Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.
Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.
However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.
I’m currently reading White Rural Rage and boy, do I have thoughts. It’s clearly written by two people who do not live in rural spaces, but about people that do.
The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest that VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.
Apple’s relentless and uncompromising hardware insanity is largely what made it possible for such a high-res display to exist in a VR headset, and it’s clear that this product couldn’t possibly have launched much sooner than 2024 for one simple limiting factor — the maturity of micro-OLED displays plus the existence of power-efficient chipsets that can deliver the heavy compute required to drive this kind of display (i.e. the M2).
Micro-OLED displays differ from any other previous consumer display technology because they are manufactured on top of a silicon substrate (similar to how semiconductor chips are made). To put the insanity of micro-OLED displays in perspective, the Vision Pro panel has a 7.4x higher pixel density than the latest iPhone and nearly 3x the Quest 3.
The bottom line for me is that we can see a relatively near future where carrying a MacBook Air and a Vision Pro in your backpack could give you a reasonably good workstation, one that delivers enough benefits in the form of productivity gains that you might be willing to wear a headset for a few hours in a café, on an airplane, or even on your couch at home. (This perspective is of course made in complete absence of value-for-money considerations).
One of the biggest looming threats to many forms of encryption is quantum computing. The strength of the algorithms used in virtually all messaging apps relies on mathematical problems that are easy to solve in one direction and extremely hard to solve in the other. Unlike a traditional computer, a quantum computer with sufficient resources can solve these problems in considerably less time.
No one knows how soon that day will come. One common estimate is that a quantum computer with 20 million qubits (a basic unit of measurement) will be able to crack a single 2,048-bit RSA key in about eight hours. The biggest known quantum computer to date has 433 qubits.
Whenever that future arrives, cryptography engineers know it’s inevitable. They also know that it’s likely some adversaries will collect and stockpile as much encrypted data now and decrypt it once quantum advances allow for it. The moves by both Apple and Signal aim to defend against that eventuality using Kyber, one of several PQC algorithms currently endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Apple is a corporation and I am proud of their stance on user privacy.
The Watch Ultra is different. Its large screen, clear yet dense interface, and rugged yet refined physical design all suggest that it must be far more expensive than the rest of the Apple Watch lineup. Yet, at $799, it’s only a mere seven percent costlier than the $749 stainless steel model.
The Ultra is second only to my phone as my favorite piece of Apple hardware. For my lifestyle, habits, location, and interests, it’s close to ideal (though I’ll never say no to more battery life), and the goodwill inspired by its utility is notable.
Pricing it just above the stainless steel regular watch was smart — Apple convinced me the Ultra was a bargain, effectively obfuscating their infamous profit margin.
This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet. Just as when I scrolled my finger around the wheel of the first iPod or used my finger and thumb to zoom into an image on the first iPhone. With the Vision Pro, I could look at an app icon and simply tap my fingers together, and the app would open. And then it was hanging in front of me. In the clearest resolution I’d ever seen in my life. I could swipe through images with my hands, move things with my fingers. Unlike other VR headsets, where you have to use a controller that feels like you have lobster claws for hands, with the Apple Vision Pro your eyes become the mouse absolutely seamlessly. “It’s mind-blowing,” Cook said to me when I told him about my experience. “We live in a 3D world, but the content that we enjoy is flat.”
And here it is:
I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. “I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.
Apple’s positive effect on my life should not be underestimated. My Mom once (lovingly, teasingly) said to me that my alternate career, had all this never happened, was “criminal genius.” Which might have been fun too, but possibly more stressful than I might have liked. At any rate, Apple has saved me from a life of crime, and I should love Apple for that.
But I need to remember, now and again, that Apple is a corporation, and corporations aren’t people, and they can’t love you back. You wouldn’t love GE or Exxon or Comcast — and you shouldn’t love Apple. It’s not an exception to the rule: there are no exceptions.
Emphasis mine.
I have long "loved" Apple. My first Mac came at a very lonely time in life (first year of college). Before then, computers were work, literally: my first job was at the local internet service provider in my small town. I had my own desktop at home where I'd play games, but thoughts about drivers and memory and storage and sound cards were never far from my mind.
With a Mac, that all changed. Apple created this functional computer in a beautifully designed enclosure. The Mac OS X was whimsical and fun in a way Windows never was (and never has been). Most of all, Apple was attentive to detail. Sure, it couldn't do everything a Windows computer did, but it sure did what it could do much more thoughtfully.
I've been in the Apple ecosystem for nearly a two decades. More than half my life. I have few regrets about entrusting the company with my data. Hell, their devices enabled me to have a career while living out of my tent. Apple devices have enabled an unprecedented amount of freedom, and for that, I'm grateful.
I am also an Apple shareholder. I became one shortly after the first iPhone was announced. That investment was, back in 2007, risky and ill-advised. But it has paid off, literally, and again, for that I'm grateful.
But Apple is still a corporation. Their computers are just things. iPhone, as central as it is to my life — to my ability to have the kind of life I live — it merely a thing. An incredibly powerful, almost god-like tool, but still just a thing.
People accuse me of loving Apple. At times, I'm ashamed to say I have. But they are a corporation. Their only loyalty is to profit, to the financial benefit of their shareholders. Corporations do not give a shit about anything other than profit.
Christ, Apple. Have some faith that people use your phones because they’re the best on the market, not because they’re locked into iMessage. 🤦🏼♂️
I’m all for security — end-to-end encryption is table stakes at this point, and I won’t use anything without it to meaningfully communicate — but inhibiting innovation solely to protect a monopoly of a marketplace (in this case, the App Store)? C’mon.
Apple, you have the technical expertise to protect people’s data even if they sideload. It won’t be easy, I know, but come on.
Give people a choice.
On the other hand, my work is tech-adjacent and my passions are obviously tech-y. I work with a lot of people — smart, professional people — that don’t know shit about the phones in their pocket, not least of all how to safeguard them.
If smart people can’t be bothered to protect themselves, no doubt sideloading will invite bad actors (i.e. advertisers) to get people to download software that tracks the hell out of them. More than it already does.
So maybe Apple has a point.
But the least they could do is lower their 30% App Store commission. It’s difficult to take anyone arguing the moral high ground seriously when they’re making such an extreme profit from their position.
When you deploy Contact Key Verification with someone you already know, you upgrade an existing conversation from “I think I know this person” to “I know this person, and we now have an out-of-band encryption verification step to keep our conversations secure and tamper resistant.”
All you have to do is pull up an existing conversation and then use some trusted method to read the provided code, as you can see below. If the code matches, you each tap Mark As Verified.
Small-but-important changes in the world of digital journalism, and not a moment too soon.
“It’s a real testament to how far the entire kind of electronics ecosystem has come that you could create a knockoff that’s actually this sophisticated. This is way less sophisticated than a real Apple product, but compared to what any earbuds would have done 15 years ago, this is giant.”
On the functional side, Apple either needs to improve or replace its Bluetooth support. My Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad frequently disconnect from my Mac mini, which is all of about eighteen inches away, and the keyboard in particular is egregious in terms of the amount of time it takes for typed characters to show up on screen. This certainly seems like a place that Apple could use its vaunted engineering prowess to offer something that’s a little extra in much the same way that it does with AirPods. Not only would a custom wireless chip potentially allow for more robust and reliable connections, but it could also simplify switching peripherals between devices, a process that Bluetooth makes fairly painful.
The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the organization behind Matter, released the Matter 1.2 specification this week, a year after launching Matter 1.0, following through on its promise to release two updates a year. Now, appliance manufacturers can add support for Matter to their devices, and ecosystems such as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings can start supporting the new device types.
The flatness of log gives you the power to make it your own in the grade. The other huge advantage of log is that it is known, meaning it’s possible to convert it to and from various color spaces accurately.
iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 are the most stable point-zero releases I’ve ever seen from Apple.
Very impressive. I have no qualms encouraging everyone to update.
The Vision Pro is Apple’s initial foray into spatial computing. But Vision Pro is not Apple’s first product in the world of augmented reality: AirPods Pro (and to a lesser degree, at the moment, AirPods Max) are. We humans are visual creatures and we naturally tend to think of augmented reality as a primarily visual experience, but AirPods Pro offer profoundly enjoyable and useful augmentation of the aural world around you. Starting today, Adaptive Audio takes that to another level.
Adaptive Audio is only available for the AirPods Pro 2, which means I’m only going to be more irritated if I ever again find myself wearing my old first-generation AirPods Pro out of necessity. At this point AirPods Pro 2 are as much better than the original AirPods Pro as the original AirPods Pro seemed from the original non-pro AirPods. They’re far more than wireless earbuds — they’re clever, powerful, delightful computers you put in your ears.
He’s right. I’ve used the AirPods Pro 2 for the last year and they are incredible little computers. For years, I only used regular AirPods, insisting that for my lifestyle, I don’t want anything that slides into my ears and seals — I need to be able to hear what’s around me.
But these second-gen AirPods do exactly that, but they make it optional. I can hear what’s around me when I want to, but I can also enable noise canceling and tune it all out. Most often, I find myself in a noisy place and just sliding them in. I don’t listen to anything, I just enable noise canceling. It’s helped my focus tremendously.
The new Adaptive Audio feature in iOS 17 is scary good. Though it’s only been a day, I no longer find myself toggling between transparency and noise cancellation — the AirPods do it themselves.
On Tuesday, Apple revealed yet another reason why we might want to have our Apple devices with us at all times: Roadside Assistance. The service, which is compatible with the iPhone 14 and later, lets you contact AAA via satellite in case your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
In the West, I use location sharing via satellite connectivity on my iPhone 14 constantly, but visiting family in the Midwest I don’t (and can’t) use it at all. It’s a testament to cell carriers that they’ve blanketed much of the eastern half of the United States with cellular connectivity.
On the photography front there were two major new features announced Tuesday. The first is a new generation of portrait photography, where Portrait mode can be applied to an image after it was shot as a regular still image. I’ve wanted this feature ever since Portrait mode debuted. While capturing, you don’t have to do a damn thing. You just frame your photo and hit the shutter. No switching modes. But on-device machine learning will decide on the spot whether Portrait mode would improve the image (which will only happen automatically if the subject is a person, dog, or cat), but you can enable it, disable it, and adjust it to your heart’s content in post.
The second is the iPhone 15 Pro models’ ability to capture spatial video. I had speculated over the summer that it would be cool if Apple could launch this for iPhones this year, and they did it. Clearly the optimal way to watch spatial video will be with a Vision headset, but the best way to capture them — especially in terms of the old adage that the best camera is the one you have with you — will be with iPhones. I considered it a lock that iPhones would eventually be able to capture spatial video memories, but to me it’s a sign of operational excellence and cross-device collaboration that Apple pulled it off this year, with iPhones that will ship months ahead of the first-generation Vision Pro. (The ability to shoot spatial video using an iPhone 15 Pro isn’t available yet — it’s “coming later this year”. And the hands-on area units didn’t have the feature, nor any example spatial videos preloaded. So the only thing we know about the feature is what was broadcast in the keynote.)
The average iPhone customer is 7.4 times as valuable as an Android user. That’s remarkable, but not surprising.
I know very few Android users these days, but those I do share a common refrain: “tech is too complicated, so why would I pay more for an iPhone?” Never having used an iPhone, they become used to a certain…lack of polish. Case-in-point: for the first decade of Android, scrolling on the devices was awful. Jittery, jumpy… Compare that to the very first iPhone, which nailed smooth scrolling right off the bat.
Like using a Mac, the joy and delight (and I use both of those words intentionally) of an iPhone is not in the tasks you accomplish with it (you can, after all, take a photo with an Android, or send a text, or browse the web), but the million little in-between interactions. Opening an app. Swiping to go home. The speed at which FaceID unlocks your phone. The little thoughtful, playful animations of the Dynamic Island. All those interactions add up.
They add up to customers that deeply and perhaps subconsciously satisfied. And people who are satisfied are far more likely to use their phone. It so happens that most people use their phone to, well, buy stuff.
Me? I spent a good deal of money on software for my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I buy apps that are thoughtfully designed by creative people. (Lumy is a recent find that I just adore.) And, notably, I’m happy to do so. For that, I credit Apple.