Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

I like: StarTech Thunderbolt 3 adapter

I like the StarTech Thunderbolt 3 adapter, or to give it its full name: StarTech.com TBT3TBTADAP Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter.

Like many people who have bought a new Apple laptop recently. The move to USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 has been extremely disruptive. I spent a fortune on new accessories. One thing I wasn’t prepared to do was throw away my Belkin hubs and Apple Cinema monitors. I tried Apple’s own Thunderbolt 2 – Thunderbolt 3 adapter; and it worked inconsistently. One day I would switch on my computer and the monitor or hub wouldn’t work. For apparent no reason, on a seemingly random basis.

StarTech are a Canadian company who have been involved in unsexy, but necessary parts of the technology and video industry. Their focus is purely on interconnectivity of different video display standards. Whilst they aren’t a well known brand like Logitech or Belkin, there are probably some of their products used by your office sys.admin. They used to make a well respected Thunderbolt 2 hub, that didn’t seem to ship to the UK. So in desperation I decided to give their adaptors a chance.

Let’s get the negative aspects about them out of the way first. They are bulky, with the electronics coming in a case about the size of a stack of playing cards, rather than a small pack of chewing gum like Apple’s own convertors. They’re in a shade of dark grey only a sys.admin could love.

But once you get over these cosmetic issues you get a product that just works. It is ironic that I had to go to a non-Apple supplier to get this most Apple of attributes. I can wholeheartedly recommend these convertors.

More on my trials and tribulations with USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 here.

September 24, 2019
By innovation only. Yet another iPhone launch
Apple’s September 10 event ‘By innovation only’ marked the autumn season of premium smartphone launches. It is also a bellwether of what we can expect from the technology sector.

Mark Twain’s ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’ fits especially well in the smartphone business. From a consumer perspective Apple’s 2019/20 iPhone range is basically the same phones but with more camera features. Other vendors are going to come out with handsets with more camera and 5G modems.

All of them are going to be trapped in the same pictures-under-glass metaphor. The smartphone industry as a whole (with the iPhone as bellwether) is trapped in its own version of groundhog day.

5G? Not so fast

Whilst 5G sounds good on new handsets, there’s five points to consider:
- Early generation handsets for a new wireless standards tend to have poor battery lives
- 5G phones are only as good as 5G networks
- There aren’t applications to make use of 5G networks
- A lot of mobile usage happens on home or other wi-fi networks. 5G is competing with your home broadband connection rather than your patchy cellular connection
- 5G isn’t really about smartphones
When you see all launches (like this picture from the Huawei Mate 30 launch); just remember the five points above and process the slick technology spin through this lens.

In Huawei’s case they’re basically launching very pretty €1,000+ 5G Mi-Fi hotspots with point-and-shoot camera functionality, since they’re an Android phone without access to Google services. The Porsche Design variants come out at closer to €2,500 – ideal for bored, but patriotic 土豪.

Price inelasticity

Apple’s iPhone X and XS models tested the the price elasticity of premium smartphones. The market spoke. This year’s prices have stayed the same rather than increasing. You could argue that the value proposition has increased through a year’s worth of bundled services. Of course, its only worth anything if you use the services.

Differentiation through services

Seven years ago I was sat in a hotel restaurant in Seoul and overheard Flipboard going through a pitch they wanted to deliver to Samsung. Samsung eventually tried out Flipboard and free content subscriptions to help sell the Galaxy S3.

Apple decided to build their own free subscription model based around streaming video. This is to:
- Differentiate its new devices from competitors
- Provide a recurring revenue stream from iPhone users with older devices
- Utilise the massive data centres that Apple has been building for the past decade
Built to last

The use of superior materials has resulted in iPhones lasting longer. Add this to pricing and for many people, their first iPhone is a pre-owned iPhone. They are handed down in families or to older relatives. This has built Apple a large user base. The big question is whether they can turn this footprint into services.

There is a tension between new phone sales in a saturated marketplace, versus a growing base of service users.

More information

Apple Live Event: Apple Cuts Prices for Sales, New Subscribers – Bloomberg

Apple Event: Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades – Tech.pinions

The iPhone and Apple’s Services Strategy – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Apple is making its iPhones last longer. That’s a good thing | Macworld
September 20, 2019
Jeremy Renner store + more stuff
The Jeremy Renner store – this must be the 21st century equivalent of the celebrity infomercial on cable TV: @ Amazon.com. The Jeremy Renner store is interesting because it’s an odd choice of celebrity. More on Amazon here.

Nike China with Weiden + Kennedy did these great basketball-themed adverts

Laundry Musical. Procter & Gamble invented the soap opera back during the great depression as sponsored radio serials. They were instrumental in building P&G as a brand powerhouse. Riffing on the theme P&G Philippines launched the first ‘laundry musical’ with Broadway star Lea Salonga.

It is hard to explain how musical Filipino culture is. Wherever Flipinos are as a community, there is music. In Hong Kong they do group singing and dance routines. Music has been a huge export for the Philippines. You go to bars around the world and there will be a Filipino band who can pivot from hard rock to soulful R&B standards.

Filipinos make up most of the bands on cruise ships too, which isn’t surprising given the amount of recruitment for the shipping industry that goes in the Philippines from sailors to engineers.

TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Lee Clow on the making of Apple’s Think Different campaign. Chiat\Day still have this campaign as their calling card a quarter of a century later. The opening statement that technology is not a substitute for an idea is something that feels more relevant now. It is also interesting seeing the creatives working on MacOS Classic.

Apple used the creative process as a way to showcase the creative hardware and software used on the campaign
- Microsoft Word
- Quark Xpress
- Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat
- AVID non-linear professional video editing
- Claris eMailer – which was an email client similar to mail.app on macOS now. I had never used it, as I was using Netscape Communicator at the time
Irish department store Brown Thomas launches its first brand anthem film
September 6, 2019
Worrying debt + more things

WSJ City | Young Chinese Spending Creates Worrying Debt – looks like a credit bubble waiting to happen. Worrying debt in terms of personal credit doesn’t create economic value in the same way that government debt on infrastructure does. Chinese corporates also have worrying debt also has shades of bubble era Japan about it. Since consumer spending is driving China’s 6 percent growth, what would happen if the credit bubble burst?

Busy Chinese city life

A European Perspective on Boeing’s 737 MAX Debacle: An “Existential Crisis” for a National Champion | naked capitalism – Boeing’s Crashes Expose Systemic Failings – fascinating Spiegel article of which this pulls out the highlights

BangBros Acquires, Shuts Down PornWikiLeaks Site | AVN – this is about trying to stem the flood of doxxing that has beset performers in the adult entertainment industry and their families

Big Brands ‘Acting Like Startups’ – A Potential Red Flag | LinkedIn – one for companies in FMCG space like Unilever to read. It points out the flaws in ‘disruption porn’ pedalled by McKinsey Digital and Accenture

WSJ City | Trans-Pacific Tensions Threaten US Data Link to China – also likely to affect Hong Kong as a financial centre and base for cloud network hosting

YouTube to adjust UK algorithm to cut false and extremist content | Technology | The Guardian – censorship. Interesting that there will be concern about China yet we’ve stepped on a slippery slope

Big brands turn to big data to rekindle growth | Financial Times – this makes me worry about the internal future state of research in large consumer companies

bellingcat – Amazon’s Online Bezos Brigade Unleashed On Twitter – If you’ve worked on Amazon social you might want to take it off your CV after reading this…

Nicolas Roope: “A different design language is taking over” – The challenge is how brands can adapt their propositions. Architecture demonstrates the formality of this new direction: what is now a series of gestures and actions that may or may not be involved in the surface will be critical to the success of the project. How do these buildings respond to the urgent requirements of energy use reduction and waste reduction? How do they perform as stories in hyperconnected environments where reputations are established in social media? Think Instagrammable hotel rooms…

The Economist | China’s thin-skinned nationalists want to be loved and feared – Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million netizens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet, heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it can sometimes be:

Big Blue Open Sources Power Chip Instruction Set – a really interesting opportunity opens up for a fully open source rival to ARM

Member Research: Away vs. Rimowa – 2PM – I’ve been a long time RIMOWA fan, but the pilot case I like has been discontinued

Mediatel: Newsline: Millennials finally get to neg someone else – gen-z seen as workshy egotists by gen-y

Beyond Techno-Orientalism: An Interview with Logic Magazine’s Xiaowei R Wang

August 31, 2019
Dieter Rams

I was watching the Dieter Rams documentary – Rams: Principles of Good Design by film maker Gary Hustwit and a small section jumped out at me.

I immediately thought of how Spotify and other streaming services have dramatically changed our relationship with music. Music is as good a place to start as any, Dieter Rams first sprang to prominence due to a stereo dubbed Snow White’s coffin. Streamed music is not something that is actively listened to. The music disappears without leaving a trace.

Digitisation diminishes our experience of things.

Pictures appear and disappear one after the other without leaving a trace up here (pointing to his head).

This goes insanely fast.

And maybe that’s why we can or want to, consume so much.

The world that can be perceived through the senses exudes an aura that I believe cannot be digitised.

We have to be careful now, that we rule over the digital world, and are not ruled by it.
Dieter Rams – Rams: Principles of Good Design

Of course, consumerism took off at a rate of knots way before the cellphone became mainstream let alone the smartphone. But his comments about content being ephemeral in nature, lacking in memorability or substance rang through. Rams maybe right, we’re at a time where consumer interest in analogue media formats such as the vinyl record and the cassette tape is on the rise.

There are even niche record labels that put out recordings on reel-to-reel tape for well-heeled and committed listener. As for the digital medium, the playlist is more important than the album or single, let alone the artist name. Even well established acts fail to make significant returns from streamed music. In some respects it goes back to era of the Rediffusion radio set that piped music into the consumers home, rather than ‘owned media’ from the LP to the iPod.

We’re seeing a move away from DAW (digital audio workstation) based instruments in music that Dieter Rams would likely approve of. And a move to hardware that would have been familiar to the 1970s version of Brian Eno. Despite the best efforts of Pearson Education and Amazon; consumers still love printed books.

Continued love of Dieter Rams’ and his team’s own designs at Braun and Vistoe are an illustration of that championing of the real over virtual. More on design here.

August 27, 2019