Apple

Tuesday, February 17

Inside Out

If Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography left you wanting more – more insight into Steve Jobs the man and more insight into Apple the company – then Ian Parker’s recent profile of Jonathan Ive for The New Yorker just might fit the bill. Parker seems to have gained unprecedented access not only to Ive, but to his studio of designers, as well as other Apple executives like Tim Cook and Bob Mansfield. Parker builds his narrative around the period leading up to and following the announcement of the Apple Watch and on to the present developments with Apple’s still-under-construction Campus 2, a project in which Ive is intimately involved.

If you’ve ever been curious about anything Apple-related I highly recommend Parker’s profile. It’s a great read with revelations that practically supplant any outsider perspective of the company I’ve ever read. One thing the profile makes clear – Ive’s design team has a significant role in all aspects of product development at Apple; from hardware – internal and external components – to software and all the way down to how a product is manufactured.

Update: On this week’s episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa notes that Parker’s profile borrows liberally from Leander Kahney’s book about Jonny Ive. That might make my statement about the significance of Parker’s profile a little bit of a reach, but if you’ve read Kahney’s book (I haven’t), then maybe you can think of Parker’s profile as a bit of an update.

Friday, February 13
Thursday, February 12

Starbucks iOS App Now Supports Apple Pay

I don’t visit Starbucks anywhere near as much as I used to, but news of Apple Pay support in the latest update1 brought a smile to my face nonetheless. Using Apple Pay to reload the card is easy as pie and certainly beats typing in my account password. Now, we just need Dunkin Donuts to follow suit.

There’s some trepidation over the fact that the Apple Pay integration only allows you to reload a stored card balance. I’d welcome a pay-at-the-register option, but removing the need for password input to reload is a huge improvement.

  1. How is it still not optimized for iPhone 6/6 Plus? ↩

Saturday, February 07

Photos for Mac

Everpix was the perfect photo back-up and sharing service for me and ever since it folded, I’ve been waiting for Apple to come in and fill the void.1 for the last year and a half I’ve been limping along with Picturelife, a service that mostly checks all the boxes for what I need2, but with less elegant execution than I’d like3.

But with my ballooning photo library pushing me into a pricier storage tier with Picturelife, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Photos for Mac, announced last summer at WWDC. And this week, after the mysterious case of the disappearing Photos for Mac references on Apple’s website, we finally see new signs of life in the OS X 10.10.3 Developer Beta. There are certainly still many questions left to be answered, not the least of which is, “Can we really trust iCloud with our precious photos?”

My hope is that Apple recognizes the importance we place on our digital memories. They seem to get it with the iPhone4, but their attention, or lack thereof, to iPhoto and Aperture and recent issues with iCloud don’t exactly instill the greatest confidence in the minds of the public. Apple seems to be taking their time with Photos, and my optimistic take is that they’re being deliberate, working diligently to ensure the syncing mechanism on the back-end is rock solid. The early reviews of the front-end sound promising, at least for iPhoto power- or Aperture light-users. I participate in Apple’s AppleSeed consumer beta testing program, so I look forward to taking Photos for a spin soon.

  1. I still don’t understand why they didn’t just buy Everpix. It seemed like a perfect fit.↩
  2. Comprehensive back-up and archiving, photo/album sharing with privacy controls, and library sync including edits made after the initial upload.↩
  3. And was recently sold to Streamnation.↩
  4. The iPhone is now the second-most prolific camera among Flickr uploads.↩
Monday, February 02

Compensating

When Apple hired Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts away from the venerable fashion brand, I wondered how they managed to poach a CEO from a fairly large and growing fashion brand to be a lowly Senior Vice President1. Well, now we know at least the monetary part2 of the pitch. No question $73 million would buy a lot of plaid.

From where I sit, it’s difficult to tell what significance, if any, Ahrendts’ presence had on Apple’s most recent quarterly results; The biggest part of Apple’s business is the iPhone and the iPhone 6/Plus were certainly already well on their way to production by the time she stepped in. But the results in China, supposedly Ahrendts’ specialty, were astounding and even if she played no part in that achievement, the compensation package would hardly stand out on Apple’s most recent quarterly balance sheet3.

While money could easily be a stumbling block for this type of recruiting (if the number is too low), I bet it’s rarely the most persuasive part of the package. I imagine the same type of person who would aspire to be the CEO of trend-setting luxury fashion brand is probably the same type of person who could find a challenge ushering in a new era of retail at Apple. Hiring Ahrendts pretty much substantiated rumors of an Apple Watch, at least for Apple followers, because “luxury fashion” is exactly the approach Apple would take to bring their not-yet-announced take on wearables to market. Not much about what they’ve done since announcing Apple Watch late last year would refute that. Couple that with Ahrendts’ previously mentioned success in China and the role almost seems perfect for her.

  1. Any argument about the relative size of Burberry compared to Apple’s retail business underestimates the specific character traits of the type of person it takes to be a CEO.↩
  2. See above. Along those same lines, money is often also not a primary motivator, though I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.↩
  3. Especially considering a lot of the compensation is in company stock.↩
Saturday, January 31
Monday, December 22

Waiting for Apple TV

The past few months, the primary feeling I associate with Apple TV is waiting: Waiting for it to come up when I turn it on; Waiting for content to load when I select an item (from the main menu or within an app); Waiting for new content or channels; and worst of all, waiting for new hardware.

When I piece together the various rumors and executive side-stepping over the last few years, I come to one clumsy conclusion: that Apple is, indeed, planning something revolutionary for the living room, but something is holding up that vision. The primary culprits are technology and content owners, and given Apple’s recent decade of success with hardware, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s the latter – difficulty working out deals with content owners and creators – that’s causing the Apple TV to languish.

That Apple is possibly shooting for the moon doesn’t bother me, but what does bother me is that they’re letting the moonshot play ground their otherwise serviceable and perfectly adequate existing technology. Recent hardware releases from competitors Google (Chromecast, Android TV) and Amazon (Fire TV, Fire Stick) aren’t revolutionary, but they are evolutionary enhancements over Apple TV and, by some accounts, they’re eating Apple TV’s lunch in the marketplace. Longtime contender Roku is also benefitting from the lull in Apple TV’s lifecycle.

My wife and I recently wanted to watch a Christmas movie that we only have on gasp DVD. My TV only has two HDMI ports, so I had to choose between temporarily disconnecting the FireTV or the Apple TV. The decision was harder than I thought. I’m an Apple loyalist, and I’m well entrenched in their eco-system, but I’m not an idiot. Apple TV works well-enough for me to get by, but in my recent experience, Amazon’s Fire TV works better and it feels faster – experiences I usually associate more with Apple products. I ultimately chose to disconnect the FireTV, a fortuitous decision because I ended up buying the movie we planned to watch on iTunes when the damage done to the DVD by our two-year old proved too much for the DVD player to overcome.

I am all in on the moonshot, but let’s not forget about what we already have and what it needs in order to maintain its place in the marketplace. Apple innovates most successfully when they iterate rather than leap. I wish they would apply that strategy to their hobbies as relentlessly as they do their core business.