Category Archives: Apple

Can’t Take That Away

I was surprised how much I enjoyed all the pro-Mac celebration today, marking the 30th anniversary of its debut.

Apple’s home page is dedicated to the Mac, and links to an extremely extensive special feature outlining, year-by-year, some significant uses of the Mac, by significant people, as well as the major shifts in design and functionality that the computer has seen.

As a long-time Mac user and developer — I started working for Apple at 18, went indie at 26, and am 38 now, still working on Macs — I was touched by the amount of pride Apple exudes today in celebrating the triumph of the Mac. Especially over the the past several years, as many people have shifted their attention to mobile devices based on iOS and Android, it’s easy to forget that the Mac is still an amazing device and that the hardware and software both continue to improve every year.

Topping off a great day, news came out of Cupertino that Apple has posted giant posters on campus, upon which are printed the names of “every employee who has ever worked for Apple.” Holy cow, my pride overflows. What a grand, yet humble gesture. My old friend Dan Curtis Johnson confirmed that I had made the cut:

In close proximity, both Dan Jalkut and Ellen Hancock. Such a faraway time, the long-long ago.

It was long-enough ago, that some people still called me Dan.

I learned so much at Apple, and had many profound experiences that shaped the way I see the world both technically and otherwise. I was hired a year or two before Steve Jobs came back, and one of my first joys at Apple was adding my own name to the “About Box” for the Memory Control, which I had taken charge of. And because I could, I also added the names of some friends. I was a little immature. When Steve came back, one of his company-wide edicts was that the names of individuals must be removed from about boxes. I had to commit the source code that wiped my own identity off the faces of the products I had worked on.

Steve’s explanation was something along the lines that it was unfair to put the names of a few in about boxes because it was a disservice to all the other employees who were not listed. He insisted that each of them was as important to the success of the company as the people who were listed. Of course he was right, but it didn’t feel great at the time.

It’s hard not to think of Steve when I read about this perfect gesture of gratitude to all the employees who helped, directly or indirectly, in making the Mac a success. The Mac is his baby, and it’s grown to be not only strong and robust, but in some respects unassailable, thanks to the hard work of the tens of thousands of people whose names are on those posters.

I started at Apple while I was still in college, barely having glimpsed the professional world outside of the company. I learned a lot in school, but I learned much, much more at Apple. My time there completely shaped not only the way I develop software but the reasons I develop software. Fundamentally: to serve and delight the people who use it.

I often think back wistfully, wondering what would have happened if I stayed at the company. I might have gone on to do important, admirable work, or I might have become one of those (rare) old slackers at Apple who doesn’t earn his or her keep. Either way, my name would have been on one of those posters today. And either way, it would have been well-earned. People often say the great thing about education is that nobody can take it away from you. The same is true of working for Apple, and the company’s gestures today strongly underscore that fact.

Apple’s Nest

Google is acquiring Nest Labs, and since the news broke, most of the analysis I’ve seen has to do with why Nest might be worth $3 Billion to Google, and whether or not it’s a blow to Apple that Google bought the company before they could.

I agree with the folks who point out that $3 Billion is a hefty price tag for a small company that only sells home thermostats and smoke detectors. But I also agree with the folks who argue that the potential upside for Google could be huge. On the latest episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and John Moltz cover many potential wins for Google: a proven consumer product expert in Tony Fadell, tens if not hundreds of talented engineers, and perhaps most importantly a team with a knack for delivering casual infometric devices to the masses.

For years, Google’s successful tack has been first inserting itself between users and their data, and then figuring how to best capitalize on that relationship. This approach pans out proportionally to the total number of users and to the amount and diversity of data being intermediated. As Google’s knowledge of people and their data grows, it empowers them to provide increasingly clever life solutions. It also empowers them to help themselves to what advertisers will pay for access to this very large, very well understood user base.

The products might seem to offer little to Google, but it’s easy to imagine how Nest’s knowledge could strengthen Google’s other services. For Maps? “Raise the thermostat in my home to 68F when I am 1 mile away from arriving at home.” Or for Gmail and Google Voice? “Do not disturb … unless there is an emergency at home.” It also seems reasonable to assume that Nest’s two shipping products are the tip of the iceberg and that Tony Fadell and his team have a long list of ideas for how their product line should expand in the future.

What does it mean for Apple that Google acquired Nest? Not much. Unlike Google, Apple has made a habit of staying out of the relationship between users and their data. Sometimes to a fault! For most of Apple’s products, knowing anything about the specific data that users are working with is at best an afterthought and more often a degree of involvement that the company has made a point of avoiding. What are your emails about? Apple doesn’t want to know. What kind of writing are you doing in Pages? Not interested. What are your favorite mapping POIs? They barely know where anything is, let alone whether you’ve been there or not. This is Apple’s flaw and it’s great, great asset: they care much, much more about the kinds of things than the specific things that people use their products to work with. Google is more interested in raw, specific data, while Apple is more obsessed with generalized ideas about data.

On that point, one reason I wouldn’t expect Apple to acquire a company like Nest is that the products are far too specific, far too niche. Apple doesn’t make very many specific things anymore. They make general tools and leave it to customers how they should best be used. In fact, over the past 10 to 15 years, Apple’s products are increasingly generalized, and more suitable to a wide range of uses (and customers) as the products become more refined.

Apple used to sell a countless variety of Mac models which are now more or less reduced to MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Minis, and the Mac Pro. Apple used to sell iPods for playing music, QuickTakes for taking pictures, and printers for … printing. Now they sell devices that double as music players, devices that double as cameras, and devices that extend the capabilities of 3rd party printers.

Apple’s Airport Express could be sold as a standalone Wi-Fi printer adaptor. Have a USB-based printer? Just plug it in to the Apple AirPrinter device and now it’s a Wi-Fi-connected printer. It could also be sold as a Wi-Fi music adaptor. Have a pair of powered speakers? Just plug it in to the Apple AirPlayer and let your tunes fly. But no, it’s sold as a Wi-Fi base station. A base station that happens to offer many features that are generally useful to a household with network-connectable devices.

In many respects Apple’s Airport Express is like Nest’s thermostat: a small form factor with built-in WiFi and considerable smarts. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the next version of the Airport Express featured a touch screen for interaction and feedback? During AirPlay broadcast of music to connected speakers the on-board display could show the album artwork, artist, and song title, as well as a convenient UI for skipping or favoriting a song. While printing documents it would reflect up-to-the-moment job status and offer a big, fat “Stop” button for canceling an unnecessary printout. And when it wasn’t doing anything in particular? It could show generally helpful information such as the current time, local weather, etc.

Given Apple’s history of expanding the functionality of the Airport Express, I wouldn’t outright reject the possibility that they might add a temperature sensor or smoke detector to the device itself. Or better yet, what if they announced a standard Bluetooth LE protocol for in-home instruments from any manufacturer to integrate seamlessly with Apple’s $99 Airport Express? That would be pretty great, and maybe at that point it would finally be time to come up with a better name for Apple’s Nest.

Choices And Consequences

Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores employ a crude system of ratings and reviews that nonetheless has an impact on how marketable an app is, and accordingly, how much money it brings in.

Since very early in the history of these stores, developers looking to raise the average “star rating” on their apps, and to garner gushing words of praise in their reviews, have dealt with a conundrum: users do not typically review apps unless angered or … encouraged.

So developers have encouraged users to review their apps, using techniques that span a spectrum from what most users would consider harmless, to tactics that even the most naive users recognize as badgering, condescending, and manipulative.

At the harmless end of the spectrum, you find gentle reminders on Twitter, links in the about boxes of apps, and earnest pleas in the signature footer of email correspondence. These are not a huge deal to most people, and are usually phrased in a way that extracts empathy and a sense of obligation from passionate users: “We know it takes time and effort to review an app, but if you value our work please consider leaving a positive review. It means a lot. Thank you!”

At the other end, you find blatant harassment and tricky language meant to confuse users into capitulating. Modal alert panels might interrupt a user’s workflow at inopportune times, demanding that they either leave a review now or be reminded later to do so. The natural reaction of any user in this situation would be to try to determine which series of hoops must be jumped through to get the app to leave one friggin’ alone!

Recently John Gruber addressed the problem of apps on the badgering end of the spectrum, and merely hinted at a grass-roots campaign that might make a dent in the problem:

I’ve long considered a public campaign against this particular practice, wherein I’d encourage Daring Fireball readers, whenever they encounter these “Please rate this app” prompts, to go ahead and take the time to do it — but to rate the app with just one star and to leave a review along the lines of, “One star for annoying me with a prompt to review the app.”

Of course, by alluding to such a campaign in the plain view of hundreds of thousands of readers, Gruber may in fact have launched it. I witnessed many hoots of agreement among folks on Twitter, but also this more considerate reaction from Cabel Sasser of Panic:

That said, ‘give apps that do this 1 star’ suggestion bummed me out — stoops to the level of ‘1 star until you add X feature!’

Damn you, Cabel, and your empathetic rationality. There’s something to his call for civility and for taking the high road. On the other hand, damn it, too many developers have chosen the low road and users are entitled to react accordingly!

Probably the most uncomfortable aspect for me of this debate is that the temptation to … encourage users to write reviews and to rate software is completely rational. It makes perfect sense for us as developers to do everything we can to maximize the positive marketing of our apps.

But every choice in business comes with consequences, positive and negative. You implement a new feature that wows half your audience and increases sales among them by 10%, only to discover you’ve pissed off the other half and cut sales by 50% in their camp. It’s not fair or necessarily even rational. It’s just the mechanics of choices, reactions, and consequences.

Many developers cling tightly to the belief that because positive reviews can lead to increased sales, it’s unambiguously right to encourage more of them. And if producing a small number of reviews is a good thing, then producing a huge number of reviews must be a great thing. Mo’ reviews, mo’ money. What’s the problem?

The problem is that except to the least soulful among us, maximizing sales is not the only goal of writing software or developing a business. We need sales to keep ourselves and our families comfortable, but we need other things too. To many of us, these priorities are at least, if not more important than the specific need to make a living somehow:

  • The satisfaction that our customers are being treated well.
  • The ongoing support of customers for months and years to come.
  • The sense of pride in owning and stewarding a well-crafted product.

It’s smart to take it as given that something should be done to encourage users to leave positive ratings and reviews. That’s good business sense. But also take it as given that the farther you tread in the direction of badgering and disrespecting users, the more you chip away at the meaningful non-monetary benefits listed above.

If somebody like John Gruber incites your customers to rebel against the choices you’ve made in designing and marketing your product, take a step back before condemning him as the problem. Whether they knew it or not, your customers were already pissed at you before reading Gruber’s opinions. He’s only providing them with a context for expressing that rage. Take it as a wake up call and as an opportunity to re-evaluate your behavior before too many additional customers are moved to act.

Heavy-handed efforts to drum up reviews that produce a cash influx today might lead to unwanted consequences down the road. You might end up unsatisfied and ashamed that your otherwise brilliant app stoops to nagging and infuriating its users on a regular basis. And to top it all off, somebody like Gruber might light the match that sets them off revolting against you. It won’t be his fault, because the choices were yours all along. The consequences? Those are yours as well.

Fingerprints As Access Tokens

Everybody seems to have an opinion about the new TouchID fingerprint sensor on Apple’s iPhone 5S. I suppose I do, as well.

Critics object to the idea that a fingerprint sensor, no matter how good, should be used to safeguard critical data. Dustin Kirkland makes the case (via John Moltz) that biometric information is inherently bad as a substitute for a password, because it cannot be “independently chosen, changed, and rotated.”

I take his points seriously, and they seem well reasoned from a security point of view, but they are based upon the premise that passwords are the end-all be-all of security, when in fact common sense proves they are not. The oldest, most trusted, and most widely deployed method of authentication on the planet is in fact “biometric”: the human ability to recognize a familiar face. The fact that my appearance could technically be spoofed does not change the fact that arriving at the home of a childhood friend after 20 years of separation will still earn me an invitation to the dinner table, if not a bed for the night.

So fingerprints make lousy passwords. Who cares? Their use in practice need not replace other authentication schemes, it only needs to augment other schemes in a manner that increases overall security.

Most authentication systems in society are scaled appropriately for the context in which they are deployed. When I travel by airplane, I am asked to show a government ID to get through the security gate, but thereafter, a simple piece of printed paper will get me on a plane. The government takes it for granted that once I’m in the boarding area, the odds of somebody getting hold of my scrap of paper, or my getting hold of theirs, and neither one of us subsequently complaining, are marginally small. Furthermore, if the two of us mutually agree to swap tickets and travel to the other’s destination, we haven’t really caused any significant harm, except perhaps to the egos of the folks in charge at the TSA.

Boarding passes are little scraps of paper that make lousy identification cards. I can’t use them to reserve a hotel, file a police report, or obtain a marriage license. Yet in the right context, I can use one to travel from Boston to Shanghai without a single person batting an eye or thinking twice about verifying my identity.

In this sense the airline boarding pass is like an access token. On the web, an access token is something obtained by stronger authentication that permits continued access with weaker authentication. For example when I allow a Twitter client to connect to my Twitter account, I must first visit Twitter.com and possibly enter my full account credentials. After the access token has been vended however, it serves much like a boarding pass, allowing free access until and unless I or Twitter registers a complaint.

There’s another sort of abstract access token that has been available to users iOS devices since day one: your continuous use of the device. If you have in your possession an iOS device and you abstain from turning it off or letting it sit idle, you retain free access to the various data on the phone. From a security point of view, this token is even worse than a fingerprint: anybody, including the family cat, can sustain it if they are so inclined. Leave a phone on a table for 5 seconds, somebody else picks it up, they have your “activity token,” and they didn’t even need to scan your fingerprint.

I view the fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5S and other devices as an opportunity for extending this kind of implicit authentication. It’s not a substitute for a password, but rather a convenient token for obtaining streamlined, continued access to protected resources. It’s the boarding pass that prevents you needing to take out your ID, and go through a body scanner or pat-down again, just to get on the damned plane.

We can argue about whether Apple has chosen the right boundaries for where a fingerprint should be traded for full authentication, but as a technology it stands to fill that gap between the frighteningly insecure “unlocked while active,” and frustratingly unusable “full authentication required when inactive.”

In short, I would like to see fingerprint authentication deployed in a way that pays respect both to the relative convenience and the relative insecurity of a fingerprint. If I can for example configure my phone to require a fingerprint unlock after 1 minute of inactivity, but to require a passcode unlock after 30 minutes of inactivity, my concerns about fingerprint security would be effectively put to rest. Could a malicious person steal a high quality impression of my thumb print, construct a prosthetic, fleshy representation of it, and use it to unlock my phone? Perhaps. But if they can’t do it within half an hour of stealing my phone, they better get to work on cracking the passcode.

Assembled In USA

Apple has reportedly begun promoting the new Mac Pro, of all products, in US movie theaters. John Gruber linked to the story, commenting on the apparent disparity between mass movie-going audiences and a pro-market computer:

Impressive marketing move for a product that is by all means truly “pro”.

One objective of the teaser is to remind everyday American movie-goers that Apple continues to innovate in computer hardware. The teaser emphasizes Apple’s ability to design beautiful hardware and to push the envelope of how a computer looks and feels. It serves to remind the public that Apple is both capable and cool.

But I expect the other goal with this spot is to appeal to American pride. Why promote an expensive, niche-market computer like the Mac Pro to everyday Joes and Janes across the country? Because on top of being an innovative, beautiful, envelope-pushing piece of hardware, it will be made right here in the USA.

I haven’t seen a verbatim copy of the trailer as shown in theaters. Apparently it ends with a headline indicating the Mac Pro will be available “Fall 2013.” I will be surprised if it doesn’t also subtly allude to its American manufacture. A small percentage of folks who see the ad will leave the theater committed to purchasing a Mac Pro this Fall. A far greater percentage will leave the theater convinced that the Chinese-manufactured iPhone or iPad they’re considering for Christmas is part of a great American tradition. And they’ll be right.

Update: Reports from folks on Twitter indicate that the movie-trailer features no such mention of the Mac Pro’s US assembly. That strikes me as a shame and a missed opportunity particularly considered the hyper-focused US market for the ads. Another compelling theory from Drew Pickard suggests that running ads for the Mac Pro in movie theaters is a good way to make sure every movie-making professional is aware of the computer, and will consider purchasing them for their production teams.

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like

A week or so ago on John Gruber’s The Talk Show, Gruber and special guest John Moltz recapped the situation with WWDC selling out and with the sprinkling of alternative conferences and events springing up to fill excess demand during the same week in San Francisco. Among those conferences is altWWDC, put on by folks from Appsterdam, and the CocoaConf Alt conference.

During the podcast they remarked on the use of “WWDC” literally in the naming of “altWWDC,” and joked about how likely it was that Apple would take notice and demand something change on that front. As far as I know, altWWDC has escaped thus far unscathed, but CocoaConf Alt has not been so fortunate:

We had secured space in the hotel directly next door to the big show, and we were putting together a phenomenal list of speakers. Ticket sales were better than we had hoped. All was well until we got an email from the Intercontinental San Francisco, saying that they had determined that our event was in conflict with Apple and that due to their contract with Apple, we couldn’t use the space.

Taken at face value: CocoaConf reserved space in a reputable San Francisco hotel, counted on that reservation to sell tickets and to begin organizing the conference in earnest, and now the hotel has backed out of its agreement.

There is a lot of “who, what, when, why and how” missing here. Did Apple specifically ask the Intercontinental to cancel the deal with CocoaConf upon learning about it, or did somebody at the hotel discover a conflict while reviewing the contract terms and proactively seek to avoid an issue with Apple? My hunch is that the hotel is either overacting on its own initiative, or that some individual at Apple is overacting without the full, reasoned consent of Apple’s leadership.

Whatever went down, and whoever is to blame for it: this is not good for developers, not good for San Francisco, and not good for Apple. In an era when WWDC conferences sell out in minutes, it’s only natural that other events would rush in to help to fill the void. And it’s only natural that some of those events will seek to capitalize on the momentum of Apple’s huge event already drawing the spotlight on San Francisco and attracting hundreds if not thousands of additional visitors who are not registered attendees of the conference.

Apple should actively encourage parallel events such as these. They could even go a step further by participating to a limited extent in the events. Sending a few company representatives out to float among each of the satellite activities would give attendees of those events a sense of connectedness to Apple without overly-straining Apple’s limited resources inside the conference.

One of the major benefits of WWDC to Apple is to draw the world’s attention the company’s relevance to desktop and mobile developers, and to how eager the company is to serve them. Even being cited as the cause of quashing meet-ups in the periphery of WWDC is not in the service of that goal. If Apple was involved in pushing for this decision, they should clarify and retract that position. If they were not involved, they should take care to ensure that the hotels they sign contracts with in the future understand they hold no ill will towards these events.

End WWDC

Not long ago, when Apple’s WWDC conference dates were announced, a slow trickle of registrations would occur as developers consulted with spouses, bosses, and co-workers to determine, in their own sweet time, whether or not they would attend. There was never any rush, because the conference never sold out. Weeks after the announcement, developers who had not registered might even receive a personalized telephone call from Apple, urging them to make a decision. Seriously kids, this is how it used to be.

Over the past several years, demand increased such that at last, those telephone reminders from Apple were no longer necessary. By 2008, the conference sold out for the first time, in a matter of months. By 2010 it took eight days. Last year it took less than 2 hours, and this year? Less than two minutes. I was one of the lucky ones who got a ticket. A few minutes later, as I witnessed friends and colleagues upset after missing the boat? I cancelled my order. It made me uncomfortable to know we had all made the same effort to register as quickly as possible, but for arbitrary reasons I was admitted in and they were left out.

The conference has room for at most 5,000 developers. According to Apple’s job stimulus statistics, there are 275,000 or more registered iOS developers alone. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Mac developers add only 25,000, bringing the total to 300,000. Every year, 5,000 attendees are selected from the qualified pool, meaning just 1 out of 60, or 1.5% of potential attendees will have the chance to attend.

What are the goals of WWDC, anyway? For Apple, it’s primarily a chance to educate developers and to encourage them to contribute to the growth of Apple’s platforms. By teaching developers the latest and greatest technologies, they leverage developer efforts to differentiate Apple and to make its platforms more competitive.

For developers the main goal is to get a leg up on the persistent challenge of developing great software for these platforms, even as they are constantly changing. A side-benefit is the opportunity to commune with like-minded developers who are trying to do the same. Ideally with folks who share similar visions for how software should be developed and how the end product should behave for customers.

As the sheer number of Apple developers increases, the capacity of WWDC remains the same. The goals of the conference both for Apple and for developers are increasingly unmet as the number of developers who would like to be educated, indoctrinated, and communed with far outweighs the number of developers who actually can be.

Over the years people have made plenty of flip suggestions for how Apple can solve the problems that plague WWDC: get a bigger venue, charge more money, split it up into multiple conferences. But any of these would be a very small band-aid on a very large wound. WWDC is flat-out busted, and can’t be fixed by any of these analog solutions.

The whole point of the conference needs to be rethought, and the goals addressed from scratch using new approaches. As the greatest challenge for WWDC is in scaling to meet demand, I think it’s obvious that the rethought WWDC should be considered in terms of digital solutions. Call it WWDC if you like, but it needs to take place 365 days a year instead of 4. It needs to serve 300,000 developers, not 5,000. And it needs to take place online, not within the cramped confines of a small convention center in San Francisco.

Apple has effectively headed down this course with their laudable offering of free videos of conference sessions. The high-level goal of merely educating developers is largely met by these. But what of the other goals? The vast majority of benefits that Apple and developers see in WWDC could be achieved online using more effective digital materials that are available to, and more importantly, that scale to the vast number of developers eager to learn about and promote Apple’s platforms.

Instead of a week each year when a developer must enter a lottery for a chance at talking directly with a knowledgable Apple engineer in the labs, beef up the existing Developer Technical Support process and workflow so that vexing issues can be driven to the point of resolution, and so that the fruits of those discoveries can be shared with others. For every “lifesaving” tip a developer has received in the WWDC labs, how many others continue to struggle in anguish because the effort was never made to codify that wisdom in the form of a developer technote or other reference material? It doesn’t make sense … it’s a bug, if you will … that so many Apple developers feel that their only opportunity to solve a problem is by meeting in person with an Apple engineer at WWDC.

Instead of asking Apple’s engineers to spend weeks every year preparing, rehearsing, and delivering sessions in San Francisco, ask them to spend a reasonable percentage of the year consulting with and assisting in the development of long-term interactive, iteratively improved video documentation. Start with the last 3 years of WWDC talks on a given subject and condense it down to concise summary of the most pertinent instruction, tips, and demos. It would be ridiculous for Apple to maintain separate text documents for each year, and for developers to be told “Oh, that was addressed in 2011’s NSTextView documentation, go back and look it up.” Yet that’s what developers are forced to do when trying to extract gems of knowledge from past WWDC sessions. (Cough, it’s regrettably true that Apple’s “Release Notes” sometimes serve as a similar kind of decentralized documentation authority).

And what about the community incentive for developers? Isn’t it important to have an opportunity to meet with and catch up with developers from around the world? Yes, it is important, or I should say it would be if it actually worked any longer at WWDC. The very small fraction of developers who are admitted, combined with the unpredictability of whether you or your friends will make the cut, make it essentially useless as an annual catching-up venue. Look to smaller conferences for this ambition. While some of them are similarly challenged in meeting demand for attendance, many are more fine-tuned both in teaching style and in topic choice. They each have a special feel of their own, which naturally attracts a repeat audience whose members are more likely to find fellowship with one another than in the comparatively giant, rotating petri dish of this year’s random WWDC ticket winners.

I have loved the times I’ve attended WWDC, and I may yet end up enjoying it again, but its time has passed. It’s time to move on. In 1983, 1993, and 2003 it was the right tool for the job because it largely fulfilled the objectives for both Apple and developers. In 2013 it’s a strangely exclusive, rotating club with arbitrary membership rules, and increasingly dubious advantages. It’s a source of annual stress and uncertainty for would-be attendees, and has just delivered a whopping blow to thousands of developers who didn’t make the cut for this year’s show.

I would miss many things about WWDC, but the things I would miss could easily be offset by superior, scalable solutions. And I would be happy to leave behind the increasing number of obnoxious aspects of the yearly ritual. It’s time for something better. It’s time to end WWDC.

Virtual ROM

My attention was drawn by Anil Dash on Twitter to two posts discussing the purported and actual capacities of devices that, for example, advertise “64GB of storage.”

Marco Arment linked to an article on The Verge, asserting Microsoft’s 64GB Surface Pro will have only 23GB of usable space. Arment went on to suggest that device manufacturers should be required to market devices based on the “amount of space available for end-user” data.

Ed Bott’s take, on the other hand, was that Microsoft’s Surface Pro is more comparable to a MacBook Air than other tablets, and its baseline disk usage should be considered in that context.

I think each of Arment’s and Bott’s analyses are useful. It would be nice, as Arment suggests, if users were presented with a realistic expectation of how much capacity a device will have after they actually start to use it. And there is merit in Bott’s defense that a powerful tablet, using a more computer-scale percentage of a built-in disk’s storage, should be compared with other full-fledged computers.

Let’s just say if fudging capacity numbers was patented, every tech company would be in hot water with the patent trolls. A quick glance at iTunes reveals that my allegedly 64GB iPhone actually has a capacity of 57.3GB.

ITunes

I don’t know precisely what accounts for this discrepancy, but I can guess that technological detritus such as the metadata used by the filesystem to merely manage the content on the disk takes up a significant amount of space. On top of that, the discrepancy may include space allotted for Apple’s operating system, bundled frameworks, and apps. Additional features such as recovery partitions always come at the cost of that precious disk space. Nonetheless, Apple doesn’t sell this 64GB iPhone as the 57.30GB iPhone. No other company would, either.

It seems that in the marketing of computers, capacity has always been cited in the absence of any clarification about actual utility. One of my first computers (after my Timex Sinclair 1000) was the Commodore 64, a computer whose RAM capacity was built in to the very marketing name of the product. Later, Apple followed this scheme with computers that would be known as the Mac 128K and Mac 512K. Each alluding to its ever-increasing RAM capacity.

The purported RAM capacity was somewhat misleading. Sure, the Commodore 64 had 64K of RAM, but some of that had to be used up by the operating system. Surely it would not be possible to run a program that expects 64K of RAM, and have it work. So was it misleading? Yes, all marketing is misleading, and just as it’s easier to describe an iPhone 5 as having 64GB capacity, it was easier to describe a Commodore as having 64K, or a Mac as having 128K of RAM.

But the capacity claims were more honest than they might have been, thanks to the pragmatic allure of storing much of a computer’s own private data in ROM instead of RAM. Because in those days it was much faster to read data from ROM than from RAM, there was a practical, competitive reason for a company to store as much of its “nuts & bolts” code in ROM. The Mac 128K shipped with 128K of RAM, but also shipped with 64K of ROM, on which much of the operating system’s own code could be stored and accessed.

Thanks to the ROM storage that came bundled with computers, more of the installed RAM was available to end users. And thanks to the slowness of floppy and hard disks, not to mention the question of whether a particular user would even have one, disk storage was also primarily at the user’s discretion. It was only after the performance of hard drives and RAM increased that the allure of ROM diminished, and computer makers turned gradually away from storing their own data separately from the space previously reserved for users. With the increasing speed and size of RAM, and then with the advent of virtual memory on consumer computers, disk and RAM storage graduated into a sort of virtual ROM.

The transition took some time. Over the years from that Mac 128K, for example, Apple did continue to increase the amount of ROM that it included in its computers. I started working at Apple in an era when a good portion of an operating system would be “burned in ROM”, with only the requisite bug fixes and updates patched in via updates that were loaded from disk. I haven’t kept up with the latest developments, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ROM on modern Macs is only sufficient to boot the computer and bootstrap the operating system from disk. For example, the technical specifications of the Mac Mini don’t even list ROM among its attributes. The vast majority of capacity for running code on modern computers is derived from leveraging in tandem the RAM and hard disk capacities of the device.

So we have transitioned from a time where the advertised capacity of a device was largely available to a user, to an era where the technical capacity may deviate greatly from what a user can realistically work with. The speed and affordability of RAM, magnetic disk, and most recently SSD storage, have created a situation where the parts of a computer that the vendor most wants to exploit are the same that the customer covets. Two parties laying claim to a single precious resource can be a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for us customers, RAM, SSD, and hard disks are cheaper than they have ever been. Whether we opt for 64GB, 128GB, or 1TB, we can probably afford to lend the device makers a little space for their virtual ROM.

Out Of The Bag

AppleInsider reported on Friday that the number of visitors to their site purportedly running a pre-release version of Mac OS X 10.9 had risen dramatically in January. Federico Viticci of MacStories followed up on Twitter, confirming a similar trend.

I was curious about my own web statistics, so I started poking around at my Apache log files. They start with the IP address of the visitor and include various other information including the URL that was accessed, the referrer, and most importantly here, the user agent string for the browser.

Although the vast majority of visitors to my sites are running Mac OS X 10.8, or iOS, or even Windows, there were indeed a few examples of visitors who appeared to be running 10.9. This is what the user agent string looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9) AppleWebKit/537.28.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.1 Safari/537.28.2

See that 10_9? It’s a strong indicator, combined with the respectably “higher than 10.8” Safari and WebKit versions, that the visitor is indeed running 10.9. Could it be fake? Sure, but the odds of anybody faking this kind of thing seem relatively low: there is little imaginable reward for duping a site into believing that a solitary IP address is running 10.9, and it would be challenging to orchestrate some kind of distributed fraud without being found out.

If you have access to your own site’s HTTP access log, and the format is like mine, you can sift out the 10.9 accesses by simply grepping for the 10_9 substring:

grep 10_9 access_log

If you have any matches, odds are good that they will be from IP addresses that start with 17. Why? Because Apple is somewhat unique in that it owns outright an entire class A subnet of IP addresses: all addresses starting with “17.” are theirs.

So people at Apple are running 10.9. What’s the big deal? For one thing, anybody with access to a reasonably popular web site’s access logs now has an insight into Apple’s development schedule. Look at the graph from the AppleInsider link above and you can deduce not only that the number of users actively running 10.9 has gone up, but I would also guess that the troughs and peaks in the graph are correlated with the release cycle of internal test builds. What is this worth to a competitor? Probably not much, but who knows.

The other issue that comes to mind is that not all the IP addresses are liable to start with 17. Why? For one thing, Apple employees may be working from home, either in the Bay Area near Apple headquarters, or scattered around the world in their respective telecommuting locations. For another, Apple may have granted early access to close business partners who would naturally be running the operating system in their own office environments, on other subnets than 17. To see if you’ve been treated to any of these visitors, and to further refine the list to avoid duplicates from the same IP, try this:

grep -v ^17\\. access_log | sort -u -t- -k1,1

If you found any results, first of all I strongly encourage you not to share the IP addresses in public. I am writing this article at least in part to call out the reasons why Apple’s divulging this information is a risk to its employees and partners. You should protect the confidence of your site’s visitors.

That said, you may want to privately perform a rough geographic lookup based on the IP address. Googling will find many services for this and this is just one that I used. You will probably find that the IP address maps to a location in San Francisco, San Jose, or Santa Cruz. But some of my 10.9 visitors hailed from other parts of the US.

So Apple’s broadcasting of the Safari user agent string reveals information about their development schedule, and divulges the IP addresses of likely employees or business partners. While I can’t quite imagine somebody taking advantage of the employee IP addresses, it sets off my spidey-sense creepiness alarm. The potential for divulging business partners could be of more obvious pragmatic interest to investors or competitors. The discovery of an alliance between Apple and another company would seem likely to affect the perceived value of either company, and could ruffle the feathers of other business partners who feel threatened by the cooperation.

So what should Apple do? The answer was in their hands before Safari launched: spoof the user agent! Don Melton was on the Safari team and wrote recently about keeping the project a secret:

Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

To guard clues about their development schedule, they should probably spoof the user agent string until the release is in a large enough number of hands that the number of user agents is uninterestingly diverse. But to protect the IP addresses of their employees and business partners from prying eyes they should at least spoof the user agent on non-17 subnets.

Apple’s famous secrecy is not foolproof. We don’t know yet what exciting new features 10.9 will bring or which hardware it will support. We don’t know how much it will cost, or which of the diminishing number of code names it will have. But we know it’s coming, and we know collectively the IP addresses of those who are testing it. The cat is still a secret, but the paws are out of the bag.

AAPL Stops On A Dime

Two months ago, Joe Springer of Seeking Alpha called out January 18, today, as a point of interest in the trajectory of Apple’s stock price. He suggested that because of a particularly large number of open AAPL options expiring today, this would be a turning point: the stock price would remain artificially deflated through today, and then rise more organically starting next week.

Earlier this week, John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to the post and gave his own summary of the situation:

Billions of dollars at stake if AAPL stays near or under $500 a share until January 19 and then makes a run after that. No tinfoil hat required to see the motivation here.

I’m not sure where the $500 number comes from, because it wasn’t cited in the original article. I suspect that Gruber did some more research and determined that in the months since Springer’s article, $500 had become the most popular option price among investors, and thus carried the heaviest weight among the variously-priced options set to expire today.

Today, Apple’s stock price closed at exactly $500. Sometimes the way things unfold seem too precise to be merely coincidence, and Gruber’s reaction to the news says as much:

I still have that bridge to sell you if you don’t think the fix was in on this.

But was it a fix, or merely an “honest” market doing what markets do? I don’t claim to know too much about the perplexing ebbs and flows of the stock market, particularly when it comes to options, but this article by Rocco Pendola offers a counterpoint to the conspiracy angle, taken verbatim from his interview in 2011 with Neil Pearson:

Neil Pearson: Let’s use AAPL as an example. Friday, AAPL’s closing price was near $340. Further, let’s suppose that there is a large trader or group of traders who follow a hedging strategy that requires them to sell aggressively if AAPL rises above $340, and buy aggressively if AAPL falls below $340. If this is the case, their trading will have a tendency to “pin” AAPL at or near $340. It is only a tendency, because during the week there might be some event, either a news announcement or trading by some other investors, that dwarfs the effect of the hedging strategy and moves AAPL away from $340.

In other words, Pendola agrees that the large number of open options had a part in pushing the stock price to $500, but insists that the fact that it closed precisely on that number was hardly guaranteed or “fixed” as Gruber suggests.

Because Pendola and Pearson are experts in stock analysis, who have covered precisely this topic before, even to the extent that Apple was previously the subject, I tend to respect their conclusion. I also noticed that in after-hours trading, AAPL hasn’t begun rocketing upwards. If there were some conspiratorial manipulation of the stock to keep it at $500 only through close of trading today, one would imagine it would have traded higher than $500.31 after-hours.

I was as quick as anybody to jump on the conspiracy wagon when the stock closed exactly at $500, but sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.