Ged Carroll

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  • iPod SSD

    iPod SSD

    Trawling eBay gives access to a cottage industry of predominantly China-based suppliers of the iPod SSD. They take iPod Classics and remanufacture them. They get new cases and new batteries and a new drive.

    SSD

    The real trick is in the new component put in the device. Out goes the Toshiba micro-hard drive of 120GB or 160GB and in goes a 256GB SSD. Apple had abandoned production of the iPod Classic because it couldn’t get the right parts any more. Technology had moved on and flash memory had replaced micro hard drive’s as storage technology of choice for portable consumer devices.
    iPod ClassicSwapping out the hard drive for an SSD provides an iPod with a number of advantages:

    • The iPod SSD is a third lighter than Apple’s version of the iPod Classic. This changes dynamics in usage. It no longer has the same heft, you feel less conscious of it in a pocket or jacket
    • The battery lasts longer. I now get about 30 hours of listening from the iPod SSD. By comparison I get 18 hours out of my smartphone. If I used the smartphone as a music player as well, that battery time would drop further. If I used a streaming service, that would sound worse, hammer the battery life and mobile phone bill even further
    • It holds more music. At 256GB up from 160GB in the last model of iPod Classic it makes the difference between being able to hold all of my music library with me or not. You don’t have Spotify when you have 15,000+ tracks to choose from
    • The same great iPod experience. iTunes still syncs with the device. It has a good quality DAC (digital-to-analogue convertor) chip. With the right headphones and a sufficiently high sample rate it is indistinguishable from CDs. Under normal circumstances it sounds better your typical smartphone – which is trying to do lots of job well
    • It is quieter than the original iPod Classic. There is no longer the noise of a hard drive spinning up and reading the music data from the disk
    • Vigorous movement is not a problem. Apple had done a good job with the original iPod Classic songs were cached in RAM to iron out temporary stoppages due to movement affecting the hard disk. An SSD had no moving parts so it isn’t an issue any more

    What becomes apparent is that Apple wouldn’t have had to make that much effort to make the product itself, but for no known reason it didn’t want to.

    I suspect that part of this is down to:

    • The law of big numbers. The iPod Classic revamped in this way would be a decent business for most companies, but just isn’t as big as Apple is used to
    • A modified iPod probably too simple a design solution. Apple likes to take a big step forward (even when it doesn’t) – there are no plaudits or design awards in an iPod Classic with a solid state drive

    The reimagined iPod is a development in sharp contrast to Apple’s new product developments:

    • Loved products bought by key Apple advocates have not been updated or ignored: the Mac Pro and the Apple Display (which Apple has abandoned)
    • Moving out of entry level products. With the MacBook Pro and MacBook line-ups, the entry device is now a secondhand laptop rather than the 11″ MacBook Air or the non-Retina MacBook Pro
    • Big bets that aren’t resonating with the marketplace: the Apple Watch has been a best selling smart watch; but is in a category which lacks a compelling reason to purchase. The iPad is a passive content consumption device for most consumers. It has a replacement cycle that would be more familiar to television manufacturers than a computer company

    More related posts here.

  • Vladimir Putin + more news

    Vladimir Putin

    Why do diplomats use this alien WhatsApp emoji for Vladimir Putin? | Technology | The Guardian – its hardly diplomatic to carry on this in this way even if it is referring to Vladimir Putin. Secondly, I am pretty confident that Vladimir Putin and his team have a good insight into it. Finally I’d still want to be using Signal rather than giving Facebook indirect oversight of messaging. Given the ubiquity of WhatsApp, I would have thought that the security services that report into President Vladimir Putin would have found a way to crack WhatsApp

    China

    How did China’s Xi Jinping secure ‘core’ status in just four years? | South China Morning Post

    Culture

    This Cheesy, 1980s Promotional Video for a Northern Nightclub is UK Nightlife’s Finest Hour | Thump – OMG

    Economics

    Is the Gig Economy Cannibalizing or Creating Jobs? Here’s Some Early Evidence. – The Experts – WSJ – that the spreading gig economy (at least in the case of ride-sharing) is, in fact, substituting for some payroll employment, or at least depressing its growth.

    Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy | McKinsey & Company – good read

    Finance

    The Story of the Self Destruction of Deutsche Bank – SPIEGEL ONLINE – fascinating read

    China Prepares To Impose Curbs, “Capital Controls” On Bitcoin – inevitable to control capital outflows. Given China’s market maker status it could also weaponise bitcoin

    Gadgets

    VCR era ends due to lack of chips – and demand | Electronics EETimes – interesting analysis of the engineering that went into analogue video recorders

    Innovation

    Tim Cook on Apple’s strategy and Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to be Done” theory – Business Insider – basically do the new products actually have use cases?

    Luxury

    Why the fashion world won’t let Amazon in 

    Media

    Tokyo Festival: Online Piracy on the Rise in Japan | Variety – problems with assessing traffic on Alexa as a sample. Also piracy has made up for problems getting Japanese content to market and even made markets for them

    Microsoft Keeps Dossiers on Journalists and Sent Us One By Accident | Gizmodo – reminds me of the Fred Vogel dossier sent a number of years ago, its not NSA level dirt unfortunately

    Online

    Google is returning to China? It never really left | Technology | The Guardian – There has been issues accessing dashboards though

    Merkel: murky internet giants distort perception of reality – The Local – “the algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?” 

    “These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information.”

    Security

    Troy Hunt: The Red Cross Blood Service: Australia’s largest ever leak of personal data – just wow!

    Divorced by Apple in California | josh.com – which nukes Apple’s security measures if true

    Software

    The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint | Matt Mullenweg – not terribly surprised by this. WordPress represents the old ethos of web 2.0, Wix represents the Uber or Facebook Hotel California mentality

    Technology

    Microsoft Is Looking Like the New Apple | MIT Technology Review – this isn’t the headline Apple want. Its kind of like the immediate aftermath of Windows 95. I think Apple’s interface design call is right but its marketing, product design and pricing is fucked. If they had put 32GB RAM in the machine, hadn’t upped the pricing and messed with the ports as badly this wouldn’t be a problem. It’s execution which is failing them

    Wireless

    LG mobile unit records possible worst quarterly loss ever at nearly $400 million – wow this is sad, I felt LG had done a good job with the phone and will discourage design innovation in the future

    Xiaomi Mi MIX Is An Edgeless Concept Phone That’s Actually Available For Purchase: Snapdragon 821, 6 GB RAM And More : TECH : Tech Times – big challenge to get back its crown in China from Huawei and Oppo. P9 or this? No contest to be honest with you the MIX wins hands down

  • Stone Island + more things

    Stone Island

    Arco Maher’s video lookbook for Stone Island via Dazed & Confused. With the book Maher and Stone Island are trying to draw a clear line between the Milan Paninaro sub-culture of the 1980s and urban British youth. There are clear parallels for Stone Island to draw on: conspicuous consumption, international orientation love of club related music. However the Paninaro look itself now has faded into staples of street style so is no longer distinct. Also Stone Island earned itself an unenviable reputation as the clothing of football casuals in the UK. A Stone Island top was enough to get you barred from many establishments.

    Halifax

    This Cheesy, 1980s Promotional Video for a Northern Nightclub is UK Nightlife’s Finest Hour | Thump – OMG was the first thing that sprung out of my mouth watching this. I spent a good deal of my university time in Halifax working part-time as a market research analyst. This early 1980s glamour is so faraway from what the town was when I was there. The video reminds of Fitzcarraldo; bringing culture and class to an otherwise inhospitable place for their endeavour.

    The Webbys

    The Webby Awards have a good Instagram account. This quote from Iain Tait stood out for me. Is it about agencies, the metaphysics of quality or both – you decide.

     

    A photo posted by The Webby Awards (@thewebbyawards) on

    BMW films

    BMW Films have returned, its a 13 minute feature film. Jon Bernthal plays the foil to Clive Owen in a role that is eerily similar to the look and feel of The Accountant. I wasn’t impressed with him on his outing as The Punisher on Daredevil, but if he keeps this up – he could work on the standalone series if Marvel gave it the go-ahead.

    Start up stock tracker

    The Startup Stock Tracker – WSJ.com – based on secondary market value (don’t expect an update every 15 minutes)

  • New Apple MacBook Pro

    I slept a few naps before pulling together these thoughts on the new Apple MacBook Pro. I have been a Mac user since it was the mark of eccentricity. I am writing this post on a 13″ MacBook Pro and have a house of other Macs and peripherals.

    Theatre
    Apple launched a new range of Apple MacBook Pro’s on October 27, 2016. This was a day after Microsoft’s reinvigoration of its Surface franchise.  Apple ignores timing and tries to plough its own furrow. But comparisons by journalists and market analysts are inevitable.

    Microsoft has done a very good job at presenting a device that owes its build quality to the schooling that Apple has given to the Shenzhen eco-system over the past two decades.

    The focus on touch computing feels like a step on a roadmap to Minority Report style computing interfaces.  Microsoft has finally mastered the showmanship of Apple at its best.

    Apple’s presentation trod a well-worn formula. Tim Cook acts as the ringmaster and provides a business update. Angela Ahrendts sits at a prominent place in the audience and appears on a few cut-in shots. Craig Federighi presented the first product setting a light self-depreciating humour with in-jokes that pull the Apple watchers through the fourth wall and draws them inside ‘Apple’. Eddy Cue plays a similar role for more content related products. In that respect they are interchangeable like pieces of Lego.

    Phil Schiller came in to do the heavy lifting on the product. While the design had some points of interest including TouchID and the touchpad the ports on the machine are a major issue.

    Given the Pro nature of the computer, Apple couldn’t completely hide behind ‘design’ like it has done with the MacBook. So Phil Schiller was given the job of doing the heavy lifting on the product introduction.

    There was the usual Jonny Ive voiceover video on how the product was made with identikit superlatives from previous launches. It could almost be done by a bot with the voice of Jonny Ive, rather than disturbing his creative process.

    It all felt like it was dialled in, there wasn’t the sense of occasion that Apple has managed in the past.

    User experience
    Many people have pointed out that Microsoft’s products looked more innovative and seemed to be actively courting the creatives that have been the core of Apple’s support. In reality much of it was smoke and mirrors. Yes Apple has lost some of the video market because its machines just aren’t powerful, in comparison to other workstations out there.

    The touch interface is more of a red herring. Ever since the HP-150 – touch hasn’t played that well with desktop computers because content creators don’t like to take their hands too far from the keyboard when work. It ruins the flow if you can touch type; or have muscle memory for your PhotoShop shortcuts.

    Apple didn’t invent the Surface Dial because it already had an equivalent made by Griffin Technology – the PowerMate. In fact the PowerMate had originally been available for Windows Vista and Linux as well, but for some reason the device software didn’t work well with Windows 7 & 8.

    I can see why Apple has gravitated towards the touchpad instead. But it needed to do a better job telling the story.

    Heat
    Regardless of the wrong headedness of Microsoft’s announcements, the company has managed to get much of the heat that Apple used to bring to announcements. By comparison Apple ploughed exactly the same furrow as it has done for the past few years – the products themselves where interchangeable.

    The design provided little enthusiasm amongst the creatives that I know, beyond agitation at the pointless port changes and inconvenience that conveyed.

    While these people aren’t going to move to Microsoft, the Surface announcements provided them with a compare and contrast experience which agitated the situation further.  To quote one friend

    Apple doesn’t know who it is. It doesn’t know its customers and it no longer understands professionals.

    Design
    Apple’s design of the MacBook Pro shows a good deal of myopia. Yes, Apple saved weight in the laptops; but that doesn’t mean that the consumer saves weight. The move to USB C only has had a huge impact. A raft of new dongles, SD card readers and adaptors required. If like me you present to external parties, you will have a Thunderbolt to VGA dongle.

    With the new laptop, you will need a new VGA dongle, and a new HDMI dongle. I have £2,000 of Thunderbolt displays that will need some way of connecting to Apple’s new USB C port. I replace my displays less often than my laptop. We have even earlier displays in the office.

    Every so often I transfer files on to a disk for clients with locked down IT systems. Their IT department don’t like file transfer services like WeTransfer or FTP. They don’t like shared drives from Google or Box. I will need a USB C to USB adaptor to make this happen. Even the encrypted USB thumb drive on my ‘real life’ key chain will require an adaptor!

    I will be swimming in a sea of extra cables and parts that will weigh more than the 1/2 pound that Apple managed to save. Thank you for nothing, Apple.  Where interfaces have changed before there was a strong industry argument. Apple hit the curve at the right time for standards such as USB and dispensing with optical drives.

    The move to USB C seems to be more about having a long thin slot instead of a slightly taller one. Getting rid of the MagSafe power connector has actually made the laptop less safe. MagSafe is a connector that is still superior to anything else on the market.  Apple has moved from an obsession with ‘form and function’ to ‘form over function’.

    The problem is one of Apple’s own making: it has obsessed about size zero design since Steve Jobs used to have a Motorola RAZR.

    Price versus Value
    So despite coming with a half pound less mass and a lot of inconvenience, the devices come in at $200 more expensive than their predecessors. It will be harder for Apple customers to upgrade to this device unless their current machine is at least five years old. I don’t think that this laptop will provide the injection in shipments that Apple believes it will.

    A quick word on displays
    Apple’s move away from external displays was an interesting one. There can’t be that much engineering difference between building the iMac and the Apple Display? Yet Apple seems to have abandoned the market. It gives some professionals a natural break point to review whether they should stay with Apple. Apple displays aren’t only a product line but a visible ambassador of Apple’s brand where you can see the sea of displays in agencies and know that they are an Apple shop. It is the classic ‘Carol Bartz’ school of technology product management. What do you think of the new Apple MacBook Pro?

    More information
    Initial thoughts on Windows 8 | renaissance chambara
    Size Zero Design | renaissance chambara
    Why I am sunsetting Yahoo! | renaissance chambara
    Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for – Charged Tech – Medium
    Apple (AAPL) removed MagSafe, its safest, smartest invention ever, from the new MacBook Pros — Quartz
    How Apple’s New MacBook Pros Compare To Microsoft’s New Surface Studio | Fast Company | Business + Innovation – a subtly cutting article on the new MacBook Pro
    New MacBook Pro touches at why computers still matter for Apple | CNet
    Apple’s new MacBook Pro kills off most of the ports you probably need | TechCrunch

  • Democracy in Decline by Philip Kotler

    It was a curious experience for me to be reading Democracy in Decline. When I was in college Philip Kotler was a constant part of my life. His Principles of Marketing was a core text for my degree. It is a bit weird reading another book by Professor Kotler; especially one on such a dramatically different topic.
    Democracy in Decline
    In Democracy in Decline Kotler addresses what are commonly cited as weaknesses in the political system of the United States. He provides an easy to understand guide to the US political system.  Kotler then gets into what he identifies as the key points of failure in the American political system.

    1. Low voter literacy, turnout and engagement
    2. Shortage of highly qualified and visionary candidates
    3. Blind belief in American exceptionalism
    4. Growing public antipathy towards government
    5. Two-party gridlock preventing needed legislation
    6. Growing role of money in politics
    7. Gerrymandering empowering incumbents to get re-elected forever
    8. Caucuses and primaries leading candidates to adopt more extreme positions
    9. Continuous conflict between the President and Congress
    10. Continuous conflict between the federal and state governments
    11. The supreme court’s readiness to revise legislative actions
    12. The difficulty of passing new amendments
    13. The difficulty of developing a sound foreign policy
    14. Making government agencies more accountable

    Kotler’s viewpoint is unashamedly liberal and supportive of collegiate rivalry underpinned by compromise in politics. The White House he envisions is more like the Barlett administration in The West Wing or Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets rather than Hilary Clinton. The flaws he has identified are so big in scale that they would likely require a major re-engineering of American society. From the electoral system, the relationship between federal and state government, public policy and public service.

    That kind of re-engineering would require widespread societal approval. That wouldn’t happen in the riven, polarised society of America today. The books measures would be completely against the interests of the conservative movement.

    For the European reader, Kotler offers an interesting engaged analysis of the American condition, however there is little to no reflection on the commonalities of national populism in European politics. This book will only provide an understanding of the United States; and that’s ok.

    Kotler has a sub-header in the tile of the book ‘Rebuilding the future‘. In reality Kotler provides an effective diagnosis, but an not anything that points to an effective solution beyond hoping for the best.