512 Pixels

I’ve seen a couple machines in the last month or so just start showing symptoms of this hardware failure. I’m glad to see Apple extending this past what most repair extension programs get.

Bloomberg Businessweek has a great profile of Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president for hardware technologies:

Srouji runs what is probably the most important and least understood division inside the world’s most profitable company. Since 2010, when his team produced the A4 chip for the original iPad, Apple has immersed itself in the costly and complex science of silicon.

I’ve been independent for just about six months now, ¹ and I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how things are going.

The Work

As most nerds, I can’t really just work on one thing, so I divide my working time into three big categories.

Relay FM

Relay FM is the majority of my income and is what I spend the most time on. Being able to dedicate much more of my time and effort to the network has been huge. For example, our membership program had been on the to-do list for months before I had time to get it built out. It’s been a big success, and it’s really great to see our hosts be able to make more from their shows. Putting together the newsletter for our members is a real joy each month.

The two shows I co-host are firing on all cylinders. On Connected, we’re breaking free of the news cycle more often to discuss other topics, and I think its led to some amazing episodes. My other podcast — Liftoff — has come into its own. Our rhythm of covering space news, hosting interviews and working through explainer episodes is unique, and a lot of fun to work on with Jason.

Behind the scenes, I’ve been more involved in developing new shows, working harder on the business side of things and have been planning some very exciting stuff for later this year you’ll hear about soon.

512 Pixels

In terms of raw percentages, this site has seen the biggest increase in time and attention since August. It had been put aside to a degree when we launched Relay, and it’s been to be able to write more than I have in previous months.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve branched out a bit with the new YouTube channel. This is very experimental. I don’t have a ton of video experience, but I’m learning a lot as I go. I’ve got two videos done, and I’m proud of both of them. Feedback has been great, and I have another one in the works now. ²

I’m not sure what the end game is with the videos quite yet. I’d like to make some income from them eventually, but for now, I’m still exploring.

Freelance

I’m continuing to do a little bit of freelance. I’m still helping manage The Sweet Setup, and I’m having a good time writing my monthly Apple History column over on iMore.

Out in the real world, I service a handful of clients’ technical needs, but it’s a small business that I’m not really looking to expand.

Life at Home

Adjusting to working at home has been the biggest challenge of the last six months. While I have an office I go to when I need to record, most days I work at home from a desk we set up in our bedroom. ³

We have three kids, and my wife is currently homeschooling. Figuring out the ins and outs of being at home has been tricky some days. One reason I did this was to have more time with my family during the week, but if I’m just hanging out all day, I can’t pay the bills. While I can shut the door and put headphones in, that’s not always the right answer, either.

I think we’ve gotten better at knowing when I need to step away from work and get involved, but its still a little bit of a work in progress. If something crazy is going on, my wife will ask me to help wrangle the madness, and I’m happy to do so.

If I’m really swamped, I will pack up and head to the office to focus. It’s nice having another place to go when I need a change of scenery.

Finances

There is a lot of inherent weirdness in going independent and talking about money on the Internet. To sidestep all that, I will simply say this: things are good. Even with the additional burden of paying for our own insurance, our family’s finances are just as solid as they were when I had a 9–5 job. I’m not making what I was when I had all this stuff and a paycheck, but the graph is moving in the right direction.

The bulk of our income comes from Relay FM, with The Sweet Setup, 512 Pixels and iMore rounding things out.

I need 512 Pixels to be a bigger part of the pie. I’m pouring time into it, but the site doesn’t make enough money to justify the current effort, especially if I count the time spent shooting and editing video for the YouTube channel. That sidebar ad doesn’t pay much, and RSS sponsorships have slowed down, despite the site being more popular than ever. I’m going to keep investing time here because 512 is my first Internet love, but I’m keeping my eye on things.

Oh yeah, then there’s taxes. Woof.

The Future

It’s been a wild six months. I’m still working too many evenings and weekends, but it’s manageable. Not having anyone to answer is amazing, and I get to pick and choose what I work on most days. The freedom is worth the risk, and I’m already probably ruined for going back to a jobby job. Barring anything major happening to Relay or any other part of my business, there’s no end in sight.

Time to get back to work.

Marco Arment:

As we’ve learned from national hero Edward Snowden and, well, almost every other high-profile action taken by law enforcement recently, this most likely has very little to do with the specific crime or iPhone that the FBI is citing in this case.

It’s their excuse to establish precedent and permanent backdoors for themselves so they can illegally spy on anyone’s data whenever they please.

This is the most dangerous kind of slippery slope in today’s world: one that starts under the guise of security in the face of terrorism.

I missed today’s recording, but I’m hitting play as I type this:

This week, Federico and Myke discuss Amazon Echo, Tim Cook’s letter to the FBI and Apple executives on The Talk Show.

Our thanks to our sponsors this week:

• Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ‘WORLD’ for 10% off.
• PDFpen, from Smile: The Swiss Army Knife for working with PDFs.

Tim Cook:

The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.

This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.

If you haven’t read this, go read it.

With an iPad Air 3 rumored to be right around the corner, there’s been a lot of discussion about the new 9.7-inch iPad. Will it gain Pencil support? What about the Smart Connector?

I think the Pencil is probably a no-brainer for this device. The iPad Pro is great — I’m typing this on mine, actually — but it is big. An iPad Air with a Pencil more closely mimics keeping a paper notebook tucked under you arm if you’re just going out to sketch. I think putting the Pencil in the hands of more users is only good for the platform.

The Smart Keyboard is far more interesting to me. After initially dismissing it, I’ve ended up changing my tune on the accessory. While it is not the perfect keyboard, the tradeoffs are acceptable for the portability it affords.

One of the reasons the Smart Keyboard shines is its size. It’s just about the width of the Magic Keyboard, making for a much better experience than other tablet keyboards I’ve tried. For smaller tablets, keyboard makers that have to shrink everything down to match the iPad’s size.

Therein lies the problem. The iPad Air 2 is a good bit smaller than the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard:

Aside from the obvious weirdness of putting these two particular devices together, check out the width of the keyboard itself. To get a Smart Keyboard to fit the iPad Air’s frame, Apple is going to have to deal with the same issues other vendors have over the years.

I don’t see Apple creating some sort of crazy mechanism in which a new Smart Keyboard somehow folds out to be the width we’ve come to expect from keyboards when not tucked away. I think a new Smart Keyboard would probably have with the same downsides as other iPad Air-sized keyboards do: small keys that are too close together for comfortable typing.

While I’m sure the company has tried it, and may even be readying a smaller Smart Keyboard, I’m not sure it should. While there are good iPad Air-sized keyboards on the market today, nothing is a good as the Smart Keyboard, and I believe that has everything to do with size. Anything smaller just isn’t a great keyboard for most people.

Would Apple ship a product that is compromised like this? I’m afraid I think we know the answer.

The iMac G4 is one of my favorite designs to ever come out of Apple. If you aren’t familiar with it, this PDF is a great place to start.

During the last fortnight, humankind detected gravitational waves for the first time and Jason spent some time at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

My thanks to these sponsors:

• Luminos: A fantastic astronomy app, 10 years in the making! Now with an Apple Watch app for skygazing!
• Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ‘LIFTOFF’ for 10% off.

Dan Vanderkam, writing in 1998, about the very first version of the Mac’s operating system:

OK, the last first glimpse difference is probably the biggest shocker. In the disk, you can see the icon of a system folder. You can also see that there’s only 196K in the disk! This means that the system folder on it must be positively tiny! Well, as you can see from the list view at the right, that’s darned true. Yes, that’s the COMPLETE system folder! For some comparison, look at it this way: In system 7, the scrapbook file alone is usually twice as large as this system folder! Ahh, if only apple still made things this small. Nowadays, a full system folder easily tops 100 megs, and can easily have over a thousand items in it. A thousand! That’s a far cry from the six that made up the original system folder.

Relive some of the horror of the 1990s:

The Malware Museum is a collection of malware programs, usually viruses, that were distributed in the 1980s and 1990s on home computers. Once they infected a system, they would sometimes show animation or messages that you had been infected. Through the use of emulations, and additionally removing any destructive routines within the viruses, this collection allows you to experience virus infection of decades ago with safety.

Backblaze support:

We’ve encountered an issue on the Mac where Adobe Creative Cloud appears to be removing the contents of the first hidden folder at the root of the drive, in alphabetic order. By happenstance, the first hidden folder on most Backblaze customer’s internal drive is the .bzvol folder.

WTF, Adobe. This is why we can’t have nice things; I guess this is a vote in favor of enforced sandboxing on the Mac.