This week on Download, Google held its annual developer conference. It brought a bunch of news about Assistant, Home and Photos, and plenty of AI! Meanwhile, the WannaCry attack exploits old software to bring PCs around the world to a grinding halt.
Guest Starring: Devindra Hardiwar and Russell Ivanovic
My thanks to our sponsor this week:
I love how typography trends have changed over the years and really enjoyed Dr. Drang’s post about this has affected textbook design over the years.
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld, bouncing off of Steven Levy’s recent feature about Apple’s new campus:
As detailed by Levy, Apple Park is an Apple product through and through. The company took great care to make design decisions, and create custom hardware, at many key points—from the massive glass sheets that required the building of a gigantic furnace, to the toilets, to the handles on the doors, to the pizza boxes in the cafeteria. It’s a one-off product designed by Apple for itself, yes, but it seems to have received the same attention to detail as any other major product launch.
Snell continues:
(In fact, reading Levy’s story, I wondered to myself if some of Apple’s product sluggishness over the last couple of years might be somehow related to the design energy going into the new campus. Probably not, but you never know. I’m more concerned about the hit in productivity the company may experience when it has to move so many of its employees to new workspaces and allow them some time to adapt to their surroundings.)
In looking back over the last 18 or more months, it’s not hard to think Apple has been disctracted by something. I don’t think Apple Park is all of it, but I think it may be part of a puzzle we’ll never see.
Whatever the case may be there — and we could be reading Apple all wrong here — there’s no doubt this new campus has Jobs’ fingerprints all over it.
MacMuzeum is an incredible collection of Apple hardware that may be up for sale soon. I really hope it goes to a good home.
This week, we look back at how to look for files:
As the name implies, invisible files and folders are those that cannot be seen in the Finder, whether they reside on the desktop or in a window. Invisible files and folders have an internal flag set that tells the Finder not to display them.
A file or folder is typically invisible for a reason. Deleting or modifying one of them may cause unpredictable results. Unless you know the outcome of your modification, you should not make changes to an invisible file or folder.
Myke Hurley, on our company blog:
As you may know, Relay FM is hosting a meetup at WWDC this year, but our tickets sold out really quickly. But for those of you that may have missed out, we have some great news!
We are working with women@wwdc and James Dempsey and the Breakpoints to host a mini Relay FM meetup at their App Camp for Girls benefit on Wednesday, June 7.
At this event there will be a special Relay FM meet-and-greet section inside the venue. So grab your tickets now, and be sure to get there at 7 PM to meet up with fellow listeners and some of your favorite Relay FM hosts.
Hope to see you there!
The 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar is a weird computer.
In many ways, it’s the new MacBook Air. If Apple could have sold it for $999, perhaps it would be the new MacBook Air. If the 12-inch, single-port MacBook had earned the Air name, maybe this computer would have been the MacBook.
Naming stuff aside — including the need for ATP to dub this computer the “MacBook Escape” — it’s a pretty enjoyable notebook. It strikes a great balance, as I wrote in my review:
In shopping for a notebook, I wanted something that offered a balance of weight and power that I felt was acceptable. If this computer was my only machine, I would have opted for a 15-inch with an i7. For something that I’m only going to ever use after carrying it out of the house, I wanted it to be thin and light.
This thing being smaller than a MacBook Air and having a Retina display is was what sold me. The new design is 12% thinner and is 13% smaller in volume (and weighs the same) as the Air. In my bag, they are feel exactly the same, but this machine comes with a far better display and is far faster.
All of that stands up nicely six months later, but I don’t have that computer anymore.
I needed a second Mac to cut open in a YouTube video and bought a base-model 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar:
My intention was to return it but… yeah.
Here it is, on my desk.
Most of my earlier review still stands. The keyboard is loud, the trackpad is huge and Thunderbolt 3 requires dongles.
The increased speed is nice, but the battery life on this model seems even less predictable than it was on the Escape. Switching from Chrome to Safari helped, but run time can still be uneven across sessions.
The move from two to four ports is really nice. I use my MacBook Pro for a lot of media work when I’m traveling, and some things would just not be possible with two ports:
Even though the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the right-hand side of my notebook aren’t as fast the ones on the left, I haven’t run into any problems. All I’m really doing is adapting out to USB 3 most of the time.
Then there’s the matter of the Touch Bar. I think I fall into line with most thoughts on the new technology. It’s very clever, but not super useful at this point. A lot of Apple apps have adopted it, but third-party support has been slower to come.
Control Strip — the right side of the Touch Bar full of system controls — is nicely done and can be easily modified. For example, I ditched Siri and replaced it with a shortcut to launch Mission Control and show my desktop.
I was initially worried that I would get used to the Touch Bar on my MacBook Pro, and then be frustrated that my iMac — my main machine — was missing it. In reality, that hasn’t been a problem. The Touch Bar adds niceties like an emoji picker that makes sense, but I’m so wired into keyboard shortcuts, I don’t feel hampered without it.
I think the Touch Bar has a nice future once it’s adopted more widely, but for now, it’s just polish on top of the Mac experience.
Touch ID, on the other hand, is a huge deal on the Mac. Logging in, making purchases, unlocking 1Password and more are just a thumbprint away. It’s fast and easy to set up, just like on iOS.
I look forward to seeing Touch ID ship on all Macs.
All in all, it was probably a little silly to keep this MacBook Pro and sell the Escape, but I do like this laptop. It’s fast, light and the additional ports are a nice upgrade. It’s not the best MacBook Pro I’ve ever had, but it’s the lightest and the most forward-thinking, for whatever that’s worth.
Unless you need four ports or more power, I’d probably recommend you just buy the one without the Touch Bar for now.
This article got sent to me by several people, and I can’t pass up linking to it. In it, Peter Lewis responds to the then-new Bondi Blue iMac G3:
Apple was certainly “thinking different” when it created the iMac. The new personal computer, which goes on sale on Aug. 15, has already won popular acclaim for its creative design and its refreshing departure from the computer industry standard of boring beige boxes.
By rushing the iMac to market, Apple succeeded in getting on the radar screens of buyers before the next school year starts. There is a pent-up demand among owners of older Macintoshes for an affordable upgrade, and Apple is expected to sell all the iMacs it can make in coming months.
So far, so good…
Sources who say they have seen prototypes of other Apple computers report that the company may be thinking of adding translucence to desktop machines later this year. Although some reports say the new desktop systems will be smoky black, others describe the color as a translucent midnight blue, the same color Apple used in its new translucent Studio Display monitor.
Turns out, one of those was true.
Then there was the software:
The iMac also acts different from most computers. Like all current Macintoshes, it uses the Mac OS 8.1 operating system software, which is incompatible with more than 90 percent of all other computers. The Mac OS still sets the standard for ease of use and innovation, and it is arguably a superior choice for the consumer and education audience that Apple hopes to impress with the iMac.
It’s easy to forget the iMac shipped with Mac OS 8. That operating system feels further back in time to me than the iMac’s hardware.
(I wrote a whole book about this. You should read it.)
The iMac has a modest hard disk drive (four gigabytes, half the capacity of many new computers), but it lacks a built-in floppy disk drive or other removable media, like disks, for backing up files. A few customers may be able to work effectively without some way to transport data physically, by backing up files to a network server or to the Internet, but most of the consumers Apple is trying to appeal to live in a world where floppy disks are important.
Apple contends that the 1.44-megabyte, 3.5-inch disk drive is a thing of the past and that putting one in the iMac would have made it last year’s machine instead of next year’s.
Instead, Apple left a hole called a Universal Serial Bus port that allows a customer to attach storage devices to the iMac.
Lewis went on to quote a bunch of industry folks on the pros (but mostly cons) of this move.
This passage is why this link is getting passed around. It is easy to look back and mock this response. Of course, we think, it lacked a floppy drive. They were going out of style fast!
That turned out to be true, but wasn’t evident in 1998 to all. Apple was pushing the ball forward, breaking things as it went. That’s been the company’s modus operandi for years. I just have to look at the side of my new MacBook Pro to understand it today.
I think includes a lesson for those of us who review and talk about technology professionally. We shouldn’t hold our opinions too tightly. The move to USB was a little crazy for 1998’s world, but it made possible our world today. At the time, it was seen as a mistake by some, but that’s not how things panned out.
This month on MacStories, I spent some time with the first iPad to really stick around more than a year, the iPad 2:
While that doesn’t seem remarkable today, it was an eternity when it came to iOS devices at the time. The iPad 2 was one of the first devices Apple kept around to fill a lower price point on its product matrix.
Veteran reporter Steven Levy has a great feature on Apple’s new campus. It’s full of details about the building and its environment. This part really jumped out at me:
“This might be a stupid question,” I say. “But why do you need a four-story glass door?”
Ive raises an eyebrow. “Well,” he says. “It depends how you define need, doesn’t it?”
This morning, we’re announcing two new shows on Relay FM: Originality is hosted by Aleen Simms and K Tempest Bradford. The show is all about exploring the wheres, hows, and whys of creative genius. The hosts are joined each episode by a diverse assortment of guests from a variety of fields.
Roboism is a podcast mostly about robots. Alex Cox and Savannah Million care about how robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are affecting our culture.
I’m really happy to have Aleen Simms back on the air, and to welcome K Tempest Bradford, Savannah Million and Alex Cox to the network.
Enjoy the shows!
MP3, the digital audio coding format, changed the way we listen to music and drove the adoption of countless new devices over the last couple of decades. And now, it’s dead. The developer of the format announced this week that it has officially terminated its licensing program.
The gist of the story is pretty simple. The Fraunhofer Institute has licensed certain MP3 patents, and recently announced that program has come to an end:
On April 23, 2017, Technicolor’s mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated.
We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio codec in the world, during the past two decades.
The page then launches into a history lesson of sorts:
The development of mp3 started in the late 80s at Fraunhofer IIS, based on previous development results at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3.
David Lumb at Engadget summed up the news this way:
MP3, the format that revolutionized the way we consume (and steal) music since the 90s, has been officially retired – in a manner of speaking. The German research institution that created the format, The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, announced that it had terminated licensing for certain MP3-related patents…in other words, they didn’t want to keep it on life support, because there are better ways to store music in the year 2017. Rest now forever, MP3.
It is true that there are better options than the MP3 for some applications, but don’t be fooled. The reason the licensing plan is over is not that AAC is suddenly the savior of the world.
Quite simply, it’s because the MP3 patents have expired, as this marvelously-detailed post by Josh Cogliati outlines:
MP3 has at least three separate companies that claim to have patents, Alcatel-Lucent, Thompson and AudioMPEG. All their claimed US MP3 patents are listed in the automatically generated MP3 patent list. The last of these patents expires in April of 2017. If you only look at the MP3 patents filed before December 1992 (one year after the decoding spec was published), then the last decoding patent expires in September of 2015. AudioMPEG claims that their patents cover MPEG-1 layers 1,2 and 3. The other companies just talk about Layer 3. So, at the minimum, fully decoding and encoding MPEG-1 audio is patented.
The MP3 isn’t dead; it’s just not profitable anymore.