Category: The Next Computer

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The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, December 2020 – the post-home-screen world

(Previously:August, September, October, November home screens)

A couple of weeks ago, I hid all home screens on my iPhone. This is a feature new to iOS 14. It requires at least one home screen to be visible, so one remains.

Why’d I do this? Because there are now multiple ways to launch the apps I want, quickly.

The biggest among them is App Library, an index of every app on your iPhone – also new to iOS 14. Then there are Siri suggestions, long available as a quick down-swipe on the home screen. And there’s Back Tap – tapping the back of my iPhone twice or thrice launches different Shortcuts.

Between these I can get to any app I want. And so I’ve filled up the lone home screen with a few widgets.

I’m in the post-home-screen world:

The widgets haven’t changed much: local times at a few places around the world, weather for one of them, and my calendar and meetings.

You can see the App Library on the right. Tapping on the large icons launches the app. Tapping on the small ones opens the folder. A short swipe shows an alphabetical listing:

My app usage hasn’t changed. I still use Drafts for text. Safari for browsing. A bunch of chat apps. The stock Apple Mail app. Music. Photos. Camera. A range of photo editing apps including Pixelmator. Slack for the day job. And of course Twitter and Reddit apps.

Last month, I also began using my phone – and iPad – less: I had my mid 2012 15″ Retina Macbook Pro repaired and despite its size and weight it’s become my go-to portable machine at home.

It’s a fantastic machine: the design, the keyboard, the display, the oodles of real estate. Here’s the developer Marco Arment:

Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed. Introduced in 2012, less than a year after Steve Jobs died, I see it as the peak of Jobs’ vision for the Mac.

– The best laptop ever made

The iPad has some clear use cases: it’s where I read my books. Watch TV. Sketch. Edit photos. I’m probably not going to attempt to use the iPad as my full time machine soon, but it’s always going to get a good few hours of use every day. But the iPhone? Well December is going to be an interesting month.

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The Next Computer

Letting people choose what OS they want to run on their iPad Pro

A follow up to the two-part series on imagining Mac OS big Sur running on the iPad Pro. I came across this blog post that described what it would take to free the iPad itself from the current constraints of iPad OS without running Mac OS on it. Some of the writer’s recommendations:

Introduce Gatekeeper and app notarization for iOS. The process of side-loading apps should not be as simple as downloading them from the App Store. Bury it in Settings, make it slightly convoluted, whatever: just have an officially-sanctioned way of doing it.

Ruthlessly purge the App Store Guidelines of anything that prevents the iPad from serving as a development machine. Every kind of development from web to games should be possible on an iPad. And speaking of games—emulators should be allowed, too.

Introduce Time Machine backups for iPadOS.

I don’t disagree with her. But I wonder if it’s simply better to optimize the two operating systems – iPadOS and Mac OS – for different types of users, and let them choose what they want to run on their Apple hardware. The iPad app ecosystem is already open on the Mac. The logical next step is to make Mac OS available on the iPad

Imagining Mac OS Big Sur on the iPad Pro – Part 1
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The Next Computer

Imagining Mac OS Big Sur on the iPad Pro – Part 2

(Part 1 – the iPad is a fantastic device let down by iPad OS)

Which brings me back to the M1, which is the same machine architecture, ARM64, as the A series of chips that power the iPad and iPhone.

If Big Sur can run on the M1, can it run on the A14 “Bionic” chip?

In other words, could it be possible have the iPad run Mac OS Big Sur?

Architecturally, it should be possible. Practically? Maybe. While I’m not a computer architecture professional, the A14 Bionic compares quite well with the M1.

There are some big differences, such as the L2 cache and the GPU “execution cores”. Also, the A14 was designed for iOS, which is a lot more restrictive with resource management than Mac OS, a desktop OS where user applications can run indefinitely in the background. Could the A14 support this more freewheeling approach to process execution without killing battery life? Or will Apple need Mac OS’ resource management algorithm to adapt depending on whether it runs on an A-series or M-series chip?

On the other hand, there are similarities beyond just both being ARM64 machines. Big Sur expects certain security capabilities of the M1 chip: “… the latest generation Secure Enclave, a high-performance storage controller with AES encryption hardware, and hardware‑verified secure boot.” These capabilities used to be provided by the T2 chip, which was present on most (all?) Macs from 2018 onwards, has now been moved into M1. But the iPad Pro 2020 has this T2 chip, which Apple says is used for “hardware microphone disconnect“, but potentially has the same capabilities as one in a Mac.

If you think of the iPad Pro as a Mac optimised for even greater portability than the MacBook Air, sacrificing some of the supposedly unbelievable performance for flexibility, it begins to make more sense. It could be the Macbook with 4G that people have wanted for years.

A Redditor’s take on this

The iPad hardware ecosystem, even Apple’s own product,s already has a wide range of pointer and keyboard accessories. Apple’s Magic Keyboard for the iPad has multitouch support. One could interact with Mac OS using iPad accessories quite easily.

Then there’s touch. Mac OS Big Sur is a lot more touch-friendly than previous versions – some changes like the new Control Centre seem more from the touch-first world than a trackpad-first one. The Apple senior VP Craig Federighi recently denied designing Mac OS for touch, and that might well be true – it’s just elementary interactions with the OS like changing settings and dragging windows – may work well with touch.

And finally, Mac OS Big Sur can run iOS/iPadOS applications without them needing to be modified, since they’re built for the same machine architecture. So Mac OS could still run Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu and other iPad-optimised entertainment iOS apps without issue, instead of running them in the browser as today. Those apps were built for touch, and will respond to touch just as well as if they ran on iPadOS.

So there you have it. The iPad Pros are gorgeous, powerful machines. And have been for a while. But iPadOS is still quite limiting for a variety of work, despite a ton of progress in the last three years.

If Macs and iPads now run on chips of the same system architecture, that opens the possibility of the iPad being able to take advantage of Mac OS’ capabilities. Mac OS Big Sur can run iPad apps natively. That makes it technically possible – though not straightforward – for Apple to make Mac OS itself run on the iPad, truly creating an entirely new type of portable, flexible, capable computer.

(ends)

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Data Custody The Next Computer

Imagining Mac OS Big Sur on the iPad Pro – Part 1

Apple’s always marketed the fact that buyers of its devices benefit from having hardware and software designed in conduction with each other. Well, now it’s been taken all the way down the chip level, resulting in what seems to be an exceptional step-function leap in performance.

The reviews I’ve read about Apple’s M1 laptops have been beyond effusive in their praise of its power, speed and battery life.

The M1 MacBook Air (and M1 MacBook Pro) are now the best laptops regardless of operating system. They’re the new gold standard by which all laptops will be judged, and this is just the start. In a few years, we’ll look back and wonder how we ever tolerated laptops with anything less than this kind of performance.

– “MacBook Air M1 review: Windows laptops are so screwed“

Other reviews have described how its great to have their laptop get the same sort of performance has high end laptop with the power consumption of their iPhone and iPad.

Then I read this set of tweets:

https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/1330033394349125642?s=20

A sad but inescapable conclusion from the impressive launch of the M1 is just how much Apple squandered the potential of the iPad. The iPad has had amazing performance for a while, so why is the M1 a game changer? Because it’s finally in a machine we can actually do things on.

It’s been an open secret for a while that the iPad could embarrass MacBooks in more and more benchmarks. If the iPad had meaningfully advanced in any sort of product vision, this would be the iPad’s time to shine, not the time to shove an iPad’s guts into an old MacBook case.

11 years after the launch of the iPad, we settled for the Intel transition when we could have had an iPhone-style revolution. The great triumph is “wow, emulation is really fast!” instead of “remember when we used to use clunky laptops”. Meanwhile the iPad… got trackpad support

I understand this. I used a 12.9″ iPad Pro as my main computer for most of 2020. It was great in many ways. The portability is unbeatable. The flexibility of being able to ditch the Smart Folio and turn it into a gorgeous magazine is unlike any laptop. The power is several times what I need from even my work machine. The Apple Pencil just works, turning it into a sketchpad in a trice. The battery lasts all day, even with work breaks to watch TV shows.

However, it’s limiting. And the problem is iPadOS. Not the iPad hardware.

For instance, the iPad has supported multiple windows for a long time, but manipulating them is still far harder than it should be. Revealing, dragging, dropping, resizing, sliding is constant. I have to keep thinking about it. On Mac OS, I can launch and move between windows without a thought. I can drag them around – including using three-finger drag. Why, I can drag them between different virtual desktops. I can see all open windows with Expose with a single button or gesture. I can also use third-party tools like Shift It to snap, move and resize windows. And I can do all of this through muscle memory, leaving me to focus on my work.

This isn’t because I’m just used to Mac OS. I’ve used Mac OS – then OS X – from 2010. I bought my first iPad in 2012 and immediately began using it as a part-time work machine. I bought a Bluetooth keyboard-with-stand for it that works just fine. And in recent years I’ve used iPadOS a lot more than Mac OS.

But the OS continues to bother me in many other ways.

The Files app isn’t nearly as capable as Finder, and I deal with files a lot.

Throughout the OS, unless I use the Magic Keyboard with the Trackpad, which I don’t, I have to tap and hold to reveal action menus, which are an instant right-click or Ctrl-click on MacOS.

I can drag and drop music files, podcasts, audiobooks into my iTunes library. Add lyrics. My own album artwork. None of this is possible on the iOS/iPadOS Music app.

Then there’s constantly having to specify that I’d like something opened in a browser window, not in an app. Or vice versa. It’s exhausting.

iPadOS supports a wide variety of hardware accessories, but you still can’t connect an external webcam to an iPad – the OS just doesn’t recognise it.

Finally, the iPad should have more than enough power to drive an external display – and it does – but iPadOS only supports a single aspect ratio, so the display on widescreen monitors is letterboxed.

Federico Viticci’s iPad setup. See the wide unused vertical areas on the monitor.

You can do (almost) everything on the iPad today that you can on the Mac. It just takes a lot more mental energy to accomplish.

(Part 2 follows)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality The Next Computer

More “smart” device woes

A problem with Amazon Web Services caused several appliances to go offline. Some of them, like the Roomba vacuum, have physical buttons and could still be used without the app-based remote. Others, like Amazon’s own Ring ‘smart doorbells’, stopped working altogether.

Our previous coverage on smart devices rendered dumber than dumb by outages or outright corporate policy changes:

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Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Applying anti-smoking techniques to content addiction

(via Kottke.org)

This writer tried the usual techniques to kick her phone addiction – turning off notifications, deleting apps, tracking usage, using apps to block usage, going cold turkey – none of it worked. Then she turned to a technique people use to quit smoking – one of the hardest addictions to kick. From the book she read:

… there is a huge disconnect between what we want and what we actually enjoy. They’re different neurological processes. That’s why you can desperately crave, for example, an entire blueberry cheesecake, but when you actually eat it, it’s only OK… He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness. How does it taste? Not, “how did you imagine it would taste when you were craving it,” but how does it actually taste?

When the writer tried it with her phone consumption,

I paused and paid attention to my body. Do I feel better than I did 30 seconds ago, or worse? Inevitably, it was worse. My brain felt frazzled and crunched up. My body felt more tense and defensive. The experience had been a net loss… The more I really paid attention to the reality of how much I “liked” checking my phone, the easier it became to resist the impulse.

It’s fortuitous I should come across this. As I’ve been going through my second 30-day Reddit isolation, I have realised that I do enjoy browsing the site, but I pass from happiness to mindlessness pretty quickly, without realising it. Quitting entirely is a net negative, but so is consumption without self-awareness – I’m working on understanding what that transition point is for me.

(Featured image photo credit: Lawless Capture/Unsplash)

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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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Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 1

In my post earlier this month, we saw how you can make time stretch longer while also improving its quality:

Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years – one’s life… Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.

This year – and who knows how much longer – a combination of less structured days and ubiquitous entertainment from our devices means it’s easy to fill up time outside of our commitments via endless consumption. It’s not just easy, it’s the default way we’ll spend our time.

This year the severe curtailing of face-to-face meetings outdoors means that we’ve moved to messaging to keep in touch. With all of its upsides, messaging with a bunch of people all days takes – all day. It’s less efficient than a conversation, it means day-long interruptions via notifications, and unlike a catch-up, has no defined beginning and end.

Added to this, we have an abundance of apps that have been designed to hold our attention: notifications, pull to refresh, gamification with streaks, guilting through use of language, ‘smart’ defaults like auto-loading the next episode, and a myriad of others. It’s hard to say no. The minutes and hours add up: go to either iOS’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing Dashboard to see how long you spend on your devices, and how often you pick them up.

Further layer on top of this the end of any boundary between work time and ‘life’ time. Despite increased flexibility for the most part, not only are we starting work early but are also less and less putting a firm end to it.

The common theme across these is the blurring of boundaries.

(Part 2 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)

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Data Custody The Next Computer

Desktops as resistance to closed, locked-down computers

In continuation from the 2-part series on how Apple’s creating truly locked-down, closed computers with the M1 chip, this blog post by a person who is considering moving to a self-assembled PC running Linux, in a quest for computing freedom:

What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for the masses is that so few seem to understand that it is ending. Many are content to use “devices” that are merely stripped-down Internet appliances masquerading as reasonable substitutes for what they have replaced. Has the word “device” been substituted for the word “computer” in an effort to erase even the memory of what we are losing? Many do not understand, because they are too young to ever have used a true general-purpose computer. They have no experience with anything but locked-down platforms–just as 96% of the generation before them knew nothing but Microsoft operating systems. To call this a tragedy is not being overly dramatic.

People find ways around oppressive practices [but] I also know that solutions can sometimes take decades to appear. Whole generations can be lost in the mean time. This is why the trend toward stripped-down, Big-Brother-controlled computers has me genuinely worried. I am not looking forward to a near-term future in which my operating system is so locked down that I cannot install the software I want. Many have already reached this future, perhaps without even having realized it.