Category Archives: Photography

The last great iMac – September, 2016

Bio, Macintosh

Times past.

With my son recently registered at a Massachusetts boarding school, the full force of the sheer horribleness of living in the Bay Area invaded my psyche massively as I contemplated that great day.

I moved to California in 1987, Los Angeles. Loved it. Later stints found me in San Diego, loved it, and San Francisco, loved it a lot.

But, after two decades, no more. San Francisco and the Bay Area are a living hell. Maybe if you are here on an H1B visa and MacDonald’s is a new taste sensation for you, it’s heaven on earth. But for long time denizens, it’s anything but. Take the Mission District, which I love, as a microcosm of what has happened. Earnest Googlites are destroying the Hispanic culture, replacing it with seven figure condominiums and chic restaurants. We really need more of those. Housing costs effectively gentrify all poor areas – Millbrae, South San Francisco, SOMA, Oakland, and yes, even as far north as Sacramento, as our great capitalist businesses force out all those who cannot code social media apps. The result is that the people who keep a city running, the waiters and cooks, the house cleaners and secretaries, cannot afford to live where they work. That is not right.

So within a week, emulating my son, I will also take a one way flight out of here, to the more relaxed vistas of Scottsdale, Arizona in the desert that I have learned to love on my many travels there these past two decades.

That move brings with it the inevitable rigors of packing precious possessions, though in my case they are precious by association, not by value. And one which ranks right up there is the greatest desktop computer Apple ever made, the iMac G4. Here it is after the ever amusing task of trying to figure out exactly how it fits in all those complex polystyrene pieces, packaging which is a design masterpiece in its own right:

Design genius.

The original, butt ugly iMac may have saved an Apple headed for Chapter XI, when Steve returned. But it was a prosaic CRT design housed in a funky translucent plastic shell which was mostly silly for all its ‘Think(ing) Different’. The G4 iMac was something else. First there was the use of an LCD display, 15″ or 17″. No one used LCDs. SSDs did not exist – at least not at affordable prices – so Apple housed the HDD in a cheeky gargantuan half-cricket ball (OK, baseball) which formed the housing for the electronics and fans. And they boasted about it on that splendid box. See above.

But the genius of the design, an ergonomic masterpiece, was the elegantly cantilevered ‘screen on a stick’. Move it up, move it down, move it toward you, move it away, move it around. It did what it was told. Burning DVDs? Easy. At a touch of the button Pandora’s Box opened, and the DVD tray magically emerged from the cricket ball. It was fun, it was new and it was magic!

And that magical G4 iMac defines exactly what is wrong with Apple today. It’s the same thing that is wrong with the Bay Area. Life is not a mobile device looking for a new app. Life is not an overpriced condo which displaces good people. Life is a contemplative experience attended by an extended attention span which rewards those who indulge in that rarest of modern pastimes: thinking.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

iPhone7

iPhone

Hurry up and wait.

The iPhone7 manages to be an exercise in three things at once: arrogance, greed and desperation.

Arrogance, as Apple has removed the traditional 3.5mm headphone socket replacing it with wireless earbuds whose poor 5 hour life and need to carry a charger manage to simultaneously break something which did not need fixing and make the result worse. “Our way or the highway”. Did the iPhone get slimmer, the rational (?) reason to pull that socket? Nope. It’s the same as the iPhone6+, but the battery life has increased. Given that the battery was already good for a day’s use (and more with the bigger model) this a solution looking for a problem. The iPhone ergonomics, meanwhile, make a kitchen knife look sophisticated, with poor placement of buttons and easy to accidentally shift modes in the camera. Yup, you have been there.

Greed, as those earbuds will run you a shocking $159 to remove that oh! so onerous earphone cable, while deleting its handy control button. This for a device which likely costs $10 to make.

Desperation, for Apple is clearly out of ideas – those went to the grave with Steve – and is trying to milk its margins with silly earpieces. Look out below.

Apple’s onanistic boasting about how they redesigned everything, with no user benefit, smacks of a loss of awareness of customer needs much as their bizarre new headquarters building smacks of a zenith in the company’s fortunes. Building castles all too frequently means you have peaked. Ask Henry VIII and the Tudors.

Meanwhile Siri voice recognition remains worthless (come on, do you know anyone who uses it?), there is still no ‘delete to the left’ (needing but one line of code) and spelling correction has zero contextual logic. iOS is an abomination, seemingly riddled with security holes. 

The other day I was in a Toyota Prius whose driver placed her Blackberry on a small shelf at the base of the console. Now I’ll admit the Prius is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are so many videos, tones and flashing lights going on that I swear the thing would drive me potty were I to stay in one over 15 minutes. But that little shelf contains an inductive charger, common to Blackberries and many Google devices which removes a cable which really needs removing – the charger cable. Not the one to your ears.

So we wait for iPhone8. Meanwhile I hope I can get the thieves at Verizon to reduce my bill as my iPhone 6 is now paid for.

Kindle Paperwhite – 2015 edition

Photography

Never say never.


The 2015 Kindle Paperwhite beside the iPad Air1, both on maximum brightness in room lighting.

Every few years, it seems, I succumb to the temptation to buy a Kindle EInk book reading tablet from Amazon. And a few days later I sell or return it in dismay.

My previous Paperwhite, a 2012 model, was the best (OK, least bad) yet, but I sold it when the unevenness of the built in illumination started driving me to distraction during bedtime reading. Kindles are easy to sell and very few crop up on eBay, testifying to owners’ loyalty.

Since that 2012 model Amazon has increased definition from 160ppi to 300ppi in the 2014 model (not a big deal on the smallish 6″ display) but inexplicably dropped battery capacity by 25% in the 2015 model (the battery capacity has been reduced from 2800mAh to 2100mAh). The disingenuous advertising of battery life, with ridiculous claims of months of life if you never actually use the thing continues, and Amazon really should be ashamed. Read a couple of hours daily (what serious reader reads less?) and you can reckon on one week’s life at best, assuming you do not turn the display brightness way down or constantly futz with switching off wi-fi and the optional 3G. 3G costs an additional $70 with no usage charges, using AT&T’s cellular network, so check for coverage before springing for this if you want it. I got 3G then splashed out an additional $20 to delete the default advertising and the whole thing came to $210, exactly the proceeds of sale of my glutinously slow iPad3, obsoleted by a no less dishonest Apple with its purported iOS ‘upgrades’. Best as I can tell the primary purpose of these ‘upgrades’ is to make older devices useless.


Pure BS. You can get like life on a tank of gas, so long as you don’t drive.

E Ink is the technology – another great invention from MIT, the best engineering school the world has ever seen (along with Caltech, to respect my friendships there!) – which makes possible the low power consumption of the display in the Kindle. Unlike LCD or LED displays, which remain useless in bright sun, the biggest disappointment is that the rumored hybrid technology of a few years ago has never seen the light of day, or of the sun, come to think of it. That technology promised to combine the best of LED/LCD and E Ink so that displays would remain readable in any weather from California sun to London gloom. So those of us who think the beach is a jolly place to be in the summer – or in the CA winter for that matter – two devices are required. One for iOS based use where you actually need, you know, to do things, and the other for vegging out with book consumption in bright light where the single purpose Kindle, errr …. shines, though its matte screen makes sure that it does not, unlike every iOS device ever made. Maybe if Apple had invested its $1bn in display research rather than sending that sum to China to bribe, oops!, invest, in taxi services for Android users, they would today have a distinguishing technology to keep the iPhone ferris wheel running for at least another couple of device generations before the whole thing collapses around their single-product ears?

Amazon continues to do an excellent job of pre-registering your Kindle for use even before it arrives. Your device list is automatically updated at Amazon.com and your login information and book library are there when you open the box. Just add your wifi password. Your Amazon password is already there on receipt. Nice, unless your mailman is a thief.

Mine performed a software update over the air when first turned on which took ten minutes, with much flashing of the screen which even the meanest of code monkeys could have prevented. It just says schlocky, like much of Amazon from their gauchely (un)formatted emails to their clunky site with its awful navigation and look. No class.


The day before receipt. My account at Amazon has already been updated.

So what’s the deal with the 2015 Kindle after the dismay with the 2012? Well, the OS remains hostile to the common ePub book format, but a few moments with Calibre will allow the user to transform ePub books to Kindle format (AZWx) for upload to the tablet.


Calibre supported formats.

A pain in the nether regions, but hardly a disqualifying reason to avoid the Kindle. Mercifully the Gutenberg Project, a vast library of free books (Shakespeare gets no royalties), increasingly shows Kindle format available for download, not the case when I dumped my previous Paperwhite.

Weight, or lack thereof, is a far from trivial consideration, with the 3G Paperwhite weighing just 7.6ozs, assuming you don’t waste time and money on a cover. That’s featherweight and never tires a hand whose fingers easily span the back (unless you are a short fingered vulgarian running for the Oval Office, but that means you do not read in any case, so no biggie) or hold one of the front bezels. The comparably sized iPad, the iPad Mini 4, comes in at 10.7ozs, the full size iPad at 15.7ozs. The first two are easily held in one hand, the last is not. And, yes, the Paperwhite will easily fit into the back pocket on your Levi 501 buttonfly jeans, the pants which conquered the West. Just don’t sit on your Kindle. Save that for your horse.

Like every Kindle before it, the 2015 Paperwhite is not waterproof, so it’s probably not a good idea to use it in the bath.

For faster recharging Amazon milks the margins by asking an additional $20 for its charger, but you can simply plug in the provided microUSB cable with its USB plug into any iPhone or iPad charger for like results, meaning faster charging – 2 hours, not 4. Failing that, plug that cable into any USB2 or USB3 socket for slower, no adapter recharging. The keyed microUSB cable has to be one of the worst connectors ever designed, especially as it’s never easy to know which way to insert it – unlike Apple’s superb current Lightning connector – and just feels fragile. Still, it works. I put a blob of white paint on mine to ease connection hassles.

The Paperwhite retains a touchscreen for page turning and it works well. The screen’s sides, when touched, turn pages and a touch on the top discloses the simple menu system. The power button is still a small nub at the base and is easy to use. Power up is a matter of a couple of seconds to the last page at which you left off. Or just leave the thing on, as it’s page turning/screen refreshes which use power with E Ink technology, not continuous display (assuming the lighting LEDs are turned down). Amazon claims that the lighting LEDs adjust to prevailing light levels, suggesting that the device includes an ambient light sensor. You can also adjust screen brightness manually. I have mine set at maximum for daytime reading, half of that at night in a dark room.

So that leaves the key question which is have they fixed the uneven illumination issue with the four LEDs buried at the base of the display, one so much on display in the 2012?

Yes. Illumination is excellent, with the merest hint of shadowing at the very base of the screen which is not in the least obtrusive. The long columns of local specular lighting emanating from the base of the display which distinguished the 2012 Paperwhite are gone and illumination in the dark is almost perfectly even all over. That reason alone, plus the instantaneous page turns, makes me unreservedly recommend the Kindle for the first time. Fourth time’s a charm in my case. Do you need to blow $70 on cellular connectivity? If you download many books outside wifi range, or like to sync to the last location from your iOS reading when out of wifi range, then cellular will probably pay for itself as there are no use charges. $20 to get rid of advertising (‘Special Offers’ in Amazon-speak)? Worth every penny. The home screen is the home screen with an abstract display, not a diaper ad.

The Kindle boasts 4GB of RAM but as any previously purchased book from Amazon is easily re-downloaded to the device in seconds, that will not be a limitation. Most Project Gutenberg titles in Kindle format run 1-2MB so even a great many of those, which have to be stored on the Kindle, will not challenge storage availability. We are talking thousands of titles here.

Borrowing books from the local public library is easy.

This is a simple, one purpose device and while there are niggles – the awful microUSB connector, the misleading claims about battery life, which are contractually correct but ethically deeply wrong – Amazon has stuck to its knitting and finally got the Kindle right. At some $120 for the base Paperwhite model it’s highly recommended. Does it make sense to own a Kindle if you have an iPad? Absolutely, if you like reading in bright light and favor the lightest possible device for your monochrome reading.

End of Empire

Hall of Shame

Doing a Thatcher.

When Steve Jobs was dying and passed the reins at Apple to Tim Cook my instant reaction was that he was ‘doing a Thatcher’. That strong and successful British leader had ceded the reins of power to a weak nonentity as successor and the general reaction was that this would only make her look better in retrospect. Indeed, in public life, there are any number of such examples – Thatcher-Major, FDR-Truman, Churchill-Eden, Reagan-Bush, de Gaulle-Pompidou. Each transition succeeded loudly in emphasizing the greatness of the predecessor.

And that suspicion has not only deepened since Jobs died some four and a half years ago, it’s being shouted from the rooftops today. Since he rode Jobs’s coattails to record iPhone sales with such stunning innovations like a bigger phone display, a lighter iPad and the Apple Watch with its thrilling selection of bands, we see the culmination of this unimaginative Apple CEO’s leadership in today’s announcement that Apple has invested $1bn of its shareholders’ monies in …. a cab service – an amount which buys Apple but 4% of the company based on its $25bn valuation:

With Apple just having recorded its first quarter of falling revenues since Jobs returned at the helm in 1998, this on the back of a greenmailing investor in the guise of Carl Icahn teaching Cook about shareholder dividends and returns, Apple has decided that its best and highest use of money is to buy into a Chinese Uber-variant named Didi because, after all, there’s a billion of them out there waiting to hail a ride …. on their knock-off Android phones. A Doodoo ‘investment’ (‘bribe’, inept as it sounds, might be closer to the mark, if equally unproductive) if ever there was one.

Meanwhile Apple Mail is broken, El Capitan is a disaster getting worse with each version, Siri’s AI is fundamentally deficient, iOS voice recognition badly lags GOOG’s and the predictive corrections in the iOS keyboard are worse than useless – and positively embarassing when some doofus ‘correction’ slips through and you tell your girlfriend she’s a slut when you meant to compliment her cooking.

Steve, where are you when we need you?


Doing a Thatcher, and spinning in his grave.

Cook, when not donating money to transgender causes, has made a point of making Apple a ‘nice’ place to work, devoid of conflict and tension. I expect to learn that Apple HQ has transitioned to unisex bathrooms any day now. Recall this is the man who, when first CEO, gave all Apple workers Thanksgiving week off …. That same ‘niceness’ thing, the craving for popularity which Jobs never had, was the reason he immediately fired Scott Forstall – the driver behind both OS X and iOS (and, indeed, Siri, which he would have made great had he been given a chance). Forstall was the proverbial irritant, a disruptive force and one with which Steve was perfectly at ease, having been cast from the same mold. When you fire people like that, you forever lose the competitive edge. Apple has managed to do just that under its current leadership.

Mediocrity

Hardware

Tim Cook’s Apple.

Along with blazing innovation – a larger iPad, the failed Apple Watch – what lands in my inbox the other day?

There was a reason Steve Jobs famously remarked that Apple did not do focus groups or customer surveys. The company was not Procter & Gamble, selling dish detergents. His company was in the business of innovation, meaning it told people what they needed – iPods, iPhones, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks – not asking what they wanted.

Now we have a CEO focused on trying to thwart the US government’s attempts – marketing disguised as customer protection – to keep Americans safe while making ever fancier watch bands, as Apple becomes just another mediocre non-growth business.