Thanks to Sean French for the link.
Category Archives: Apple
The IoS map disaster: Antennagate redux
Lots of people are outraged by the glaring defects in Apple’s maps — now a mandatory part of IoS6. (Jean-Jouis Gassee takes a more nuanced view.) But David Talbot’s Technology Review piece rightly focusses on Apple’s Kremlin-like PR response to the fiasco.
This disaster (see “Smartphone Makers Can’t Afford to Mess Up Mapping”) is still unfolding. It’s worse than just being a bad service. Given the ubiquity of these devices, it’s not hard to imagine people getting sent down Class 4 unmaintained roads in rural areas and getting stuck in ditches. Others may be getting directed the wrong-way on one-way streets and posing a danger of head-on collisions. It’s only a matter of time before anecdotes like these will start emerging.
Apple is in full spin mode. Trudy Miller, an Apple spokeswoman, released this statement yesterday: “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service. We are excited to offer this service with innovative new features like Flyover, turn by turn navigation, and Siri integration. We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”
Personally I’m going to avoid updating to IoS6 for the time being. But what I’d really like to know is how the screw-up was allowed to happen in a company that’s usually good at getting working stuff out on time. And isn’t it strange how even a smart company doesn’t get it that old-style PR responses don’t wash any more. The right thing to have done would have been to say: “we f****d up and here’s a voucher to compensate you for any inconvenience that the maps might have caused”.
This is like Antennagate all over again.
MORE: Business Insider thinks that part of the problem may be due to the fact that Apple hasn’t thrown enough resources at the mapping application:
In June, we talked to a pair of Googlers involved in its mapping product, and they said that Google has 1,100 full time employees and 6,000 contractors working on its mapping products. Those 7,000 people do all sorts of granular work.
What do these 7,000 people do? Our source says they are “street view drivers, people flying planes, people drawing maps, people correcting listings, and people building new products.”
Apple is reportedly hiring developers to improve its Maps product.
Seems like it’s going to take a lot more than that.
Normal technology, ergo incremental change
Thomas Kuhn portrayed scientific research as long periods of “puzzle-solving” based on an accepted paradigm, with occasional bouts of revolutionary upheaval during which one paradigm is replaced by another. (See my extended essay on Kuhn, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his great book.) Much the same goes on in technology, IMHO. At the moment, we’re in a phase of “normal” technology with everything based around the paradigm of a smartphone laid down by Apple with the iPhone. This graphic (from CultOfMac) makes the point well.
This NYTimes piece starts to make the same point, but then gets a bit lost. Still, good in parts.
The iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last week with only incremental changes seemed to signal that the industry has entered an era of technological bunny hops.
Faster chips, bigger screens and speedier wireless Internet connections are among the refinements smartphone users can count on year after year in new models, most of them in familiar rectangular packages. They are improvements, to be sure, but they lack the breathtaking impact the first iPhone had, with its pioneering fusion of software and touch screens.
“Since then, it has been kind of incremental,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst. “It does not feel like there is a big shift.”
Yep. See also this Observer column about how we’re stuck in an app-centric rut for the time being.
The next phase (and the threat to Apple and Google)
From Business Insider.
There are two major trends that will dictate the future of the tech industry.By the end of this decade more people will be using the Internet through a mobile device than through their desktop.The Internet is becoming Chinese. Already, there are more Internet users in China than there are in any other country in the world. That lead will only grow. Research firm IDC says China’s market already accounts for 25 percent of the world’s smartphone sales, more than the US’s 17.5 percent.These trends combine to create an obvious reality: Any company that wants to control the future must have a firm grasp on the smartphone market in China.
Broken Windows and the iPhone 5
It’s not every day when one finds Paul Krugman writing about technology, but here he is today on the strange theory that the iPhone 5 (out tomorrow, for those who have been vacationing on Mars) might give a boost to the US economy:
I can’t judge how plausible the sales estimates are; but it’s worth pointing out how the economic logic of this suggestion relates to the larger picture.
The key point is that the optimism about the iPhone’s effects has nothing (or at any rate not much) to do with the presumed quality of the phone, and the ways in which it might make us happier or more productive. Instead, the immediate gains would come from the way the new phone would get people to junk their old phones and replace them.
In other words, if you believe that the iPhone really might give the economy a big boost, you have — whether you realize it or not — bought into a version of the “broken windows” theory, in which destroying some capital can actually be a good thing under depression conditions.
Of course, it’s nice that the reason we’re junking old capital is to make room for something better, not just for the hell of it. But you know what would also be nice? Building useful stuff like infrastructure employing labor and cash that would otherwise sit idle.
Our new software monoculture
This morning’s Observer column.
Apple has to date authorised 500,000 [Apps] for its iPhone. The corresponding number for the Android platform is 600,000. These numbers provide ample justification for the late Steve Jobs’s great insight: phones were really powerful hand-held computers that could run useful applications. And so it proved. Jobs unleashed an explosion in creativity as programmers raced to create apps that people would buy in huge volumes. The result is a world in which smartphones are basically app-running devices that can also make voice calls. Ditto for tablets, except that they don’t bother with the calls.
So that’s all right, then? Not quite. Look closer at this explosion of creativity and you find that much of what it has created is either trivial or downright crap. You can, for example, get an app to put an image of bubblewrap on your iPhone screen. Then there’s the Halloween Sound Machine (“Sneak up on your mates with the sounds of a rusty chainsaw, go on, you know you want to!”). Or how about iBeer (“turns the iPhone’s screen into a showy pint of the foamy stuff”)? And gentlemen trying to decide between a walrus moustache, Victorian sidewhiskers or a goatee beard will doubtless find Beard Booth invaluable.
I could go on, but you get the point. A large proportion of smartphone apps are the contemporary equivalent of those plastic gee-gaws my kids bought all those years ago: impulse purchases that provide a moment’s entertainment – or even delight – and are then forgotten…
This year, 9/12 will also be a date to remember
September 12 will be an interesting day this year.
1. It’s the day that the Dutch go to the polls, and there’s some evidence that public opinion has shifted in an interesting way.
2. It’s also the day when the German constitutional court will rule on whether the European stability mechanism – the new permanent bailout fund for the eurozone – breaches the country’s constitution.
3. On the same day the European Commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, will give details of its proposals to strengthen banking regulation as a quid pro quo for a cross-eurozone bank bailout fund.
4. Oh — and it’s also the day when the iPhone 5 comes out.
iPhone, uCopy, iSue
Eminently sane Economist piece about the Apple v Samsung patent case.
It is useful to recall why patents exist. The system was established as a trade-off that provides a public benefit: the state agrees to grant a limited monopoly to an inventor in return for disclosing how the technology works. To qualify, an innovation must be novel, useful and non-obvious, which earns the inventor 20 years of exclusivity. “Design patents”, which cover appearances and are granted after a simpler review process, are valid for 14 years.
The dispute between Apple and Samsung is less over how the devices work and more over their look and feel. At issue are features like the ability to zoom into an image with a double finger tap, pinching gestures, and the visual “rubber band” effect when you scroll to the end of a page. The case even extends to whether the device and its on-screen icons are allowed to have rounded corners. To be sure, some of these things were terrific improvements over what existed before the iPhone’s arrival, but to award a monopoly right to finger gestures and rounded rectangles is to stretch the definition of “novel” and “non-obvious” to breaking-point.
A proliferation of patents harms the public in three ways. First, it means that technology companies will compete more at the courtroom than in the marketplace—precisely what seems to be happening. Second, it hampers follow-on improvements by firms that implement an existing technology but build upon it as well. Third, it fuels many of the American patent system’s broader problems, such as patent trolls (speculative lawsuits by patent-holders who have no intention of actually making anything); defensive patenting (acquiring patents mainly to pre-empt the risk of litigation, which raises business costs); and “innovation gridlock” (the difficulty of combining multiple technologies to create a single new product because too many small patents are spread among too many players).
Some basic reforms would alleviate many of the problems exemplified by the iPhone lawsuit. The existing criteria for a patent should be applied with greater vigour. Specialised courts for patent disputes should be established, with technically minded judges in charge: the inflated patent-damage awards of recent years are largely the result of jury trials. And if patents are infringed, judges should favour monetary penalties over injunctions that ban the sale of offending products and thereby reduce consumer choice.
And it’s nuts letting this stuff go to jury trial.
iPhone5 Preview
Mmmm… 50mm macro lens!
Imitation: the sincerest form of flattery (except when it’s the most expensive).
As Samsung now realize. Interesting graphic from CultofMac. Shows mobile phones before and after iPhone.
Thanks to Tom N for the link.