I’m late for my 8am marketing class. I’m running out the door of my tiny apartment, scrambling along the the sidewalk to campus. I’m 10 minutes away. Can I grab a coffee before class? Surely I can make it. I pull out my shiny new iPhone 5. Pull up YouTube. The wired headphones slowly untangle as I saunter into the student union building. I search for “majestic casual”. I hit play. Full send, volume up. Every step seems softer with music flowing out of the headphones.
Majestic was my daily driver for so long. This was a lo-fi, trip-hop, chillwave firehose of music for so long that my entire catalog of playlists came directly from Majestic for years. That is until there was a brief hiatus because of copyright drama.
My electronic roots demanded reflection today. Lo and behold, after digging up old playlists, I discovered that Majestic is a listed Curator on Apple Music!
It doesn’t look like there’s much activity, but maybe that will change? Check out some of the playlists here:
It’s the little things! I tuned in to the livestream of the mission and thought it was culturally important to share. In the stream, it’s hard to tell but I believe Glover was taking a photo of Hansen posing for a photo. I think they were preparing for press interviews.
Since the beginning of the iPhone, Apple has resisted opening up it’s operating system in many ways. The App Store being the biggest walled garden, but the lesser known and perhaps more arcane is the browser on your iPhone.
Apple, has for years successfully kept alternative browsers on iOS locked-into using Webkit to the dismay of Google and consumers. Last year in February, there was a concerted test to see how well a Blink-based browser would fair on iPhones. You see, Apple has resisted allowing apps to use alternative browser vendors for years because of several reasons.
Apple likes to keep a iron-grip control on marketshare of it’s software. It is an old war that software companies continue to fight. For good reason too. It’s part of their strategy to keep users within the flywheel of their subscription businesses and tick-tock product cycles. If Apple wants to maintain market share of it’s browser, it must remain competitive. The problem with webkit, and Safari the browser by extension is, it’s lacking in terms of feature development and popularity. There are claims that webkit can has superior power management, simple to extend, secure and less of a memory hog.
theverge.com – Priced at $199, the Rabbit R1 features a 2.88-inch touchscreen, camera, and built-in assistant that uses your existing subscriptions and services. Its ambitious design hints at a potential future as a smartphone alternative.
The iPhone has no doubt been a crazy success since the early days. But how did the iPhone end up being such a success? Speculation, rumors and the lack of a design-first company in the market left Apple wide-open to squeeze into a already crowding market of cell phones and catalyze the smartphone industry into the behemoth that it is today. It took years of research, iteration and trial and error to produce the first iPhones. Apple was prototyping devices in secrecy with fabricators in China as early as 2005 with Foxconn and Pegatron. Looking back, we can see the design lineage and early ideas that were afoot in the company.
Early on, there was a bet that the clickwheel, an invention of the successful iPod could be re-used in the iPhone. Thanks to @DongleBookPro, and (a few others over the years), we have some interesting images of late Acorns OS. Apple installed numerous diagnostic tools on these devices such as fabricator diagnostics, carrier and engineering diagnostic UI. Hap Plain of Cult of Mac put together this video showing just how rudimentary some of these early P-series iPhones worked here:
What is clear, is that the streaming wars are becoming increasingly expensive. Everyone is vying for the customer’s prime-time attention. Just to watch the latest new original series X on streaming service Y is a mind-bending calculation. Just between those two variables alone, and conservative estimates on new original content: roughly 10 services with original content, 5 new series per year at 10 episodes each, comes to about 250 episodes to stream. That’s roughly 250 hours worth of content to stream pear year. America’s greatest export is after all, entertainment.
That’s a lot to keep up with, and that doesn’t even include cable studio production releases that come from favorites such as FX or SYFY.
Professor Scott Galloway makes a great point that SVODs that have an economic flywheel (e.g. companies that attract customers via Prime or iPhone sales, and enjoy the benefits of staying within those ecosystems such as Prime Video or Apple TV+ respectively) are immune to economic downturns. A couple of obvious giants that fit that mould are Amazon and Apple:
I’m not even sure Netflix gets out alive. Netflix is now the US economy, vulnerable to a spike in interest rates as it takes on increasing amounts of debt to fund staggering investments in original content. The original gangster can’t rely on gross margin dollars from Mandalorian action figures, handsets, or paper towels (no flywheel). The key question is can Netflix’s first-mover advantage/skill be replicated in other markets.
If Netflix isn’t careful, when the next recession or economic downturn hits, (reminder: the American deficit is nearing $1 Trillion) it’s entirely possible that Netflix won’t survive.
That’s important to understand because the fuel for that economic furnace is powered by people. You’d think it’s devices (and it is really), but at the end of the day, it’s people who assemble these ivory devices. Apple’s device sales generate the bulk of their cash. That’s why Apple has been focused on other revenue segments such as services and entertainment recently. Foxconn, is Apple’s primary fabricator and production darling, located in Shenzhen.
The hinge is also a bit stiff so you won’t be able to just whip it open with a flick of a wrist — closing it with one hand also involves some more finger contortions to start the closing action. It’s just more practical to close it with your other hand.
Even with these caveats, the whole opening and closing mechanism is supremely satisfying to do, with crisp snaps in both directions. Snapping the phone shut to hang up on a call is a particular delight; there really is no better way to end a call than the classic flip phone snap, and it’s excellent to see that Motorola has kept it alive here. The hardware feels great, too, with solid-feeling stainless steel and glass on the outside and a wonderfully textured back that’s nice and grippy, which is essential for not dropping it while flipping it open and shut. (It is a fingerprint magnet, though.)
Pretty wild right? What year is this? Check out The Verge’s review video below. At the 1:20 mark, Chaim makes a fantastic point. All the other foldables seem to have run into the same problem. They all have terrible hinge designs, among other unmemorable product design issues. For other unknown reasons, most of the other devices fold hamburger style instead of hotdog. Perplexing really. Remember the Samsung Galaxy Fold? It was atrocious, and If you recall, it failed spectacularly.
Sure, the new RAZR isn’t exactly the most beautiful smart device either. It does after all run on Android and will likely employ Google RCS. Nonetheless, it does raise some eyebrows. It brings Motorola back into the fray, and it brings the flip back to smart phones in such a memorable way. One major upside for this design? No more glass screens, which means no more cracked screens for those that fumble (myself included). I think that’s a bright future we can all hope for.
Overall, I’m not sure if I would love it owning a RAZR (I never owned the original RAZR in the first place, but I did own a Sidekick 3 once upon a time), but it has certainly piqued my interest. I think it’s entirely possible that this foldable mobile-device paradigm just might make a comeback. What do ya’ll think?
General Magic was probably the single-most important project of the 20th century. Originally spun out of an internal Apple project. The at-the-time CEO, John Sculley later joined the board of General Magic and despite Apple’s minority stake in General Magic, attempted to cannibalize their research and neuter their products:
Even though the company folded shortly after the dot-com bust in 2004, the spoils of their research and development gave us Palm’s Pilot, RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, and countless other products that we now collectively call: the smartphones. Veterans of General Magic are, to say the least, numerous:
The head of AI at Apple. The founder of Nest. The founder of eBay. The head of Google’s speech recognition. The CTO of Twitter. The CTO and cofounder of LinkedIn. The VP of technology at Apple. They all have one thing in common: In the early 1990s, they worked at General Magic. https://t.co/EgeQcmafF7
Phil Goldman and Steve Perlman, both founders of WebTV (Side-note: WebTV was briefly classified as a weapon for overseas sales due to the nature of its strong encryption. Later is rebranded as MSN TV) which Microsoft acquired in 1997 for $425 million.
Peter Nieh, currently is a partner at LightSpeed Venture Partners.
Marco DeMiroz, currently is a partner and co-founder at The VR Fund, a venture capital firm dedicated to all things VR.
I mean as hilarious as these hot-takes are, just how serious is Apple taking this heat? Well, in their documentation they have clearly defined safe-areas to lock-in content in our familiar-yet-safe rectangle we're fond of.
A safe-area example and Auto Layout grid columns.
I think designers are going to have to get creative to deal with this. Thankfully app designers can look to web design for inspiration. Lots of wonderful solutions are just waiting to be discovered.
Apple apparently has some yet-to-be-released Safari documentation about how to handle full-width designs as their Apple TV 4K seems to take advantage of this. Check it out:
Apparently there is a way to set the background color, e.g. the Apple TV 4K page does it. pic.twitter.com/Am3xn6wjRp
I have a feeling that it's just the background-color of the document body, but we'll find out sooner than later. I think this is a real challenge, but in the beginning it's going to be a bit rough out there. I'm going to do a deep-dive into the Human Interface Guidelines and documentation next.
