Here we go again, second try. Had a bit of false start last week with DNS settings not propagating and SSL certificates becoming invalid. (Edit: Also a false start today, I was on with support for four hours to get this going. Hopefully this is is.) This whole thing came about because I realised I hadn’t updated my website in ages and that extended to a whole web overhaul; website, blog etc. I’m still uploading stuff to ResearchGate and Academia in the background. Someone should make this easier.
So what precisely is new? Well, beyond this new place for the blog which got a brief explanation last week, the website got a bit of a redesign and update. I’m still finding the WordPress interface much more satisfying. I’ve added Cormorant to everything and I think it it looks good with Roboto. I’m still not totally happy with the website but I’m sure it’ll get there as I work out the niggles. Importantly I think the DNS and SSL stuff has settled down, I’m sure folks will let me know if not.
And I didn’t buy this powerful domain to move everything to in the end. There are better causes for my end-of-the-month £200 so it’s gone there instead. I probably would have regretted it today anyway.
The Astounding Arrogance of Apple
It’s sort of tedious to Apple-bash in 2020. Not only are there significantly greater injustices that demand our attention than their App Store racketeering and hideously ugly design principles. But I side-eyed the Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday growing increasingly aghast at the grotesque statements the grinning Valley puppets were making. The whole event showcased a global mega-corporation utterly disconnected from the cultural zeitgeist and out of touch with the times, that completely misunderstood its users and was often fundamentally technically backwards. Apple’s brand strategy hinges on convincing people that their increasingly exploitative and reductive decisions about their users are actually innovation. It’s the basest form of bugs to features: Sure the fan is nowhere near the CPU which massively increases heat waste and reduces performance by 10-20% but we made the case 5mm thinner and released a line of leather cases to go with it. The folks at Apple have been buying into their own hype for so long that much of the event comes across as LARPing The Circle and I wondered if it was all a long-con. The last time I almost bought an Apple product was on having the battery to my iPhone 6 replaced, they tried to convince me to upgrade but couldn’t confirm that either a) I would be less annoyed by having a phone or b) that the battery would last more than eight hours in a year’s time.
So. Monday. First of all there was the relentless lashing of ‘power’, ‘performance’ and ‘productivity.’ The last year or two has seen a significant shift in the mainstream conversation about what we want from our technology and how it could help us live. I wasn’t expecting Apple to suddenly pivot to tackling repairability, interoperability or transparency of course. These ideas are fundamentally alien to their Elysium world-view of digital ecosystems but even a nod towards more sustainable consumption or lower-energy performance would have indicated a company that looked out the window of their circular Death Star. They did bang on about security upgrades to Safari, which would make it easier to download Chrome.
An aside, but the whole premise of the event is linguistically constructed around a series of tautologies; This is our latest and fastest thing yet! It’s not really funny or interesting but the whole narrative is strung together by this collective fiction of newer being faster and faster being better and you don’t need to know the details.
Then there’s ARM, which tl:dr; they’re ditching Intel chips that enabled interoperability and performance rivalling a PC for the last fifteen years because they want you to use your laptop like your phone. Why, aside from conspiracy theories that they’ve been tanking Intel performance on purpose (eg. not cooling the chips) since 2015 to make an argument for the switch? Who knows. ARM chips are designed for phones to reduce size and energy usage. They’re so that you can scroll Instagram at 3am without cooking your hand. But what will this mean for the high-performance activities I often do on my Apple laptop as a creative practitioner? Oh don’t worry they gone along and done some demo for you!
Look at this master-crafted piece of piss-taking. This forms the narrative drive of the rest of the demo; ARM works comparably ok. You can move pictures around in Word, you can refresh Excel spreadsheets, you can only use the apps that Apple validate and you’ll have less control over the OS. Oh but you can play a two-year old game just about ok as well:
In this choice segment another Apple bod (not grinny Craig) demonstrates a two-year old game designed for a ten-year old console running quite well at a whopping 1080p. What a world that has such wonders! Clearly, those hypebeasts at Apple are down with the kids and noticed that just six weeks ago Unreal previewed one of the most jaw-droppingly stunning advances in consumer visual software for years and went ‘can we get that old Tomb Raider game running for the conference?’
There is actual physical pain on the faces of the Apple bods as they try and convince you that this is good, that this is better, that if they just say ‘historic day’, ‘this changes everything’, ‘power’ and ‘performance’ enough times at this year’s annual obsolescence conference a decade’s track record of design choices made in the project of trapping users in an inescapable ecosystem of progressively worse stuff will be erased. This year: we made the edges of everything rounder and took some big leaps backwards in hardware. No you still can’t have an external GPU or modularity. Then we’d end up creating the very possible reality that we become a platform for use by the creative industry again.
In the early-mid 2000’s Apple trapped people like me and you in their ecosystem by allowing piracy of Adobe and giving away iMovie and Garageband for free. I started like a hundred bands and got through design school with that stuff alone. Now I spend my time in Word and Excel and they know it and are humiliating me as a result; eight years of design education adding up to the ability to do really good conditional formatting. But rather than challenge their user base or even extend their market to the enormous boom in PC gaming they’ve decided to make Instagram easier to look at on your Mac as you escape the raw tedium of aligning pictures in tables. Bonza.
Learning
Enough of that silliness. That baffling stupidity. You know like the argument about Trump where everyone was like; he’s either an incredibly smart manipulator of media and politics (some news outlets keep this up) playing at a much higher level or just dumb. Yeah he’s just dumb. Apple are just dumb, there’s no play here, they’re the dog that caught the car and now they don’t know what to do so they’re just faffing about hoping something sticks. Here’s some interesting stuff that made me feel good:
- I was reading about Göbekli Tepe which is this amazing archaeological site in Turkey thought to be about twelve-thousand years old. The site consists of a circular sets of massive T-shaped pillars which are expected to continue underground. Currently less than 5% of the site has been excavated but the implications for what we thought we knew about the level of development of hunter-gatherer society are astounding.
- This reading coincided this week with the discovery of the Durrington Shafts near Stonehenge, the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain, implying that folks then also had a much greater understanding of geometry than we thought. A lot of it is lost to the growth of towns around the circle but it’s always exciting to discover stuff right under our feet.
- Here’s an interesting article detailing a fued between some mathematicians and a journalist over the nature of proof which resulted in a minimal surface shape being named after him; the Horgan surface.
That’s it. That’s enough. It’s been a frustrating week and Apple’s audacity didn’t help. I love you, I’m sorry. Bye.