Mountain Lion

Thursday, 16 February 2012

“We’re starting to do some things differently,” Phil Schiller said to me.

We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product briefing”. I had no idea heading into the meeting what it was about. I had no idea how it would be conducted. This was new territory for me, and I think, for Apple.

I knew it wasn’t about the iPad 3 — that would get a full-force press event in California. Perhaps new retina display MacBooks, I thought. But that was just a wild guess, and it was wrong. It was about Mac OS X — or, as Apple now calls it almost everywhere, OS X. The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announcement event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR. (From the outside, at least in my own experience, Apple’s product marketing and PR people are so well-coordinated that it’s hard to discern the difference between the two.)

Handshakes, a few pleasantries, good hot coffee, and then, well, then I got an Apple press event for one. Keynote slides that would have looked perfect had they been projected on stage at Moscone West or the Yerba Buena Center, but instead were shown on a big iMac on a coffee table in front of us. A presentation that started with the day’s focus (“We wanted you here today to talk about OS X”) and a review of the Mac’s success over the past few years (5.2 million Macs sold last quarter; 23 (soon to be 24) consecutive quarters of sales growth exceeding the overall PC industry; tremendous uptake among Mac users of the Mac App Store and the rapid adoption of Lion).

And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule. This year’s update is scheduled for release in the summer, and is ready now for a developer preview release. Its name is Mountain Lion.¹

There are many new features, I’m told, but today they’re going to focus on telling me about ten of them. This is just like an Apple event, I keep thinking. Just like with Lion, Mountain Lion is evolving in the direction of the iPad. But, just as with Lion last year, it’s about sharing ideas and concepts with iOS, not sharing the exact same interaction design or code. The words “Windows” and “Microsoft” are never mentioned, but the insinuation is clear: Apple sees a fundamental difference between software for the keyboard-and-mouse-pointer Mac and that for the touchscreen iPad. Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes.

Major new features

The recurring theme: Apple is fighting against cruft — inconsistencies and oddities that have accumulated over the years, which made sense at one point but no longer — like managing to-dos in iCal (because CalDAV was being used to sync them to a server) or notes in Mail (because IMAP was the syncing back-end). The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making things simpler and more obvious, closer to how things should be rather than simply how they always have been.

Schiller has no notes. He is every bit as articulate, precise, and rehearsed as he is for major on-stage events. He knows the slide deck stone cold. It strikes me that I have spoken in front of a thousand people but I’ve never been as well-prepared for a presentation as Schiller is for this one-on-one meeting. (Note to self: I should be that rehearsed.)

This is an awful lot of effort and attention in order to brief what I’m guessing is a list of a dozen or two writers and journalists. It’s Phil Schiller, spending an entire week on the East Coast, repeating this presentation over and over to a series of audiences of one. There was no less effort put into the preparation of this presentation than there would have been if it had been the WWDC keynote address.

What do I think so far, Schiller asks. It all seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it — and I mean obvious in a good way. I remain convinced that iCloud is exactly what Steve Jobs said it was: the cornerstone of everything Apple does for the next decade. So of course it makes sense to bring iCloud to the Mac in a big way. Simplified document storage, iMessage, Notification Center², synced Notes and Reminders — all of these things are part of iCloud. It’s all a step toward making your Mac just another device managed in your iCloud account. Look at your iPad and think about the features it has that would work well, for a lot of people, if they were on the Mac. That’s Mountain Lion — and probably a good way to predict the future of the continuing parallel evolution of iOS and OS X.³

But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?

That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.

I wonder immediately about that “now”. I don’t press, because I find the question that immediately sprang to mind uncomfortable. And some things remain unchanged: Apple executives explain what they want to explain, and they explain nothing more.

My gut feeling though, is this. Apple didn’t want to hold an event to announce Mountain Lion because those press events are precious. They just used one for the iBooks/education thing, and they’re almost certainly on the cusp of holding a major one for the iPad. They don’t want to wait to release the Mountain Lion preview because they want to give Mac developers months of time to adopt new APIs and to help Apple shake out bugs. So: an announcement without an event. But they don’t want Mountain Lion to go unheralded. They are keenly aware that many observers suspect or at least worry that the Mac is on the wane, relegated to the sideline in favor of the new and sensationally popular iPad.

Thus, these private briefings. Not merely to explain what Mountain Lion is — that could just as easily be done with a website or PDF feature guide — but to convey that the Mac and OS X remain both important and the subject of the company’s attention. The move to a roughly annual release cycle, to me, suggests that Apple is attempting to prove itself a walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time company. Remember this, five years ago?

Putting both iOS and OS X on an annual release schedule is a sign that Apple is confident it no longer needs to make such tradeoffs in engineering resources. There’s an aspect of Apple’s “now” — changes it needs to make, ways the company needs to adapt — that simply relate to just how damn big, and how successful, the company has become. They are in uncharted territory, success-wise. They are cognizant that they’re no longer the upstart, and are changing accordingly.

It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.

I’ve been using Mountain Lion for a week, preinstalled on a MacBook Air loaned to me by Apple. I have little to report: it’s good, and I look forward to installing the developer preview on my own personal Air. It’s a preview, incomplete and with bugs, but it feels at least as solid as Lion did a year ago in its developer previews.

I’m interested to see how developer support for Mac App Store-only features plays out. Two big ones: iCloud document storage and Notification Center. Both of these are slated only for third-party apps from the Mac App Store. Many developers, though, have been maintaining non-Mac App Store versions of their apps. If this continues, such apps are going to lose feature parity between the App Store and non-App Store versions. Apple is not taking the Mac in iOS’s “all apps must come through the App Store” direction, but they’re certainly encouraging developers to go Mac App Store-only with iCloud features that are only available to Mac App Store apps (and, thus, which have gone through the App Store approval process).

My favorite Mountain Lion feature, though, is one that hardly even has a visible interface. Apple is calling it “Gatekeeper”. It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple. Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion:

The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also benefits developers, preserving the freedom to ship whatever software they want for the Mac, with no approval process.

Call me nuts, but that’s one feature I hope will someday go in the other direction — from OS X to iOS. ★

Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

What is Apple at heart: a software company, or a hardware company?

This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience.

But, as a thought experiment, which is more important to you? What phone would you rather carry? An iPhone 4S modified to run Android or Windows Phone 7? Or a top-of-the-line HTC, Samsung, or Nokia handset running iOS 5?

What computer would you rather use? A MacBook running Windows 7, or, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X 10.7?

For me, the answers are easy. It’s the software that matters most to me. I’d pick a Nokia Lumia running iOS 5 over an iPhone 4S running any other OS, and I’d pick the ThinkPad running Mac OS X over a Mac running Windows. No hesitation.

What do you think Steve Jobs would have chosen, facing the same choices?

Truth is he probably would have smashed any of such hypothetical devices against the nearest wall in a fit of rage, but, if forced to choose, I believe Jobs would have gone with the software.¹ The hardware and the software are both important; Jobs clearly cared deeply about both. But I think Jobs ultimately thought software was more important. That was his whole explanation for the one-button design of the iPhone, on stage at Macworld Expo in January 2007, talking about the inherent problems with the existing smartphones then on the market. Jobs said:

A few minutes later, Jobs said:

This design — getting rid of all those buttons and just making a giant screen — is today not only the ubiquitous standard for smartphones industry-wide, but also exactly describes another device you may have heard of, called the iPad.

Design Is How It Works

There is much that is wrong with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, but its treatment of software is the most profound of the book’s flaws. Isaacson doesn’t merely neglect or underemphasize Jobs’s passion for software and design, but he flat-out paints the opposite picture.

Isaacson makes it seem as though Jobs was almost solely interested in hardware, and even there, only in what the hardware looked like. Superficial aesthetics.

In Chapter 26, “Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive”, Isaacson writes (p. 344 in the hardcover print edition):

Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works.

Jobs, in an interview with Rob Walker for his terrific 2003 New York Times Magazine profile on the creation of the iPod, said:

That quote is absent from Isaacson’s book, despite the book’s frequent use of existing source material. Instead, Isaacson includes an older quote:

I think Jobs meant what he said to Fortune, and it’s an attempt to communicate the same core truth. But “Design is how it works” is a much better statement of Apple’s philosophy. Talk of a “product’s essence” (Isaacson’s words) or “the fundamental soul of a man-made creation” (Jobs’s) only serves to separate, conceptually, the art of design from the cold hard science of engineering. With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.

Design and engineering are, indeed, often in opposition — engineering constraints affect design; design goals affect engineering tradeoffs. But they are not separate endeavors. The philosophical question is which one is a subset of the other. What Schiller is telling Isaacson is that prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world.

Isaacson does not understand this, and his telling of the Antennagate saga illustrates this perfectly. Again, the aforequoted bit from Chapter 26:

The edge of the iPhone 4 (and now 4S) is the antenna.² And it’s not made of brushed aluminum — it’s bead-blasted stainless steel.³ The engineering concern was therefore not that the steel edge would compromise the antennas, but rather that external antennas would compromise reception. The trade-off was that moving the antennas to the outside left more room on the inside — room for a bigger battery and other components, and allowed for the device to be thinner. Isaacson paints Jobs and Ive as being concerned only with how it looked and felt, with engineers left to worry about how it worked. The truth is that the design was how it worked.

Isaacson returns to this story in Chapter 39, in a section titled “Antennagate: Design vs. Engineering” (which section title again positions engineering as being separate from design, rather than part of design):

No passage in the book better illustrates Isaacson’s disregard for Steve Jobs’s philosophy of what “design” means.

Serious About Software

Isaacson, it seems clear, mistrusted Jobs. That’s good. But rather than using that mistrust to push back, to ask insightful questions, he instead simply turned to others. Regarding the early days of Apple and the original Mac, Isaacson turned to Andy Hertzfeld. The book does not suffer for this, because Hertzfeld is both honest and blessed with a seemingly extraordinary memory. But this history has been ably documented before — particularly well, no surprise, by Hertzfeld himself, with his Folklore website and the outstanding book compiled from that website, Revolution in the Valley.

Far less documented are the subsequent stages of Jobs’s career: the NeXT years and his return to Apple. As a counterpart to Jobs for those years, Isaacson repeatedly turned to Bill Gates.

Isaacson refers many times throughout the book to Jobs’s famed “reality distortion field”. A search for the term in the iBooks edition returns 30 results, including the title of Chapter 11. In that chapter, Isaacson writes:

I.e., Jobs had the ability to make people believe whatever he said, whether it was true or not. But not everyone:

I think Isaacson viewed Jobs’s RDF as something very much akin to the Jedi mind trick — something that worked against most people, but not those with strong minds. That might even be true. But I think Isaacson was so concerned with himself being “resistant” that he chose to treat much of what Jobs told him as false.

Again, skepticism is good. But rather than do the research to verify Jobs’s version of events, to learn the facts so as to be able to dispute Jobs himself, he simply turned to sources he did trust, like Hertzfeld and Gates. But Gates is an odd choice to trust, because he clearly has a conflict of interest. His company competed against Jobs’s, and at a personal level, he is Jobs’s only rival in terms of historical stature in the industry.

What happens then, repeatedly, is that Jobs tells Isaacson something that is true, but Isaacson doesn’t believe it, and he then quotes someone else, like Bill Gates, saying something that is false to refute it, and Isaacson lets that remark stand as fact.

One example stands above all others. Chapter 23, “The Second Coming”, tells the tale of Apple’s 1996 acquisition of NeXT and Jobs’s return. For context, then-CEO Gil Amelio had decided that Apple needed to go outside the company for a successor to the classic Mac OS. The options: acquiring Be or NeXT, or licensing Sun’s Solaris or Microsoft’s Windows NT. (Licensing Windows NT was, according to Isaacson, what Amelio favored early on — which goes to show just how profoundly fucked Apple was at the time.) On page 302, Isaacson writes:

The only thing interesting about this quote is that Gates was so utterly, astoundingly, completely wrong. But Isaacson never points that out.

In Gates’s defense, the above anti-NeXT invective is attributed to him second-hand. Isaacson drew it from Gil Amelio’s On the Firing Line. But what Gates did say to Isaacson, in the present day, paints an even less accurate picture. The next paragraph in the book reads:

So ends this section of the chapter, with no additional commentary from Isaacson or any other sources. The above is simply left to stand as a description. A reader with no knowledge, who trusts Isaacson, would be left to believe that the above is an accurate description of Apple’s NeXT acquisition.

It is, in fact, completely and utterly wrong. NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”. Apple did get NeXT’s OS to run on Mac hardware. Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system with Mac technologies integrated, not the other way around. iOS — the system that powers both the iPhone and iPad — is a direct descendent of NeXTStep. Even the original iPod, which wasn’t based on NeXT technology, used the column-view concept for hierarchical navigation that NeXT pioneered.

Gates makes it sound as though Apple’s NeXT acquisition was effectively only a talent acquisition. It was in fact both a talent and technology acquisition, and what was then NeXT technology now serves as the basis for both Mac OS X and iOS.

It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth. This is no small thing for Steve Jobs’s biographer to get wrong. Jobs’s career was long, rich, and varied, but if you wanted to reduce his entire life’s work to a nutshell, it would be exactly what Isaacson, channeling Gates, so completely misunderstood: the software system created by NeXT, which was then continuously expanded upon and refined by Apple.

NeXT’s software was what brought Jobs back to Apple. It saved the Mac platform, then grew the Mac platform. It serves today as the foundation of the iPhone and iPad. NeXT did struggle in the market, but their software was a long bet that ultimately paid off. Arguably it took 20 years for it to thrive, but Steve Jobs seemingly never lost faith or confidence in it.

It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about something; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.

After reading about Jobs, it’s tempting to succumb to a Jobsian-style binary view of the world. Total shit, or the greatest thing ever; five stars, or zero stars. You can get fired up that way, and see my criticism here as condemning Isaacson’s book as total shit, zero stars. That would be a mistake. Steve Jobs is not literature, but it is a good book, but alas with several holes and egregious errors.

Isaacson includes that Alan Kay quote about serious software people making their own hardware, but doesn’t seem to heed it, or to recognize that it perfectly describes Steve Jobs’s career and explains the phenomenal success of Apple’s products.

Note that my complaints here are not about Isaacson being insufficiently deferential. That the book is not a hagiography is to its credit. The personal stuff — documentation of Jobs’s cruelty (and his talent for cruelty), his tantrums, his tendency to claim for himself the ideas of others — that’s not problematic. Isaacson handles that well, and what he reports in that regard jibes with everything we know about the man. My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.

You could learn more about Steve Jobs’s work by reading Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine piece than by reading Isaacson’s book, but even then we’re left wanting for the stories behind any of Apple’s products after the iPod. Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, youth, eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.

Isaacson gives us the story of an asshole. But the world is full of assholes. What we need is the story of the one man who spearheaded so many remarkable products and who built an amazing and unique company. ★

The ‘Apple Should Be Worried If Anyone Else Has Any Success Whatsoever’ School of Thought

Friday, 10 February 2012

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, regarding this week’s news about Windows for ARM:

This is a recurring theme. Someone does something different than Apple, has some success with it, and pundits like Kingsley-Hughes start arguing that Apple needs to change course and do what the other guys are doing. Exhibit A: the Kindle Fire. It’s selling well — nowhere near as well as the iPad, mind you, but it’s not collecting dust in warehouses like most other tablets are — prompting some to argue that Apple “must” release a $250 7-inch tablet too.

Now we have Microsoft taking a very different approach to managing the difference between traditional PCs and touchscreen tablets. They’re going with a “one OS for all devices” strategy; Apple chose a “different OSes with specific shared concepts for each type of device” strategy.

Good for Microsoft for choosing a different strategy. Good for Amazon for choosing a different strategy. Their possible successes, however, do not necessarily bode poorly for Apple. There is room in the market for very different devices.

That Microsoft’s approach appeals to some more than Apple’s doesn’t mean Apple needs to respond to it or follow their lead. The fact that the iPad does not run Mac OS X, nor run Mac apps, is by design — not a technical limitation. And the iPad’s success — it now sells at three times the rate of all Macs combined — suggests that consumers see the iPad’s differences as a benefit, not a limitation.

That doesn’t mean Microsoft (and Amazon, and everyone else) should copy Apple’s iPad strategy as closely as possible. But it certainly shows that Apple not only does not “need” to follow Microsoft’s or Amazon’s strategies, but that they shouldn’t. The iPad was not designed to be all things for all people. How much better would the iPad need to be selling to convince these pundits that Apple nailed it, that they struck gold with the iPad’s concept and execution? There may well be gold in other spots on the tablet frontier, but Apple is going to keep digging in the same spot. ★