTE speeds.

AT&T claims that this a step on the road to 5G, but to be clear, it’s just a sticker on top of the same LTE we’ve all been using for a while.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Here’s a bit from a 2012 article on Macworld, written by Lex Friedman:

The 4G label in iOS 5.1 instead reflects AT&T’s perspective, namely that the carrier’s HSPA+ network (also known as Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) qualifies as 4G technology. Carriers tend to refer to both HSPA+ and LTE—the cellular network technology built into the new iPad—as 4G, though the inner workings of the technologies are vastly different.

Thus, because the iPhone 4S on AT&T’s 3G network can achieve what both Apple and the carrier describe as 4G-style speeds, the status bar now shows the 4G label whenever you’re connected to AT&T’s HSPA+ network. Again, though, your iPhone 4S isn’t any faster than it was last week; this label change falls somewhere between semantics and marketing.

Sigh.

Don’t miss Austin Evans’ recent video on this:

Hamza Shaban at The Washington Post, writing about a study that looked at the effects of leaving Facebook:

In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

What’s more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.

I left the site last year, and while I do feel disconnected from some people I used to only keep tabs on via Facebook, in reality, most of those weren’t real friendships anyway. It’s more work to stay connected without it, but I do feel better without Facebook in my life.

That’s not to say I’ve left it all behind. I do have an active Instagram account that I quite enjoy. Instagram feels like one of the few public places left on the web that hasn’t been completely ruined yet, but I know its days are probably numbered.

Of course, many find Instagram to be depressing. If you follow a bunch of fancy traveling influencers, it make your life seem dull. The trick is not to do that.

This week, we have a fun one:

Current Mac notebook computers and Apple wired and wireless keyboards (except Magic Keyboard) have Liquid Contact Indicators (LCI) to help determine if these products have been exposed to liquid.

Benefits under the manufacturer’s warranty are in addition to rights provided by consumer law. You can learn more at Apple Products and Consumer Law Rights.

This week on Mac Power Users:

Christina Warren, tech commentator, podcaster and Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft drops by to talk about using a Mac at work, the state of PowerPoint and how to get the most out of tech when traveling the world.

Christina is the best, and it was great to hear about what she’s up to these days.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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1992 Apple was … different.

Apple, in a statement to Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week. We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.

We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix. We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible. We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us.

Apparently, after the update comes out next week, older versions will be blacklisted from using Group FaceTime. That’s the right call.

This week on Connected, a couple of topics that are real bummers, and my very shiny blue iPhone:

Apple and Facebook try to outdo each other in who can have the more terrible week, and Stephen test drives the iPhone XR.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.
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Apple Support with a question and answer for the ages:

We have just set up a firewall on our network. Now I can’t access our Filemaker Pro Server over TCP/IP. In order to gain access to the server over TCP/IP, our network administrator needs to know what “port” the Filemaker Pro Server uses. Can you tell me what TCP/IP port number is used by the FileMaker Pro Server?

The Filemaker Pro Server, uses the TCP/IP port number of 5003.

Apple:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2019 first quarter ended December 29, 2018. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $84.3 billion, a decline of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $4.18, up 7.5 percent. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Revenue from iPhone declined 15 percent from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19 percent. Services revenue reached an all-time high of $10.9 billion, up 19 percent over the prior year. Revenue from Mac and Wearables, Home and Accessories also reached all-time highs, growing 9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, and revenue from iPad grew 17 percent.

This makes the quarter Apple’s second-best ever, and the company now has 1.4 billion active devices in the world.

Don’t miss Jason’s chart mania and full transcript of the earnings call. John Voorhees at MacStories, with a reminder (emphasis mine) of the change to Apple’s results this time around:

In the year-ago quarter (Q1 2018), Apple earned $88.3 billion in revenue. During that quarter Apple sold 77.3 million iPhones, 13.2 million iPads, and 5.1 million Macs. As announced on Apple’s last earnings call, the company did not report Q1 2019 unit sales for any of its products.

In an interview with Reuters, Tim Cook said that prices in some markets will come down:

When you look at foreign currencies and then particularly those markets that weakened over the last year those (iPhone price) increases were obviously more. And so as we’ve gotten into January and assessed the macroeconomic condition in some of those markets we’ve decided to go back to more commensurate with what our local prices were a year ago in hopes of helping the sales in those areas.

The Six Colors boys make a good point:

Apple’s also rejiggered its categories a bit starting this quarter. “Other Products” is gone, replaced by “Wearables, Home and Accessories”. Which, this quarter, is pretty much as big a business as the Mac.

— Six Colors liveblog (@sixcolorsevent) January 29, 2019