Apple March 2016 Keynote – 10am PDT
apple.comI found that keynote terribly disappointing and uninspired. I had really hoped for Apple that they show something new and innovative - instead of two smaller versions of existing products.
EDIT: I did not mean that in an Apple-bashing way. But I wonder what Elon Musk would come up with if he had time and - let's say - 100 billion USD at his disposal.
I think if we were to go back through Apple keynotes--say, the last decade or maybe 15 years--we would find that the vast majority of keynotes were incremental in nature.
There were a few major innovations--some of which, like the iPod, have an impact that is only visible in retrospect (it was met largely with question marks at the time). Others, like the iPad or watch, have a mixed record since then.
But in terms of groundbreaking, huge, obvious innovation, I think there are probably only a couple keynotes that meet that bar: the iMac, and the iPhone. The former rescued the company and set them on a new path; the latter transformed the entire mobile computing market.
For me, the biggest announcement today was the health stuff. It feels like a thin wedge under the huge load often known as "health IT." I think it's fair to say that so far, the promise of technology to revolutionize health care is mostly unfulfilled. And who knows whether Apple will have a real impact. But the work they are doing now seems to be connecting good technology with the right people.
I agree. There was little sign of the old Apple Arrogance that paved new product lines and pushed tech forward. Instead, the presentation explicitly mentioned several times that they only released these products because "customers asked for them."
As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.
Steve Jobs never said that, or at least it's easily to misinterpret. Here's what he said:
"But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." (Businessweek, 1998)
The point is that Apple is VERY concerned about what customers want, and listen to customers, and usually achieves that through an engine of incremental improvement once the product is out there. They just don't believe in a focus-group approach to new products.
Secondly, the current internet meme is that Apple needs to slow down and make their products more stable. Yet we still want our innovation "drug hit" from their announcements. This is hard to balance.
> As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.
I wonder... What visionary, long term, skunkworks projects did Steve initiate into the pipeline before he fell ill? It should be safe to assume there were a number of secret exploratory rods into the fire, if the end of his career there was similar to the rest of it. Some should be emerging from dev right around now.
Where are they now and why aren't we seeing them? Did Steve run out of ideas? Or did they all get mothballed in favor of safer alternatives?
Right? Like last year's fall keynote where they just released a faster version of the previous years’ product, and the 2014 fall keynote where they just released bigger versions of the previous year’s products, and…
I was hoping they'd at least announce some new security improvements (I mean besides patches). But perhaps it's too soon for that, and we may see them in iOS 10 (X?).
I'd like to see client-side encrypted iCloud sync and either adopt Signal's encryption protocol for iMessage or at least disable iMessage sync by default and give the user control over iMessage sync alone (as opposed to being an all-or-nothing solution as it is now).
Well, I, at least found it great, because I am walking around with a dying iPhone 5 unwilling to 'upgrade' to an iPhone 6 despite all the features because it's simply two large for me to use in the way I want (i.e. one-handed). And I've tried with my SO's iPhone 6s.
So, the iPhone SE is great for Apple because they are about to extract $$$ from me.
Edit - doesn't work on Chrome 49
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Non safari users, you can change your user agent to Safari for live stream.
Chrome extension- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switche...
Firefox extension- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-sw...
Works on Edge...
No updated MacBook Pro? That's annoying.
I was rather hoping for a small refresh to include the new Skylake processors, it's certainly due one: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac
I have a mid-2010 MBP that is in dire need of replacement. I was disappointed to see rumors that the 15" Skylake MBP might not come out until September!
I think one of two things is true:
- There's no big redesign planned this year, and the Macbook and Macbook Pro will see press-release releases with updated guts (most notably Skylake) before too long.
- There is a significant redesign of the Macbook Pro coming up, and it'll be announced at WWDC.
I hope number 2 ends up to be true, but most likely number one. Phil Schiller described the ipad pro as "The ultimate replacement for the PC", and that means Apple is all-in for replacing the laptop in the mass market, while also very convenient for profits since their closed hardware will only run an OS and Apps signed by Apple, with only one store to buy Software.
They don't have an incentive to support open computing, and for the first time in years IBM and Microsoft have better products (Carbon X1, Surface book) while OSX haven't seen a major update and MacBook Pros that once were the best professional laptops are really past generation hardware and software.
Yeah, dammit! I would basically have bought an MBPR 15" right away if they'd released one....
I was literally planning to order one as soon as it became available on apple.com, but oh well...
That's exactly what I was going to do. Only reason I even had the keynote on tbh.
Am changing jobs and will be using my own laptop from now on, but guess I'll have to dust off eek a bit of life out of my aging MacBook Air - as I resent spending that much money on a laptop with year old hardware.
On the plus side Apple did just save me from spending £2,000 ;)
Haha ... me too! 2010 Macbook Pro that I've upgraded piecemeal. It is starting to act flakey so need to upgrade soon. It is surprising how long Apple is doing to do the Skylake update.
Sometimes minor updates are done without announcing them. Check the store when it comes back up.
The speculation I've seen is that they're waiting for the new 14nm graphics cards to be released this summer, since the current generation is 3 years old. I'm also due for a new MBP, but if this is true then I'm fine waiting another 3 months.
I'm curious why my modern browser "doesn’t support live streaming of the event" according to Apple.
It was the same issue last year. I need an Apple product (or a Windows 10 PC with Microsoft Edge) to watch a livestream on the internet. Odd for 2016.
Is this really a technical barrier or a marketing/strategic barrier?
They use HTTP Live Streaming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming) which is Apple's own protocol and hasn't been adopted by anyone but Microsoft.
To be fair, when they first implemented it MPEG DASH was a long way off.
HLS is used in plenty of places outside Apple and Microsoft. For example, Twitch.tv uses it in their HTML5 player which works in all modern browsers.
If you paste the playlist URL from another subthread into an open-source HTML5 player [1], it works perfectly. There's literally no reason that Apple couldn't embed this on their home page except stubbornness.
For those looking for the link to copy:
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1603kjbnadc...
I believe it's also in fairly heavy use by Roku, as a supported technology that third party channels can use to provide a better streaming experience.
They use some sort of proprietary streaming .hls that for some reason doesn't support third-party browsers (DRM?) and Microsoft supports it but only wants it to be available in their Edge browser.
It's not that proprietary. FFMpeg supports creating these streams – I once created an encoding pipeline using HLS for a gig. The idea behind the tech is pretty good.
But yeah, browser support is very poor – I had to use a Flash fallback for browsers that didn't support it (which was basically everything but Safari at the time... looks like that sadly still hasn't changed).
At the time it was the best thing for the job, but I haven't done anything with video lately. What would be the best tool for the job these days? Regarding browsers support, etc.
You can still use it via Javascript that repackages the MPEG-TS into MP4 files. However, DASH or a similar home-rolled solution could potentially avoid the repackaging.
Yeah, HLS is really just an extension to the .m3u streaming MP3 playlist format. It's not hard to reason about or understand.
Interesting that Edge is allowed to stream.
PS: Wiki [1] says Apples's HTTP live streaming is supported on Chrome 30 and onwards.
Isn't it more to do with safari doesn't run on Windows? So Apple need to officially support a Windows browser as to not exclude all those windows users
I checked that too. It's supported on Chrome 30 and onwards, but not for Chrome on desktop OSes.
Alternative theories:
1) They have a limited streaming capacity.
2) They gave up on expanding their user base.
Your browser doesn’t support live streaming of the event.
Seriously Apple ...
'Apple refuses to stream on your browser' would be a better message
Apple uses a live streaming variant of HLS to stream their events. Since HLS is basically an Apple proprietary protocol it isn't well supported on other platforms.
Apple in one of their previous press events enabled support for the Microsoft Edge browser.
I cringed every time they kept trying to emphasize the night hue mode as if it is innovative... they explicitly removed two apps from the store that added the feature in the past just to try and profit from an old idea.
A big part of Apple's product appeal is the ecosystem, and a big part of the ecosystem is that amazing features simply work, and work well. They don't have to be configured or hunted for. Taken a step further, the problems some of these new features solve don't even have to be fully apparent to the user.
To that end, Apple improves their ecosystem by making good features standard. Tim Cook mentioned that there were 1 billion Apple devices in circulation. How many of those do you think have users that were even aware of the existence of those two apps? Or even the problem that they address?
I'm not a fan of any bigCo squashing innovative software (and I'm certainly not defending it), but there's no question that in cases like this bringing that feature into the fold leads to a better user experience across the board. To those of us who knew the circumstances it might be cringeworthy, but for the other 98% of users it's just another advance in a progression of features that keeps the ecosystem's user-experience better than any other.
> Apple improves their ecosystem by making good features standard.
Only if you buy their latest devices. Case in point: I just updated to iOS 9.3 for the hue feature and I come to find out (by the fine print on their website) that it's not available for iPhone 5 users for no reason other than to force upgrades.
If they handled the Flux app situation fairly I wouldn't need to buy a new phone for such a simple but important feature.
I don't disagree with you. I'm not being an Apple apologist, just commenting why from their viewpoint it makes sense to bring the very best features into the fold of standard, native, functionality.
For those who aren't in a position to watch the video, Ars Technica is doing their usual live blog
Big reveal: robots will now do the dirty work of recycling iPhones, instead of Bangladeshi children.
I think this is showing another benefit of focusing on a smaller number of products and controlling their development from (virtually) top-to-bottom.
Apple has such a limited number of products that they can build robots to disassemble said products piece-by-piece, which is arguably a more efficient manner to recycle individual parts. Other companies that have a zillion products would likely find it difficult to achieve the same level of efficiency, because they basically have to "shred" their products and sort the bits out later.
EDIT: Do you have a source on Apple using "Bangladeshi children" for disassembly before today?
OTOH a great way to reduce waste is to make products repairable and upgradable, which is something Apple keeps moving away from, especially on popular products.
Not really. The products aren't upgradable or repairable by the end user, but as they demonstrated today, they are upgradeable (to brand new things like solar panels) and repairable by Apple themselves. I for one hate the idea of an end-user upgradeable smart phone. That sounds like a minefield of driver issues and the like that I just don't want. Its why I moved away from Windows in the first place.
I think it makes a great deal of sense to consolidate the upgrades and repairs - they can do it far more efficiently at scale.
> Not really.
Yes really.
> The products aren't upgradable or repairable by the end user
See? Yes really indeed.
> as they demonstrated today, they are upgradeable (to brand new things like solar panels) and repairable by Apple themselves.
Recycling is neither upgrading nor repairing.
> I for one hate the idea of an end-user upgradeable smart phone. That sounds like a minefield of driver issues and the like that I just don't want. Its why I moved away from Windows in the first place.
I'm not talking changing GPU (which doesn't really make sense on a laptop let alone a cell phone), I'm talking about soldered RAM and non-standard SSD connectors on laptops, and heavily glued batteries behind tons of odd screws on both phones and laptops. No drivers involved, and the ability to increase device lifespan by years.
> I think it makes a great deal of sense to consolidate the upgrades and repairs
Again, recycling is not upgrading or repairing, it's taking waste and re-making into product, that requires more materials and energy than not having to do that and being able to keep using the product in the first place.
> they can do it far more efficiently at scale.
That makes literally no sense. Recycling, even at scale, can't be more efficient than not making product into waste in the first place. You can't recover as much matter and energy as was put into building the product to start with unless you've found a way around everything we know of thermodynamics, and if you have what are you commenting on internet forums for? You've basically solved all the world's problem!
I doubt Apple does that for its official recycling program. But I also doubt most iPhones are recycled through the official program (though I can't find statistics).
I'm pretty sure the rep Apple has on labor and environmental issues is highly unfair. Greenpeace actually admitted targeting Apple because it's better PR, one of the main 'journalists' accusing Apple of child labor was actually caught in a web lof lies(http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/r...). See also http://fortune.com/2015/09/28/apple-sorkin-children-factchec...
I don't mean to single out Apple except to the extent that these sorts of events don't lend themselves to honestly discussing the huge environmental impact of the disposable electronics Apple and others produces. I'm willing to believe they're better than most other companies in this regard, but that doesn't mean much when there is almost zero accountability in this area.
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give Skylake MBP
Anybody have a tip on how to watch on Windows 7?
Open this network stream with VLC:
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1603kjbnadc...
Thank you. Why wouldn't they just put this on their website? Crazy that they make it so uninviting for so many people.
As with anything Apple, it's like that by design.
Thank you for this. I would otherwise have had to watch the event on my iPhone. Just curious, how did you find this?
Most boring apple keynote ever. Seriously.
What a horrible keynote. There was literally nothing new, just the same products, only smaller.
On Safari on OSX and I'm just getting the "starting at 10am PDT" message, anybody else?