Marco.org

This week: the red Mac Pro, iOS 7.0.3, and a lot more on John Siracusa’s Mavericks review.

Sponsored by Oxygene and Igloo.

Matthew Panzarino got some responses from J.D. Power that really don’t explain much. Apparently, we’re not supposed to do math on the values in that 5-dot chart:

First off, the “power circle” chart that’s being widely circulated is simply a visual tool, and not representative of the actual scores given to the brands evaluated in its survey.

Given that there’s no way that the “power circle” chart can be accurate if Samsung “won”, J.D. Power had to say this. But what they’re really admitting, at best, is that they published an extremely inaccurate and misleading chart under the guise of survey results. For a market-research firm, this is a sleazy Fox News move indicating either extreme negligence or malice.

[J.D. Power spokesman Kirk Parsons] said that the differential between the price category scores of the iPad and the score of the Samsung tablets that were included in the survey was large enough to “more than offset” the score in the other four categories. …

Many comparable Apple and Samsung models are priced identically or very closely. To overcome losing in every other category, Samsung would need to have a huge price advantage across their entire tablet line.

And if price is worth enough to overcome large deficiencies in every other category, why didn’t Amazon win?

Parsons declined to share the exact price ranges of the tablets included in the study. Of note: Apple also scored the same two power circles on the first study earlier this year, which it aced, and which applied the same metrics and questions.

Interesting. Same scores, different conclusion.

The more likely story is that J.D. Power tweaked the survey’s scope to get the result they wanted to publish. By restricting the survey to certain models, price ranges, and survey respondents, and then denying that their published comparison chart has any mathematical relation to the scores, they can justify almost any manufacturer “winning”.

Why might they want to say that Samsung’s tablets are better than Apple’s?

Samsung spends a ton of money on marketing — far more than Apple — and frequently employs unethical marketing techniques. Apple isn’t known to play ball very well with the enterprise analyst or market-research rackets, which often implicitly require companies to pay for their high-end services in order for them to recommend the companies’ products. And publishing a conclusion like this gets J.D. Power a lot of attention in a market that the internet is constantly making less relevant.

With even their apparently arbitrary chart denying their conclusion and the numbers not making much sense, it’s at best a desperate stretch. They’re not even good at this game.

J.D. Power is as credible as Consumer Reports now.

I can’t support or deny ZDNet’s trashy headline about today’s tablet platforms being “basically equal”, although the market certainly doesn’t seem to agree. But this statement about the author’s usage, implying that his conclusions are broadly applicable, is comical:

My usage covers a broad spectrum, from surfing the web and consuming content to working with office documents.

Nearly everyone “surfs”¹ the web and “consumes content” on tablets. Not everyone works with office documents, but I bet among people who do anything else besides basic web tasks and media consumption, it’s probably a close runner-up to game-playing.

With everything that modern tablets can do, web browsing, media playing, and basic office tasks are hardly a broad spectrum. It’s really the lowest-common-denominator of tablet (and PC) usage.

If you venture into any non-mainstream apps, the differences become much clearer. And this works like the 80/20 feature myth: the likelihood of any given person needing a specific app niche are low, but the likelihood of a person needing any niche apps is high.

(Also, Amazon tablets are notably missing from the author’s assessment. They’re certainly a major player, and their tablets are different enough from stock Android that they’re worth evaluating separately.)

Let’s face it: implementing an intranet can be an arduous task. Throwing technology at it gets the business request off your plate… but if it doesn’t work, everyone is going to use Dropbox and Yammer instead, giving you more leaks than the NSA.

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Thanks to Igloo for sponsoring Marco.org this week.

Joe Kissell at TidBITS has been documenting all of the problems with Mail in 10.9 while using a Gmail account:

I’m sorely tempted to look for a different email provider (something I was pondering anyway, for unrelated reasons), but it irks me that I should have to do so now just because Apple broke Mail in the very process of trying to improve the way it works with Gmail.

It’s pretty bad that Apple didn’t catch this in beta testing — it is, after all, a pretty big set of new bugs with the system’s email client when configured for one of the world’s most popular email services. That’s on Apple, fair and square.

But if you’re a Gmail user and expecting to wedge it into an IMAP client without ever hitting problems, that’s increasingly your problem.

Gmail is a highly proprietary, constantly changing, email-like product. It is not standard IMAP email, and it will never work flawlessly in standard IMAP clients. (It never has.) Google has always supported IMAP reluctantly and poorly, and that won’t change — in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they removed IMAP support in the next few years.

Gmail’s primary, most important, and best-supported client will always be its web interface, with its own native mobile apps following. Everything else — especially standard IMAP clients — is a less-profitable nuisance to Google, not showing ads and holding back feature development by not being under Google’s complete control.

If you want to use email in a browser and Google’s mobile apps, use Gmail. But if you want to use standard IMAP email apps, use a standard IMAP email host.

Update: Joe decided to leave Gmail because he wanted standard IMAP structure and behavior. Good move, for the right reasons.

As spotted by Mac Rumors:

…between the 6-core and 8-core machines, the two unsurprisingly show similar single-core scores of around 3300 in Geekbench 3, while the newly surfaced 6-core machine sees a lower multi-core score of 18309 compared to the 24429 seen on the 8-core version.

Performance on almost all current high-end Intel chips is pretty similar, thanks to thermal limits and Turbo Boost — you can see that the new 2.6 GHz Retina MacBook Pro matches the Mac Pro’s single-core score, and the multi-core score scales almost perfectly linearly, even between the mobile and Xeon parts, with the number of cores.

Based on Apple’s stated specs and process of elimination, these are all of the new Mac Pro’s CPU options:

Notably, they left out better 6-core and 8-core options with the same TDP that seem to have no other disadvantages except a few hundred dollars, which hardly matters at the price range of a high-end Xeon workstation:

Oh well.

On paper, and these Geekbench results from the 6- and 8-core support this, it looks like you really can’t go wrong with any of the CPU options below the 12-core — the deciding factors should only be cost and how much parallelism you can take advantage of.

The 12-core will not only be very expensive, but it will likely suffer in single-threaded tasks with its low Turbo Boost ceiling, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless it will spend most of its life doing highly parallelized CPU tasks that actually max out all 12 cores.

If I end up buying a Mac Pro of this generation, having seen no other benchmarks or Apple’s likely very inflated CPU pricing, I’d probably go 6-core. The 8-core is tempting on paper, but I bet it’ll be a very big price jump for what ends up being very similar performance most of the time.

This week: Why Everpix failed, photo storage woes, and final Mavericks scraps.

Sponsored by Hover and F-Sim Space Shuttle.

We will continue to publish all content on our website that is freely available to everyone. But if objc.io is valuable to you and you would like to support this project, the Newsstand app gives you a way to do so. We greatly appreciate your support!

If you write code for iOS or Mac for a living or as a hobby, you need to be reading this amazingly high-quality publication. I’ve been doing this stuff for years, and I still learn a ton from every new issue — and it’s practical stuff I can use often in my work.

Now, there’s a way to support it. It’s a no-brainer for me.

(See also.)

I’ve been using TextMate 2 full-time since its alpha release almost a year ago, and it has served me very well. In that entire time, I can count the number of crashes on one hand, and it has never lost unsaved data. Recommended.

Its biggest shortcoming, by far, is that it relies too much on bundles and hidden defaults commands for basic settings and customizability. It has even fewer common settings exposed in the GUI than TextMate 1 — everything’s in bundles now, and even common settings usually require a web search to figure out.

Yes, most TextMate users will be programmers and power users, but we’re not all expert TextMate hackers, and we shouldn’t need to be.

It’s a fantastic editor in desperate need of a few more panes in the settings screen. If MacroMates doesn’t meaningfully expand the settings UI for release, a lot of people are going to be needlessly driven away by a perceived attitude that basic usability and customers’ time isn’t being respected.

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Thanks to Tapstream for sponsoring Marco.org this week. I’m a happy Tapstream user.

If, by some gross oversight, you aren’t already reading Brent Simmons’ blog, I highly recommend following it now for this ongoing series describing challenges and decisions as he implements sync for Vesper.

(Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.)

Sync is hard not because it’s difficult to write the actual code to do it, but because it’s difficult to design it — most big decisions come with tradeoffs and edge cases that you need to weigh and choose for your app.

Reading this while I develop Overcast, which includes a sync engine, is very helpful: I’ve made some different decisions as Brent since Overcast’s needs are very different, but Brent’s posts often make me reconsider a decision or accommodate a new edge case.

Kentuckians like to tell you that 95 percent of the world’s bourbon comes from their state. What they won’t tell you is that pretty much every last drop of that bourbon comes from a handful of conglomerate distilleries.

Very interesting. I knew that most of the big bourbon labels were owned by a few big companies, but I didn’t realize how many upscale labels were just longer-aged bottlings of the low- to mid-range bourbons.

I’ve saved the big tree image for future shopping reference.

This week: John’s new Kindles, Photo Stream confusion, Elop’s plan, and a story about enterprise software.

Sponsored by Transporter, Hover, and Squarespace.

I assumed the most we could hope for this year in the Mini was the equivalent of the iPad 4.

That was totally wrong.

Also, don’t miss the AnandTech review for more technical detail, including comparisons with more tablets and some unexpected differences with the iPad Air.

When a new version of Mac OS X comes out, the only review I need to read is John Siracusa’s. And when new iPhones or iPads arrive, the only reviews I need to read are John Gruber’s and Anand Lal Shimpi’s.

It began modestly enough.

Awesome.

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Thanks to Winch for sponsoring Marco.org this week.

In this special episode of our car podcast, guest star Underscore David Smith joins us as we recount our experience at the 2-day BMW M Performance Driving School.

A beautiful hardcover compilation of some of The Magazine’s best work in its first year. I’m honored to have chosen a few of those articles.

This is my favorite part:

All contributors whose work appears in this collection will be paid a reprint fee if we fund this collection. This is sadly unusual in the publication industry, where rights are paid for once and forever. As we pass our original goal, we’ll increase our reprint fees as well…

When I started The Magazine, one of my primary goals was to pay writers as well as I possibly could. Under Glenn’s ownership, he has continued that policy, and this Kickstarter-funded print edition is no exception.

Grab one of the “early bird” spots and you can get the hardcover and DRM-free ebook for just $25 total. Even the regular $35 price is very reasonable.

Bonus: You can buy a visit from Lex Friedman — yes, the Lex Friedman — and learn all of his tricks.

As Federico Viticci reports:

The big news is, of course, the fact that Apple is embedding a video in the App Store, which has historically only allowed developers to include up to five static screenshots for their apps. …

The possibility of including videos alongside screenshots on the App Store has long been one of the most requested features by third-party developers who, over the years, have struggled to explain App Store customers the purpose of their app or game with just text and images.

I’d love for Apple to roll this out more broadly… I think.

If they only enable videos for a very small number of featured apps, that’s actually a bad thing for the rest of the App Store — it can create a class divide of sorts. What will customers think of your video-less app if most of the ones they’ve seen in the featured sections and top lists have videos? How likely will they be to take a risk on your app if they get accustomed to seeing videos before buying?

Enabling videos for all apps would be much more fair, of course. It would add more perceived value to apps before purchasing, which would somewhat improve the store’s pricing problems and make it a bit easier to sell paid-up-front apps. (Probably not by a lot.) Even for free-up-front apps, more people would be willing to download the good ones after seeing a video, which helps almost everyone.

But that’s a double-edged sword: if Apple does let everyone add videos to their app listings, and buyers start expecting them, then developers will need to produce app videos, and that’s time-consuming and potentially expensive. It would also become a way for deep-pocketed developers to gain an advantage over everyone else: how will your app sell if your video is a nice screen recording of a feature tour in the simulator, then your competitor buys a Sandwich Video?

Also, the App Store reviewers only have a few minutes to spend on each app. Reviewing minute-long videos will add up, so this could also result in slower app-review times.

Be careful what you wish for in the App Store. App videos might be great overall, but they won’t be free.

This week: Why enterprise software is hard, game-console sales, Retina iPad Minis, image retention, the A7’s awesomeness, and repairing HFS.

Sponsored by Ting and Gemvara.

A Medium post by Alicia Liu on Medium. Did I mention this was on Medium?

To me, it was just another marketing gimmick, like so many corporate-sponsored hackathons before it, to trick otherwise sane developers into working for free—with copious amounts of junk food and caffeine and the lure of dubious prizes—to develop apps on top of APIs and platforms they otherwise wouldn’t bother with.

Turns out her suspicions, which were published on Medium, were correct. But Salesforce’s execution was much shittier and sleazier than most people would have predicted. See the Hacker News comments as well.

While Salesforce got a bunch of free ideas out of this, they also burned the developer community badly, which is going to hurt their recruiting (and maybe retention, too). I can’t imagine this will prove worthwhile in the long run.

I wonder how Mattt Thompson feels about the company he works for now, after he spent some of his immense credibility to promote this event. I wouldn’t hold it against him — I’m sure he didn’t know this would happen — but he should sure hold it against them.

Matt Gemmell on how we view and use multiple computing devices today:

I don’t think we take enough time to assess whether we’re unconsciously opting into constraints that don’t really need to exist.

At the end of last week’s ATP episode, I ranted about people going iPad-only for workloads that laptops are much better suited for. This is along the same lines, but better said: if you have the ability to own multiple tools, use the right tool for the job.

If your work can’t be done on an iPad without jumping through hoops and bending over backwards, it’s probably the wrong tool for the job.

The portability and battery-life gap between an iPad and a MacBook Air has never been smaller. This is a great time for iPads and Macs. If you’re reading my site, there’s a good chance that you don’t need to choose just an iPad for your computing needs.¹ Nobody’s pressuring you to go iPad-only. The laptop isn’t going away.

If your work fits gracefully into an iPad, then great — you have options. But if it doesn’t, don’t force it.

One of my favorite writers, Dan Rutter, explains and dissects many audiophile claims in discussing Neil Young’s proposed Pono platform:

The big deal about Pono is, of course, that 24/192 audio is meant to sound better even than CD, let alone lossily-compressed MP3s or AACs. According to Neil Young, digital-music listeners today, who are almost all listening to music data-reduced via MP3 or some other lossy codec, are as a result enduring sound worse than that from a 78-RPM shellac record.

Seriously, that’s what he says. … And he may be exaggerating a bit, but he is not joking.

And actually, I think that from his own point of view he may be right, in a way. But the only way for him to be right is a terrible one, that leaves me wondering if everybody else is just humouring this old guy with a large wallet.

In response to the many angry letters he got, he went even further in a follow-up.

These two articles took me days to get through because, like the intended procedure for John Siracusa’s OS X reviews, I kept following the links. My favorite two are this for science value and this for humor value — “shocked”!

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Is this real? Please let this be a joke.

This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture, unreasonable expectations, and workaholism in one job posting, by a company with a massive audience that probably contains a very high percentage of young software developers.

They would like someone with a computer science degree and at least three years of professional experience in developing web apps top-to-bottom on the full PHP/MySQL stack and Java, Python, or Ruby development¹ and high-traffic server and database administration and supporting their other employees’ local office IT needs.

They’re going to require you to be a workaholic, not having any work-life balance, which they flippantly celebrate and glorify.

They don’t specify a salary, but they’re very clear that it’s going to be very low — they’d rather spend a fraction of the difference making the office nice.

I did almost this exact job for Tumblr’s first four years. I required, and was given, a great salary plus stock, a nice office environment, and a healthy work-life balance. The difference is that I didn’t have much experience going in — I learned most of the scaling side as we went. An advanced web developer who also wants to be a sysadmin and already has experience managing high-traffic infrastructure is very rare and far more valuable.

Penny Arcade wants one of those so they can pay them a low salary and burn them out. The candidate is expected to be happy and honored at the privilege of this terrible deal.

Their unreasonable, immature expectations are a damaging message to send to their huge audience of young software developers. Yes, there are other employers this bad (and worse) in the industry, but you don’t have to work for them. There are a lot of better options, especially if you satisfy even half of Penny Arcade’s requirements — and a healthy work-life balance is a basic requirement, like your paycheck, that you shouldn’t tolerate losing for any employer.

Pretty much.

For closed headphones, this is a very good pair for the lowest price I’ve ever seen. See my review.

(At the much higher end, the excellent but open Beyerdynamic T90 is on sale for almost $100 off its usual price. It’s a shockingly good pair of headphones. Full review coming soon.)

Also worth noting: the Big Jambox is on sale for $250. I’ve owned or tried a handful of Bluetooth and AirPlay speakers, and the Big Jambox is the best by far. I just bought another one. Here’s my review, especially compared to the Bose SoundLink (which I hated) and regular-sized Jambox (which I don’t recommend anymore). For whatever it’s worth, to me, it looks best in white.

Update: Great prices on my favorite portable sets for walking, commuting, or traveling, too: closed (recommended) and open.

This week’s show: Disk Utility repair results, Xbox One launch, PrimeSense, Apple’s potential in TV, Penny Arcade’s job posting, and an extended after-show about facing trolls and your own flaws.

Sponsored by Warby Parker and Ting.

Wired can’t find any evidence that “burn-in” actually changes the sound of speakers, headphones, and microphones, concluding:

Indeed, all of this variation gets at the real thing people are reacting to when they buy new head- and earphones: mental burn-in. If you’re used to dark-sounding headphones, neutral ones may sound bright at first until you get used to the new sound. That flexible calibration is how many of our senses work. Light seems brighter after darkness, sound rings louder after silence. Chances are, a lot of what people attribute to headphone burn-in is actually just their brains gradually becoming used to this new sound or new setting.

I think this is exactly right. I’ve never noticed any effects of burn-in on any of my audio equipment — excellent equipment sounds great on day one, and underwhelming equipment never becomes more… whelming over time.

Hamish McKenzie:

Whereas the Newsstand in previous version of iOS looked like a bookshelf hosting a row of magazine covers, the new version is opaque, showing only a diagrammatic representation of generic magazine covers.

… But what’s worse for publishers is that there is now no visual reminder within the Newsstand icon that there are publications inside, waiting to be read. On top of that, in iOS7 users can now hide the Newsstand icon inside a folder. The once-special treatment that Apple gave publishers in order to encourage the distribution of magazines to the iPhone and iPad had apparently vanished, at least in terms of visual prominence.

The problems with Newsstand go even deeper on the technical and economic side:

• Auto-renewing subscriptions, which launched as effectively Newsstand-exclusive, are now permitted in any app that sells content or services that fit within Apple’s (vague, arbitrary, and capricious) permitted categories for auto-renewal.

• Background downloads and silent content-available push notifications could only be used in Newsstand apps prior to iOS 7. But under iOS 7, these are available to all apps.

  Adding insult to injury, the new NSURLSession background-download system is much better than Newsstand’s old NKAssetDownload system, and during the iOS 7 beta, Newsstand developers were told to stick with their old system and not use the new one.

I see no benefit to magazines being in Newsstand anymore. Newsstand apps now have no meaningful exclusive abilities, and iOS 7 effectively buries them in a bland, opaque folder that’s easily hidden.

I don’t think there’s a good way for existing Newsstand apps to leave it without losing all of their subscriptions, but if I were making a new publication app today, I’d stay out of Newsstand and just make it a regular app.