Apple Archive

Federico Viticci's iOS 9 wishlist contains my number one gamebreakinig missing feature in iOS:

If Apple were to finally make this possible, there's going to be a whole lot of Google iPhones and Google iPads out there.

Crazy custom build. Can't be cheap.

With the kind of money Apple has in reserve, and the kind of growth figures the company is still demonstrating each quarter, this seems like a very, very, very distant future. Apple will remain on top like this for a long, long time.

Molly Watt has Usher Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes deafblindness. Her first few days with the Apple Watch are probably unlike that of any other reviewer, considering her situation. Quite insightful.

Right now, virtually all reporting about Apple focusses on its biggest new product in years - the Apple Watch. It's the centre of the Apple media show, and no matter where you go on the web, there's no way to get around it or avoid it - even here on OSNews. Apple is the biggest company in the world, so this makes perfect sense, whether you like it or not. Even if the Apple Watch does not sell well by Apple's standards, it will still be a billion dollar business, and it will still leave a huge mark on the industry.

However, I think Apple has a much more interesting new product on the shelves. This new product got its stage time during the various keynotes, and it sure isn't neglected by the media or anything, but I think its potential is so huge, so game-changing, that it deserves way, way more than it is getting.

I've been using touch devices for a really long time. From Palm OS and PocketPC devices, to iPhones and Android phones, and everything in between. I've used them with styluses, my fingertips, my fingernails, but there has always been a hugely important downside to touch interaction that made it cumbersome to use: the lack of any form of tactile feedback. In all these years, I've never learned to type properly on touch devices. I still regularly miss tap targets, and I still need to look at my device whenever I want to tap on something. It's cumbersome.

Apple's new Force Touch and Taptic Engine technology has the potential to change all of this.

This week, I bought a brand new 13.3" retina MacBook Pro, equipped with the fancy new trackpad technology. Remember the hype on stage as Apple unveiled this new technology? For once, they weren't overselling it. This really feels like some sort of crazy form of black magic. The trackpad does not move; it does not physically depress, and yet, when you use it, it's indistinguishable from a traditional trackpad.

When the device is off and the trackpad is, thus, unpowered, "clicking" on the trackpad feels just like trying to click on any other rigid surface. A blind person would not know she is touching a trackpad. Turn the device on, however, and the technology comes to life, turning this inanimate piece of glass into something that feels exactly like a traditional trackpad, clicks and all.

Using Force Touch - where you press down a little harder - is an even stranger sensation; it feels identical to a camera's two-stage shutter button, even though there's no actual downward movement of the pad. My brain still doesn't quite comprehend it. I know how the technology works and what's happening, but it's still downright amazing.

With the ability to give this kind of detailed tactile feedback to your fingers, Apple is on the cusp of solving the problem of the lack of tactility on touchscreens. Once this technology is further refined, it will surely find its way to iPhones and iPads, allowing you to feel individual keys on the virtual keyboard, and buttons in the user interface. Not only will this allow people to type more accurately and find their way around their device, it will also mean that one of my best friends, who is suffering from a very rare degenerative eye condition that will leave her close to blind within 15-20 years, could possibly continue to use an iPhone.

Force Touch and the Taptic Engine are, despite their horrible names, the most exciting products Apple has unveiled since the original iPhone. I'm excited to see where Apple takes this, and once it makes its way to the iPhone, I will have to think long and hard about my choice of mobile platform.

Another insanely great quarter. Interesting tidbit: it seems like the post-PC world has hit a bit of a bump, because Apple is earning more profit from its PCs than from its iPads.

Even of they aren't any good yet, they will improve rapidly once the Apple Watch is in the hands of the millions of users who have pre-ordered them (and the many millions more buying them over the coming months). We'll have to wait for the real applications to arrive later this year, when the native SDK arrives. The current ones are just small shells who have to beam virtually everything over from your iPhone, causing lots of performance issues across the board.

I do hope they get better looking though, because my god, the current crop is clunky, busy, and ugly. Those dark transparent backgrounds everywhere remind me of old Android widgets.

In what is surely to surprise no one, and in what will surely be waved away by the usual people, Apple seems to be rejecting applications from the iOS App Store that mention "Pebble".

This application has been in the App Store for two years with the same mentions of Pebble and Pebble support, but now that the Apple Watch is here, that's magically no longer allowed. Further down in the comments, another developer has had to remove Pebble screenshots from his application's description page. About a month ago, I already predicted this kind of bevahiour, mostly because I'm really good at pattern recognition.

I think this calls for an official EU investigation into Google's behaviour.

It's on github.

It's almost as if carefully orchestrated press events attended by nothing but employees and hand-picked, pre-approved press outlets, as well as fake renders on a company website, are not a good way to gauge a new product.

With the Apple Watch' launch upon us, it's become a bit of a thing to drudge up old internet comments from back when the iPhone was released, and act all smug about how random internet commenters were wrong. Just for fun, I decided to go back into our own extensive archives, and take a look at what we at OSNews had to say when the iPhone was released.

The actual post covering the keynote contains no judgement calls, but a few hours later, Eugenia posted a lengthy analysis of the then-new device. She concluded:

While Apple (and more so in their specific case, Android) did eventually displace Nokia and Motorola, her conclusion seems pretty spot on - worldwide, Apple holds about 15% of the smartphone market, and that's more, more, more than enough for the company to be crazy super unimaginably successful. And, of course, smartphones are (or have) taken over from feature phones.

I had to dig pretty deep into the comments on the first few iPhone articles to try and find my own analysis - and I came up short. I did stumble upon a few comments from me complaining about the lack of tactile feedback and not being able to operate a touchscreen device without looking at it, and I still stand by those - coming from Palm OS and PocketPC, I knew just how cumbersome using a touch device is while, I don't know, on a bike, because you have to look at them to use them. This bothers me to this day, and it's one of the reasons I'm so excited about Apple's Force Touch technology.

In any case, we also ran a review of the first iPhone, written by OSNews' publisher David Adams. His conclusion:

With the power of hindsight, this seems pretty spot-on, too.

All this being said, it'll be interesting to see what's going to happen with the Apple Watch. One prediction I'm reasonably sure of: it will be a successful product in the countries where Apple's iPhone is doing well - the UK and Ireland, North America, Japan, Australia, and China. Different people will have different perceptions of the word "successful", but we can be reasonable sure that in its first year, the Apple Watch will sell in the millions in these countries alone (I would guess 15-20 million).

Outside of these countries, it will be a much harder sell, for reasons we all understand - you need an iPhone for the Apple Watch, so in countries with fewer iPhones, the Apple Watch won't be a big deal at all. Of course, there's always the possibility of the Apple Watch converting non-iOS users to iOS, but I don't think that number will be very substantial.

The big hurdle to overcome for the Apple Watch is the same hurdle that seems to plague both the Pebble and Android Wear, as well as other wearables: the drawer. It seems many wearables take only a few weeks to end up in the proverbial drawer once the user forgets to charge it one night, doesn't put it on, eventually putting it away in a drawer. If the Apple Watch can overcome this problem, it could be a hit. I don't think it will ever achieve iPhone or iPad status, but it will continue to bring in a steady stream of money.

A fluff piece, but still an interesting read about the origins of the Apple Watch. Two parts stand out to me. First:

This makes zero sense to me. If your phone is indeed ruining your life, how is adding another tiny, finnicky screen on your wrist going to help? All it does is add another step between seeing a notification and acting upon it. Instead of staring at just your phone's screen, you'll be staring at both your phone's and your watch's screen. The watch will invariably suck for acting upon notifications (tiny screen, low battery, voice recognition will fail), forcing you to take out your much more usable phone anyway... At which point you might as well take care of everything while on your phone. You'll be back at square one.

There are still interesting use cases for a smartwatch, but saving you from notification overload is not one of them.

Second:

From the very beginning, I said that the Apple Watch looked a lot like a tiny iPhone strapped to your wrist - unlike Android Wear, which was designed from the ground-up for the wrist (not to a lot of success, might I add, but still). The fact that the Apple Watch literally started out as an iPhone strapped to your wrist is telling, and explains why the device seems to be so convoluted and complex.

Apple has a far better track record making stuff people want, so there's a considerable chance this is exactly what people want, but not once while using my Moto 360 I thought to myself "if only this thing was even more complicated and convoluted, than I would not want to ditch this thing in a drawer!".

If there is just one article you read this month, let it be this one. Do not skip this.

Exactly what you expect. Great story.