Category: Products and Design

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Products and Design The Next Computer

Tim Apple, an iPad and delight

Apple often talks about how its ability to meld hardware and software means there are some experiences it alone can create. I know from over a decade’s experience for this to be true, from large technological leaps to small everyday delights.

In Tim Cook’s Apple, hardware and software also meld with services.

I recently bought my parents the iPad Air (2020) from the Apple India online store, which opened in September 2020. It was delivered by a national Indian courier company, and I received an SMS from the courier when my parents accepted the delivery. But minutes later, I also received this email:

This wasn’t a paper slip inside the box with a URL (or QR code) that I’d have to scan on my phone or type on my computer or iPad. This is Apple syncing its online store, third-party delivery and customer service into a single experience that unfolded by itself.

This is true delight.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design Startups

Beautiful products that respect their users – where are they?

Why is it hard to find beautiful products that are respectful of their users’ privacy and are designed to last?

There’s such an opportunity for something that looks as good as the Nest, but doesn’t require two-factor authentication to replace. I didn’t want to call it dumb but beautiful, so let’s say “autonomous and beautiful” appliances and home devices. I still want it to be smart, but if you’re going to have the risk profile of a device that connects to the internet, it needs to be worth it, like Brilliant, Sonos, smart TVs, or connected cameras.

– Matt Mullenweg

One argument is that design talent is expensive, and that they work at those very companies whose idea of advanced equals internet connectivity.

Free/Open Source Software has disproved this for engineers. For over three decades it’s shown that the world’s best engineers can work on products that respect security, privacy and work independently of the Internet. It could be equally true of designers, and there are in fact well designed open source software products – take the Firefox browser or the KDE desktop environment or the NextCloud suite. One problem is that it isn’t mainstream yet.

The main problem, I think, is that great companies stay independent for shorter and shorter times. Nest was an independent company was less than four years from its founding to its acquisition by Google. That’s less time than you expect your thermostat to last. I have more to say on this but I’m organising my thoughts at the moment.

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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Why you shouldn’t delete Whatsapp and move to Signal

The Ars Technica website has a solid explanation of Whatsapp’s new privacy policy changes, which involve sharing extensive data about your Whatsapp usage with Facebook, Whatsapp’s parent company.

Whatsapp has been sharing data with Facebook since 2016, but earlier you had one chance to opt out of it. With the prompt you saw last week, it’s now mandatory – if you didn’t opt in this time, you won’t be able to use the app after 8 Feb 2021.

Now. Whatsapp claims it cannot read the actual contents of your chats – the company says those are encrypted end to end, in a way that even Whatsapp/Facebook can’t unscramble, in fact using technology from the privacy-focused app Signal.

But metadata – “data about data” – is not encrypted. This is your activity in the app:

  • Who you chat with
  • When and how often you chat with them
  • Whether you send multimedia,
  • Whose profiles you search and look at,
  • Whose statuses you check,
  • who you call on the app, when and for how long

All of this is sent as one long, continuous stream of data. The plan is almost certainly to match this with similar data collected by the Facebook and Instagram apps, and the thousands of other apps that use the Facebook ‘SDK’ for ads/tracking, to build a detailed picture of you.

So. Now that you know this, should you move off Whatsapp to Signal, as Elon Musk suggested on Twitter?

In general, no. You shouldn’t move off Whatsapp and move to Signal.

Is this you?

  • You have a Facebook account
  • You stay logged into it on one tab while you browse other sites on the web
  • You run the Facebook app on your phone
  • You have an Instagram account
  • You’ve given either or both FB and Instagram access to your contacts when they asked you at signup
  • You’ve used Log In With Facebook to sign into other apps
  • You hadn’t opted out of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook when asked a few earlier

If you’ve answered Yes or even I’m not sure to some of these questions,, the Whatsapp policy change really doesn’t make much difference. You’re already sharing data – lots of it – with the Facebook family. Deleting WhatsApp is plugging a few squares in a sieve.

I’m not judging you. Our relationship with technology, especially social media, is highly asymmetric. It isn’t practical for you and me to understand the average privacy policy fully, leave alone that the onus of tracking frequent changes to it is on us. Repeat for each app that we use, and the tracking code from different other companies that that app uses.

Even if you’ve wisened up, even if you’re now uncomfortable with the amount of data the Facebook family of apps collects about you, chances are your friends, family, professional groups don’t care as much – they’ll still happily use them, and they’ll expect you to ‘be’ on these apps too.

Quitting Whatsapp is most effective when you quit the rest of Facebook too. It’ll take time. It’ll take some convincing, it’ll take some re-evaluation of relationships. But you can make it work.

It’s taken even Facebook a few years to hook you enough to get the sheer amount of data it has on you. Give yourself time to rid yourself of it too.

Update: A friend asked me if Facebook was able to collect any less data if one used Instagram in a browser as opposed to the app:

“I signed up [on Instagram] using an email address I created specifically for IG, but it doesn’t take Zuck to figure out that the overlap between the people I talk to on Whatsapp and those that this IG account interacts with means that we’re the same person.”

“Your interaction on Instagram the service reveals more about you than the specific devices you use it on. Sure, the IG app can tell your location more accurately than IG in a browser window can, because the former uses GPS and the latter looks up your IP in a database. But IG in the browser still knows when you log in and for how long, whose profiles you lurk on, what your friend network is and suchlike.”

“When you upload a photo, IG can tell a lot from the photo’s EXIF data: the precise model of the camera you used, phone or otherwise, where you were when you took it, when you took it, among other things. IG can run facial recognition algorithms on them to draw an even more detailed picture of your network. But both of these have little to do with whether you use the app or the browser.”

“If someone spots you at a cafe, you aren’t better hidden if you pulled up to the cafe in an uber as opposed to drove there. The fact remains that you were there and someone saw you. (I am rather bad at analogies but I think this one might actually work)”

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Markus Spiske/Unsplash)

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Products and Design The Next Computer

An alternative future where we could Ship-of-Theseus our laptops

Today at someone’s place I came across a laptop that represented an alternative future: one where manufacturers didn’t relentlessly choose size and weight over extendability. Where a portable machine – just like an assembled desktop – could be upgraded over time instead of having to buy an entirely new one.

This is the Dell Inspiron 14R N4110 from 2011, which runs Windows 7 just fine.

In return for having to lug around over two kilos, you get a DVD read/write drive, three USB ports, two of them USB 3.0, an ethernet port, a VGA port, an HDMI port, an SD card slot, an eSATA port, and audio in and out – and a Kensington lock slot.

Plus, you get a removable battery, a user-accessible slot to pop RAM modules in and out to expand RAM (although only up to 8GB), the ability to replace not just the hard drive with an SSD, not just the display with a higher-resolution one, but also the processor itself!

In fact, Dell itself published a detailed manual [PDF] for laptop owners to access – in addition to the RAM, display, processor and battery – the optical drive, the keyboard, the wireless card, the bluetooth card, the motherboard, the speakers, camera, I/O board, AC adapter and even the coin-cell battery that the boards use to keep internal time. With all this, you could not just use the laptop for well over a decade, but keep it current over that time, simply by upgrading the components that became bottlenecks, or that wore out.

Granted, our laptops would be a lot thicker than the iPad Pro:

In this alternate future, Dell and its ilk would be component manufacturers more than laptop manufacturers – and it’d be a lot more exciting because we’d see a large variety in such components.

I imagine that in this future’s 2020, people forced to work from home who suddenly wanted a better webcam could buy an high-resolution one from Dell and plug it into their laptop’s display. Maybe there’d be a choice of lenses. Instead, our only choices are to either buy an external webcam, becoming one more accessory and cable to carry, or buy a whole new laptop. In that universe, as things improved in the coming years and people began working from a variety of remote places instead of returning to offices, they’d buy larger batteries from Dell – all for the same laptop.

Today we have laptops that are ever-lighter, with some improvement in battery life than in 2011, when the Dell in question was first manufactured. But we have lost nearly all repairability and upgradability. With minimal ports, we have lost a lot of extensibility, unless we buy even more adapters and dongles and cables. We’re turning our computers into appliances and, like appliances, replacing them instead of repairing them – because we can’t.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Personal Finance Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Herd mentality

I read recently about the USA investing app Robinhood being charged with “gamifying” investing and not putting in place “proper controls to safeguard inexperienced investors.” I was curious about what gamification techniques the service actually uses. Here’s what I found:

“Robinhood’s Role in the ‘Gamification’ of Investing: QuickTake”, Bloomberg, Dec 2020

Investors are congratulated for their first trade with a confetti animation. They’re offered a (tiny) chance of snagging a share of a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc. if they get a friend to sign up. They can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow users for inspiration. An entertainment ecosystem has risen up alongside Robinhood; TikTok videos under #robinhoodstocks have millions of views.

“Robinhood’s Addictive App Made Trading a Pandemic Pastime”, Bloomberg, Oct 2020

Robinhood’s app emphasizes social interaction by using the possibility of getting a free share of stock in exchange for inviting friends to sign up. You have a tiny chance of snagging a high-price glamour stock such as Apple Inc., Robinhood says, if your friend signs up and links a bank account. If you find your well of investment ideas running dry—or perhaps don’t know where to start—you can browse the 100 most-held stocks among fellow Robinhood users for inspiration.]

Robinhood and the Gamification of the Stock Market, McGill Business Review, Jul 2020

Through a Candy Crush-esque UX design with additions like confetti showers to celebrate transactions, the app gamifies the stock market, sending millions of bored-in-the-house millennials into a trading frenzy through a seemingly playful environment with dangerously real consequences.

Robinhood Has Gamified Online Trading Into an Addiction, Scott Galloway, Jun 2020

Confetti falls to celebrate transactions.
Colorful Candy Crush interface.
Users can tap up to 1,000x per day to improve their position on the waitlist for Robinhood’s cash management feature (essentially a high-yield checking account on the app).

Designed to distract: Stock app Robinhood nudges users to take risks, NBC News, Sep 2019

When smartphone owners pull up Robinhood’s investment app, they’re greeted with a variety of dazzling touches: bursts of confetti to celebrate transactions, the price of bitcoin in neon pink and a list of popular stocks to trade.

A critique of Robinhood’s gamified interface, Georgetown Collegiate Investors, Aug 2020

For starters, the flashing green and red lights, as well as the confetti, often lead users to act on their emotions instead of keeping a calm and level head. The green lights and confetti serve as subtle but prevalent psychological rewards for users. Likewise, the red numbers on the screen invoke feelings of anxiety and fear that may drive users to make irrational choices.

It’s surprising how over the course of a whole year and more, all the articles criticising Robinhood about its gamified interface don’t go beyond the confetti and a detail-less reference to Candy Crush-like design.

Further, nearly every post I’ve read on this topic follows a familiar narrative: that Robinhood encourages poor investing decisions because it doesn’t charge commissions, that it turns investing into a game, that it is disingenuous about how it makes money (payment for order flow to high-speed trading firms), that a customer once took his life after misinterpreting a large negative balance, quotes from ‘industry experts’ about Robinhood being the vanguard of a disturbing trend towards casual DIY investing. It’s astonishing how similar these articles are.

Ironically, the only post with any more detail and actual screenshots is this one, which praises Robinhood interface:

Robinhood is gamified from the start. They reward users that have just signed up with one free share of a stock, chosen by chance. The app doesn’t simply present the free stock to the user from the beginning. The process is similar to something you’d see at a casino. Users are presented with three blank cards, and are prompted to choose one. When chosen, the card flips and the free stock is revealed, with confetti and all…
The black background and bright primary accent colors are reminiscent of a Pacman game. Red is used when a stock has moved down, and green when a stock is up, creating a sense that the user is winning or losing

Obviously, this isn’t about what I think of Robinhood the service. It’s that the onus of understanding an issue in depth seems to be on the reader. And it doesn’t seem to be practical – the only reason I read over a dozen articles on the specific topic of Robinhood’s gamification of stock investing was because that was what I was curious about. The average reader’s just going to read one of these and form an opinion, unaware that all the other coverage of this issue is identical and narrow.

Ultimately this means that we, as individuals, need to choose carefully what topics we are interested in, since, as we’ve seen, the quality of online coverage leaves the duty of diligence to us. And finally, curators will almost certainly become even more important, moving beyond their role as tastemakers and influencers to shapers of world-views.

[Addition 5 Jan 2021] The clearest description of Robinhood’s techniques to drive impulse-based purchases is from a Twitter thread. If you are at all curious about what Robinhood’s gamification means, read through this:

https://twitter.com/petershk/status/1344286419380916228?s=20

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Austin Distel/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

Monopolies that may not matter

I came across this blog post that cites Peter Thiel’s thesis of monopoly power in his book Zero to One as one of the root causes of the dominance of Big Tech:

Thiel made the case for monopoly as the ultimate goal of capitalism. Indeed, “monopoly is the condition of every successful business,” he asserted. With it, you’re free to set your own prices, think long-term, innovate, and pursue goals other than mere survival. Without it, you’re replaceable, and your profits will eventually converge on zero.

… it’s not hard to imagine how Thiel’s outlook [on monopoly] has helped to justify behavior by tech titans that routinely crosses the line from aggressive to anticompetitive, including Facebook’s policy of cutting off access to its platform from any company it deems a direct competitor. Like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street proclaiming that “greed … is good,” Thiel’s full-throated defense of monopoly gave tech leaders such as Zuckerberg philosophical cover to ruthlessly pursue their own self-interest while patting themselves on the back for it.

I think the writer misses an important point: the definition of a market that a business looks to monopolise. With sharp positioning, brands divide a market into a number of micro-markets that they look to dominate. See this good explanation of what great positioning looks like:

Harley-Davidson publicly shared their positioning statement:
The only motorcycle manufacturer
That makes big, loud motorcycles
For macho guys (and “macho wannabes”)
Mostly in the United States
Who want to join a gang of cowboys
In an era of decreasing personal freedom.

In tech, the barriers to entry in most spaces have trended downwards. Funding has, in general, been plentiful, including during a year as unusual as 2020. Every creator wants to be monopolist for their increasingly narrowly defined market.

Facebook, the target of an antitrust case as of this writing, understands this well. Facebook leadership understands that people tomorrow may look to something completely different to stay ‘open and connected’. It could be visual – hence their acquisition of Instagram. It could be text-oriented, group and chat based – see Whatsapp. Could be VR – Oculus. Could be audio or even video, hence their description of Tiktok as an existential thread and their building of stories into every product, including Whatsapp statuses. But it could also be something that looks like Slack or Discord. It could be something built on top of boring old email, unrecognisable from today’s traditional email clients. But more than anything it could be all of them. It could be – and is likely to be – multiple startups of each such type optimised for different narrow audiences.

Everyone may still have a Facebook account, they may still be tracked all over the web, and it wouldn’t matter because they’re no longer logging into Facebook that often to be served ads.

To come full circle on the issue of monopolies – one could imagine a future in which Facebook could technically be a monopoly: they could be the number one social network by far. Their MAUs could be in the billions. But their Big Tent positioning would also be irrelevant in a world where tens of thousands of brands have successfully created microniches such that not a single one of them holds a candle to Facebook’s numbers but taken together they have taken away all of the attention that Facebook used to capture.

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Products and Design The Next Computer

Commitment to principles

I wish that I could buy hardware as well made as Apple’s from anyone else, for any amount of money. To be clear, I don’t mean “brushed aluminum” or “sub-micron tolerances” or “retina screens are made of love”, though those are all nice enough; I mean “committed.” To a set of values, of principles, an aesthetic. To something. Apple’s hardware is extraordinarily well-executed design-in-depth in service of a set of principles I fundamentally disagree with and a vision I don’t share. But I don’t know of anyone else making hardware who is that committed to level of execution, to understanding their own values and expressing them through the design and function of their products. I don’t care about “thin” or “light” at all, but far as I can tell I can’t buy hardware built with a comparable commitment to resilience, maintainability or experimentation from anyone, anywhere. 

– Mike Hoye, The Setup, 2019
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Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer

The tradeoff between security and liberty

The tradeoff between security and liberty often comes up in the USA. The context is usually infringement of civil rights vs the threat of terrorism. This tradeoff is seen in an entirely different context when Apple’s approach to data security on its newer Mac computers.

For the last four years or so, most Mac machines have had their disks encrypted in hardware:

Mac computers that have the Apple T2 Security Chip integrate security into both software and hardware to provide encrypted-storage capabilities. Data on the built-in, solid-state drive (SSD) is encrypted using a hardware-accelerated AES engine built into the T2 chip. This encryption is performed with 256-bit keys tied to a unique identifier within the T2 chip… The advanced encryption technology integrated into the T2 chip provides line-speed encryption

Another Apple document goes into more detail:

On Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip, encrypted internal storage devices directly connected to the T2 chip leverage the hardware security capabilities of the chip. After a user turns on FileVault on a Mac, their credentials are required during the boot process… Without valid login credentials or a cryptographic recovery key, the internal APFS volume… remains encrypted and is protected from unauthorized access even if the physical storage device is removed and connected to another computer… all FileVault key handling occurs in the Secure Enclave; encryption keys are never directly exposed to the Intel CPU

But. To accomplish this, the hard drive must be soldered on to the same board that the T2 chip is. The same Apple doc clarifies:

Encryption of removable storage devices doesn’t utilize the security capabilities of the Apple T2 Security Chip, and its encryption is performed in the same manner as Mac computers without the T2 chip.

Which means that when you buy a computer with such a T2 chip, you get the benefit of high-grade default-on encryption at nearly zero overhead, but at the cost of never being able to upgrade your hard drive size for the lifetime of the device.

In addition, replacements to other components must be verified by running a tool whose distribution Apple closely controls:

… the T2 chip could render a computer inoperable if, say, the logic board is replaced, unless the chip recognizes a special piece of diagnostic software has been run. That means if you wanted to repair certain key parts of your MacBook, iMac, or Mac mini, you would need to go to an official Apple Store or a repair shop that’s part of the company’s Authorized Service Provider (ASP) network…

For Macs with the Apple T2 chip, the repair process is not complete for certain parts replacements until the AST 2 System Configuration suite has been run. Failure to perform this step will result in an inoperative system and an incomplete repair.

I see Apple’s gravitational pull make privacy more widely discussed than otherwise, causing other major tech companies to pay at least lip service to it. In the next few years, I think we will see new companies emerge that take a bold privacy-first stand because of Apple’s position on this. We’ve already seen Apple, Cloudflare and Fastly collaborate on a new privacy-oriented enhancement to an already privacy-oriented DNS lookup standard.

However, it increasingly seems that in its own ecosystem, Apple’s making it clearer than ever that the cost of this security is inherently going to be near-zero freedom to customise, repair or upgrade your hardware.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 2

(Part 1)

In the old world, boundaries used to be imposed naturally, although they were not always welcome. Leaving for work was a sharp boundary. The start of the work day at the office was another. Then there was the lunch break. Your commute back. Your evening at a pub or a restaurant. And so on.

Those boundaries were almost always set by (or with) someone else. Typically the only one you truly set was your run or gym session.

In the absence of those boundaries, your time is up for grabs. This is a threat and an opportunity. If you’re passive about it, it’ll be claimed – all of it – by your boss, by your kids, by social media and online TV, and by a hundred parallel low-attention messaging threads.

I’ve seen this story before: back in 2009, I ran the consumer Internet division of a company. The flagship product was an SMS subscriptions store that promised to fill up the tiny free moments in your life: waiting for your train, taking the elevator, standing in line. It was designed on the premise that you had a finite number of such moments in your life, and therefore needed a finite (though renewing) amount of content to fill them. It was a great idea and took off immediately. Within weeks we had over a quarter of a million people try it out, and a significant number of them jump through hoops for paid content on the store.

But in just the next couple of years, most of the Indian middle class had smartphones, everyone had Facebook – and Twitter – on their phones. They had games from Zynga and from local studios. They discovered YouTube! And just like that, you had an infinite amount of content to fill those little moments.

But the tide shifted even further. Filling crevices of time wasn’t enough, this new content created new gaps for itself. You’d quickly scroll through Facebook at traffic stops until the car behind honked at you. You’d interrupt meals to post photos on Instagram. You’d check Twitter during conversations. You’d play games while putting off chores.

By the middle of the 2010s, we were already living fragmented lives. At the end of the decade, the pandemic has knocked down natural boundaries of time too. Everything is fluid.

What shape are we going to give it?

(Part 3 follows tomorrow)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Products and Design The Next Computer

Thinking through sustainable computing

The programmer and writer Mark Pilgrim, nearly eleven years ago, talked about sustainable computing at the hardware, operating system and application layers – the same ones we discussed in the context of Apple’s Mac computers with its M1 chip. He was speaking in the context of building a computer he could use for twenty years.

About the hardware, Mark says

People throw away computers every day because they’re “too slow” to run the latest version of their preferred operating system. Linux (and open source in general) is not immune to this, but I think it’s more immune than proprietary operating systems. Debian only recently dropped official support for Motorola 68K machines; that’s stuff like the Mac IIci that I bought off the clearance rack at Microcenter in 1992. The latest version of Debian still runs on my old PowerPC “G4” Apple laptop, even though the latest version of Apple’s operating system doesn’t. Commercial vendors have a vested interest in upgrading you to the latest and greatest; supporting the old stuff is unglamorous and expensive.

About operating systems,

People think Linux driver support sucks because newer hardware sometimes only works with proprietary Windows drivers. That’s true, but there’s a lot more old hardware in the world than new hardware, and Linux has superior support for older hardware because the community writes and maintains their own drivers. People throw away computer accessories every day because they upgrade their operating system and can’t find functioning drivers… I’m not saying Linux never drops support for older hardware, but the cycle is longer and the incentives are different.

He makes sound arguments about open source application software too, and we have discussed them on this site over many years. But what he ends with has stayed with me ever since:

Where my 20-year plan will most likely fail is not at the operating system or driver level, nor with the existing crop of applications. At some point we will invent an entirely new class of application, like the web browser was an entirely new class of application 20 years ago. This new class of application will naturally be targeted at the “current” hardware of the day, and nobody will bother to backport it to the hardware I have now. Chromium is actually a good example of this, only shifted a few years. It contains a dynamic JavaScript compiler (V8) which requires explicit support for each hardware architecture. There is no Chromium for PowerPC, even though it’s open source, because a central piece of the application only works on x86 and AMD64 architectures. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing a PowerPC version of V8, but it’s unlikely to happen unless some super-genius hobbyist decides to take it on. 

(Featured image photo credit: bert s z/Unsplash)