Marzipan & other news

4 minutes estimated reading time

Marzipan

Daring Fireball: Marzipan – Gruber posits that Marzipan is a unified development environment that allows programmers to create apps optimised for iOS and macOS. Marzipan means that the only have to write the app only one time, rather than having to rewrite completely for each platform. It makes more sense than the original Guzman article on a future merging of iOS and macOS

Business

Behind the Fall and Rise of China’s Xiaomi | WIRED – interesting analysis of how Xiaomi made mixed retail / e-tail strategy and smart home products pull their business

Apple Took the Lion Share of Smartphone Industry Profits in Q3 2017 at Close to 60% – Patently Apple – there are many ways to cut this data. Apple is still doing well, Samsung has made big strides to get back into the game over the last year and the largest Chinese manufacturers are still living on thin margins of $15 per handset. Huawei’s numbers are likely to be mixed. The Honor handsets will have a much lower margins and so pull down Huawei’s aggregate value.

Consumer behaviour

The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right – Gidron – 2017 – The British Journal of Sociology – Wiley Online Library – the answers may lie on the ‘supply side’ of political competition, where recent movements in party platforms have made the populist right more attractive to many voters. A convergence over the past three decades in the economic platforms of the centre-left and centre-right toward the right have reduced the appeal of the centre-left to the working class. In this context, many voters now complain that no one speaks for them. At the same time, parties on the populist right have moved their economic platforms to the left, making them more plausible providers of jobs and social protection. Moreover, in order to mount distinctive appeals at a time when the differences between parties on economic issues has narrowed, many parties have put more emphasis on identity or values issues, which often draw middle-class voters to the left but working-class voters to the right

Finance

China puts US$15,000 annual personal cap on overseas bank card withdrawals | South China Morning Post – further clamping down on capital flight, overseas property investment etc

China moves to impose order on mobile payments boom | FT – $76/day usage limit is going to kill their usage abroad since they have mostly penetrated duty free and high-end department stores (paywall)

Marketing

The Jeanius Style of Steve Jobs – Levi Strauss – wait a minute; Levi’s used to give billionaire Steve Jobs free jeans? Why?

Daring Fireball: Italian Company Calls Itself ‘Steve Jobs’ – expect overpriced mock turtlenecks in any colour you want so long as it’s black

Legal

Trump Says U.S. Post Office Should Charge Amazon `Much More’ | Ad Age – actually a fair point, the problem is that Amazon has got too large and too powerful (paywall)

China takes popular news app Toutiao offline for 24 hours over pornographic content | South China Morning Post – it was only a matter of when this would happen

The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth – The New York Timespublic officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits. – When does pork barrel politics start to look like organised crime?

Huawei executive detained on suspicion of taking bribes | HKEJ Insights – it is worthwhile bearing in mind that Huawei is a big ass company, so the odds of at least some employees being bent is a sure thing, just on the scale of numbers. It isn’t necessarily proof that the company is rotten. Huawei has its cultural foibles but corruption isn’t necessarily one of them

Security

Tencent denies storing WeChat records after Chinese billionaire reportedly questions monitoring | South China Morning Post – how does it comply with Chinese law for monitoring etc? Interesting privacy now a minor issue at least in China. I had heard of people moving to Ding as they didn’t trust WeChat

China’s Huawei flags slower smartphone and overall revenue growth | Reuters – I thought that 5G infrastructure and continued enterprise sales would kick in for Huawei, they are still desperately trying to increase their slim margins on smartphone sales

The strange story of “Extended Random” – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering – you can deploy a cryptographic backdoor, but it’s awfully hard to control where it will end up

Technology

Researchers Made Google’s Image Recognition AI Mistake a Rifle For a Helicopter | WIRED – interesting implications for black SEO