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Craig Federighi on Why There Is No Touchscreen Mac→

CNET spoke with Craig Federighi after last week’s keynote, and one of the questions they ask him is whether there will be a touchscreen Mac (around 2:30 in the video):

Craig Federighi: At Apple we build prototypes around all sorts of ideas. So we certainly explored the topic deeply many years ago and had working models, but we decided it really was a compromise. For a device you hold in your hand like a phone or tablet it is very natural to rest your hand on the tablet and work that way. We think touch is at its best and we wanted to build, and have built, a really deep experience around a multi-touch first user interface. Grafting touch onto something that was fundamentally designed around a precise pointer really compromises the experience.

Those were carefully chosen words by Federighi. He does not say that there won’t be a touchscreen Mac, instead he notes that the simple addition or “grafting” on of a touchscreen to the Mac would be a compromise. Importantly, the compromise that he refers to is not one related to ergonomics, but rather the fact that macOS is currently designed around an interaction model driven by a precise pointer.

I agree with Federighi. I certainly wouldn’t want to see a Mac with a touchscreen bolted on, with no adjustments to the UI of macOS. But as someone who regularly uses the iPad Pro in a laptop-esque configuration with the Smart Keyboard, I see the value in having a touchscreen on a Mac, provided that there are also UI changes to macOS. I don’t expect this any time soon, but I do think it will happen.

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Apple’s Willingness to Embrace Its Past→

Jonathan Zufi, author of ICONIC, a coffee table book that celebrates the history of Apple products through beautiful photography, uses the October 27th Apple event to challenge a comment by Phil Schiller in 2012 that Apple is ‘focused on inventing the future, not celebrating the past.’

Although Steve Jobs shut down Apple’s internal Apple museum in 1997 and transferred its collection to Stanford, Zufi points out that Apple has begun honoring past products more often in recent years, especially where doing so highlights the innovations of current products. As Zufi observes:

People love reminiscing about the past, and there are still many Apple fans who love to celebrate the company’s rich product history — its successes and its failures. I’ve heard from readers who simply loved the fact that they sat down with [ICONIC and] a glass of wine and lost themselves for hours reliving these old machines, where they were in their lives when they first came across them, and how much has changed.

That’s why Phil Schiller’s comment about not celebrating the past always bothered me and I’m going to disagree with Phil on this — I’m certain Apple will continue celebrating their past as they blaze the future.

Selling the past short isn’t a prerequisite to embracing the future. Apple’s newfound willingness to look back feels like the mark of a mature company that’s as confident with where it’s been as it is with where it’s going.

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Outlook for iOS Adds Group Scheduling→

Microsoft has added a new group scheduling tool for Office 365 subscribers and users of the latest version of Exchange. Microsoft’s Outlook blog explains how it works:

Once you’ve created an event from your calendar and added your coworkers to the People field, tap the date picker. Times that work for everyone show in white, yellow indicates availability for one or more people in the group, and red indicates times with no availability. Next, tap the time picker and just drag and drop until it turns green—indicating everyone is available at that time.

After you have found a time that works for everyone and fill out any additional information about your event tapping the checkmark sends an invitation to each invitee and saves the event to your calendar.

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The End of the Mac Startup Chime→

The MacBook Pros introduced by Apple last Thursday no longer chime on startup or when NVRAM is reset. First discovered by Pingie.com, Stephen Hackett dives into the details on 512 Pixels, including a new Apple kbase article on resetting NVRAM.

The end of the startup chime is a small thing, but as Hackett observes:

…the startup chime is ingrained into the experience of having a Mac, I’m sad to see it go. A Mac without the chime feels broken, even if I know it isn’t. I don’t power down my machines often, but I liked hearing the chime when I power them back up.

It’s tradition.

It’s like losing the Happy Mac all over again.

It makes me a little sad and nostalgic to lose the Mac’s familiar chime too. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one more link to the Mac’s origins that is gone, which feels like a loss.

512 Pixels has some great links to the history of the startup chime that are a good read while you’re pouring one out for the Mac’s familiar sound.

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How the Touch Bar Works→

Good overview of the Touch Bar and its developer API by Benjamin Mayo:

Developers can display pretty much whatever they want whilst their app is in the foreground; this includes swapping out views and buttons depending on the current window of their app (a compose window necessitates different Touch Bar accessory views than the inbox window). However, the Touch Bar does not allow persistent widgets, status items or similar features like always-visible news tickers. These constraints are unlikely to be lifted either; Apple is imposing the restriction so that the UI under the user’s finger isn’t constantly changing due to spurious notifications or text messages.

Apple wants the bar to display peaceful relatively-static UI based on the current task. Major changes to the Bar should only happen when the application state drastically changes, such as opening a new tab or beginning a new modal activity. To repeat: once an app’s window is not active, it loses its control to influence what is shown on the Bar. The system Control Strip sits to the right in a collapsed state by default, but can be disabled entirely in System Preferences if desired.

This makes sense to me: the Touch Bar is intended to be an extension of the keyboard that deals with input – it’s not a smaller Dashboard or a widget container. This means that apps like PCalc won’t be able to persistently display their controls in the Touch Bar unless they’re the frontmost (active) app.

The more I think about it, the more the Touch Bar feels like the natural evolution of QuickType and the Shortcut Bar from iOS – to the point where I wonder if we’ll ever get this kind of evolution on the iPad Pro as well (where the current app is always the frontmost one and system controls could use a faster way to be engaged than Control Center). Perhaps with a new external keyboard with its own embedded Touch Bar and T1 chip?

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Canvas, Episode 22: Workflow – The Basics→

This week Fraser and Federico begin a multi-part series on the iOS automation app Workflow.

For the next several weeks on Canvas, we’re going to focus on Workflow with a series of episodes aimed at covering the basics of the app, its automation features, as well as its more advanced aspects. In the first episode, we explain what Workflow is and its key principles. We have lots more to come, so stay tuned. You can listen here.

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Steven Levy Reminisces About the First iPod→

The world in the Fall of 2001 was a very different place and time. Steven Levy went through his email archives for October of that year to tell the story of how he was introduced to the first iPod. Levy who wrote a cover story for Newsweek magazine about the iPod and later, a book, describes what it was like when he received that first iPod from Apple:

The box was striking, with a kinetic photo of Jimi Hendrix. When you opened it, the stark white device — which I’d describe as a thermostat control in a David Hockney painting — sat like a gem in a jewel box. Apple had also provided reviewers with a stack of CDs (presumably to dispel the charge that illegally downloaded music would populate the iPod’s 5-gigabyte hard drive).

In 2001, the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it combined existing technologies in a simple and stylish way that caused people to sit up and take notice. That first iPod was expensive and only worked tethered to a Mac via FireWire, which it was criticized for by some. But Levy and others saw the promise of the fledgling device.

Fifteen years later, it’s interesting to consider Levy’s interview of Steve Jobs as he legitimately questions who the iPod is for and why Apple made it. Few products reach the heights that the iPod eventually did, but it’s the possibility that one might that makes the introduction of new gadgets and technologies exciting to all but the most jaded.

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Perpendicular Philosophy→

Jason Snell:

Apple, in contrast, believes that touchscreen interfaces are great and computers are great and they’re not the same thing. Apple has steadfastly resisted adding touchscreens to the Mac, and when you ask the company’s executives why, they have been remarkably consistent on this point for the past few years.

What defines a computer, they’ll say, is that it’s made up of two perpendicular surfaces. There’s a vertical display surface, more or less up and down, right in front of you. And there’s a horizontal control surface—a table or desk or the base of a laptop—that you use for input and control. If you want a Mac, that’s what you get. If you want a touch-based device, get an iPad.

Seen through this philosophy, the new MacBook Pro and its Touch Bar interface fit perfectly. The Touch Bar brings the things Apple loves about touchscreen interfaces—customizability and support for multitouch—and adds it to the control surface of the Mac, right above the keyboard. It doesn’t break Apple’s definition of a computer at all, because it’s a new sort of touchscreen, and it’s part of the keyboard area, not the display area.

I don’t use a Mac as my daily computer anymore, and I don’t plan to switch from my iPad Pro, but the Touch Bar is the first change to the Mac line to pique my curiosity in years. Probably because it borrows from what makes iOS great.

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Ars Technica on the T1 Chip in the New MacBook Pro→

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica, got Apple on the record about the T1 chip and what it does for security and the Touch Bar:

At any rate, the T1 is an interesting chip that does much more than support Touch ID and Apple Pay. Apple tells us that it has a built-in image signal processor (ISP) related to the ones Apple uses in iPhone and iPad SoCs, something which Troughton-Smith suggests could protect the camera from malware hijacking. And its Secure Enclave handles the encryption and storage of fingerprint data and protects it from the rest of the operating system and its apps, much as it does in iOS.

When you interact with the Touch Bar, Apple tells us that the majority of the processing is being done by the Intel CPU, although the T1 also appears to do some processing in specific situations for security’s sake, as when Apple Pay is used. But to keep the Touch Bar from counting toward the number of external monitors you can use (Intel’s GPUs support a total of three separate displays, AMD’s support six), the T1 is used to drive the Touch Bar’s screen. From what Apple told me, it sounds like the image you’re seeing is actually being drawn by the main system GPU but is being output to the display by T1, not unlike the way other hybrid graphics implementations work.

Between A-series chips, the W1, and the T1, Apple’s most fascinating work is happening in the custom silicon space. The whole T1-Touch Bar deal is extremely intriguing.

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