1. John Gruber is angry
I don’t think I have seen a more angry post from John about something Apple has done for a long, long while. In “Something is rotten in the state of Apple” he gives the company both barrels and a good kicking over the delay of the new Siri Intelligence features. And I think he’s right: for Apple to announce something which was clearly miles away from release and was, in fact, just a demo video was very unlike the company. Hopefully it will learn some valuable lessons.
I will take issue with one point in John’s post though: I think he is unkind to the Knowledge Navigator video:
What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple—the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century—does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features. Until WWDC last year, that is.
I think there’s a big difference: Knowledge Navigator was never meant to be a demonstration of a product which Apple was going to release. Instead, it was made as part of John Sculley’s presentation to an education show, and was designed to illustrate key technologies which Sculley thought would be important for the future: hypertext; voice recognition and computer speech; software agents; and video communications.
The video proved to be pretty popular, especially within Apple. When I was working there in 1990, we had an afternoon-long learning session where various new technologies got demonstrated to the whole company, including the forthcoming QuickTime, HyperCard, and – of course – “Blue”, which was the codename for OS 7. Knowledge Navigator formed part of that afternoon, with a discussion of how far away we were from having the kind of tech it demonstrated.
As an aside, that was a very different Apple from today. I was just a lowly intern in IS&T (Information Systems and Technology) but even I had access to the internal alpha release of Blue. There were stacks of the CD-ROM version just lying around for anyone to grab and play with. It was buggy as heck, but I was soon running it – slowly – on my Mac Plus at home.
2. Apple to add E2EE support to iMessage for RCS
This is good news. Apple added the ability to message Android users using RCS rather than SMS a while ago, but – in part because the E2EE used by Google was not part of the RCS standard – it wasn’t supported between iPhones and Android phones.
Of course this means that Google will have to implement the new standard too, but they are committing to do that. This is definitely a step forward for cross-platform secure messaging.
3. The endless delights of enshittification
I’m willing to bet that no consumer survey ever has shown demand for advertising appearing on the dashboard of your very expensive car every time you stop at a red light. What an absolute garbage world of products we live in.
4. Taskmasking
I’m sure this article is probably hogwash, but I have definitely noticed that my Gen Z colleagues almost never take their headphones off. Which I think is missing out quite a bit of the point of being in an office, where you soak up a lot of knowledge by osmosis. Or maybe I’m old.
5. Oh Spotify
I stopped using Spotify when it started paying conspiracy theorist and right wing-adjacent podcaster Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars, but if you want any more reason then just look at how long it took to remove misgynistic content from weak-assed rapist and pimp Andrew Tate.
The company finally removed a Tate course on "pimping hoes" after employee complaints about its misogynistic content, highlighting internal concerns over the platform hosting material that promotes exploitation and criminal activity. Of course, it still pays Rogan vast amounts of money despite him promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and a lot more. But hey, that makes them money – Tate wasn’t, because the creator programme he used to monetise his show pays 100% of the cash to him.
6. In other news, water still wet
Surprise! The browser duopoly on mobile damages innovation! Of course it does.
7. Inoreader AI summaries are smart
I know, I know: not everything has to have AI. But when it is incorporated into a product, it helps to think about the use case. Inoreader, which has been my RSS reader of choice for years, has added (optional) AI summaries to articles with a neat twist: you can decide the kind of summary you want.
There are obvious ones, like a one sentence summary, but more useful are things like “Objective vs Opinion” views, which give you a bullet pointed list of the objective facts in an article and a second one of the opinions of the author. I like it.
8. Apple, spite and maps
Ever wanted to set a default navigation app in iOS? You have? Well good news: you can in iOS 18.4.
But not if you live outside the EU. As Michael Tsai notes, this is basically just spiteful. Other applications can have defaults changed – what’s the rationale for not allowing users to change maps?
9. Who else has the UK government demanded a backdoor from?
Possibly Google. But that’s kind of the point: it’s illegal for a company which has had one of these requests to publicly reveal it. I genuinely don’t think I have seen a more stupid law in quite a while.
10. Tim Sweeney remains an embarrassment
What is it with rich tech men and their ability to be a sucker for the nearest conspiracy theory which confirms their biases? It’s almost as if none of them have any critical faculties at all. Truly, technology rots the brain.