Apple acquires Dark Sky, Android version shutting down in July

Dark Sky, the popular weather app, has been acquired by Apple. News of the acquisition comes by way of Dark Sky’s own blog.

The company says that there will be “no changes” for users on iOS right now — but for Dark Sky users on Android, the forecast isn’t so good. The company says it’ll shutdown the service on Android in just a few months time.

From their post:

Android and Wear OS App:

The app will no longer be available for download. Service to existing users and subscribers will continue until July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down. Subscribers who are still active at that time will receive a refund.

The company will also no longer accept new signups for its API, which allowed other developers to tap Dark Sky’s database of “weather forecasts and historical weather data“. The company is committing to running that API through the end of 2021, but it’s unclear what’ll happen to it after that.

Dark Sky found its following by being one of the first apps to focus on “hyperlocal” weather, with reports based on your precise location rather than a swooping approximation for an entire zip code. For places like San Francisco where the weather can vary wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood, that’s a must.

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Daily Crunch: FDA clears procedure for N95 mask decontamination

The FDA approves a new procedure that could allow healthcare workers to reuse N95 respirator masks, Microsoft divests from a facial recognition startup and Saudi spies have been taking advantage of a network security flaw. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 30, 2020.

1. FDA grants emergency authorization to system that decontaminates N95 respirator masks for reuse

Research, development and lab management company Battelle has received special emergency authorization from the U.S. healthcare regulator to put into use a system it developed to decontaminate used N95 respirator masks using concentrated hydrogen peroxide.

The system is able to turn single use respirators into masks that can be used up to 20 times, with a 2.5-hour decontamination process between each use. And it’s already in operation at Battelle’s Ohio facility, with a decontamination capacity of up to 80,000 masks per day.

2. Divesting from one facial recognition startup, Microsoft ends outside investments in the tech

Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its investment from AnyVision, an Israeli company developing facial recognition software, came as a result of an investigation into reports that AnyVision’s technology was being used by the Israeli government to surveil residents in the West Bank.

3. Saudi spies tracked phones using flaws the FCC failed to fix for years

Lawmakers and security experts have long warned of security flaws in the underbelly of the world’s cell networks. Now a whistleblower says the Saudi government is exploiting those flaws to track its citizens across the U.S. as part of a “systematic” surveillance campaign.

4. Test and trace with Apple and Google

Jon Evans looks at what Apple and Google can learn from Singapore, where they use a “TraceTogether” app. The app uses Bluetooth to track nearby phones (without location tracking), keeps local logs of those contacts, and only uploads them to the Ministry of Health when the user chooses to do — presumably after a diagnosis — so those contacts can be alerted.

5. Attract, engage and retain employees in the new remote-work era

Having the right technology in place to sustain work-from-home practices is more important now than ever before. There are four steps that employers can take to successfully integrate and adapt successful virtual hiring technologies into their business continuity plans. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Online tutoring marketplace Preply banks $10M to fuel growth in North America, Europe

The startup said it has seen a record number of daily hours booked on its platform this past week. It also reports a spike in the number of tutors registering in markets including the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain — which are among the regions where schools have been closed as a coronavirus response measure.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length Equity episode discusses Stripe’s investment into login/checkout startup Fast, while the Monday news recap covers three funding rounds and a downturn. Meanwhile, Original Content reviews Hulu’s star-studded “Little Fires Everywhere” and the bonkers Netflix documentary “Tiger King.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Security lapse exposed Republican voter firm’s internal app code

A voter contact and canvassing company, used exclusively by Republican political campaigns, mistakenly left an unprotected copy of its app’s code on its website for anyone to find.

The company, Campaign Sidekick, helps Republican campaigns canvas its districts using iOS and Android apps, which pull in names and addresses from voter registration rolls. Campaign Sidekick says it has helped campaigns in Arizona, Montana, and Ohio and contributed to the Brian Kemp campaign, which saw him narrowly win against Democratic rival Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial campaign in 2018.

For the past two decades, political campaigns have ramped up their use of data to identify swing voters. This growing political data business has opened up a whole economy of startups and tech companies using data to help campaigns better understand their electorate. But that has led to voter records spilling out of unprotected servers and other privacy-related controversies — like the case of Cambridge Analytica obtaining private data from social media sites.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, said he found the cache of Campaign Sidekick’s code by chance.

In his review of the code, Vickery found several instances of credentials and other app-related secrets, he said in a blog post on Monday, which he shared exclusively with TechCrunch. These secrets, such as keys and tokens, can typically be used to gain access to systems or data without a username or password. But Vickery did not test the password as doing so would be unlawful. Vickery also found a sampling of personally identifiable information, he said, amounting to dozens of spreadsheets packed with voter names and addresses.

Fearing the exposed credentials could be abused if accessed by a malicious actor, Vickery informed the company of the issue in mid-February. Campaign Sidekick quickly pulled the exposed cache of code offline.

One of the Campaign Sidekick mockups, using dummy data, collates a voter’s data in one place. (Image: supplied)

One of the screenshots provided by Vickery showed a mockup of a voter profile compiled by the app, containing basic information about the voter and their past voting and donor history, which can be obtained from public and voter records. The mockup also lists the voter’s “friends.”

Vickery told TechCrunch he found “clear evidence” that the app’s code was designed to pull in data from its now-defunct Facebook app, which allowed users to sign-in and pull their list of friends — a feature that was supported by Facebook at the time until limits were put on third-party developers’ access to friends’ data.

“There is clear evidence that Campaign Sidekick and related entities had and have used access to Facebook user data and APIs to query that data,” Vickery said.

Drew Ryun, founder of Campaign Sidekick, told TechCrunch that its Facebook project was from eight years prior, that Facebook had since deprecated access to developers, and that the screenshot was a “digital artifact of a mockup.” (TechCrunch confirmed that the data in the mockup did not match public records.)

Ryun said after he learned of the exposed data the company “immediately changed sensitive credentials for our current systems,” but that the credentials in the exposed code could have been used to access its databases storing user and voter data.

Democrats are using a data scientist’s secret sauce to flip Texas blue

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Test and trace with Apple and Google

After the shutdown, the testing and tracing. “Trace, test and treat is the mantra … no lockdowns, no roadblocks and no restriction on movement” in South Korea. “To suppress and control the epidemic, countries must isolate, test, treat and trace,” say WHO.

But what does “tracing” look like exactly? In Singapore, they use a “TraceTogether” app, which uses Bluetooth to track nearby phones (without location tracking), keeps local logs of those contacts, and only uploads them to the Ministry of Health when the user chooses/consents, presumably after a diagnosis, so those contacts can be alerted. Singapore plans to open-source the app.

In South Korea, the government texts people to let them know if they were in the vicinity of a diagnosed individual. The information conveyed can include the person’s age, gender, and detailed location history. Subsequently, even more details may be made available:

The level of detail provided by @Seoul_gov for each and every COVID-19 case in the city is astonishing:

Last name (which I've obscured)
Sex
Birth year
District of residence
Profession
Travel history
Contact with known cases
Hospital where they're being treated pic.twitter.com/GsI0QQPcVH

— Victoria Kim (@vicjkim) March 24, 2020

In China, as you might expect, the surveillance is even more pervasive and draconian. Here, the pervasive apps Alipay and WeChat now include health codes – green, yellow, or red – set by the Chinese government, using opaque criteria. This health status is then used in hundreds of cities (and soon nationwide) to determine whether people are allowed to e.g. ride the subway, take a train, enter a building, or even exit a highway.

What about us, in the rich democratic world? Are we OK with the Chinese model? Of course not. The South Korean model? …Probably not. The Singaporean model? …Maybe. (I suspect it would fly in my homeland of Canada, for instance.) But the need to install a separate app, with TraceTogether or the directionally similar MIT project Safe Paths, is a problem. It works in a city-state like Singapore but will be much more problematic in a huge, politically divided nation like America. This will lead to inferior data blinded by both noncompliance and selection bias.

More generally, at what point does the urgent need for better data collide with the need to protect individual privacy and avoid enabling the tools for an aspiring, or existing, police state? And let’s not kid ourselves; the pandemic increases, rather than diminishes, the authoritarian threat.

Maybe, like the UK’s NHS, creators of new pandemic data infrastructures will promise “Once the public health emergency situation has ended, data will either be destroyed or returned” — but not all organizations instill the required level of trust in their populace. This tension has provoked heated discussion around whether we should create new surveillance systems to help mitigate and control the pandemic.

This surprises me greatly. Wherever you may be on that spectrum, there is no sense whatsoever in creating a new surveillance system — seeing as how multiple options already exist. We don’t like to think about it, much, but the cold fact is that two groups of entities already collectively have essentially unfettered access to all our proximity (and location) data, as and when they choose to do so.

I refer of course to the major cell providers, and to Apple & Google. This was vividly illustrated by data company Tectonix in a viral visualization of the spread of Spring Break partygoers:

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020

Needless to say, Apple and Google, purveyors of the OSes on all those phones, have essentially the same capability as and when they choose to exercise it. An open letter from “technologists, epidemiologists & medical professionals” calls on “Apple, Google, and other mobile operating system vendors” (the notion that any other vendors are remotely relevant is adorable) “to provide an opt-in, privacy preserving OS feature to support contact tracing.”

They’re right. Android and iOS could, and should, add and roll out privacy-preserving, interoperable, TraceTogether-like functionality at the OS level (or Google Play Services level, to split fine technical hairs.) Granted, this means relying on corporate surveillance, which makes all of us feel uneasy. But at least it doesn’t mean creating a whole new surveillance infrastructure. Furthermore, Apple and Google, especially compared to cellular providers, have a strong institutional history and focus on protecting privacy and limiting the remit of their surveillance.

(Don’t believe me? Apple’s commitment to privacy has long been a competitive advantage. Google offers a thorough set of tools to let you control your data and privacy settings. I ask you: where is your cell service provider’s equivalent? Ah. Do you expect it to ever create one? I see. Would you also be interested in this fine, very lightly used Brooklyn Bridge I have on sale?)

Apple and Google are also much better suited to the task of preserving privacy by “anonymizing” data sets (I know, I know, but see below), or, better yet, preserving privacy via some form(s) of differential privacy and/or homomorphic encryption — or even some kind of zero-knowledge cryptography, he handwaved wildly. And, on a practical level, they’re more able than a third-party app developer to ensure a background service like that stays active.

Obviously this should all be well and firmly regulated. But at the same time, we should remain cognizant of the fact that not every nation believes in such regulation. Building privacy deep into a contact-tracing system, to the maximum extent consonant with its efficacy, is especially important when we consider its potential usage in authoritarian nations who might demand the raw data. “Anonymized” location datasets admittedly tend to be something of an oxymoron, but authoritarians may still be technically stymied by the difficulty of deanonymization; and if individual privacy can be preserved even more securely than that via some elegant encryption scheme, so much the better.

Compared to the other alternatives — government surveillance; the phone companies; or some new app, with all the concomitant friction and barriers to usage — Apple and Google are by some distance the least objectionable option. What’s more, in the face of this global pandemic they could roll out their part of the test-and-trace solution to three billion users relatively quickly. If we need a pervasive pandemic surveillance system, then let’s use one which (though we don’t like to talk about it) already exists, in the least dangerous, most privacy-preserving way.

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Microsoft brings Teams to consumers and launches Microsoft 365 personal and family plans

Microsoft today announced a slew of new products, but at the core of the release is a major change to how the company is marketing its tools and services to consumers.

Office 365, which has long been the brand for the company’s subscription service for its productivity tools like Word, Excel and Outlook, is going away. On April 21, it’ll be replaced by new Microsoft 365 plans, including new personal and family plans (for up to six people), at $6.99 and $9.99 respectively. That’s the same price as the existing Office 365 Personal and Home plans.

“We are basically evolving our subscription from — in our minds — a set of tools to solutions that help you manage across your work and life,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s CVP of Modern Life, Search and Devices, told me ahead of today’s announcement.

Microsoft is making similar branding changes to its business plans for Office 365. For the most part. There, they are a bit more convoluted, with Office 365 Business Premium now called Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business now becoming Microsoft 365 Business Premium, but for the most part, this is about branding while prices stay the same.

These new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans will include access to Outlook and the Office desktop apps for Windows and macOS, 1TB of OneDrive storage per person (including unlimited access to the more secure OneDrive Personal Vault service) and 50G of Outlook.com email storage, Skype call recording and 60 minutes of Skype landline and mobile phone calls.

And since this is now Microsoft 365 and not Office 365, you can also get Windows 10 technical support with the subscription, as well as additional security features to protect you from phishing and malware attacks.

More than 37 million people currently have personal Office 365 subscriptions and chances are these lower prices will bring more users to the platform in the long run. As Mehdi stressed, Microsoft’s free offerings aren’t going away.

But with today’s release, Microsoft isn’t just changing the branding and launching these new plans, it’s also highlighting quite a few new capabilities in its various applications that are either launching today or in the coming months.

Microsoft Teams gets a personal edition

The highlight of this launch, especially given the current situation around COVID-19, is likely the announcement of Teams for consumers. Teams is already one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing products for businesses, with 44 million people using it. But in its efforts to help people bridge their work and personal lives, it will now launch a new Teams edition for consumers, as well.

Just like you can switch between work and personal accounts in Outlook, you will soon be able to do the same in Teams. The personal teams view will look a little bit different, with shared calendars for the family, access to OneDrive vaults, photo sharing, etc., but it sits on the same codebase as the business version. You’ll also be able to do video calls and shared to-do lists.

Microsoft Teams is coming to consumers — but Skype is here to stay

Better writing through AI

About a year ago, Microsoft announced that Word Online would get a new AI-powered editor that would help you write better. You can think of it as a smarter grammar checker that can fix all of your standard grammar mistakes but can also help you avoid overly complex sentences and bias in your word choices.

This editor is now the Microsoft Editor, and the company is expanding it well beyond Word. The new AI-powered service is now available in 20 languages in Word and Outlook.com — and maybe most importantly, it’ll be available as a Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome plug-in, too.

Free users will get basic spelling and grammar features, while Microsoft 365 subscribers will get a number of more advanced features like the ability to ask the editor to suggest a rewrite of a mangled sentence, a plagiarism checker, style analysis to see if your writing is unclear or too formal, and access to an inclusive language critique to help you avoid unintentional bias.

If you’ve used Grammarly in the past, then a lot of this will sound familiar. Both services now offer a similar set of capabilities, but Microsoft may have an edge with its ability to rewrite sentences.

Better presentations through technology

In a similar vein, Microsoft also launched a presentation coach for PowerPoint as a limited test last September. This AI-driven feature helps you avoid filler words and other presentation no-nos.

This feature first launched in the online version of PowerPoint, with a basic set of features. Now, Microsoft 365 subscribers will get two new advanced features, too, that can help you avoid a monotone pitch that puts your audience to sleep and avoid grammar mistakes in your spoken sentences.

Currently, these are still available as a free preview to all but will become Microsoft 365-only features soon.

PowerPoint is also getting an updated Designer to help you create better presentations. It can now easily turn text into a timeline, for example, and when you add an image, it can present you with a set of potential slide layouts.

Microsoft 365 subscribers now also get access to over 8,000 images and 175 looping videos from Getty Images, as well as 300 new fonts and 2,800 new icons.

Excel + Plaid

For you spreadsheet jockeys out there, Microsoft also has some good news, especially if you want to use Excel to manage your personal budgets.

In partnership with Plaid, you can now link your bank accounts to Excel and import all of your expenses into your spreadsheets. With that, you can then categorize your spend and build your own personal Mint. This feature, dubbed “Money in Excel,” will launch in the U.S. in the coming months.

In addition, Excel is getting a lot more cloud- and AI-driven data types that now cover over 100 topics, including nutrition, movies, places, chemistry and — because why not — Pokémon. Like some of the previous features, this is an extension of the work Microsoft did on Excel in the last few years, starting with the ability to pull in stock market and geographical data.

And just like with the previous set of features, you’ll need a Microsoft 365 subscription to get access to these additional data types. Otherwise, you’ll remain restricted to the stock market and geography data types, which will become available to Office Insiders in the spring and then Personal and Family subscribers in the U.S. in the coming months.

Outlook gets more personal

Even though you may want to forget about Outlook and ignore your inbox for a while, Microsoft doesn’t. In Outlook on the web, you can now link your personal and work calendars to ensure you don’t end up with a work meeting in the middle of a personal appointment, because Chris from marketing really needs another sync meeting during your gym time even though a short email would suffice.

Outlook for Android can now summarize and read your emails aloud for you, too. This feature will roll out in the coming months.

Family Safety

While most of the new features here focus on existing applications, Microsoft is also launching one completely new app: Microsoft Family Safety. This app is coming to Microsoft 365 subscribers on iOS and Android and will bring together a set of tools that can help families manage their online activities and track the location of family members.

The app lets families manage the screen time of their kids (and maybe parents, too) across Windows, Android and Xbox, for example. Parents can also set content filters that only allow kids to download age-appropriate apps. But it also allows parents to track their kids in the real world through location tracking and even driving reports. This, as Mehdi stressed, is a feature that kids can turn off, but they’ll probably have to explain themselves to their parents then. Indeed, he stressed that a lot of what the app does is give parents a chance to have a dialog with their kids. What makes the service unique is that it works across platforms, with iOS support coming in the future.

This app is launching as a limited preview now and will be available in the coming months (I think you can spot a trend here).

Partner benefits

Mehdi noted that Microsoft is also partnering with companies like Adobe, Bark, Blinkist, Creative Live, Experian, Headspace and TeamSnap to provide Microsoft 365 subscribers with additional benefits like limited-time access to their products and services. Subscribers will get three free months of access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, for example.

At the core of today’s updates, though, is a mission to bring a lot of the productivity tools that people know from their work life to their personal life, too, with the personal edition of Teams being the core example.

“We’re very much excited to bring this type of value — not increase the price of Office 365 — take a big step forward, and then move to this,” Mehdi said. “We think now more than ever, it is valuable for people to have the subscription service for their life that helps them make the most of their time, protects their family, lets them develop and grow. And our goal or aspiration is: Can we give you the most valuable subscription for your life? I know people value their video subscriptions and music subscriptions. Our aspiration is to provide the most valuable subscription for your life via Microsoft 365 Personal and Family.”

Microsoft Edge is getting smart copy and paste, a password monitor and vertical tabs

Microsoft Teams is coming to consumers — but Skype is here to stay

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This Week in Apps: Apple launches a COVID-19 app, the outbreak’s impact on social and video apps and more

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry saw a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’re continuing our special coverage of how the COVID-19 outbreak is impacting apps and the wider mobile app industry as more COVID-19 apps appear — including one from Apple built in partnership with the CDC, among others. We also take a look at the gains made by social and video apps in recent weeks as people struggle to stay connected while stuck at home in quarantine. In other headlines, we dig into Instagram’s co-watching feature, the Google for Games conference news, Apple’s latest releases and updates, Epic Games expansion into publishing and more.

Coronavirus Special Coverage

Social video apps are exploding due to the COVID-19 pandemic

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News-reading app Flipboard expands local coverage, including coronavirus updates, to 12 more US metros

Earlier this year, personalized news aggregation app Flipboard expanded into local news. The feature brought local news, sports, real estate, weather, transportation news and more to 23 cities across the U.S. Today, Flipboard is bringing local news to 12 more U.S. metros and is adding critical coronavirus local coverage to all of the 35 supported locales.

The 12 new metros include the following:  Baltimore, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, St. Louis and Tampa Bay.

They join the 23 cities that were already supported: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington, D.C.

To offer local news in its app, Flipboard works with area partners, big and small, like The Plain Dealer’s Cleveland.com, the Detroit Free Press and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It has now added to the list of partners local news service Patch and ProPublica, including its Local Reporting Network partners and its collaborative journalism project Electionland.

Patch alone is putting out more than 200 local coronavirus stories per day. Meanwhile, the ProPublica Local Reporting Network funds and jointly publishes year-long investigative projects with 23 local news organizations across the U.S. The Electionland initiative reports on problems that disenfranchise eligible voters, like misinformation, changing voting laws and rules, voter harassment, equipment failures and long lines at the polls.

To determine if a user should be shown local news, based on a user’s IP address — not a precise location — the app may recommend stories relevant to local audiences. It will also offer the Local sections inside the Explore tab in the Flipboard app. Once added, users can then browse their local news alongside other content they’re interested in, across a variety of topics.

At present, there are two main areas of interest to news readers — the COVID-19 outbreak and the 2020 Election, both of which are now offered in the local sections. In addition to understanding the current state of the pandemic on a global and national level, Flipboard readers in the supported areas will be able to track how the COVID-19 outbreak is impacting where they live. This could include coverage of things like local ordinances, school closings, shelter-in-place laws, number of cases and deaths, testing resources and more.

“Understanding the decisions state and local governments make and their impact on the community is not only important, but gives people a greater connection to their local leaders and the media,” said Marci McCue, VP of Content and Communications at Flipboard. “For instance, as a local resident you may want coverage from national newspapers about the coronavirus outbreak, but even more importantly is a local source that tells you where you can get tested and measures local leaders are taking that impact your daily life,” she noted.

The addition of coronavirus special coverage at a local level, aggregated from across publishers, means readers will be able to track stories without having to hop around different sites or apps from area newspapers or broadcasters.

For Flipboard’s business, adding local news allows advertisers to target against user interests, which may now include a city’s metro region as one of those interests.

Flipboard’s mobile app today reaches 145 million users per month. Local news is available in the supported metros across both iOS and Android.

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Apple launches COVID-19 screening website

Today, Apple launched its own coronavirus screening site (apple.com/covid19) and iOS app developed alongside the White House, CDC and FEMA.

The site is pretty simple, with basic information about best practices and safety tips alongside a basic screening tool which should give you a fairly solid idea on whether or not you need to be tested for COVID-19. The site, which is — of course — accessible on mobile and desktop, also includes some quick tips on social distancing, isolation, hand-washing, surface disinfecting and symptom monitoring.

The app, which contains identical information to the site, is U.S.-only at the moment; the website is available worldwide.

Depending on your symptoms, the site will push you to get in contact with your health provider, contact emergency services or inform you that you likely do not need to be tested. It will not route you to a testing center directly.

In a privacy note on the site, Apple notes which data is collected. “Apple is not collecting your answers from the screening tool. To help improve the site, Apple collects some information about how you use it. The information collected will not personally identify you.”

Big tech companies are looking to ensure that people have easy access to key information on COVID-19. Google’s Verily launched a limited version of its Project Baseline coronavirus screening site last week, which, in comparison to Apple’s site does not require users to log in, but it will also not help users with scheduling a test directly.

Alphabet’s Verily launches its California COVID-19 test screening site in a limited pilot

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Apple extends free trials for its pro creative apps

Apple announced today that they are temporarily extending the free trials on Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X from 30 days to 90 days, giving potential customers stuck at home a longer window of time to try out the software.

An Apple spokesperson said the company hopes the promotion will “greatly benefit creative Mac users, and especially students, who find themselves creating and learning in new environments…”

Apple joins a number of other software companies extending the free trials of their products in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Notably, Apple does not charge subscription pricing, so if you want to continue using the video or audio editing software suites, you’ll have to pony up the full purchase price.

Logic Pro X retails for $199.99 and Final Cut Pro X goes for $299.99. Apple says that the extended trial is already live for Final Cut Pro X and will be honored for recent downloads, while Logic Pro X should gain the extended trial in the coming days.

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Stocks shoot upward as ‘Phase Three’ stimulus passes Senate and unemployment skyrockets

Stocks soared on Thursday even as the U.S. reported its worst unemployment numbers in 50 years of tracking data.

The pain felt on main street was offset for investors by the federal government opening its wallet to Wall Street, businesses and (at some point) workers in the form of the $2 trillion stimulus package designed as a response to business closures as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Details of the plan and its implications for startup companies are still being assessed, but the spigot is now on for businesses large and small to avail themselves of low interest stimulus loans and financing that should keep them afloat even as prolonged shutdowns look to continue in the nation’s most populous cities.

Here’s the tale of the tape:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: jumped 6.38%, or 1,351.62 to close at 22,552.17
• S&P 500: popped 6.24%, or 154.51, to close at 2,630.07
• Nasdaq Composite: bounced 5.60%, or 413.24, to close at 7,797.54

Tech stocks followed the broader markets and posted gains on the day. Facebook was up nearly 4.5% and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) was up 5.5%. Shares of Apple were up over 5% as well and Amazon rose 3% on the day.

 

 

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India’s MX Player expands to US, UK and other markets in international push

MX Player, the on-demand video streaming service owned by India’s conglomerate Times Internet, is expanding to more than half a dozen new international markets including the U.S. and the UK to supply more entertainment content to millions of people trapped in their homes.

The Singapore-headquartered on-demand video streaming service, which raised $111 million in a round led by Tencent last year, said it has expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Nepal in addition to the U.S. and the UK.

Like in India, MX Player will offer its catalog at no charge to users in the international markets and monetize through ads, Karan Bedi, chief executive of the service, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The streaming service, which has amassed over 175 million monthly active users in India, is offering locally relevant titles in each market, he said. This is notably different from Disney’s Hotstar expansion into select international markets, where it has largely aimed to cater to the Indian diaspora.

MX Player is not currently offering any originally produced titles in any international market — instead offering movies and shows it has licensed from global and local studios — but the streamer plans to change that in the coming months, said Bedi.

Even as the expansion comes at a time when the world is grappling with containing and fighting the coronavirus outbreak, Bedi said MX Player had already been testing the service in several markets for a few months.

“We believe in meeting this rapidly rising demand from discerning entertainment lovers with stories that strike a chord. To that end, we have collaborated with some of the best talent and content partners globally who will help bring us a step closer to becoming the go-to destination for entertainment across the world,” said Nakul Kapur, Business Head for International markets at MX Player, in a statement.

Times Internet acquired MX Player, an app popular for efficiently playing a plethora of locally-stored media files on entry-level Android smartphones, in 2018 for about $140 million. In the years since, Times Internet has introduced video streaming service to it, and then live TV channels in India.

MX Player has also bundled free music streaming (through Gaana, another property owned by Times Internet) and has introduced in-app casual games for users in the country.

Bedi said the company is working on bringing these additional services to international markets, and also looking to enter additional regions including the Middle East and South Asia.

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Review: 100,000 miles and one week with an iPad Pro

For the past eighteen months, the iPad Pro has been my only machine away from home, and until recently, I was away from home a lot, traveling domestically and internationally to event locations around the world or our offices in San Francisco, New York and London. Every moment of every day that I wasn’t at my home desk, the iPad Pro was my main portable machine.

I made the switch on a trip to Brazil for our conference and Startup Battlefield competition (which was rad, by the way, a computer vision cattle scale won the top prize) on somewhat of a whim. I thought I’d take this one-week trip to make sure I got a good handle on how the iPad Pro would perform as a work device and then move back to my trusty 13” MacBook Pro.

The trip changed my mind completely about whether I could run TechCrunch wholly from a tablet. It turns out that it was lighter, smoother and more willing than my MacBook at nearly every turn. I never went back.

iPad Pro, 2018, Brazil

The early days were absolutely full of growing pains for both the iPad and myself. Rebuilding workflows by patching together the share sheet and automation tools and the newly introduced Shortcuts was a big part of making it a viable working machine at that point. And the changes that came with iPadOS that boosted slipover, split and the home screen were welcome in that they made the whole device feel more flexible.

The past year and a half has taught me a lot about what the absolute killer features of the iPad Pro are, while also forcing me to learn about the harsher trade-offs I would have to make for carrying a lighter, faster machine than a laptop.

All of which is to set the context for my past week with the new version of that machine.

For the greater part, this new 2020 iPad Pro still looks much the same as the one released in 2019. Aside from the square camera array, it’s a near twin. The good news on that front is that you can tell Apple nailed the ID the first time because it still feels super crisp and futuristic almost two years later. The idealized expression of a computer. Light, handheld, powerful and functional.

The 12.9” iPad Pro that I tested contains the new A12Z chip which performs at a near identical level to the same model I’ve been using. At over 5015 single-core and over 18,000 multi-core scores in Geekbench 4, it remains one of the more powerful portable computers you can own, regardless of class. The 1TB model appears to still have 6GB of RAM, though I don’t know if that’s still stepped down for the lower models to 4GB.

This version adds an additional GPU core and “enhanced thermal architecture” — presumably better heat distribution under load but that was not especially evident given that the iPad Pro has rarely run hot for me. I’m interested to see what teardowns turn up here. New venting, piping or component distribution perhaps. Or something on-die.

It’s interesting, of course, that this processor is so close in performance (at least at a CPU level) to the A12X Bionic chip. Even at a GPU level Apple says nothing more than that it is faster than the A12X with none of the normal multipliers it typically touts.

The clearest answer for this appears to be that this is a true “refresh” of the iPad Pro. There are new features, which I’ll talk about next, but on the whole this is “the new one” in a way that is rarely but sometimes true of Apple devices. Whatever they’ve learned and are able to execute currently on hardware without a massive overhaul of the design or implementation of hardware is what we see here.

I suppose my one note on this is that the A12X still feels fast as hell and I’ve never wanted for power so, fine? I’ve been arguing against speed bumps at the cost of usability forever, so now is the time I make good on those arguments and don’t really find a reason to complain about something that works so well.

CamARa

The most evident physical difference on the new iPad Pro is, of course, the large camera array which contains a 10MP ultra wide and 12MP wide camera. These work to spec but it’s the addition of the new lidar scanner that is the most intriguing addition.

It is inevitable that we will eventually experience the world on several layers at once. The physical layer we know will be augmented by additional rings of data like the growth rings of a redwood.

In fact, that future has already come for most of us, whether we realize it or not. Right now, we experience these layers mostly in an asynchronous fashion by requesting their presence. Need a data overlay to tell you where to go? Call up a map with turn-by-turn. Want to know the definition of a word or the weather? Ask a voice assistant.

The next era beyond this one, though, is passive, contextually driven info layers that are presented to us proactively visually and audibly.

We’ve been calling this either augmented reality or mixed reality, though I think that neither one of those is ultimately very descriptive of what will eventually come. The augmented human experience has started with the smartphone, but will slowly work its way closer to our cerebellum as we progress down the chain from screens to transparent displays to lenses to ocular implants to brain-stem integration.

If you’re rolling your un-enhanced eyes right now, I don’t blame you. But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. Bookmark this and let’s discuss in 2030.

In the near term, though, the advancement of AR technology is being driven primarily by smartphone experiences. And those are being advanced most quickly by Google and Apple with the frameworks they are offering to developers to integrate AR into their apps and the hardware that they’re willing to fit onboard their devices.

One of the biggest hurdles to AR experiences being incredibly realistic has been occlusion. This is effect that allows one object to intersect with another realistically — to obscure or hide it in a way that tells our brain that “this is behind that.” Occlusion leads to a bunch of interesting things like shared experiences, interaction of physical and digital worlds and just general believability.

This is where the iPad Pro’s lidar scanner comes in. With lidar, two major steps forward are possible for AR applications.

1. Initialization time is nearly instantaneous. Because lidar works at the speed of light, reading pulses of light it sends out and measuring their “flight” times to determine the shape of objects or environments, it is very fast. That typical “fire it up, wave it around and pray” AR awkwardness should theoretically be eliminated with lidar.
2. Occlusion becomes an automatic. It no longer requires calculations be done using the camera, small hand movements and computer vision to “guess” at the shape of objects and their relationship to one another. Developers essentially get all of this for “free” computationally and at blazing speed.

There’s a reason lidar is used in many autonomous free roaming vehicle systems and semi-autonomous driving systems. It’s fast, relatively reliable and a powerful mapping tool.

ARKit 3.5 now supplies the ability to create a full topological 3D mesh of an environment with plane and surface detection. It also comes with greater precision than was possible with a simple camera-first approach.

Unfortunately, I was unable to test this system; applications that take advantage of it are not yet available, though Apple says many are on their way from games like Hot Lava to home furnishing apps like Ikea. I’m interested to see how effective this addition is to iPad as it is highly likely that it will also come to the iPhone this year or next at the latest.

One thing I am surprised but not totally shocked by is that the iPad Pro rear-facing camera does not do Portrait photos. Only the front-facing True Depth camera does Portrait mode here.

My guess is that there is a far more accurate Portrait mode coming to iPad Pro that utilizes the lidar array as well as the camera, and it is just not ready yet. There is no reason that Apple should not be able to execute a Portrait style image with an even better understanding of the relationships of subjects to backgrounds.

lidar is a technology with a ton of promise and a slew of potential applications. Having this much more accurate way to bring the outside world into your device is going to open a lot of doors for Apple and developers over time, but my guess is that we’ll see those doors open over the next couple of years rather than all at once.

One disappointment for me is that the True Depth camera placement remains unchanged. In a sea of fantastic choices that Apple made about the iPad Pro’s design, the placement of the camera in a location most likely to be covered by your hand when it is in landscape mode is a standout poor one.

Over the time I’ve been using iPad Pro as my portable machine I have turned it to portrait mode a small handful of times, and most of those were likely because an app just purely did not support landscape.

This is a device that was born to be landscape, and the camera should reflect that. My one consideration here is that the new “floating” design of the Magic Keyboard that ships in May will raise the camera up and away from your hands and may, in fact, work a hell of a lot better because of it.

Keyboard and trackpad support

At this point, enough people have seen the mouse and trackpad support to have formed some opinions on it. In general, the response has been extremely positive, and I agree with that assessment. There are minor quibbles about how much snap Apple is applying to the cursor as it attaches itself to buttons or actions, but overall the effect is incredibly pleasant and useful.

Re-imagining the cursor as a malleable object rather than a hard-edged arrow or hand icon makes a ton of sense in a touch environment. We’re used to our finger becoming whatever tool we need it to be — a pencil or a scrubber or a button pusher. It only makes sense that the cursor on iPad would also be contextually aware as well.

I was only able to use the Magic Trackpad so far, of course, but I have high hopes that it should fall right into the normal flow of work when the Magic Keyboard drops.

And, given the design of the keyboard, I think that it will be nice to be able to keep your hands on the keyboard and away from poking at a screen that is now much higher than it was before.

Surface Comparisons

I think that with the addition of the trackpad to the iPad Pro there has been an instinct to say, “Hey, the Surface was the right thing after all.” I’ve been thinking about this at one point or another for a couple of years now as I’ve been daily driving the iPad.

I made an assessment back in 2018 about this whole philosophical argument, and I think it’s easiest to just quote it here:

One basic summary of the arena is that Microsoft has been working at making laptops into tablets, Apple has been working on making tablets into laptops and everyone else has been doing who knows what.

Microsoft still hasn’t been able (come at me) to ever get it through their heads that they needed to start by cutting the head off of their OS and building a tablet first, then walking backwards. I think now Microsoft is probably much more capable than then Microsoft, but that’s probably another whole discussion.

Apple went and cut the head off of OS X at the very beginning, and has been very slowly walking in the other direction ever since. But the fact remains that no Surface Pro has ever offered a tablet experience anywhere near as satisfying as an iPad’s.

Yes, it may offer more flexibility, but it comes at the cost of unity and reliably functionality. Just refrigerator toasters all the way down.

Still holds, in my opinion, even now.

Essentially, I find the thinking that the iPad has arrived at the doorstep of the Surface because the iPad’s approach was not correct to be so narrow because it focuses on hardware, when the reality is Windows has never been properly adjusted for touch. Apple is coming at this touch first, even as it adds cursor support.

To reiterate what I said above, I am not saying that “the Surface approach is bad” here so go ahead and take a leap on that one. I think the Surface team deserves a ton of credit for putting maximum effort into a convertible computer at the time that nearly the entire industry was headed in another direction. But I absolutely disagree that the iPad is “becoming the Surface” because the touch experience on the Surface is one of the worst of any tablet and the iPad is (for all of the interface’s foibles) indisputably the best.

It is one of the clearer examples of attempting to solve a similar problem from different ends in recent computing design.

That doesn’t mean, however, that several years of using the iPad Pro is without a flaw.

iPad Promise

Back in January, Apple writer and critic John Gruber laid out his case for why the iPad has yet to meet its full potential. The conclusions, basically, were that Apple had missed the mark on the multi-tasking portion of its software.

At the time, I believed a lot of really good points had been made by John and others who followed on and though I had thoughts I wasn’t really ready to crystalize them. I think I’m ready now, though. Here’s the nut of it:

The focus of the iPad Pro, its North Star, must be speed and capability, not ease of use.

Think about the last time that you, say, left your MacBook or laptop sitting for a day or two or ten. What happened when you opened it? Were you greeted with a flurry of alerts and notifications and updates and messages? Were you able to, no matter how long or short a time you had been away from it, open it and start working immediately?

With iPad Pro, no matter where I have been or what I have been doing, I was able to flip it open, swipe up and be issuing my first directive within seconds. As fast as my industry moves and as wild as our business gets, that kind of surety is literally priceless.

Never once, however, did I wish that it was easier to use.

Do you wish that a hammer is easier? No, you learn to hold it correctly and swing it accurately. The iPad could use a bit more of that.

Currently, iPadOS is still too closely tethered to the sacred cow of simplicity. In a strange bout of irony, the efforts on behalf of the iPad software team to keep things simple (same icons, same grid, same app switching paradigms) and true to their original intent have instead caused a sort of complexity to creep into the arrangement.

I feel that much of the issues surrounding the iPad Pro’s multi-tasking system could be corrected by giving professional users a way to immutably pin apps or workspaces in place — offering themselves the ability to “break” the multitasking methodology that has served the iPad for years in service of making their workspaces feel like their own. Ditch the dock entirely and make that a list of pinned spaces that can be picked from at a tap. Lose the protected status of app icons and have them reflect what is happening in those spaces live.

The above may all be terrible ideas, but the core of my argument is sound. Touch interfaces first appeared in the 70’s and have been massively popular for at least a dozen years by now.

The iPad Pro user of today is not new to a touch-based interface and is increasingly likely to have never known a computing life without touch interfaces.

If you doubt me, watch a kid bounce between six different apps putting together a simple meme or message to send to a friend. It’s a virtuoso performance that they give dozens of times a day. These users are touch native. They deserve to eat meat, not milk.

This device is still massively compelling, regardless, for all of the reasons I outlined in 2018 and still feel strongly about today. But I must note that there is little reason so far to upgrade to this from the 2018 iPad Pro. And given that the Magic Keyboard is backward compatible, it won’t change that.

If you don’t currently own an iPad Pro, however, and you’re wondering whether you can work on it or not, well, I can and I did and I do. Talking to 30 employees on multiple continents and time zones while managing the editorial side of a complex, multi-faceted editorial, events and subscription business.

I put 100,000 (airline) miles on the iPad Pro and never once did it fail me. Battery always ample; speed always constant; keyboard not exactly incredible but also spill sealed and bulletproof. I can’t say that of any laptop I’ve ever owned, Apple included.

I do think that the promise of the integrated trackpad and a leveling up of the iPad’s reason to be makes the Magic Keyboard and new iPad Pro one of the more compelling packages currently on the market.

I loved the MacBook Air and have used several models of it to death over the years. There is no way, today, that I would choose to go back to a laptop given my style of work. It’s just too fast, too reliable and too powerful.

It’s insane to have a multi-modal machine that can take typing, swiping and sketching as inputs and has robust support for every major piece of business software on the planet — and that always works, is always fast and is built like an Italian racing car.

Who can argue with that?

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/33J7wGb

Review: 100,000 miles and one week with an iPad Pro

For the past eighteen months, the iPad Pro has been my only machine away from home, and until recently, I was away from home a lot, traveling domestically and internationally to event locations around the world or our offices in San Francisco, New York and London. Every moment of every day that I wasn’t at my home desk, the iPad Pro was my main portable machine.

I made the switch on a trip to Brazil for our conference and Startup Battlefield competition (which was rad, by the way, a computer vision cattle scale won the top prize) on somewhat of a whim. I thought I’d take this one-week trip to make sure I got a good handle on how the iPad Pro would perform as a work device and then move back to my trusty 13” MacBook Pro.

The trip changed my mind completely about whether I could run TechCrunch wholly from a tablet. It turns out that it was lighter, smoother and more willing than my MacBook at nearly every turn. I never went back.

iPad Pro, 2018, Brazil

The early days were absolutely full of growing pains for both the iPad and myself. Rebuilding workflows by patching together the share sheet and automation tools and the newly introduced Shortcuts was a big part of making it a viable working machine at that point. And the changes that came with iPadOS that boosted slipover, split and the home screen were welcome in that they made the whole device feel more flexible.

The past year and a half has taught me a lot about what the absolute killer features of the iPad Pro are, while also forcing me to learn about the harsher trade-offs I would have to make for carrying a lighter, faster machine than a laptop.

All of which is to set the context for my past week with the new version of that machine.

For the greater part, this new 2020 iPad Pro still looks much the same as the one released in 2019. Aside from the square camera array, it’s a near twin. The good news on that front is that you can tell Apple nailed the ID the first time because it still feels super crisp and futuristic almost two years later. The idealized expression of a computer. Light, handheld, powerful and functional.

The 12.9” iPad Pro that I tested contains the new A12Z chip which performs at a near identical level to the same model I’ve been using. At over 5015 single-core and over 18,000 multi-core scores in Geekbench 4, it remains one of the more powerful portable computers you can own, regardless of class. The 1TB model appears to still have 6GB of RAM, though I don’t know if that’s still stepped down for the lower models to 4GB.

This version adds an additional GPU core and “enhanced thermal architecture” — presumably better heat distribution under load but that was not especially evident given that the iPad Pro has rarely run hot for me. I’m interested to see what teardowns turn up here. New venting, piping or component distribution perhaps. Or something on-die.

It’s interesting, of course, that this processor is so close in performance (at least at a CPU level) to the A12X Bionic chip. Even at a GPU level Apple says nothing more than that it is faster than the A12X with none of the normal multipliers it typically touts.

The clearest answer for this appears to be that this is a true “refresh” of the iPad Pro. There are new features, which I’ll talk about next, but on the whole this is “the new one” in a way that is rarely but sometimes true of Apple devices. Whatever they’ve learned and are able to execute currently on hardware without a massive overhaul of the design or implementation of hardware is what we see here.

I suppose my one note on this is that the A12X still feels fast as hell and I’ve never wanted for power so, fine? I’ve been arguing against speed bumps at the cost of usability forever, so now is the time I make good on those arguments and don’t really find a reason to complain about something that works so well.

CamARa

The most evident physical difference on the new iPad Pro is, of course, the large camera array which contains a 10MP ultra wide and 12MP wide camera. These work to spec but it’s the addition of the new lidar scanner that is the most intriguing addition.

It is inevitable that we will eventually experience the world on several layers at once. The physical layer we know will be augmented by additional rings of data like the growth rings of a redwood.

In fact, that future has already come for most of us, whether we realize it or not. Right now, we experience these layers mostly in an asynchronous fashion by requesting their presence. Need a data overlay to tell you where to go? Call up a map with turn-by-turn. Want to know the definition of a word or the weather? Ask a voice assistant.

The next era beyond this one, though, is passive, contextually driven info layers that are presented to us proactively visually and audibly.

We’ve been calling this either augmented reality or mixed reality, though I think that neither one of those is ultimately very descriptive of what will eventually come. The augmented human experience has started with the smartphone, but will slowly work its way closer to our cerebellum as we progress down the chain from screens to transparent displays to lenses to ocular implants to brain-stem integration.

If you’re rolling your un-enhanced eyes right now, I don’t blame you. But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. Bookmark this and let’s discuss in 2030.

In the near term, though, the advancement of AR technology is being driven primarily by smartphone experiences. And those are being advanced most quickly by Google and Apple with the frameworks they are offering to developers to integrate AR into their apps and the hardware that they’re willing to fit onboard their devices.

One of the biggest hurdles to AR experiences being incredibly realistic has been occlusion. This is effect that allows one object to intersect with another realistically — to obscure or hide it in a way that tells our brain that “this is behind that.” Occlusion leads to a bunch of interesting things like shared experiences, interaction of physical and digital worlds and just general believability.

This is where the iPad Pro’s lidar scanner comes in. With lidar, two major steps forward are possible for AR applications.

1. Initialization time is nearly instantaneous. Because lidar works at the speed of light, reading pulses of light it sends out and measuring their “flight” times to determine the shape of objects or environments, it is very fast. That typical “fire it up, wave it around and pray” AR awkwardness should theoretically be eliminated with lidar.
2. Occlusion becomes an automatic. It no longer requires calculations be done using the camera, small hand movements and computer vision to “guess” at the shape of objects and their relationship to one another. Developers essentially get all of this for “free” computationally and at blazing speed.

There’s a reason lidar is used in many autonomous free roaming vehicle systems and semi-autonomous driving systems. It’s fast, relatively reliable and a powerful mapping tool.

ARKit 3.5 now supplies the ability to create a full topological 3D mesh of an environment with plane and surface detection. It also comes with greater precision than was possible with a simple camera-first approach.

Unfortunately, I was unable to test this system; applications that take advantage of it are not yet available, though Apple says many are on their way from games like Hot Lava to home furnishing apps like Ikea. I’m interested to see how effective this addition is to iPad as it is highly likely that it will also come to the iPhone this year or next at the latest.

One thing I am surprised but not totally shocked by is that the iPad Pro rear-facing camera does not do Portrait photos. Only the front-facing True Depth camera does Portrait mode here.

My guess is that there is a far more accurate Portrait mode coming to iPad Pro that utilizes the lidar array as well as the camera, and it is just not ready yet. There is no reason that Apple should not be able to execute a Portrait style image with an even better understanding of the relationships of subjects to backgrounds.

lidar is a technology with a ton of promise and a slew of potential applications. Having this much more accurate way to bring the outside world into your device is going to open a lot of doors for Apple and developers over time, but my guess is that we’ll see those doors open over the next couple of years rather than all at once.

One disappointment for me is that the True Depth camera placement remains unchanged. In a sea of fantastic choices that Apple made about the iPad Pro’s design, the placement of the camera in a location most likely to be covered by your hand when it is in landscape mode is a standout poor one.

Over the time I’ve been using iPad Pro as my portable machine I have turned it to portrait mode a small handful of times, and most of those were likely because an app just purely did not support landscape.

This is a device that was born to be landscape, and the camera should reflect that. My one consideration here is that the new “floating” design of the Magic Keyboard that ships in May will raise the camera up and away from your hands and may, in fact, work a hell of a lot better because of it.

Keyboard and trackpad support

At this point, enough people have seen the mouse and trackpad support to have formed some opinions on it. In general, the response has been extremely positive, and I agree with that assessment. There are minor quibbles about how much snap Apple is applying to the cursor as it attaches itself to buttons or actions, but overall the effect is incredibly pleasant and useful.

Re-imagining the cursor as a malleable object rather than a hard-edged arrow or hand icon makes a ton of sense in a touch environment. We’re used to our finger becoming whatever tool we need it to be — a pencil or a scrubber or a button pusher. It only makes sense that the cursor on iPad would also be contextually aware as well.

I was only able to use the Magic Trackpad so far, of course, but I have high hopes that it should fall right into the normal flow of work when the Magic Keyboard drops.

And, given the design of the keyboard, I think that it will be nice to be able to keep your hands on the keyboard and away from poking at a screen that is now much higher than it was before.

Surface Comparisons

I think that with the addition of the trackpad to the iPad Pro there has been an instinct to say, “Hey, the Surface was the right thing after all.” I’ve been thinking about this at one point or another for a couple of years now as I’ve been daily driving the iPad.

I made an assessment back in 2018 about this whole philosophical argument, and I think it’s easiest to just quote it here:

One basic summary of the arena is that Microsoft has been working at making laptops into tablets, Apple has been working on making tablets into laptops and everyone else has been doing who knows what.

Microsoft still hasn’t been able (come at me) to ever get it through their heads that they needed to start by cutting the head off of their OS and building a tablet first, then walking backwards. I think now Microsoft is probably much more capable than then Microsoft, but that’s probably another whole discussion.

Apple went and cut the head off of OS X at the very beginning, and has been very slowly walking in the other direction ever since. But the fact remains that no Surface Pro has ever offered a tablet experience anywhere near as satisfying as an iPad’s.

Yes, it may offer more flexibility, but it comes at the cost of unity and reliably functionality. Just refrigerator toasters all the way down.

Still holds, in my opinion, even now.

Essentially, I find the thinking that the iPad has arrived at the doorstep of the Surface because the iPad’s approach was not correct to be so narrow because it focuses on hardware, when the reality is Windows has never been properly adjusted for touch. Apple is coming at this touch first, even as it adds cursor support.

To reiterate what I said above, I am not saying that “the Surface approach is bad” here so go ahead and take a leap on that one. I think the Surface team deserves a ton of credit for putting maximum effort into a convertible computer at the time that nearly the entire industry was headed in another direction. But I absolutely disagree that the iPad is “becoming the Surface” because the touch experience on the Surface is one of the worst of any tablet and the iPad is (for all of the interface’s foibles) indisputably the best.

It is one of the clearer examples of attempting to solve a similar problem from different ends in recent computing design.

That doesn’t mean, however, that several years of using the iPad Pro is without a flaw.

iPad Promise

Back in January, Apple writer and critic John Gruber laid out his case for why the iPad has yet to meet its full potential. The conclusions, basically, were that Apple had missed the mark on the multi-tasking portion of its software.

At the time, I believed a lot of really good points had been made by John and others who followed on and though I had thoughts I wasn’t really ready to crystalize them. I think I’m ready now, though. Here’s the nut of it:

The focus of the iPad Pro, its North Star, must be speed and capability, not ease of use.

Think about the last time that you, say, left your MacBook or laptop sitting for a day or two or ten. What happened when you opened it? Were you greeted with a flurry of alerts and notifications and updates and messages? Were you able to, no matter how long or short a time you had been away from it, open it and start working immediately?

With iPad Pro, no matter where I have been or what I have been doing, I was able to flip it open, swipe up and be issuing my first directive within seconds. As fast as my industry moves and as wild as our business gets, that kind of surety is literally priceless.

Never once, however, did I wish that it was easier to use.

Do you wish that a hammer is easier? No, you learn to hold it correctly and swing it accurately. The iPad could use a bit more of that.

Currently, iPadOS is still too closely tethered to the sacred cow of simplicity. In a strange bout of irony, the efforts on behalf of the iPad software team to keep things simple (same icons, same grid, same app switching paradigms) and true to their original intent have instead caused a sort of complexity to creep into the arrangement.

I feel that much of the issues surrounding the iPad Pro’s multi-tasking system could be corrected by giving professional users a way to immutably pin apps or workspaces in place — offering themselves the ability to “break” the multitasking methodology that has served the iPad for years in service of making their workspaces feel like their own. Ditch the dock entirely and make that a list of pinned spaces that can be picked from at a tap. Lose the protected status of app icons and have them reflect what is happening in those spaces live.

The above may all be terrible ideas, but the core of my argument is sound. Touch interfaces first appeared in the 70’s and have been massively popular for at least a dozen years by now.

The iPad Pro user of today is not new to a touch-based interface and is increasingly likely to have never known a computing life without touch interfaces.

If you doubt me, watch a kid bounce between six different apps putting together a simple meme or message to send to a friend. It’s a virtuoso performance that they give dozens of times a day. These users are touch native. They deserve to eat meat, not milk.

This device is still massively compelling, regardless, for all of the reasons I outlined in 2018 and still feel strongly about today. But I must note that there is little reason so far to upgrade to this from the 2018 iPad Pro. And given that the Magic Keyboard is backward compatible, it won’t change that.

If you don’t currently own an iPad Pro, however, and you’re wondering whether you can work on it or not, well, I can and I did and I do. Talking to 30 employees on multiple continents and time zones while managing the editorial side of a complex, multi-faceted editorial, events and subscription business.

I put 100,000 (airline) miles on the iPad Pro and never once did it fail me. Battery always ample; speed always constant; keyboard not exactly incredible but also spill sealed and bulletproof. I can’t say that of any laptop I’ve ever owned, Apple included.

I do think that the promise of the integrated trackpad and a leveling up of the iPad’s reason to be makes the Magic Keyboard and new iPad Pro one of the more compelling packages currently on the market.

I loved the MacBook Air and have used several models of it to death over the years. There is no way, today, that I would choose to go back to a laptop given my style of work. It’s just too fast, too reliable and too powerful.

It’s insane to have a multi-modal machine that can take typing, swiping and sketching as inputs and has robust support for every major piece of business software on the planet — and that always works, is always fast and is built like an Italian racing car.

Who can argue with that?

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/33J7wGb