Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 41

Another iOS 7 Note

There are a bunch of before-and-after shots here between apps on iOS 6 and 7.

I’ll grant that (1) I use almost none of these apps. And (2) people always instinctually prefer the familiar, at least at first.

That said, it strikes me that in only a handful of cases is the iOS 7 version an improvement; in many cases it’s a push; in a solid minority (Instapaper, Hipmunk, Days to Go, etc.) it’s a downgrade in visual presentation.

Apple After Jobs (cont.)

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the tech sphere about the new iPhone 5c and 5s and whether they’re boring or awesome–a sign that Apple has still got it, or that Apple is stagnating.

I suspect that a week or so from now the real story will be what the status of iOS7 is. For the last couple months there’s been chatter in developer circles about problems with iOS 7. Today Sonos pushed out an email to customers saying, well, here:

We aim to provide our customers with the best Controller and software experience possible. Unfortunately, we have encountered some issues related to the Sonos Controller for iPhone and iPad and the final, released version of iOS 7.

We are planning to release an update for your Sonos Controller for iPhone and iPad near the end of the month that addresses these issues. We ask that you take this into consideration before updating your devices to iOS 7.

I can’t remember ever having a major developer come out weeks before an iOS update and basically tell customers, Don’t upgrade to this new system. It’s kind of buggy and we haven’t figure out how to work through it yet.

For my money, this is the single biggest–and most consequential–change in Apple from the Jobs to the Cook era. Jobs almost never pushed out products that weren’t ready. The one time he did launch a buggy project (the iPhone 4, with it’s lousy antenna) that seems to have been a design flaw that was simply overlooked by engineers and testers.

Cook may have now gacked two launches–Apple Maps and iOS 7–with software that needed more time. And in both instances he seems to have gotten at least some internal warnings about the problems.

Maybe the new iOS won’t be so bad and the functionality problems will be minimal and superficial. But if I was at Apple, I’d be pretty nervous.

The Problem with Driverless Cars

Megan McArdle unpacks what has always seemed to me the fatal flaw in driverless cars: liability.

If a driverless car is involved in an accident, it will be the corporate entity behind the car, not the end user, who is legally liable. Which is a giant problem–there’s just no way that either tech companies or auto manufacturers need that exposure.

There are only two solutions: (1) Change the legal system–which is McArdle’s suggestion. (2) Insulate the corporations by passing liability on to drivers–which would mean requiring them to be alert and paying attention at all times. Which would render “driverless-ness” not really much more helpful than cruise control.

Neither solution seems likely to make driverless cars a reality, at least in the U.S.

The Politicized Life

When you live in Washington, one of the things that’s supposed to happen is that, by bumping around casually with folks from the other side you learn to empathize with them and come to understand that they put their pants on one leg at a time, too.

So here’s a Tweet from a guy who just met Don Rumsfeld:

Chatted briefly with Don Rumsfeld as we pulled into DC. He was giddy about seeing his great grand daughter. I was charmed by evil. Ugh.

— Stephen Geer (@stephengeer) September 11, 2013

According to his Twitter profile, Geer isn’t some wet-behind-the-ears college fanboy–he’s a pro who works in the industry. And yet his reaction from meeting Rumsfeld isn’t, Hey, nicer guy than I would have thought.

No, he’s annoyed at himself for being “charmed by evil.”

“Evil”? I’m sorry. Are you fucking kidding?

Let’s pretend we’re going to accept all of the substantive criticisms of Rumsfeld. He was wrong about Iraq. He dictatorially imposed his mistaken views on his subordinates and refused to listen to contrary opinions. At some point he became blinded to incoming evidence because of his own blinkered commitment to his course of action. Even if all of that is true, it doesn’t make him evil. Not even close.

You know who’s evil? Mohammad Atta was evil. And I wouldn’t make such a big deal over Geer not being able to make moral distinctions between Donald Rumsfeld and Mohammad Atta, except that he tweeted this on, you know, the fucking anniversary of September 11.

Twelve years before Donald Rumseld had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Geer, he spent his morning helping to carry wounded colleagues out of the burning Pentagon.

For the Clip File

This Matt Levine piece on flash trading (or robot trading, as he dubs it) is highly interesting.

The Problem with Tech Triumphalism

Okay, that’s underselling things a bit–there isn’t just one problem with tech triumphalism. But pretty high in the top 10, I’d put “the obnoxious idea that anything of any consequence was invented yesterday.”

To wit: In this otherwise kind of interesting essay on popularity, Andy Sternburgh writes,

[I]t’s a tenet of faith that we no longer experience culture as one hulking, homogeneous mass. Not that long ago, we had “Thriller,” which, at last count, sold about 66 million copies worldwide. Nothing sells 66 million copies anymore. The finale of “M*A*S*H” drew 125 million viewers; no TV broadcast, save the Super Bowl, will ever draw that many simultaneous American viewers again. That’s because we’ve turned off Top 40 and loaded up Spotify; we’ve clicked away from NBC and fired up Netflix; we, thanks to the increasingly concierge-style delivery system of the Internet, are each sheltered in our own cultural cocoon.

No. No, really, NO.

You want to understand why 125 million people don’t watch M*A*S*H* anymore? It’s not because of Netflix.

Netflix has roughly 35 million subscribers. M*A*S*H* was watched by about half of America; Netflix is barely above 10 percent penetration. It wasn’t the internet that hobbled broadcast television. It was this other invention called CABLE TV. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Or maybe not. It was invented a long time ago, like back in 1948. And it didn’t really take off until the 1970s. Nothing that that old could possibly be disruptive, right? Only the internets can be disruptive!

And Spotify? Spotify claims to have 6 million paying users and 24 million active users. Granted, one assumes Sternburgh is using Spotify as a stand-in for Pandora and all the other music stream services. But even that’s doesn’t explain the decline of record sales. For that, you have to go back to the twin inventions of the personal music player and the compact disc. Once music was digitized onto a CD, it became inevitable that loss-less copying would lead to wide-spread file-sharing. And once people could carry that music around with them–on the Walkman and later the iPod–there was less need to listen to the radio station. Which began the slow draw-down of the cultural impact of the Top 40.

I know it’s crazy, but before the internet, people somehow muddled along. They even invented stuff! And sometimes that stuff–the television, the birth control pill, the atom bomb–really changed the world around us.

I mean, not like the way Facebook has changed us, or anything. Or Twitter. Or BangWithFriends. I mean, obviously.

Gobsmacking Irony Alert

Interesting thesis here:

Just as the story of one Goldman Sachs daughter’s over-the-top bar mitzvah became a Wall Street morality tale, Parker’s wedding has been covered that way, too, across sites that seem to be, lately, more sharply attuned to covering tech culture critically. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Tech-world denizen Jesper Andersen tweeted a similar sentiment: “Change ‘startup’ to ‘hedge fund,’ ‘ecstasy’ to ‘cocaine’, and ‘douche-bag’ to ‘douche bag’ and you too can see SF is just another Wall St.” Or this, from Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”

There’s a lot to agree with in this article over at . . . The New Republic.

Behold: Tired Parents, Late Reviews

It’s like a blog created just for me. From the about section:

This is a safe place. We can all be honest here. We’ll start.

Your children are trying to murder you. We know because ours are almost succeeding against us. They suck the life from us and leave us without the ability to be human to each other, let alone them.

And they think it’s funny.

Obviously, we can’t help with that; as it is, we’re writing this from our bolt-hole next to the pantry. But we’re here to help you out with something else.

Over the course of the pain your children have inflicted on you, you’ve missed out on some popular culture, and by “some” we mean “all.” We have, too. We have decided to do something about it, and in the process, we’re going to help you and us, too.

Here you will find reviews of movies, books, and video games you will have missed while trying to survive the fact of your children. We will focus primarily on adult entertainment (by which we mean things rated PG-13 up to R, not things rated with various repetitions of X), but will also hit some kids’ material that may or may not be bearable, but to which you’ll be exposed anyway.

From their review of Transformers:

In 1986, a generation of children screamed a scream of denial, rage, and mourning as the clueless idiots at Marvel’s animation arm pointlessly and Troy Denning-like killed Optimus Prime so that Hasbro could market a new round of Transformers toys.

In Transformers: The Movie, Optimus Prime returns to the Autobots’ base on Earth to find it overrun with Decepticons, and his own forces dead or hopelessly outnumbered and soon to fall.

Because he’s Optimus Prime, he sets out to singlehandedly turn the tide of battle and to kick ass. Because he’s Optimus Prime, he succeeds. Because Marvel’s animation arm was run by people hopped up on cocaine and stupid, he is inexplicably and gratuitously killed as the incongruous protagonist of the film for no appreciable reason gets in the way of Prime’s moment of triumph.

Genius.

Time to Come Clean

I do not actually know who Robin Thicke is and I’ve never heard the song “Blurred Lines.” Then again, I didn’t hear that crazy Korean song everyone loves until October of 2012, so Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is probably winding its way into my aural sight-lines as we speak. I look forward to grooving on it sometime in mid-2015.

That said, Ace’s giant FAQ about Thicke and “Blurred Lines” strikes me as utterly brilliant. I can’t even excerpt it, because every line is gold. Go and enjoy.

Netflix and Price Discrimination

I take a fairly non-academic view of price discrimination–which is to say that if sellers want to practice it by imposing hurdles (like coupons or happy hours) that’s fine, because the hurdles apply to everyone and buyers can choose whether or not to impose them. In other words, the seller presents the array of prices and it’s the buyer who makes the discriminating decisions. I’m fairly nervous about seller-imposed price discrimination.

For instance, should Amazon be allowed to charge different prices for streamable content based on your browser? Or your OS? Maybe. How about your IP address? Or your sex? Or your race?

The reason these sorts of price discriminations make me uncomfortable is because once you allow the seller to start walking down that road, what’s to stop a company from instituting punitive pricing on groups they find distasteful, like, say, people who live in Utah. Or people whom they suspect to be opponents of gay marriage. (And if you think tech companies–even publicly-traded ones–would worry about alienating customers by pursuing political agendas, you probably haven’t been paying close attention.)

All of this is just wind-up to this academic-ish piece on the future of price discrimination in Forbes. I’d be very interested in Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman’s thoughts on it.