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I feel sorry for Pret: they have become a symbol of dull commuter life over lockdown, through no fault of their own. ↩︎
Chaffinches are funny little birds - like something drawn by a three year old, all triangular body and spindle legs. They like to hunker down too, which makes them even more squat and fat looking.
An M1 Mac vs the Surface Pro X: How do ARM devices compare?
I suspect that the Venn diagram of people who own both an M1 Mac and a Surface Pro X is small. I fall into that section in the middle, so I thought it was worth summarizing how the two compare.
I should say from the start that the Surface Pro X is by far and away my favourite Windows device. I also have a Surface Book 3, which is a pretty powerful laptop in its own right, but which I just don’t love as much.
The hardware design of the Surface Pro X is exceptional, and it is one of the few non-Apple devices that I’ve owned which matches Apple’s level of industrial design. Using an ARM processor with its much less hefty thermal requirements than Intel chips has freed Microsoft’s hardware designers to make the Surface that they have clearly always had in their heads. It’s thin and light, with an exceptionally lovely screen, and in my experience it just never gets hot, something that I can’t say of any Intel-based computer I’ve ever used.
For some categories of user, myself included, the performance is actually good. Performance is a relative thing: what’s acceptable for someone who lives in the browser would be glacial for a designer who spends their life in Photoshop.
My work life is solidly in Office 365 and a browser, and for this kind of work–which we should remember is a huge chunk of users across the globe—the Surface Pro X is perfect. Office and Edge have never felt slow, no matter how many tabs or documents I have open. And the ability to use it anywhere thanks to built-in LTE makes it more useful than a conventional laptop.
My M1 Mac mini is… well, it’s a Mac. It does everything I have ever used my Macs for, including audio and video editing, and subjectively does it as well and as fast as anything I’ve ever used. It feels faster than my year old 16in MacBook Pro, which has double the memory and on paper at least ought to be easily quicker. And it does it while being silent, cool and snappy with everything.
Using it with third party hardware has also been a very Mac-like experience. Whatever third party hardware I have plugged in has worked from an old Logitech webcam to a Blue Yeti USB mic. Even the software which allows me to programme my Corsair gaming mouse works perfectly. I don’t even know if it’s running ARM or Intel code.
That’s the crucial difference between the two devices. You don’t have to think about the Mac mini as anything other than a Mac. With the Surface Pro X you need to remember that it’s not a Windows device, it’s an ARM Windows device, and limit what you can do accordingly. If your requirements sit within those limitations, it’s a great machine. If they don’t, you won’t be able to use it at all.
This is why Microsoft’s marketing language about Windows on ARM devices focuses on how they are “a new category of PC” and why it talks about the Surface Pro X as for “mobile professionals”. The company isn’t confident—rightly—that ARM devices can replace an Intel PC except in those specific circumstances. Apple thinks of the M1 as making the Mac just a better Mac, first for low-end customers where it can deliver performance that’s already close to the top end, and in 2021 and 2022 for its most demanding users.
What can Microsoft do? I honestly don’t think there’s much it can, at the moment. To get to where Apple is, Microsoft needs to persuade Qualcomm that it should devote time and effort to build chips optimised for higher thermal envelope devices, such as laptops and desktops. That’s not as easy as it sounds. It also needs to persuade Qualcomm that building in features to make it easier to emulate or translate Intel code is worth the effort.
On the software side, it also needs to sort out the mess that is Windows development. Windows Presentation Foundation, Universal Windows Platform, Progressive Web Apps… the entire system is a mess that makes it harder, not easier, to choose how to develop for Windows. This is something that Apple has been very good at managing in the past.
Can Intel or AMD keep up? Apple is already a larger processor company than either of them in terms of units shipped, thanks to its wholly owned designs for the A- and no M-series. Combine iPhone and iPad and Apple ships more than 250m devices per year. Most of those devices will share a great deal in terms of processor design as the M1, meaning that the Mac gains from the economy of scale and design cost amortisation that Intel can only dream of. There are of course big differences between an M1 and an A14, but they share the same cores, the same Neural Engine, the same image processing and secure enclave designs. Perhaps over time the high performance cores in iPhone and Mac will diverge, but at the moment Apple doesn’t need to do it, so it can benefit from being able to design one processor core which ships in 250m devices a year—more than the number of PCs shipping over the same time scale.
I think all this adds up to Microsoft and Intel being in a bigger boatload of trouble than most people think. The shift to ARM feels like a classic Clay Christiansen transformational technology moment, with M1 the tipping point when a technology moves from cheaper but not as powerful as the incumbent to beating it. The path that Microsoft and Intel must take is a radical rethinking of their own businesses, and I am not clear that the internal forces in either company have accepted that yet.
I bought a Mac mini
I lasted a day without preordering a new Mac running Apple’s M1 processor. That’s an improvement, right? Better than I would have done a few years ago?
Well… not by much. My chronic case of former tech journalist disease means that, even though I don’t need to keep abreast of the latest technology for work, whenever a new and interesting change in computers comes out, I end up having to buy it.
That’s how come I own a Surface Pro X, and it’s now why I own a Mac mini with Apple’s M1 ARM-based processor.
I bought the lowest-end model, with 8Gb of memory and 256Gb storage. Having paid out #1800 for a new 16in MacBook Pro earlier in the year, I didn’t really want to pay another #1000 plus for a MacBook Air or Pro 13. I also have too many laptops, anyway.
The timing was right, though, for a desktop Mac, the first one I have owned since another Mac mini about 12 years ago. The shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has made me rethink my home working setup, alongside how I work. I have another post in the works about this, but having a fantastic, clear working space has become very important to me, and utilising a small desktop computer with a screen makes a lot more sense than it did even a few months ago.
The relatively limited storage doesn’t worry me. The cloud storage services I use all do on-demand downloading and manage how much of your local storage they take up (this is the future, people).
What about that 8Gb memory, though? Almost everyone’s consensus is that 8Gb is paltry, 16Gb is the bare minimum for proper work, and anyone serious has 32Gb.
I think this misunderstands the advantages of moving memory from discreet components to part of the system on a chip (SoC). Apple’s unified memory architecture is fast and efficient, and swapping between fast, efficient memory and fast SSDs is nothing like paging in and out of RAM from spinning disks back in the day. Remember, too that Apple has a lot of experience in this: while flagship phones in the Android world now come with 12Gb of RAM, the iPhone 12 Pro Max has just 6Gb—and the iPhone 12 gets by with just 4Gb. And now one would say those devices are slow or lacking in power.
Sure, the requirements with a Mac aren’t the same as a phone, but neither does the Mac have the same design restraints.
The new Mac arrives tomorrow, and I’ll be setting it up tomorrow night, so I’ll know more then.
Weeknotes- Sunday 20th September 2020
This week was the deadline for the latest piece of coursework in the masters that I'm working on (senior leadership, which is fun). That meant a scramble – with COVID tiredness affecting how much focus I have and plenty of other work to do I have to juggle and ration my time to keep everything in balance.
Doing the masters has given me a different perspective on many of the pronouncements from the government on work. It makes it obvious how outdated a view they have of management and leadership.
Consider, for example, the "everyone needs to get back into the office to get back to work" approach that Johnson and friends are so fond of talking about. Offices are Victorian, as much an invention of the Fordist Industrial Age as the production line. They are production lines for information: work passed (physically) from desk to desk in paper form. As the Information Age took over, we retained the same models because the documents we worked with had become digital, but they were confined to the physical office network.
Now, the documents and workflow are freed from this constraint. You can work from anywhere, and the information is where you are.
All this means that role of the office is now about social space, more than work space. The serried ranks of desks are no longer required, but what is needed is to retain the high-bandwidth emotional connections with the colleagues you work with and that turns a collection of workers into a team. And none of this requires you to commute in every day and sit at the same desk, eating the same Pret sandwich1
Forgotten history: How the Mac nearly ended up running on Windows NT
One thing I've been thinking about a lot this week is how much folklore of the early internet age we continue to lose.
Take Apple. Such a lot of the history of Apple has never been documented properly. It may exist in the company's archives, but knowing how company archiving works when you're talking about events of 25 years ago, I'm not hopeful.
For example: I don't know how well known it is that Apple considered using Windows NT as the basis for it's "next generation" operating system, what became Mac OS X.
Everyone knows the story of how the company ended up in with a two horse race between NeXTStep and BeOS, and how BeOS lost. But they weren't the only contenders: both Windows NT and Sun Solaris were considered. The idea was to take one of these and use its multitasking foundations to build an OS which would have a Mac "personality" running on top. It would look like a Mac, and, at least in theory, they could find a way to run Mac applications, but it would run on NT or Solaris foundations.
Even after the NeXT acquisition, inside Apple some agitated not to use the NeXT kernel:
But insiders say Jobs and Hancock have argued bitterly over the “kernel,” the code that will become the core of the operating system. Jobs has pushed Hancock to swiftly adopt Next’s kernel and move to other pieces of the software, especially the modification needed to make Next’s software compatible with that of the Macintosh. Apple has promised that new machines would be able to run older Macintosh applications in a window on the computer’s screen.
But Hancock is conducting a study of Next’s kernel, comparing it with Copland’s as well as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris. She had promised that a decision on a kernel would be made by the end of January, but nothing has been announced. Should Hancock choose a kernel other than Next’s, Apple’s engineers would face the difficult job of merging software from two different sources.
And meetings took place with Microsoft which had this on the agenda, even with Steve Jobs there:
One item of discussion was the possibility of Apple's licensing Windows NT, Microsoft's industrial-strength operating system for the corporate market, sources told the Times. No further details on the topic were disclosed.
Stories like this exist online, but unless you know to search for them, you'll never find them. Digital archeology in action.
Stuff I've been reading this week
Apple won't ship all its tracking blockers for a while
Apple should have stood its ground on ad tracking, but when you're faced with the likes of Instagram's CEO crying bitter tears because they will no longer be able to spy on you, it's easy to see why they didn't.
One word: projection
Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Pedophilia Right Now?
Weeknotes, Doh edition
Of course, a couple of weeks go I should have said that I was on holiday so wouldn't be posting much for a couple of weeks. I should have said that, but I didn't.
Normal service will be resumed this weekend.
Tot
I hadn’t heard of Tot before I read MacStories’ article about its new share extension in iOS, but when I did I was intrigued. And when I used the Mac version I knew it was something I really wanted on my Mac.
At its heart, Tot is a scratch pad. It's just a place to jot down little snippets of text, often that you will use elsewhere.
There’s only seven documents, called dots, represented by – you guessed it – a series of dots along the top of the window. If a dot has text in it, it has a colour fill (you can change this for accessibility purposes – a nice touch).
This conceit of seven and only seven possible “documents” is what makes Tot so good. It places a limitation on what the user can do which nudges you towards a particular kind of behaviour. Applications like Drafts or Apple Notes allow you to keep on making more and more new documents and that encourages you to never actually look back on what you’re written.
The seven-dot limitation of Tot means you can’t do that: if you keep taking notes, as soon as you hit that seven dot limit you’re going to have to go back through what you’re written and either delete something or, if it’s still valuable, move it elsewhere.
There are some other cute little interface touches, all of which remind me quite why I love the Iconfactory’s software. You can have Tot set up either as a menu bar icon or a dock icon. If you have it in the dock, the icon changes to match the colour of the front-most dot.
You can set a keystroke to invoke it on the Mac and there’s a smart set of keyboard shortcuts which let you move forward and back through dots without taking your hands off the keys. You’d be surprised how many text applications don’t have proper navigation like this. There’s also, I’m pleased to say, Touch Bar support.
The Mac version is free: the iOS version is $20. That sounds like a lot for an iOS app, but in the great history of what you can charge for software it’s peanuts. I paid more than that for ridiculous shareware games in the past. And as Mike Schmitt on Sweet Setup points out, for an app this simple a subscription model just doesn’t make any sense.
And the iOS version is excellent, working exactly how you would expect it. If you’re using an iPad with a keyboard then you will find all the keyboard short cuts you have on the Mac version. To switch between dots, you can just swipe across the screen with a single finger. Again, it’s simple, but you can see and touch (literally) the thought that has gone into making it easy.
The iPadOS version really comes into its own when used in a Slide Over window. It’s ideal in this kind of scenario. Of course you can use it full screen, or split view, but when you have it in Slide Over you can see the screen and take notes easily from what you’re working on, or just drag and drop text or links from your “main” view.
The key question with any new software, though, is “what can you actually use it for?” For me, it’s all about jotting down random thoughts and ideas that I’ll take and do something with later – this blog post started life as a set of jottings in a single dot, and then moved to Ulysses once I thought I had enough to start writing a full blog post on it. And the nice thing is that when I exported to Ulysses, all my links and formatting just dropped right in.
Scamware, malware, viruses. Who cares?
Computer viruses are called viruses because like biological viruses, they spread by themselves. What Malwarebytes is talking about are scam apps — things that trick or otherwise convince the user to install voluntarily. Dan Goodin had a piece at Ars Technica last month about the scourge of fake Adobe Flash installers — which work because unsophisticated Mac users had been truthfully told they needed to upgrade their version of Flash for a decade. It’s a real problem — but third-party antivirus software is not the answer. As usual, Tsai has a wonderful compilation of links to commentary on the matter.
Sigh. I can't believe John is still making this distinction as if it matters. The vast majority of malware on Windows and pretty much any platform is scamware, not viruses. This has been true on Windows for probably a decade, maybe longer.
What matters is, as I argued 12 years ago, that the Mac is now a large enough target to bother creating malware for. There's money to be made out of those Mac users, particularly the ones who bought the line that the Mac is immune from malware.
Thinner, lighter, faster
John Gruber, on the "thinner, lighter faster" Galaxy Book S compared to the MacBook Air:
Well, there’s the small notion of, you know, the operating system. And let’s see if it really does get 25 hours of video playback. But the point stands. A lot of people using MacBooks today aren’t devoted to the MacOS experience, and might switch, based on hardware alone. The ARM revolution for notebook PCs is coming, whether Apple is ready or not.
John's right that a large chunk of people using MacBooks today aren't devoted to macOS. But... macOS also just isn't as good as it used to be. That's not about software quality, something that bothers technical users more than ordinary ones. It's just that Windows 10 has got better, to such a degree that unless you're bought into the whole Apple eco-system there's not much point in going for a Mac.
The Mac is now Apple's weakest link.
So I got a Surface Pro X
Earlier this year I bought myself a shiny new Mac. This was the first Mac I’d bought since 2015, when I bought the 12in MacBook, a machine which lasted me four years but which was starting to struggle a little with battery life and a few other things.
The Mac I chose was one of the new retina MacBook Airs, the base model. As you can guess from the fact that a Core m3 MacBook was capable being my main machine for four years, I’m not a particularly demanding power user. I’m not running Photoshop, I don’t have to compile code. Mostly, I write, I do spreadsheets, and I browse the web. Mostly spreadsheets.
The Air is nice. Having TouchID built in is great, the keyboard is adequate, it’s fast enough and although it only has 128GB of storage, in the age of cloud applications and sync engines that are smart enough to work out what to sync and what you don’t ever use, that’s actually not as much of an issue for most people as you’d think.
But I don’t love it. Unlike the MacBook, which for at least two of the years I used it was an absolute darling of a machine, the MacBook Air has just always felt a little half hearted. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s probably the first Mac I’ve ever owned that I just don’t love.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Mac/Windows divide, Microsoft has released the Surface Pro X, and it’s as if they basically created a computer purpose-built to press all of my technology lust buttons. It’s light and portable – I love light and portable – and at the cutting edge thanks to its ARM processor. It’s got LTE built in, something I’ve been desperate for on a Mac for years, and something that made me use my iPad a lot. Oh and it’s a tablet too, and I absolutely adore tablets.
I don’t think I’ve prevaricated about buying a computer more than over the Surface Pro X. On the day it was announced, I added it to my basket on the Microsoft store. On the next day, I took it out. Repeat that three times and you’ll have an idea of how much I agonised over whether to buy one or not.
The reviews, when they came out a week or so before release, should have made up my mind that this was not a device for me. And yet… Reader, I bought one. And not just the lowest end one: I went for the fully tricked out 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD version, because if this thing is going to be my main computing device for a few years, I want some future proofing.
Pricey. No, REALLY pricey
You are of course paying through the nose for all this. Even for the base model, you’ll barely get change out of £1200 once you’ve bought the keyboard (yes, you need this) and pen. Even if you’re lucky enough to get an education discount, you’re still looking at a machine that starts expensive and moves quickly to the level of pricing that will make trigger automatic offers by your credit card company to raise your limit. If you want the fully-loaded 16Gb of RAM and 512GB storage version, you’re going to pay the best part of £2,000.
What you get for that money is basically what all computers should be like in 2019. Silent, always connected, light, with a great typing experience and an amazing screen. Usable in a variety of modes, and equally adept in all of them. It’s a computer that makes you feel productive.
I’ve always believed that Apple makes the best hardware in the business, and in some areas this is true (the new iPhone 11 is shockingly good). But when it comes to computers, Microsoft now beats it, pretty easily. It’s arguably better than the design of the iPad Pro, and I love that device.
Hardware without software is a paperweight
As an iPad user allow me a moment of schadenfreude: One of the biggest criticisms of the iPad from the Windows community has been its failure to run “real” desktop apps “like Photoshop”. Now, the leading edge of Microsoft devices is something which also can’t run Photoshop.
The good news is that the vast majority of applications that I use on a day-to-day basis are already ported to 64-bit ARM, which means I get good performance out of them. Using ARM applications also improves the battery life: whatever emulation system Microsoft is using to run Win32, it pushes the processor hard enough to significantly decrease how long you’ll be using the Surface Pro X without plugging it in. It’s still not bad – but you’ll definitely get a better experience if you can go ARM-only or ARM-mostly.
By and large, if you’re using ARM applications you’re going to find the experience of using the Surface Pro X really positive. That means most of Microsoft’s own apps, including – of course – Office (but weirdly not Teams), plus some staples like Spotify and WhatsApp Desktop.
The Surface Pro X can also run 32-bit Intel apps… but “run” is sometimes a generous way of putting it. It’s hit and miss whether an app will run properly, and if it does run at all, it can be prone to random freezes and crashes.
iTunes is a good example of this. It’s a Microsoft Store app, and it’s Win32, so it should work fine. But whenever I used it, it would randomly lock up while trying to do innocuous things like switching to a playlist. 1Password works, but the desktop client is slow and painful to use.
However, there’s now an ARM version of the new Edge browser, and Edge lets you run pretty much any web site as an application that appears in your task bar, you can run apps like Apple Music and Slack as web apps rather than their native equivalents. Because Microsoft has got into Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in a big way, this is actually a good experience. And 1Password has a Chrome extension version – 1Password X – which is almost as fully-featured as the client, which means you can run it as part of the browser since Chrome extensions work well with the new Edge.
The right device for me… but maybe not for you
If you’re the kind of person who lives in Office 365 and browser-based applications, you’re going to find performance on the Surface Pro X is good, battery life is excellent, and built in LTE is wonderful. Microsoft has built the best device for experiencing its own software, and if you live a Microsoft life you’re going to love it.
This describes my computing world at the moment, so unsurprisingly I love this device. Ironically, it was my experience with the iPad Pro that helped me understand the Surface Pro X could work for me. I’ve never had a problem using the iPad Pro for almost all my work and a sizeable bit of play. I’m mostly deep into the Office 365 ecosystem, and the iPad Office apps are good. And I also knew from the iPad that ARM is capable of more than enough performance to support everything I want to do.
And remember too that for three years a MacBook was my everyday carry work machine. I’ve lived the life of USB C-only for a while. I know that performance is less important to me than lightness. The iPad taught me that integrated LTE and an all-day battery was also very high on my list of requirements.
All computers are inherently a compromise between size, design, performance, mobility and ease of use. You can buy a beast of a gaming “laptop” that weighs a tonne but absolutely screams at
So does anyone want to buy a barely-used MacBook Air?
The Pixel Slate and why I still really love it
The Pixel Slate has had a rough ride. When it was initially revealed, there was a level of excitement around it which built a big bubble of hype. When it was finally released that bubble burst, spectacularly.
The Slate had a lot of problems. There were performance issues in tablet mode, which meant doing something as simple as having two windows snap side by side was a laggy experience. There was the design of the Keyboard Cover, which made the device almost impossible to use in your lap unless you had the kind of length of thigh bone that would place you into NBA levels of height (or extremely weirdly shaped legs).
But the biggest and most damaging question was one that should have been obvious to Google prior to launch: why should you buy the Pixel Slate when the Pixelbook still exists, and even though it has an older processor and bezels as wide as the Grand Canyon it actually did everything that anyone would want from a Chromebook, in a more familiar form?
I have both a Pixelbook and a Pixel Slate. I had expected the Pixel Slate to effectively replace the Pixelbook. All the things the critics said are true about the Slate, and that’s why I never sold the Slate -- but despite the Pixelbook being, in many ways, a superior device I still love using the Slate, and just when I think I’ve put it down for good it finds a way to sneak back into my life.
Why? The first reason is the screen -- and no, I’m not talking about the bezels. I can live with the bezels on the Pixelbook, and the reality is that those on the Slate are not that much smaller. But the screen itself is genuinely joyful to look at over a long period of time. The only screen that I’ve ever used that rivals it is the iPad Pro, which is the best screen on the planet for ordinary use at the moment.
Images on the screen are soft without lacking sharpness or clarity. Colours are absolutely perfect. I can look at this screen for a long, long time without wanting a break (note: I do take breaks anyway, and you should too!)
The second reason the Pixel Slate keeps luring me back is the keyboard. Yes, I know: you can’t use it in your lap, and it has to lie flat on a table because there are no clever magnets to keep it angled up like there are on the Surface Pro keyboards.
But the keys themselves are brilliant to type on. Round keys take a little while to get used to, but Google’s user testing was right. I find myself making less typing errors on it, and when you type all day that adds up to a lot of time spent not doing corrections.
Also, one for Apple: find a way to steal the bit from this keyboard that lets you put it at any angle. The two angles on the iPad Pro keyboard are a big improvement, but they just don’t cut it when you’re used to being able to work at any angle, as you can on the Pixel Slate.
I can’t speak for the lower end versions but the Core i5 that I have in my Slate performs perfectly well now, in laptop or tablet mode. Everything feels as snappy as you would expect. And battery life is fine: you can never have enough battery life, but the Slate will get me through a full typical working day.
I think the biggest problem the Slate faced was that Google never really answered a simple question for themselves: Why make a tablet at all? What role is this device going to play in someone’s life? If it’s going to replace a laptop (or even “replace a laptop 80-90% of the time”) then it needs to be better than a laptop at a wide range of tasks. The iPad is the best example of this: it’s got a better screen, it’s easier to use, the battery lasts and lasts, it’s more powerful given the price, it has really good software, it integrates brilliantly if you have an iPhone, it’s hugely better for consuming content, and thanks to that processor power and easy to use software it’s often better for consumer-level content creation.
And yet… I doubt I’ll ever regret buying the Slate. It’s a big barrel of contradictions and half thought out ideas, but it’s also just one of the most pleasant and compelling devices I own. Even when it’s frustrating you over some little thing, it’s a joyful piece of design that misses the mark in places but delivers in others.
My week with the Pixel 3 XL
Never let a bunch of people decide anything that you have to do via a Twitter poll. In my case, very definitely don’t let them condemn you to a week-long trial of any product other than the ones you favour. That’s how I ended up spending a week or so using the Google Pixel 3 XL rather than my beloved iPhone XS Max. My Apple Watch sat on the sidelines and in its place on my wrist came a Fossil Sport watch running Wear OS. I gave it a shot. But how did it actually do? And did I end up tearing my hair out?
What's better
I’m going to leave the camera to one side for a while, but there are a few areas where the Pixel 3 XL is a clear winner.Top of the list: Google Assistant. Although there are a couple of ways that Assistant is worse than Siri, by and large it’s a huge step upwards. Even though it still hasn’t got totally to grips with my accent (no, Google, “hole” does not mean the same thing as “hall”. I do not have any lights in my hole) Assistant’s ability to answer queries and generally get things done is outstanding.
What did I miss?
There were quite a few things though which made me constantly want to run back to iPhone. Mostly, they were small, but when you start to add up the small things, they matter.First, there was FaceID. Once you’ve got used to just glancing at your phone and opening it up instantly, going back to having to press your finger on a fingerprint reader makes you feel like you have gone back to some kind of technological dark age.
Next there’s Siri. Now I know that I said Google Assistant was way ahead — and it is — but there’s one area that Siri still stands head and shoulders above its Google rival, and that’s home automation. Even after all this time, Google Assistant does not understand that homes have different regions where you might want to turn off and on a bunch of lights: or, as we sometimes call them, “upstairs and downstairs”.
Apps, too, are still behind. There are plenty of streak trackers, but none as good as Streaks. There are plenty of task lists, but none as good as either OmniFocus or Things. Google Fit is fine, but as a hub for all your health information, it’s laughable compared to Apple Health and as a fitness app it’s not as good as Fitness.
Then there’s the hardware and software eco-system and how everything just works together. You would think this might be an area where Google could lead, but instead it lags. Android and Chrome OS still feel like strangers sitting next to each other on a train, rather than a couple.
Then there’s Apple Watch: boy, did I miss Apple Watch. Although I used a pretty decent recent wear OS device (the Fossil Sport), it’s pretty laughable as a wearable. Design-wise, the hardware is fine: this, after all, is a company that knows how to make good looking objects for your wrist. But the software and speed of the device itself are probably compatible to a first generation Apple Watch. Google Assistant, which should be a star on the wrist, is a laggy joke. And the lack of decent applications makes it pretty useless on the whole.
That camera
Of course, there’s one thing that I really haven’t touched on much here: the camera. The Pixel 3 series is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, camera on a smartphone at the moment. Google achieves this not through hardware – although there’s certainly nothing back about the 12 megapixel rear-facing camera – but through its “computational photography”, machine learning algorithms which use multiple shots, the shake of your hand, and other features to improve every single image.And it is a really good camera, capable of producing consistently excellent images across a huge range of lighting conditions. You just won’t get many duff shots out of the Pixel 3.
However, what you are not getting is anything close to images that are true to life, and every now and then the computational photography approach just completely messes up. Portrait mode, for example, will do wacky things like blur out the frame of someone’s glasses rather than correctly interpreting them as part of the face. Occasionally, the Pixel’s desire to make colours pop out at every opportunity also betrays it. For example, taking a wide picture of a kitchen while a friend was cooking, the Pixel decided that because they were wearing a yellow sweater, it should also add a pale yellow tinge to their face. Perhaps that algorithm needs to learn that “jaundiced” isn’t a natural human skin tone.
Portrait mode is also an interesting area. When the iPhone XS Max first came out, Apple’s algorithms for portrait mode over-smoothed skin to a crazy degree. Apple has tweaked these since, and now it’s the Pixel 3’s face smoothing looks over done. It’s not bad: but as soon as you look closely at an image, it’s pretty obvious what the Pixel is trying to do.
Then there’s Night Sight. This is widely – and rightly – regarded as something of a miracle. Even outside, on a pretty dark night with little illumination to work with I can get a clear shot of what’s going on in the garden. But it’s also weird looking, like Jeff Brouws work, and looks absolutely nothing like what you’re seeing in front of you.
There’s no optical zoom on the Pixel 3. And amazingly, you will very rarely care, because Google has done an absolutely amazing job of creating a digital zoom that’s almost as good as having a second lens. Almost – but not quite. This is an area where optics will always beat computation, but unless you’re constantly using zoom, the digital zoom on the Pixel will make you very happy indeed. Good job, Google.
At the end of the day, you are not going to go wrong with either of these cameras. Is the camera better than the iPhone XS Max? It depends on what kinds of images you prefer. Do you want something that looks more or less like what you’re seeing in front of you? The iPhone is your better option. Do you want something that’s “better” in the sense of brighter, more energetic and with lighting that looks bright but not over-lit? The Pixel is probably the camera for you. The colours you end up with on screen will look great – but they will be nothing like the colours that your eye will have seen at the time.
What next?
So am I going to stick with the Pixel? Nope. I’m too embedded in the Apple hardware ecosystem and too much in love with Apple Watch to make that leap for too long. But I am going to spend some more time with it, and in particular I’m going to spend some time with Android Q.Android Q’s third developer beta just came out, and for a bit of fun I decided to install it – and I very much like what I’ve seen so far. The gesture interface (which is so copied from iOS) is more consistent and coherent than the current version, and I like the dark mode even if – as yet – not many applications support it.
Now you’ll have to excuse me, as I have some SIM swapping to do…
The Pixel 3 XL experiment
Here's a lesson for you: never, ever ask your Twitter followers whether or not you should use a particular kind of hardware or software. Ever more so, never allow them a Twitter poll vote on whether you should do something or not.
Last week, I did this:
For the next week, starting from today, I'll be forsaking my beloved iPhone XS Max in favour of the Pixel 3 XL. Perhaps more painfully, I'll also be putting my Apple Watch on to charge and leaving it there, with a Fossil Sport WearOS smartwatch taking its place.
Next Sunday, I'll write up what I think about it. I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I know that there are some aspects of the Pixel that I like already (the camera).
This is all your fault, Twitter followers.
Learning to love silence
I’ve always been someone who has background noise around them. Growing up, the TV was always on, and my dad spent his time singing around the house – he couldn’t hear a silence without filling it with a song. My mum said that she knew my dad was seriously ill when he stopped singing.
I’ve been the same. Get home, turn the TV on, or – more recently – turn the radio on. When I lived in houses where the TV wasn’t the centre of the world, or I didn’t have one (strange to think I’ve lived in places with no TV!) then I would sing, or listen to music. I swam in noise.
Silence was a stranger.
And deeper than that, silence made me feel lonely. I used to listen to the radio late at night, while going to sleep, because the soft background hubbub of quiet voices made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world. Noise, and especially talking, showed me the world was still alive, that things were still as they should be.
Since starting to meditate regularly I’ve become much more comfortable with silence. I still lapse into singing, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but the ongoing song in my head in no longer automatically there. I can be silent inside, and sometimes just appreciate silence around me – as I am now, with no one else in the house, the cat fed (so not filling my ears with her “starved” little voice) and nothing on. No radio, no TV, no music. Just me and the sounds of my fingers clacking across the keyboard. There’s a certain comfort in that, too.
Remembering Project Marklar
Nick Wingfield mentioned something which took me back a long way:
It's well worth reading the whole thread, as much of it typifies Steve Jobs, but describing the reporting of Nick dePlume and Matthew Rothenberg at eWeek on Project Marklar as "rumours" is wrong. In 2002, they absolutely nailed the details of the nascent Intel project. I know the work that went into that story, because I talked them about it at the time.Ok, reading this report about Apple contemplating dumping Intel chips for its own put me in a nostalgic mood. Here's a little story about how Steve Jobs operated with the press. https://t.co/dsGX54xyxW
— Nick Wingfield (@nickwingfield) April 2, 2018
I was tangentially involved in it. At the time, I was news editor on MacUser UK, and a year before they broke the story, Nick called me to see if I’d heard anything about Transitive, the UK-based company whose PowerPC to Intel code translation software Apple was using.
Nick and Matthew worked on that story for a good 18 months before publishing anything. It was solid, dogged reporting. Calling it “rumours” is what Apple did at the time - basically, anything Apple didn’t want you to report, they called “rumours”.
Worth remembering: Jobs was so pissed off about the Marklar story (and many others) that he made closing dePlume’s site a priority - and eventually sued it out of existence. And way too many journalists covering the Mac gave Apple a free pass about this, effectively shrugging their shoulders.
Coda: one of our reporters, the wonderful and much missed Paul Nesbitt, asked Jobs the same question in about 2004. He got barred from Apple press conferences for it. Jobs had many fine qualities, but tolerance for a free press was not one of them.
Extra coda: there were quite a few writers about the Mac at the time who insisted that "it's a rumour until Apple announces it". This is a great tell that a writer isn't a reporter and doesn't understand that by that standard, Watergate was all rumours till Nixon resigned.