Apple Loop: Tim Cook Ignoring Apple Watch Sales, BlackBerry Killing iPhone, Apple Says Goodbye iPod.
One of the next big products that Apple is said to have in the pipeline is a larger, more powerful iPad, and it looks like Apple is already preparing iOS to support it. Apple’s upcoming operating system offers much-needed improvements, a smarter Siri and an extended battery life that will satisfy many charger-fatigued iPhone loyalists.In decades to come, 2015 will undoubtedly be considered as belonging to the early days of the “post-PC” era, but following Google’s recent developer-focused I/O conference and last Monday’s Apple WorldWide Developer’s Conference keynote, it was hard not to think mobile computing is entering its late adolescent phase, shaking off youthful limitations and early missteps as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android grow into fully fledged computing platforms.Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes a summary of the WWDC 2015 announcements, details on downloading iOS 9, the new features in OSX El Capitan, the native apps SDK for the Apple Watch, details on the Apple Music streaming service, news on the fourth beta of iOS 8.4, the arrival of Apple Pay in the UK, the iPod disappearing from the Apple homepage, and the BlackBerry killing potential of the iPhone.
In a proof-of-concept attack, a researcher has shown how a security flaw within the iOS mail client can be easily exploited to trick Apple users into handing over their iCloud passwords. While it may have been built to fill the rather sizable gap between the iPhone and Mac, it never really embraced its own identity, playing second fiddle to each of the devices it was stuck between.
Certainly, it’s clear that a certain maturity and stability has been reached – iOS and Android are the competing operating systems in a bipolar world, offering similar but distinct visions of mobile computing, with strengths and weaknesses on either side. Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read our weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes). The flaw, which can be found in the default email program in the latest version of iOS for iPhone or iPad, fails to strip out potentially malicious code such as the HTML tag in email messages. Apps were things, little squares you could see and touch, and it made sense to buy them, put them on your phone, and use them one at a time like blades in a Swiss army knife. It’s a fairly safe suggestion that the layout is meant for a future iPad, which lends credibility to the growing reports about its eventual announcement.
Consequently, Apple’s mighty tablet has never quite been able to live up to the lofty expectations it created as the de facto leader of the post-PC revolution. It boasts some features that will make Apple fans very happy, such as improved note-taking and the ability to learn about your habits and offer advice based on those habits. Apple has made good on their word to changing people’s lives by continually improving the tools that, quite literally, change the way a person with disabilities (such as myself) uses an iPhone and iPad.
The researcher who discovered the bug showed how it could be exploited by downloading a form from a remote server that looks exactly like a legit iCloud log-in prompt. Our dumb, silo’d apps are slowly but steadily becoming smart, context-aware services that link, share, and talk to each other without us having to necessarily see or touch those little squares. It’s not uncommon for Apple to prepare for new devices this way: the beta for iOS 6 scaled up to fit the 4-inch display of the iPhone 5 before it was announced, and hints of the iPhone 6’s larger display were scattered throughout the iOS 8 beta as well. During the middle of his WWDC presentation, Craig Federighi somewhat surprisingly devoted an entire segment to the iPad, highlighting several exclusive features that power users have been clamoring for.
Much like Microsoft’s Cortana, Siri can now be reminded to ask you to do something at a later time, like, “Remind me at 2 p.m. to call my mom.” And like Android’s Google Now assistant, a new feature called Proactive will try to anticipate your needs, such as telling you to leave for the airport because you have a flight to catch in a few hours and there’s traffic on the way. Fundamentally, Apple sells hardware differentiated from competitors by its tightly integrated software, whereas Google is first and foremost a services company – appreciating that distinction is critical when trying to understand the development of the mobile computing era.
Apple’s OS has a tendency to randomly display iCloud login prompts anyway, and the exploit can be programmed to ask for a password only once, so as not to arouse suspicion. Then Apple announced Proactive, an upgrade to Siri and Spotlight that lets iOS reach inside apps to surface their data and link their functionality without having to open them from your home screen. “Me too”-ness aside, Apple’s post-app future is off the blocks and on Google’s heels. With iOS 9, Apple has refocused its attention on what the iPad is and can be, positioning it as a powerful, versatile tool that seeks to redefine the role the Mac plays in Apple’s ecosystem. The screen looks virtually the same, and it’s disappointing that Apple hasn’t yet found a way around those static icons that populate users’ desktops without providing any live information until they’re clicked. The company’s WWDC keynote struck a typically utopian note: What’s not to like about an iPhone that behaves more like a personal assistant than a bag of hammers?
But a larger pattern is also beginning to emerge – what few of us could have predicted in 2007 is how mobile computing would end up swallowing so many other businesses. Even more than how they handle files and apps, Macs run circles around iPads when it comes to doing more than one thing at once, deftly letting us surf the web while writing, or watch a video while clearing out our inboxes. iOS 9 doesn’t quite bring desktop-level multitasking to our iPads, at least not yet, but Apple has finally devised a way to let us run two apps simultaneously.
I had always hoped that Apple was holding off on that fundamental improvement because it was testing some new innovation in multitasking that would blow us all away. Apple this week granted me behind-the-scenes access to sessions, labs, and developer interviews at Moscone so as to tell WWDC’s accessibility story. None will change the world, but collectively they amount to something quite useful, and they may even prompt millions of people to go buy more Apple devices.
Apple is likely going to have to make a number of changes to iOS — or, at least, to its core apps — so that the iPad Pro’s larger display makes sense. That was never clearer than the moment during the WWDC keynote when the Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi announced Apple News, a kind of Flipboard alternative for accessing news feeds from publishers. The strategy seems to be paying off: several days ago, Apple officials told Ars Technica that the company is now working on a fix for an upcoming software update.
The most obvious implementation for tablet multitasking—-and one that has is already utilized on the Samsung Galaxy Tab—-has always been to simply split the screen down the center to allow two apps to run side by side. To trot out this feature now — after every non-Apple tablet imaginable has had it for years — just seems like an acknowledgement of a longstanding error. The majority of consumers will see the update in late September or early October, but it’s possible to get access to it now as a developer, or in the upcoming public beta program. In some cases that’s been minor, but the bigger changes have been really critical for larger displays, allowing the typically streamlined and focused iOS to do a bit more.
Under-the-hood changes made to the operating system extend the life of your charge for an hour, and a new low-power mode provides about three extra hours of battery life for the iPhone 6. That illustrates one thing clearly – the tactic of media organisations betting everything on native smartphone and tablet apps suddenly seems quaint. Just as Facebook is attempting to intermediate the media business by hosting “Instant Articles” within Facebook’s app, Apple will similarly present all media sources in one app. The snag is developers are getting instant access while users have to wait until July, but there’s a simple way around this, and without the standard developer charges. Thus, the media industry’s loss of platform control continues apace – newspapers and magazines giving way to dedicated apps giving way to feeds in other companies’ apps.
In the keynote Apple used the example of an iPhone 6 (unsurprisingly no mention for the heavily leaked iPhone 6S) saying it will get an extra hour of screen time (about a 10% jump). The trend in music is not quite analogous to the news media, but music consumption is being revolutionised by streaming – where once we owned music that we listened to on dedicated devices, now we have just another icon on the homescreen for music that we rent. Like the Notification Center on OS X, it can be activated by swiping from from the right side of the screen, bringing up a skinny version of an app operating in its own window. The protracted introduction of Apple Music might have been uncharacteristically sloppy stagecraft from Apple, but the service is likely to greatly expand the number of people who pay for streaming music services, relegating the music industry to another small constituent piece of the larger mobile platform. The presenter focuses on an attribute of Accessibility like, say, VoiceOver, and demonstrate how to properly integrate it into an app, making it work with labels and images.
It’s a perfect way to respond to a message or quickly copy a bit of text into a note without needing to divert too much attention away from the main app you’re working in. OSX also picked up its yearly spring clean, and as is tradition OS X 10.11 (try saying that really quickly ten times while looking in a mirror) is given a new name.
The internet of things (IoT) has long been touted, but Google’s acquisition of smart appliance maker Nest and the launch of IoT operating system Brillo, a branch of Android for connected devices, as well as the evolution of Apple’s IoT platform HomeKit, positions us for the day when our homes become platform-specific extensions of our mobile devices. If you’re watching a video or making a FaceTime call, you can shrink it and move it around just as you would a QuickTime window on your Mac—-except it’s smart enough to resize itself and always stays as the topmost window so it won’t get lost under another app. For instance, some UI mechanics of Apple Watch related to the digital crown and the Zoom feature, where a user can turn the crown to move line by line when reading text with Zoom turned on. While the underlying code will remain separate, expect the UI and the act of sharing data between devices to become ever more integrated during the year.
Had I not seen it on the WWDC stage, the iPad’s multitasking options–most notably Picture in Picture–would seem like someone’s fantastical iOS concept video, a brilliant idea that just wouldn’t be possible in reality. And is it still worth the trouble to install, much less pay for? “The genius of the App Store was that it turned software into this discrete product you could make a clear value proposition about,” says William Van Hecke, a designer and developer at the Omni Group, which makes productivity software for iOS. “You buy this thing, you tap it, and it does what it says on the box. But much like the Siri demo opened our eyes to how voice control could eventually take over navigation and dictation, it’s not hard to imagine a future incarnation where a notepad or calculator could offer the same floating functionality, elevating the iPad to new heights of productivity. I’m already a fan and loyal user of Dark Sky’s forecasting app, so the difference between launching the app or invoking an iOS weather report “powered by” Dark Sky are trivial. If the generations-old A7 chip can already handle playing continuous video while jumping in and out of apps, future generations will be able to handle a far greater load, bringing us ever closer to the day where we can choose between full-screen and floating apps, just like on our Macs.
And once that happens, we won’t need a hybrid machine like the Surface; the iPad will be powerful and capable enough to handle all of our day-to-day computing needs, reserving our Macs for more processor intensive tasks like Photoshop or Final Cut. Health and fitness apps like Runtastic and Nike+ Running will be the obvious beneficiaries of the SDK thanks to their heavy reliance on the watch’s sensors.
Keyboards like Fleksy and Swype that are built to input text faster with one finger aren’t helpful on the larger screen, and with the exception of some clever in-app implementations, I haven’t found any that are helpful when navigating or selecting text. IDC listed Fitbit, Xiaomi and Garmin as the top three makers of wearable devices for the first quarter of 2015, but Apple’s official roll out of the Watch in April should make it the top wearable manufacturer when the second quarter numbers come out. Apple’s heavily trailed subscription music service was finally announced through Tim Cook’s use of “One More Thing…” to give it some gravitas. The service comes with three major components, a social network for artists to share media with their fans, a 24/7 streaming radio station called Beats 1 (leaving an obvious follow-up to launch Beats 2), and an ‘all you can listen to ‘ streaming music service.
The iPad’s QuickType refinements aren’t just about freeing our fingers–they elevate Apple’s tablet to a whole new level of productivity and efficiency, and open up the platform for even bigger changes. Eric Rolston, founder of the design studio Argodesign, sees the de-app-ification of mobile software empowering third-party developers hoping to secure a foothold on the platform. “There’s a lot of startups that are features masquerading as companies, and they’ll find a better home in this world,” he says. “For some transactions, it’s ideal. We’ve been reading about rumors of the iPad Pro for years, but multitasking has always been the highest hurdle Apple had to clear before it could become a reality.
If you can write a perfect API, there’s no longer a need to wrap it up in an app or UI.” Instead of retailing visually attractive “things,” developers might sell (or sell subscriptions to) context-aware “powers” that imbue a mobile device with extra capabilities, like Mario eating a mushroom. SAN FRANCISCO, CA – JUNE 08: Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue speaks during the Apple WWDC 2015 (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) I’m going to be very interested in how Beats 1 plays out.
But on mobile devices, these perceptions matter. “Consumers don’t think in terms of raw provisioning,” Rolston says. “They think of affordances that they can touch and enjoy.” Once third-party app experiences are unbundled from unique interfaces and smeared across a variety of integrated touch points and OS-level utilities, the once-abstract concept of a “mobile ecosystem” is going to get a lot more concrete. How much time will be focused on major label acts, and how much time on the indie and unsigned acts is a key concern for the industry, although I’ll be interested to see how much user feedback guides the selections. Sure, Apple and Google (not to mention Facebook and Amazon) have always wanted users to go “all in,” but we could easily balance the strengths of one tech superpower against the weaknesses of another.
The Register expands on the offering: The internet radio station will offer 24/7 music of various genres operating out of offices in London, New York and Los Angeles. Farhad Manjoo’s advice in The New York Times in February—Apple hardware, Google services, Amazon media—is practical and all but pain-free to implement. And with an even bigger screen, Apple’s iOS multitasking could be an absolute thing of beauty, perhaps even letting us run up to four apps in quadrants and taking advantage of its inevitable Force Touch technology to quickly switch between screens and views.
At the 35:00 mark is the Workflow demo, done by two Apple accessibility engineers who are blind.) Weinstein and his team gave me a demo of their app, and explained to me that their focus, accessibility-wise, was on the visually impaired. Apple has promised that songs uploaded by independent artists will be given consideration for broadcast on the service alongside titles from acts signed to record labels. Launching Facebook Paper to read the news, or Google Maps to get directions, may soon feel archaic.” If that happens, it won’t be because those app experiences aren’t well-designed. It’ll be because they’re cut off—literally dis-integrated from the seamless, platform-level services that add up to be more than the sum of their merely “good enough” parts. Tasks that weren’t natural before will become commonplace as developers explore ways to use the Slide Out, Split View, and Picture in Picture to their advantage.
For many visually impaired users, getting directions home, for example, can potentially be cumbersome because of the visual strain required to orient one’s self to the Maps interface — e.g., find the correct buttons to tap, etc. Keedogo is a iPad keyboard designed for elementary-aged children, and has many accessible traits. (I wrote about Keedogo in more detail for MacStories last year.) Proloquo2go, also for iPad, is an app designed for non-verbal children, particularly those with autism. We’re more like the no-nonsense cartel kingpin in Miami Vice who coldly informs Crockett and Tubbs that “in this business, I do not buy a service.
Something David said that has stuck with me is the fact that the tools he builds are only possible because Apple built the developer frameworks in the first place. Clicking on the “Learn more about iPod” link takes you to the Apple.com/ipod section of the web site, notably including — for now — a link to the similarly under-the-radar Apple TV, which was reportedly slated to receive an update at WWDC up until the last minute. During Monday’s keynote, Apple showed a video featuring various developers and their apps, while also discussing the impact apps have had on the world and the iOS ecosystem. BERLIN, GERMANY – MAY 03: Visitors try out hifi headphones on Apple iPods at the new Apple Store on Kurfuerstendamm avenue in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Lots of ‘love’ for former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie and his story that the iPhone killed BlackBerry.
It was a touch display, it was a clickable display, it had new applications, and it was all done in an incredibly short period of time and it blew up on us,” Balsillie said on stage at Toronto’s Empire Club. The stricken Storm had “a 100 percent return rate” for Verizon, a figure that caused the carrier — BlackBerry’s largest customer — to demand $500 million in compensation and to push handsets made by other manufacturers. “That was the time I knew we couldn’t compete on high-end hardware,” Balsillie said. “We had to stick to the low end.” While it’s true the iPhone launch coincided with the rushed development BlackBerry Storm, the real crash happened a few years later. BlackBerry maintained market share long after Apple’s smartphone hit the streets, but Research in Motion (as it was known then) lacked confidence in its core product, overstretched on others, and was simply out-thought by Steve Jobs in the mainstream consumer market.
Not to my mind, but the iPhone did cause companies to react against their own interests chasing after something too elusive, and that doomed BlackBerry.