San Diego Bike Share - What Happened to the Bikes?

I just spent the week in San Diego for a conference and it made for an interesting comparison to last year's San Diego event.

In San Diego last year, everywhere you went, there were bicycles -- GPS-enabled bike share had taken over the downtown convention center area. There were probably three or four different companies with bikes all around. What was surprising was that  I'd seen a few ride share bikes in the time, but in nowhere near the number that there were there in San Diego. Still, the bikes didn't seem out of place -- between the climate, the beach culture of San Diego and the transportation around the downtown area, the bikes seemed like a great complement to the transportation infrastructure there.

Last year there were only two options for electric scooters, Bird and Lime, and the actual number of scooters you saw was rather limited. While I used the bike share bikes for all of my around-town trips last year, I didn't rent a single scooter. In part, it was because the scooters were kind of hard to find, but some of it had to do with the whole scooter experience itself. For example, if I went for a late night run to the store for water and snacks, the idea of a nighttime ride back to the hotel on a scooter with an imbalanced load of groceries seemed like a good recipe for hitting the pavement. In contrast, most of the bike share bikes have baskets so that you could load a small amount of groceries in them.

This year, I saw only one GPS enabled bike company here, and bikes were few and far between. Instead, there are electric scooters everywhere. Everywhere. I saw scooters from three or four companies, including Lyft (something I hadn't seen before). There are also these little electric things that looks sort of like a mash-up between a bike and a mini-bike -- you sit on a bike seat to ride them, but they have something like 16" tires with bicycle disk brakes. There are no pedals, just foot-pegs. These things seemed to be a bit faster than scooters too.

The wholesale invasion of the electric scooters is kind a mixed bag. When I was getting ready to go to San Diego, I was actually looking forward to getting some bicycle time in, turning the pedals and burning some calories. Instead, there's not much for calorie burn on the electric scooters.

The scooters were okay for making the short trip from the hotel to the convention center faster. If you had your stuff in a backpack, you didn't really notice the load, but I don't know that someone with a briefcase style bag would say the same thing. That being said, the couple of times that I took a scooter out to restaurants in the Little Italy area, it was a ride that bordered on madness. Between the small wheels and the overall condition of the roads, each and every ride had moments when I thought that there was a better than even chance that I was going to crash -- and I would consider myself someone with better skills with my cycling background and decent sense of balance.

When I got off the scooter at the end of a scooter ride between Little Italy and the hotel, not once did I think, "man, that was fun. I can't wait to do that again."

Even more surprising for me were the times when I saw adults taking kids for a ride one of the scooters.

Ultimately, while I understand that the scooter model offers a lower cost element that enables these businesses to scale more easily and that the individual vehicles take up less physical space, I'm not optimistic about any sort of grand scale growth for this transportation alternative. I think it's only a matter of time before something like reports of serious injuries put a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding the whole electric scooter thing. I just wish that they would bring back the bikes.

Apple Ragnarøkkr

It's a new year and, following a warning from Apple on earnings, Apple's stock price has dropped significantly. In the warning, Apple blamed China's economy and consumer delays in upgrading their iPhones as key factors. Beyond problems with the economy and the monkey at the wheel flinging tariffs around, Apple's product problems have been a continuing trend, so it's hardly surprise that we're seeing that play out in their sales results. In terms of their product offering, the last time that Apple was this far off the rails, Steve Jobs came in for the turnaround rescue, reshaping not just the company, but the core product line. Something like that happening at this point seems rather unlikely, but rather than staring off into the distance looking for the rescue ship, let's drill down into some of the places where the current boat is taking on water.

In the earnings call, Tim Cook attributed part of Apple's revenue issue to people not upgrading their iPhones as quickly as they did in the past. For many in the media, this is directly related to the high price of the newest iPhones. Apparently, there has even been talk of price cuts across the iPhone line.

While I don't disagree with an assessment that the cost of the device is a big negative on the current line of iPhones, I don't think that that is the only answer. After all, I bought a new iPhone XS; however, in using it, I found the device to be so functionaly frustrating, I switched my phone back to my old iPhone SE. I carry the iPhone XS -- the camera is really good -- but I don't use it as a phone.

With the current state of the iPhone product line and the implied strategic direction, I expect that my next phone will come from eBay, since that's the only place that I can find an iPhone like the iPhone SE.

What's Wrong With Apple's Products
Apple's product mess extends far beyond iPhone X series. Over the holiday break, Macrumors published this post, "What do you want to See From Apple in 2019?" While lower prices topped the comment responses, you'll also see several top ranked comments focused on product. A couple of highlights include:

"Some new leadership, especially over in product." (the second most up-voted comment)

"Back to basic that Design is about how it works, not how it looks."

These comments echo the kinds of things being said within the professional design community where Apple products have been a staple for decades. Cast in a different light, these are things the "Pro" user community is saying.

Consider this Techcrunch post lamenting the loss of the headphone jack from over the break. Normally, I'd expect a "will the next iPhone include Bluetooth 11.7 Superband and theoretical 6G wireless?" from many of the tech blogs, but this post actually includes a look back at the history of the headphone jack on cellular phones. It's actually a nice walkthrough and a reminder of what a significant step it was for Apple to include a standard headphone jack on the iPhone and how that changed the industry. It was an important design decision that, by the time we got to 2016, Apple forgot it.

Why? The Techcrunch piece focuses on the idea of selling proprietary Airpods, but I think that is just another symptom because this disregard for the factors behind some of these design decisions, factors that were solved by Apple, then forgotten and abandoned. Good design understands history. Fashion follows the wind.

While I've written also about my complaints about the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the MagSafe charging interface is another example of this same kind of disregard for the value and historical significance of the design. Over the years, I've has a number of Apple laptops. From Powerbooks to Macbook Pros, I've used and carried multiple versions over the years. Before MagSafe, all of my Apple laptops suffered from the same problem -- the charging connection became problematic and would only work in certain positions and my laptop became a desktop because I couldn't unplug it risking that I couldn't get it plugged in again. This issue was always caused by the same thing -- periodic accidental yanking of the cord like when the laptop was moved or when you happened to trip over the cord or such.

The MagSafe interface was a godsend. I can't tell you how many times the power cord was ripped from my laptop with the MagSafe connector on -- with no problem. Typically, these instances involved a few strong words, a sense of reassurance, and a return to work. Having spoken to product people in the PC industry, this was one of the most envied, desired features for PC laptops, but Apple's patent mojo was strong. There's a reason why Microsoft included a magnetic charging connection on it's Surface Pro devices.

And what did Apple replace it with? A USB-C charging interface that requires a special class of USB-C cables to charge the device. Gone is the magnetic connector. Gone is the LED that displays whether the device is charging -- another extremely popular, easily overlooked innovation that took multiple years and multiple product iterations to bring to market.

What's worse is that, while the old MagSafe charging port was kind of dumb, using a data-capable USB-C port for charging presents a potential threat vector. Back in September, I came across this article about hackers/security experts crafting a malicious USB cable that could be used to compromise a system in a few seconds. It's probably also worth noting that the USB-C standards body has just recently began to discuss an Authentication Program to protect against malware and firmware/hardware based attacks. So, while I haven't ever had to worry about malware and viruses through my laptop charger before, Apple's new systems have all incorporated this brilliant innovation.

Resistance to Upgrading
One of the factors cited by Apple in their recent earnings call was an observed slowdown in the rate of users upgrading from their existing devices. Some of this is similar to what we saw in the PC industry several years ago. While processor performance provided some percentage of performance improvements, when the base level of the device had reached "good enough" and perceived requirements were not growing at the same rate, people started holding onto their systems longer and longer.

Remember when the idea of "Netbooks" were all the rage? Remember how people were pushing for Apple to offer a Netbook? In a sort of response, Apple introduced the iPad and we all know how well that went. Looking back, we now know that Netbooks didn't really succeed in doing anything other than undercutting most PC hardware manufacturers' average selling price and devaluing their hardware on the whole. Meanwhile, the creeping trend for today's Apple has been increasingly trying to convince people that the iOS-driven iPad Pro is as good as a Macbook and that a lot of core iOS software framework should be used on the Mac.

If you didn't believe them initially, wait until you see how they've added an iPhone like LCD function-bar to your Macbook Pro so that you can watch your laptop battery juice ooze out. Can't believe on revolutionary and innovative it is? Wait until you see us add it to all of our other systems' keyboards (oh wait). Still concerned about how much power it might drain? Try our new "dark mode" in the Mac OS...

Remember when getting the Beatles on iTunes was a big deal? Little did everyone realize that "Helter Skelter" was going to become the soundtrack for Apple's product strategy.

To add insult to injury, you get things like this, Yes, the 2018 MacBook Air's FaceTime HD Camera is Awful. Yes, finally the venerable MacBook Air was upgraded in 2018. Finally it had a Retina display. Sadly, it was also the end of MagSafe and the end of USB-A support on Apple's portable line. Other than that, it seemed like a pretty decent upgrade -- until you started to look into the nooks and crannies and under the rug. Hidden from view, they stuck an Intel Y series processor. Of course, Apple didn't really play this up (and most consumers look at the "i5" or "i7 number), but many of the things that I read were poo-pooing this decision.

I could go on for a while with more examples. Perhaps the simplest thing to say is, many people characterize this reluctance to upgrade being driven by price or a lack of innovation driving enough need/interest in newer hardware (remember when everyone was looking for "the killer app"). I think that there may be a third contributing explanation that is being under-factored into a reluctance to upgrade -- a concern that from a quality and utility perspective, the newer product is going to be worse by many degrees of measure.

Is this Apple Ragnarøkkr -- the "twilight of the gods"?

Apple Denies "Spy Chip" Story

You may have already been following this, but Apple has now denied the Bloomberg spy chip story a couple of times. Here's my original post, Has Your Electronic Hardware Been Hacked?, and the original Bloomberg post, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies. Techcrunch has a prior story with links to more of the denials.

While I'm in no position to know whether the story is valid or not, it can be an interesting exercise thinking about why the various respective parties might have an interest in denying the story. Similarly, it's probably worth spending a bit of time thinking about why, if it isn't true, the story was published and what might be behind it.

All of that being said, thematically, concerns about technology back doors being placed into electronic devices -- and the implications of these vectors -- will continue to be an ongoing theme.

Caveat Emptor.

------- Update:  ----------

You may find this to be pushing into the "conspiracy" end of the spectrum, but here's an interesting look into some of the nuances of the language of rebuttals from the Emptywheel blog. There's also a good breakout of the story into a timeline with links to some of the stories at the time they emerged (I found the Apple, SuperMicro firmware thread to be particularly interesting.

Rattled: China’s Hardware Hack 

There are more posts breaking down the language in some of the denials, but this one has the timeline.

Why I switched from a new iPhone Xs back to an iPhone SE

The one thing that I was hoping for in the Apple iPhone announcement back in early September was an updated iPhone SE. While I'd seen enough on the Apple rumors sites to be concerned that, if the rumored updates to the iPhone SE were true, I'd probably be unhappy with that device. As it was, the rumors sites were talking about a glass-backed iPhone SE with no audio port and no home button -- but I tried to remain optimistic. I'd even considered, in the days prior to the iPhone Xs announcement, purchasing a 128GB iPhone SE just so that I'd have a new one without 2 years of wear and tear on it.

Don't get me wrong, my iPhone SE is still a great phone that still only shows minor scrapes and scratches despite two years of life without a case.

At the same time, you couldn't help but notice the better image quality from her iPhone 8. It didn't help that there were three little spots that I kept seeing in my photos, imperfections that I came to realize was probably the result of damage to the camera lens.

With the iPhone Xs announcement, I'd hoped that Apple would, at least, continue to sell the iPhone SE - dated as it is/was. Seeing it EOLed was probably the worst aspect of that announcement.

So, grudgingly, when orders opened up for the new iPhone Xs back in September, I ordered one. It sounds like a simple decision, a simple action, but it was something more. At the time, I rationalized my decision a couple of ways.

First, I told myself that I'm adept enough with electronics that I could overcome the failures of the design in the iPhone Xs. After all, I thought, how bad could it be? I was sure that, while it might be mildly frustrating at times, I would be able to use the device and would benefit from the new camera. What was surprising was how wrong that prediction turned out to be.

From a size standpoint, I thought the iPhone Xs would end up being about the same size as the iPhone 8. Having used an iPhone 6s Plus for a year, I knew that that phone was just way too big, but I was under the impression that the iPhone X brought something close to a "Plus" size screen into the smaller non-plus sized body. While I knew that it would be larger, I wasn't prepared for how large the iPhone Xs turned out to be.

This week, after almost three weeks of using the iPhone Xs, I switched my phone back to my iPhone SE.

As I used the iPhone Xs, a number of issues because clear. First, while the whole notion of Face ID seemed like an idiotic authentication interface to me, in practice, it proved worse. While I'd initially been impressed with it's ability to recognize me and unlock the device -- almost like it authenticated without effort -- as I used it day-in-and-day-out, I began to notice that it seemed like it failed more often than it succeeded. Running the out-of-the-box software configuration, Face ID fails when you're wearing sunglasses. In other words, when you're using the device outside, you have to stop what you're doing, lift up your sunglasses and force the device to authenticate. It's worth noting that the fingerprint sensor on my iPhone SE worked equally well inside and outside, without regard to whether you were wearing sunglasses.

Face ID also often failed to work if I tried to access my iPhone while it was sitting on my desk in front of me, at a table in a restaurant or a number of other locations that I tried to casually access my iPhone from.

So, imagine yourself at lunch with a colleague and you hear your phone chime indicating that you'd received a text. With iOS 12, the default information displayed on the lock screen is that your received a message from a specified contact. In order to view that on the iPhone Xs, you have to pick up your phone and look at it, something that can be disruptive and be perceived as rude. In contrast, with the fingerprint ID, you can simply touch your iPhone, look down, and you can see whether the text is important or not.

I can't tell you how many times I repeatedly went through scenarios similar to this, particularly since, for many text messages, all you really need to do is determine whether the message is important or not. And worse, because the iPhone Xs locks quickly, you can find yourself having to repeat the whole exercise multiple times in during a single window of receiving multiple texts. It's not just bad, it's terrible.

Additionally, I thought that the lack of a headphone jack might simply be an inconvenience that I would get used to. In practice, I found that this also wasn't true. I should note that, prior to my iPhone Xs, I used my iPhone for all of my telephone communications. It's also worth noting that, while I have Apple Airpods and I use them as a Bluetooth headset when driving or some other activities, when I need to make calls where I want to ensure the audio quality of the call, I use the Apple earbuds that came with the phone. Often, sitting at my desk, I would have my iPhone SE plugged in and charging while using the earbuds for a call.

With the iPhone Xs, initially I brought the lightning based earbuds along, but I soon found myself trying to decide whether to charge the iPhone or to plug in the headset and make a call. Over nearly three weeks of use, I found myself hesitant to make phone calls. Eventually, I put my Lighting earbuds into my backpack and only took them out once or twice. Essentially, whether it was just psychological or practical, I realized that my iPhone Xs was barely functioning as a phone.

Another aspect that anticipated how much of a problem it would be was the lack of a home button. I wish I could tell you how many times I used a "Sweep Up" gesture on the device with no results. It doesn't just fail once or twice, I would estimate the failure rate at greater than 20%. You might argue that the case is a contributing factor, but I don't think that's actually the case. This failure to function has a significant impact on how well the device functions day to day. For example, if you have a problematic app and you want to "double-tap" the home button in order to bring up the multi-task screen and kill the app, you may find yourself trying for 20-30 seconds before getting the interface to change. That's just one example. It happened more frequently than I would have imagined, ane particularly frustrating if you're trying to do something like kill an app.

----

So, after a particularly frustrating round of receiving texts on my iPhone Xs and wrestling with the device functionality just to access them, I decided that I was done with it -- that I was going to switch back to my iPhone SE. I figured that I could simply carry the iPhone Xs around, using it for it's camera functionality and, since it was sometimes convenient to have the larger display, use it as a wifi-based device when I needed the larger display. If I need network access, I could simply use my iPhone SE to create a hotspot for the Xs.

I wish I could share with you the immense sense of joy that I felt once I switched back. Holding the smaller device in my hand brought me an unexpected sense of elation.

At this point, I've been back on my iPhone SE for a couple of days and I'm much happier. The iPhone Xs is sort of like having a pocket-sized iPad. At this point, give me old, obsolete Apple over the new Apple. Whether you want to blame it on Tim Cook, elements in the org further down, or something else, the company is just not doing design and functionality the way that they used to.

Has Your Electronic Hardware Been Hacked?

This is something that you should read. The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies is a story from Bloomberg Businessweek about SuperMicro server motherboards being hacked by the Chinese military, adding a hardware device to the board enabling access to the server. The hardware device was designed to look like an innocuous component, and the compromised servers may have gone to companies like Apple and Amazon, into their AWS cloud.

If you're looking for more analysis, here's a Techcrunch post on the article.

Needless to say, these are worth your time to read.

Apple Airport Network Configuration Problems Caused by Vocabulary

Let me start by saying once again that Apple's decision to abandon their Airport product line isn't just a stupid product choice, it's another exclamation point on the company saying, "we don't care about the Mac or any other part of our computing business, we're a phone company now!"

Like many, I have a long history of using Apple's Airport devices for my wireless networking. In my old apartment, I used to use multiple Airport Express devices to enable music streaming on separate audio systems that I had throughout the place (with optical digital audio connections to my receiver - nice). At the time, I had ethernet cables run to to each room and I also used the Airport Express devices to extend my wireless network throughout the apartment.

Over the years, Apple made some significant changes to the Airport Utility that ships with Mac OS X. It went from a utility where you had the option of configuring the system manually or going through a configuration wizard to one that features a cool graphic representation of your network, but directs you through the configuration wizard -- and, by default, sets the network up incorrectly. After searching through tons of "Airport Network Problems Extend a Network" on Google (and trying many solutions), I finally solved the problem and I wanted to share my solution with you.

First, a little more back story. When I moved into our current house, we set the Airport Extreme base station in a room on one side of the house. Unfortunately, with walls and such, by the time you got to the entertainment center in the living room, devices would complain about problems with wireless network strength. Several years ago, I used an Airport Express to extend the network as a wireless bridge that then provided an ethernet network for devices in the entertainment center. It sort of worked, but it had issues. Later, I tried using an Airport device to wirelessly extend the network from the entertainment center and hopefully boost the wifi to the other side of the house, This configuration really sucked and eventually, I just disconnected the airport devices at the entertainment center.

Last week, we finally wired the house with ethernet, so I decided to use older Airport Extreme device to extend my network -- especially since it now had an ethernet connection back to the main Airport Extreme. Unfortunately, not only did that configuration not work, it made the entire network slow and, essentially crash. Nothing worked. The only solution seemed to be disconnecting the second Airport Extreme.

Initially, my best guess at why it wasn't working was a difference in generations between the two Airport Extreme devices, one being the tower style and one being the older, flat, pizza-box style. As a solution to this, we decided to head over to the Apple store and pick up one of the remaining Time Capsules that they still had in stock. I brought it home, went through the basic configuration wizard in the Airport utility, and my extended network problems were back again.

In reading through potential solutions on line, I tried a number of different ones -- from IPv6 link sharing to assigning the remote Airport a static IP address, noting seemed to work. Eventually, the "DHCP Reservations" setting in "Network" helped by identify the issue. Here's what I did first: identify the MAC address of the ethernet connection on the Airport Extreme. The Airport Extreme actually has three MAC addresses, one for ethernet and two for wireless. By reserving a specific IP address for the ethernet, I was able to determine that every time I ran through the Airport Utility setup wizard, the Airport Extreme was being set up to connect to the network through it's wireless interface. Each time I restarted it and set it up, it would have a different DHCP address, not the one that I'd set up for the Airport Extreme ethernet port.

After more research, I finally discovered the solution in an online post about the difference between an extended network and a roaming network. What's important to understand here is that Apple's "Extended Network" terminology is not the Extended Network that you're looking for. When they say "Extend a Network," what they mean is "add another wireless client and have that also work to try and stretch the range of the your wireless network."

The problem with this is that it doesn't work well. It adds overhead to your wifi network and, for some reason, seems to cause some other issues that can slow your network to a crawl. In short, it doesn't really work. The difference between this configuration and modern "Mesh" wireless networks is that the Mesh networks add a second wireless connection that's just used by the wireless access points to talk to one another. It probably wouldn't have been much trouble for Apple to add something like this to Airport -- if they weren't so busy being a phone company. If you don't have the option of connecting an ethernet cable between your wireless access points, your best bet is to get one of these modern mesh wireless networks. From my research, the challenge is that, many of these don't have great support for Macs (pretty much the same reason that, way back when, Apple introduced the Airport line), so be sure to do your research before you buy.

How to Extend Your Wireless Network Using Airport Extreme and Ethernet
So, in some ways, this page is helpful for understanding your wireless network using Apple's Airport devices. It has a lot of clear diagrams, but the interface descriptions from the Airport Utility are outdated, and in the current version of the software, you won't see these options. I read this multiple times and, while the diagrams for what I wanted to do were clear, what happened in the software was not clear.

1. When setting up your wireless network with multiple Airport devices and connecting them through ethernet (a wired connection), you want to set up your wireless network up as "a Roaming Network". Here's what's important to remember about this: even though this set up will extend your wireless network, it doesn't use Apple's "Extend your Network" settings in Airport Utility.
2. Set up (or make sure you have set up) your main router or Airport base station. This device will be act as a router and distribute IP addresses. This is the device that, in terms of your network, is talking to your broadband modem. Note that it's also helpful for your computer to be plugged into ethernet while you're doing your set-up.
3. To set up the base station to extend your network with ethernet (set up a roaming network), you can start by plugging the new Airport base station into an ethernet cable (into the WAN port), then plugging in the power. If you launch Airport Utility (or have it running), within a minute or so, you should see the new device appear under the "Other WIFI devices" button.
4. If you go through the initial wizard to set up the Airport device, you may be lucky and it may offer to extend your network through the wired connection, but it may not. If you see a screen after you enter the name of the device that says extending your network over ethernet, congratulations, you won the set-up wizard lottery. The script may be setting your network up correctly. If not, don't worry, I'm going to explain how to fix it.
5. If it set up incorrectly, you can just make the configuration changes in the interface or, if you feel the need, you can use the reset the Airport to default settings then click into the "options" button on the first screen in the set-up wizard.
   
   What you want to do is "Create A Wireless Network".
   
   
   
   
   This may seem counter-intuitive, but this is the critical step in setting up a "Roaming Network" to extend your wireless network. This option is in the options portion of the set-up wizard, but if you're working with an Airport that the wizard set up wrong, you can find it in the "Wireless" screen of the base station configuration piece. If you're there, it probably says "Extend a wireless network". This is the wrong setting that's causing you problems.
6. When you "Create a wireless network", you need everything to match your existing network, so use the same network name, wireless password and wireless security setting.
7. Next, you in the "Network" screen, you need to make sure that connection sharing is off (bridge mode). If it says "DHCP and Nat", you have the wrong setting enabled.
   
   
   
   
   
8. With these to key settings made, you can save and update the Airport device and, once it reboots, it should be connected, creating a wireless network, and using it's ethernet connection to bridge the network. In your Airport Utility, you should see the second Airport unit connected by a solid line (if you see a dotted line connecting the devices, that means that it's a wireless connection). In my earlier example, I could also tell because once the Airport base station rebooted with these settings, it had the IP address that I had previously reserved for it (based on the ethernet MAC address) in the other base station set up.

It's possible that all of this is spelled out clearly somewhere in the Apple documentation, but I struggled to find it. If you're wrestling with Network issues, good luck.

How the Mac has become Apple's Red-headed Stepchild

I came across this blog post, On The Sad State of Macintosh Hardware, highlighted in this post on Macrumors. While the Macrumors post is built on the other, the original post is far more powerful. Coming from a Mac OS software developer -- they struggle to purchase hardware to develop for the platform. Also noteworthy, is the comment that they can't even run the newest version of the Mac OS, Mojave, introduced at the most recent WWDC.

Here's a quote from the original post that I found particular pointed:

Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.

Why can't Apple keep the current Mac lineup fresh like the much smaller version of Apple did over 10 years ago? The answer is pretty simple for those of us long-term Mac users.

Apple has become a phone company.

Apple doesn't care about the Mac product line. If you're a loyal Mac user, you're Mac is gone. 

Macworld on the end of the Apple Airport

I've been thinking a lot about Apple's decision to kill the Airport Wireless router line. Yesterday I went searching for this post that I remember someone writing after Steve Jobs passed away. The post relayed a story from one of the people in a meeting with Jobs at a time when they were talking about adopting wireless networking -- and the vision that Jobs had to look beyond the cost of the technology at the time and drive the vision of WiFi on all of their systems. It was such a great story that it still sticks with me today.

In the search for that story, I came across this article from Macworld, Requiem for the AirPort base station: A testament to everything Apple was and isn’t anymore. The subhead for the post is, "Apple just doesn't think this way anymore." While it wasn't the story that I was originally looking for, it does capture a great deal of what's been going through my mind following the EOL decision on the Apple Airport. These days, we're supposed to believe that thinking differently means a different color enclosure on iPhone design or an edge-to-edge display where unusable active screen space is, well, useful.

Over the years, AirPort evolved into a full wireless solution that worked with any and all devices, but the ease-of-use Apple revolutionized with the original AirPort never went away. From the remarkable Airport Express to the ingenious Time Capsule, Apple’s wireless products were always designed with the consumer in mind. It took a complicated system and made it easy, a mantra that Apple has gotten further and further away from as it has grown.

In many ways, Apple's Airport was just a router, but like so many other Apple innovations, it was filled with potential that the current Apple business has simply abandoned. Take the whole wireless "mesh" devices. Long before you had these systems, you had Apple Airport Express wireless devices that could either extend your existing network or function as a compact wireless router for up to 10 devices. From the wifi extension perspective, these devices also included a USB connector so that you could connect a printer and an audio port so that you could connect music devices for a multi-room, wireless audio system. While it had a few issues here and there, it was an incredible system on the whole.

And that whole piece was built around Airplay, another awesome Apple feature -- until it wasn't. Eventually, Airplay got so bad, we just quit trying to use it. Theoretically, there are rumors of Airplay2, but I expect that to go the way of Apple TV and Siri, interesting ideas that the current Apple has transformed into technology flops.

But, back to the Apple Airport -- here's another reason why I loved the Airport Express, it was great for traveling. While WiFi network availability has grown, in some places (like Japan), not all hotels have WiFi access. Additionally, some places that you travel to might impose limits on the number of devices you could use. In these environments, the Airport Express was great. You could simply plug it in, and you'd suddenly have your trusted WiFi network available throughout your hotel room. Plus, any of those handy needs-to-be-on-the-same-wifi-network features also worked.

But modern Apple isn't about this kind of functionality any longer. Sure, the cost to run the WiFi router group is probably a fraction of a percent of the hardware revenue of the iPhone business. Sure, there are more Apple buildings and more Apple employees around than there ever were. But today's Apple wants to repeat one aspect of Steve Jobs' approach -- eliminate and focus -- they just want to focus the money. Baby. Out. Baby. Out. Baby. Out. And now we have a nice tub full of dirty water than we can focus on.

As I've written before. I didn't abandon Apple so much as they abandoned me.

What I Learned About Apple from My Twitter Customer Support Experience

In late March, I found myself in the grips of terrible frustration with my iPhone SE. As I've noted many times in the past, there are so many issues and bugs with iOS 11, it's really unbelievable. Here are the two tweets that triggered Apple Support to reach out to me.

Each day, I am constantly reminded how @apple iOS 11 has transformed the iPhone SE that I was once quite happy with into one of the worst devices that I've ever used. Crappy lagging UI animations, touch-screen locations that don't work. It's the worst.

— yaMarketingGoomer (@MarketingToMe) March 23, 2018

Beyond the whole #batteryReplacement scandal, iOS 11 doesn't make me want to upgrade my iPhone. Rather, it makes me want to throw my iPhone at the new Apple #spaceship building. Some other once loved devices that they no longer support I'd chuck at them too...

— yaMarketingGoomer (@MarketingToMe) March 23, 2018

I'm not sure whether it was the mention of "lagging UI animations" or the "#batteryReplacement" hashtag that prompted them to reach out, but shortly thereafter, I was working with Apple Support through Twitter's Direct Message in an effort to diagnose and fix my iPhone.

The first thing that we started to address was the lagging iPhone behavior. After running their basic diagnostic tool and getting results back that seemed to indicate that the iPhone was running properly, they had me restore the iPhone as though it were a new device. When this seemed to eliminate the issue, they had me restore my device from iTunes. Sure enough, a number of the lagging animation behaviors returned. Over the course of that exercise, one of the things that I realized is that when I restored as new, the font sizes were much smaller, so I tried reducing the font size (I had been running at something like the +2 font size setting, making it easier to read emails and texts on the device). Reducing the font size seemed to solve some of the lagging animation behavior.

At this point, Apple Support wanted to see if they could improve performance further and suggested that I turn on the General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion setting, something I said that I'd had turned on since they introduced the stupid motion feature. And that was the last time I heard from Apple Support.

A couple of days later, I tried to pose another question to them about how, when I touch the top left corner of the screen on the iPhone in something like the Messages app, instead of taking me back to the list of messages from other people, it scrolls to the top of the current message list, like clicking the home key. That query was also met with crickets.

My Apple Support Takeaway
Looking back, it seems clear that my tweets that related to Apple's very public trouble surrounding the battery issue were the driver for Apple to engage with me. Over the past year or several, I've been vocal in my frustration with many aspects of Apple's products, but this is the first time that Apple Support has reached out to me over Twitter. Clearly this has become an extremely sensitive topic for them and they seem to be focusing their efforts at making sure that more battery-related PR issues don't blow up on them.

That being said, it's also another example of how iOS 11 seems like a product that only functions correctly within a certain narrow set of parameters. While I'm sure that iOS 11 probably works more like it's supposed to on an iPhone 8 or iPhone X, it makes you wonder whether you'd see the same issues with font sizes on those larger-screen devices.

When you consider how much the company has grown since the iPhone took off, it's kind of funny that they can produce software that seems inferior to the earlier versions of the software and the iPhone. For me, I'd much prefer an iPhone that worked correctly than an "animoji" feature that I'll never use.

UPDATED: FAIL: How Passage Technology's Storage Helper Torched My Relationship with Salesforce

UPDATE: So, after sending this link over the @asksalesforce support team, they re-referred it back to Salesforce customer support. I received another call from a Salesforce customer support person who took some more time to listen to the issue (apparently, he couldn't view the blog post because of security controls on their systems).

As he listened to parts of my story, he was surprised by a couple of points. First, he was surprised that I wasn't able to use Data Loader to download the deleted records on Friday, while they were still in the table. When I explained that they were gone now, he was surprised but noted that the sweeper utility may have just come through our org. According to him, I wouldn't have been able to simply restore the records by toggling the IsDeleted flag (but being able to download them while they were still in the table would have been useful - where were you on Friday?).

When I mentioned the "invalid cross reference id" error, he noted that the issue there was trying to re-import the data with an ID - that the system had to assign an ID. I told him that this would make it impossible to re-link the "Invoice Line" child records, but he said that it could be done with a bit of work in Excel. He then asked me to send those sandbox files that I needed to re-upload and offered to solve the import issue for me.

In all, I'm feeling a bit better about all this than I was yesterday at 6:30, but we'll see how it all unfolds. I'll keep you updated.

----- Origitnal Post ------

If you've been watching my Twitter feed, you've already seen parts of this story, but you may find more coherence (and a few more details) in this version.

A couple of years ago, following a mention at Dreamforce, I purchased a suite of software extensions for Salesforce from Passage Technology. As a Salesforce Admin, what drew me in was a product that they offered, Rollup Helper, that made it possible to build data roll-ups of a variety of data even across custom objects. To translate this into simpler language, a roll up field enables you to do something like total the value of all opportunities on an account. Salesforce has always had roll-up fields but the functionality was limited to records that had parent-child relationships (with the roll-up on the parent). Rollup Helper enables you to create roll-ups on records, even if there isn't a parent child relationship.

The pricing for Rollup Helper was about $2K for a one-year license, but they also offered two other software utilities, Lookup Helper and Storage Helper. If you bought them as a bundle, the other two software tools (each about $800), were included at a discount. Storage Helper seemed like it held some promise. Essentially, what it enables you to do is set up a filter condition and automate the deletion of records. Since the base data storage allocation for Salesforce.com is 1GB, depending upon your record usage, this could represent a savings for you versus paying for added storage.

For the most part, our data all fit easily within Salesforce data storage limits, with the exception of Orders and Invoices that were brought in through our Oracle back-end system integration. While the header record volume wasn't large, each of those records also included multiple lines and, as this data accumulated over the years, we hit our data limits. Initially, I manually deleted old records, but eventually wound up buying more storage space. In this environment, a software utility that we could configure to erase records that were over five years old seemed like a handy utility.

Some "In Hindsight" Data Points I Should Have Weighed More Heavily
I had mixed results with Passage Technology software, and I probably should have given more consideration to that when I ran Storage Helper on Friday. I actually created custom fields and set up Storage Helper back in October of 2016, but with our added storage, I didn't really need to run it, so the software sat, unused in my org for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I made a couple of separate attempts to use Lookup Helper, none of which were successful despite connecting with Passage Technology customer support both times.

I should have known...

In many ways, Storage Helper should be pretty simple software. The premise - set up a set of conditions to filter a search, then delete the results of the search. The thing that should make it cool is that you can set it to run on an automated script, so it will just work for you. Initially, I'd built a filter for both Orders and Invoices that looked at the year in the date record, then deleted things greater than 6 years old. Part of the reason why I'd waited to run the script was, after talking to some of my colleagues, I'd thought about possibly trying to calculate the age down to the month.

Anyway, background aside, I was getting ready to do an evaluation of Salesforce.com's Wave Analytics module. As part of the set-up for that, Salesforce also provided a trial license to a full Sandbox. But since we were going to evaluate the analytics, it seemed like it might be a good idea to remove some of the old order and invoice data, both to streamline the data migration and to simplify charting functionality. And so I ran Storage Helper on Invoices.

This was my first mistake.

Before I ran the software for the first time, I did previewed the data that would be deleted, something that's included in the software and recommended by the wizard. A quick sample of the data preview showed records from 2010 - so that looked good. It also triggered an error alert because the data set that it was getting to run on was greater that 50,000 records. I okayed that - figuring that it would require multiple runs of the software to get the job done.

After running the software, the interface offers a little dashboard that says, "Storage Helper saved you this much money and freed up this much data storage space". I was curious if it was deleting the child "Invoice Line" records and how much space that accounted for, so I went over to the Salesforce System Monitor and looked at the storage usage. Unfortunately, when stuff is in your recycle bin, it's still included in your storage count on System Monitor. I'd previewed the data (if you've ever looked at data in your recycle bin, there isn't a lot of helpful record detail info there - practically speaking, the only way to really know the details of a record is to undelete it), so I decided to go ahead and delete it. Now the system monitor showed a change and, for a moment, I was happy.

Back to Storage Helper, and I previewed the data again. Again, records from 2011, so I ran the script again. I should say that the script seemed to lag while it ran, but that's not unusual with some of these Salesforce processes. Because of the lag (thinking back, I think it lagged the first time it ran as well), I wasn't really sure whether it was working or not. Again, I deleted the records in the recycle bin. With the lag, I might even have pushed the "Run" button multiple times. Somewhere in there though, it finished it's second or third run, and I was curious how much data was left in these old records.

So I ran preview again. This time, I noticed an Invoice Owner who joined the company more recently. I was surprised -- how could this guy have owned a record from >6 years ago. I clicked through the preview to the record and, sure enough, the record was from last year. Last year? Then I looked at the Storage Helper script and the filter that I'd built -- it was gone. There was no filter.

I quickly went over to the recycle bin and "undeleted" all of the records in there. I also emailed the Storage Helper product manager from Passage Tech. This was before lunch. He emailed me about 10 minutes later to say that he was no longer the product manager for that product -- and forwarded my email to the current product manager and their customer support team. Meanwhile, I started to assess the damage.

A little after noon, I sent an follow up email to Passage Tech with these screenshots, the first being a Pivot Table report of Invoices from Live, the second being an extraction from my Sandbox that was refreshed last September:

That's an 84,948 record difference between live and seven month old data.

It goes without saying that, after that first contact with Passage Technology, I didn't hear back from them until Monday morning when I got an email from their customer support.

Salesforce Steps Up To Take Things From Bad to Worse
After not hearing anything back from Passage Technology (guessing that they were on East Coast Time and had probably gone home), I reached out to my Salesforce AE. Was there any way that Salesforce could help?

She suggested creating a case. Once there was a case, she said, they could escalate the case. And so I wrestled with the stupid subject tree to find a case and submit it. By 4:00pm, I finally had a case number. I forwarded the case number to her and she escalated it. Salesforce customer support reacted quickly, but the guy who called me talked with me as we both went to the recycle bin and looked to see if the records were there (they weren't - I'd already 'undeleted' what records were there when I realized what Storage Helper had done). Since there were no records there, he told me that Salesforce did offer a paid data recovery option, but I'd need to speak with my AE for pricing on that option. He also suggested that I consider the Idea Exchange (seriously).

So I emailed my AE again. She let me know that the data recovery thing started at $10K. Other than that, she reached out to some other Salesforce colleagues for suggestions. Queue the crickets.

Seeing that this wasn't going well, I attempted to restore some of the missing data by "Upserting" my old data from Sandbox. If you aren't familiar with the term, upserting essentially updates a record if it finds one, otherwise it inserts it. Unfortunately, this didn't work because all of the deleted records were still in the database table, they just had a field called "IsDeleted" flagged with true. Realizing this, I tried to fix it by updating all of the "IsDeleted" to false. Unfortunately, that didn't work because Salesforce won't let you modify the "IsDeleted" field.

So I searched for ways to update the IsDeleted field. I found a couple of suggestions. One suggestion was the Developer Workbench, an online tool that provides you access to a bunch of the underlying aspects of Salesforce. Using this tool, I was able to verify that the records were there. I could even look at the records individually. Thinking that this would be helpful for knowing exactly which records had been deleted, I tried to Bulk Export a .csv file of the deleted records. Unfortunately, bulk exports of this type of data weren't supported. I tried to work with specific records to change the IsDeleted flag, but that wouldn't work either. I even tried to generate a list of the deleted records so that I could copy and paste them into a spreadsheet, but that wouldn't work.

From an older post that I found online, I saw where somebody had written that some third-party data loader tools might enable you to modify IsDeleted. I tried rerunning an older version of LexiLoader that I had. It said that I needed an older version of Java to run it - so I installed that. Even then, while LexiLoader would run, it couldn't log in. By 6:30 on Friday, I'd exhausted all of the options that I could find. In another exchange with my AE, she said she was out of ideas and that we'd have to wait for technical support - on Monday.

At that point, I posted this on Twitter with what I expected to happen:

So here's what I expect to happen. Despite me trying to work with them on the issue immediately, @salesforce will do nothing and, by Monday my data will only be accessible through tape back-ups and the $10K recovery. #FAIL #sucks

— yaMarketingGoomer (@MarketingToMe) April 7, 2018

There are a couple of things worth noting at this point:

1. What I expected to happen is that at some point that night, Salesforce's system would process (and erase) the data that was flagged with IsDeleted. This would mean that data that was easily accessible and a situation that was potentially correctable with the right tools and/or permissions would soon be out of reach.
2. Once this data was deleted, depending upon how the Salesforce system works, it's possible that they might recycle the ID numbers of the records that were deleted. I don't know about this aspect of how Salesforce works and, if they do, how quickly those ID values are recycled. However, if an ID value was recycled, that would essentially mean that you couldn't just "re-upload" the data. And worse, any data that depended on being linked to that ID (like my Invoice Line child records) couldn't be re-uploaded.
3. Once this data was wiped from the data table, it would be significantly more difficult to determine which records had been erased and which ones had not, making a recovery and reset even more difficult.

Monday Arrives
As you can guess, I didn't hear anything back from Salesforce or Passage Technology until Monday morning. After I granted Passage Tech customer support login access, they came back with a grand toreador...

Unfortunately, we have no history to determine as to whether the filter existed, or was setup correctly to begin with since the job has not been successfully run in the past.

See, it's not their fault.

Meanwhile, I hadn't heard back from my Salesforce AE Monday morning, so I emailed her. I emailed her a second time after I used the Developer's Workbench tool and did indeed verify that all of the deleted records were now gone. My AE responded after 11:00am, noting that she'd been in a customer meeting. By lunchtime, she emailed me again with more scoping questions. I didn't hear back again until later in the day when I emailed a second follow up. What did seem clear from her afternoon email was that, for any data restoration being done, it would probably be on us to do it.

So yesterday evening I made a second attempt to upsert the older header records from my Sandbox instance using Data Loader. Errors again, only this time a different error message, "invalid cross reference id". It goes without saying that, it's not just a handful of records either.

At this point, it seems like the whole thing is just F@#ked!
Because of the inter-relationship of records, I don't think there's a tool (short of our integration orchestration), that can upload the data and the related. While we have the source data - we didn't loose that, it looks like there is no easy way to reload it back into Salesforce. And, essentially, all of the data is worthless because you can't easily tell what data is missing.

It goes without saying that I'm so pissed off at this point that it's even difficult for me to go back through and write about it. I'm trying really hard to keep to keep my vocabulary restrained and professional. What more can I say about Passage Technology and their software -- I think that they can expect that I won't be renewing our license for their software, but I don't expect much from them since we're really talking about, at most, a $3K per year customer.

But Salesforce? What can I say. We often talk about Salesforce.com being an unsupported platform -- when the rubber met the road, their customer support FAILED. They followed up the case on Friday night with ANOTHER email about the Idea Exchange. And, at 6:30pm on Friday when, if they had a resource that could extract or modify the IsDeleted field on two tables in our org, we could have recovered from this entire mess. Instead, they were done for the week. TGIF. Pick up the pieces next week.

At this point, I don't know how the rest of this will work out, but I do know one thing -- I don't expect to have good words about Salesforce.com going forward.

ICYMI - the NYT Story on Facebook’s Chief Information Security Officer Leaving

So I came across a link to this story again this morning -- I'd seen references to it earlier in the week. The story, Facebook Exit Hints at Dissent on Handling of Russian Trolls by Nicole Perlroth, Sheera Frenkel And Scott Shane was published on March 19. I think that the first thing I saw about this article was some back and forth about the NYT had changing the article to soften the treatment of Sheryl Sandberg, but I didn't actually dive into the piece at that time. What drew me back to this piece was a reference that I saw to this quote from a former Facebook employee.

“The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company,” said Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook enforcing privacy and other rules until 2012.

Not that that isn't apparent from the Mark Zuckerberg interviews from this week. Clearly the business is in full damage-control-spin mode. In fact, as you read through the piece, it's hard not to come away with the feeling that Facebook management is attempting to do everything they can to avoid really addressing this issue. And they certainly don't appear to be making substantive changes to their operations. At the heart of this is probably the recognition that these issues strike at the heart of their business model.

Personal Data -> Super Advertising Demographic Targeting -> In a Box
In reflecting on it, I'm reminded of this story from 2012, How Companies Learn Your Secrets, about Target's big data team. This is the story where they took all of Target took all of their purchasing data, linked it with a bunch of demographic data, and then statistical analysis, they were able to predict things like when a customer was pregnant based on their purchasing habits.

In some sense, what Facebook does is take all of this advanced technical work that Target did, and sell it to advertisers, pre-packaged and conveniently gift-wrapped. In many respects, the issues from the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook are all stories about this aspect of marketing. Consider this quote from that story:

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

Of course, as I've noted in the past, with Facebook and our broader experiences on the web, there's a built-in aspect of believing that "everyone else on the block got the same" page / view / experience. In the case of Facebook, their core platform and their business model is all about this data -- masked by the presence of family and friend photos so that they "don't spook" users.

Facebook vs. Google and Your Data

This morning, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo had this thoughtful editorial post about Facebook, Facebook Acts Like a Law Unto Itself. The gist of it is that Facebook is and has been exceptionally reckless with their user's personal data.

As I read through his piece, the thing that came to mind for me is a bit of the contrast between Facebook and some of the other tech companies out there that often get painted with the same broad brush. Take Google as an example. While we often here about how much data Google has on everyone, historically, I don't think Google has shared or exposed that personal user data in the same way that Facebook has built it's business doing. Sure, advertising represents a huge portion of Google's business and you can now do more specific audience targeting, but I think Google has been far more protective when it comes to access of user's personal data.

The Roots of Their Business Model
When I think about the history of Google, it always seems more like the story of a organization of software engineers that fumbled it's way into a successful business as opposed to a team of people trying to build a successful, dominating business. Google's search engine was doing it's thing and growing it's base well before they ever rolled out their Adwords experiment. Adwords made their company, but it's success was in no small part enabled by the accessibility that they built into the core of the program. But ultimately, Adwords was really an experiment. And remember the values that they espoused in those early days -- that they wouldn't simply place ads or rank results based on dollars spent, a quality relationship to the results needed to be maintained?

Over the years, even as Google has experimented in many directions and had their fair share of encounters with regulators and legal systems, for the most part (to my knowledge), they have made an effort to keep their user data secure. Perhaps that may have crossed some bounds when they pushed toward Google Plus and their efforts to compete with Facebook -- and as the company began to run more like a business and less like a collective of engineers sitting on a magic money-making machine -- but even then, I think Google has behaved differently.

Contrast that with Facebook's origins as, essentially, something more like a dating site. Facebook has essentially sold it's user base on the notion that sharing as much personal data with them as possible is a good thing. I remember a story from years ago about how Facebook manipulated your feed algorithm in order to help drive your engagement. The methodology anecdote went something like this: if you are a guy and your engagement metrics were dropping off, Facebook's algorithm knows that you were more likely to be engaged if you posted a pic - so they would push a woman in your friends list to post a pic which would, apparently, increase the likelihood that you would post a pic. And be more active on their platform.

Try and think of an analogous behavior from Google.

Yesterday on Twitter, I came across this thread from Francis Chollet that I think summarized some of the real danger underlying Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is not *just* the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon. The more worrying issue, in my opinion, is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector. Time for a thread

It's definitely worth your time to take a read through his thread.

It's Not Just You: Apple's Siri is a Dissappointment within the Company

Here's an interesting post from Macrumors about Apples' Siri product and the history of it's lack of development. It's definitely worth a read. The article goes into the history of Siri, including things like how earlier versions of the Homepod didn't even include Siri. The post is drawn from a longer article here, but the article is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to see the longer version.

The Grand Irony of the iMac Pro

Apple closed out the end of the year with the launch of the iMac Pro. This system is being pitched as an example of Apple's commitment to the interests of the "Pro" user -- a system that meets the needs of creative and graphics professionals that have been a core Mac user base for so long. The iMac Pro is being rolled out in advance of a redesigned Mac Pro that's supposed to be unveiled sometime in the future.

The current Mac Pro design is something like four years old. You know the one -- it looks sort of like a Dyson fan turned on it's side -- there are racks and racks of them in use... nowhere, because it doesn't really do racks. Err, my bad. I just Googled "Mac Pro Rack" and found a bunch of aftermarket chassis designs. Anyway, it's probably noteworthy is that there is a market for Mac Pro rackmount accessories -- and how disconnected the design is from the application.

After releasing a bunch of very un-Pro systems with Pro name tags and sparking a bonfire of outrage from professional Mac users (more from me about this in my previous post, Is Apple "Designing" Their Way Out of Customers?), Apple suddenly started making noise about how the Pro market was important to them and how they'd release a new, modular Mac Pro in, maybe a couple of years.

What I think that they really wanted to do was to cool the outrage and get some positive media while their Touchbar USB-C Macbook Pros racked up sales -- since those systems were the only real option available to most pro Mac laptop users, significant sales numbers inevitable.

The other thing that Apple did, while the world waited on the two-year development of the Mac Pro,  was plan and announce an iMac Pro. What I think they were trying to do with this was two-fold: first, fast-track a pro-spec system around an existing design; second, if the sales for the iMac Pro underperformed, they could use that to amplify the idea that "there really isn't much of a pro market after all -- more noise than substance".

As I noted in my headline, what makes this so ironic is that the iMac was never the system you allocated to your Pro users. The iMac was the home system, the one with colors or flowers, the inexpensive all-in-one you used for your admin and support staff so that they'd be on the same platform and could use the software -- if needed. But as Apple has gotten out of the business of doing pro monitors and systems, the iMac is their last option for control over the total package.

It's sort of like if Apple had gotten rid of all of it's iPhone models, then realized they really needed a phone, then saying, "we've made this great iPhone from our Apple Watch. In order to get the battery life and performance you'd expect from an actual iPhone, we've added these dongle attachments for battery, processor and display." Okay, maybe it's not that bad. But if there's anything that makes the case that Apple -- at least for a time -- quit caring about the pro market, it's the iMac Pro.

Also noteworthy on the iMac Pro are what you see in the actual technical specs.

• USB-3 ports. Why? Because the world still uses them. 
• A traditional audio port. Why? Because the world still uses it.
• An SD card reader. Again, another hated drop from the Macbook Pro line.
• USB-C ports used for Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, etc. If they had done this with the Macbook Pro, there probably would have been fewer complaints.
• No Touchbar. If this was a must-have feature, it would make sense to migrate it to these desktop systems. It would probably make even more sense for desktop since it wouldn't be a power draw. But the reality is that, if this feature were on a stand-alone keyboard, the additional cost would probably limit it's sales.

iMac Pro -- the missing link between evolution and devolution. Now, if they can only get this thing into a laptop-sized package, they might have something worthy of a Macbook Pro title.

New Year, New Mac

So in the back and forth over what to get for Christmas, my wife decided she would like to have an Mac of her own to use as her system (she's been using PCs regularly for many years). My initial inclination was just to buy her the latest Macbook Air, fully decked out. Essentially, that would be the same as my personal system, albeit a couple of years later with a somewhat faster processor. However, before I decided to pull the trigger on that, I decided to check the Apple site and see what options might be available in the refurb and clearance section. In the clearance section, I came across a couple of listings for the previous generation 13" Macbook Pro (pre-USB-C, Touchpad, and no Magsafe connector version).

If I could identify faults with my 13" Macbook Air, I would say that it only has two real shortcomings. First, the lack of a Retina display. As my eyes have aged, they can challenged by the lack of sharpness on the older technology LCD panel. It's also not great for image editing -- if you happen to be doing that work on a laptop screen. Prior to my wife and I getting married, when I was at home, I would do my image editing on a big screen monitor sitting on my desk in my dedicated home-office workspace. Since getting married, I no longer have the space for the desk or the monitor, so I've found myself editing images directly on the Air. Of course, Apple could update this, but they've had years to make the update and haven't done it -- I don't expect a Retina Macbook Air any time soon.

The second issue relates to the first -- when I had my Macbook Air sitting at my desk, I used to hate the fact that it only had one Thunderbolt port. I like to use one port for Ethernet and one port for display. Since the reviews weren't great for most of the Thunderbolt docks that I saw, I never invested in one. That being said, a second Thunderbolt port on the Macbook Air would make it a perfect system for me.

But, as I said, Apple isn't moving this way with their new products. Instead, the last generation Macbook Pro is really the last thing we've seen out of Cupertino resembling a Pro class laptop.

So I was looking at this clearance 13" Macbook Pro -- Retina display, two Thunderbolt ports, and even an integrated HDMI port, something that I often wind up carrying a dongle for when I travel -- and I began to see a plan take shape. After discussing it with my wife, we decided that we'd order the clearance13" Macbook Pro for me and give my wife my older Macbook Air. Merry Christmas to all. Overall, the ordering process was pretty straightforward -- other than the free shipping experience that UPS provided, essentially stealing one of our vacation days (you can read all about it on my Twitter feed). And I spent the New Years weekend migrating my old system to the new Macbook Pro.

So a couple of hick-ups that I experienced that I should probably warn you in case you find yourself in a similar position. I had a Time Machine backup of my Air, but when I tried to use the migration assistant, it told me that it couldn't use the back-up because there was a difference in versions between the two systems. Initially, I thought it was probably because my Air was running on Sierra and I expected my new Pro system to be running High Sierra. That turned out to not be true, but not before essentially forcing me to migrate my Air to High Sierra. When it still wouldn't work, I dug deeper and discovered that the new Pro clearance system shipped with El Capitan, and that was the OS difference issue. The new Pro is now running High Sierra too. Perhaps if I'd felt like jumping through some hoops, I could have restored my Air from an older backup, then went looking for a signed copy of Sierra, but it seemed like a lot of extra effort just to avoid the upgrade.

Reflections on the 13-inch Macbook Pro (early 2015 model)
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the upgrade to my system. This Macbook Pro is noticeably snappier than my Air. This system is running an Intel i5 at 2.6 GHz while my older Air was running an i7 at 1.7 GHz (or something like that).

The Retina display is much easier on my eyes.  The display color seems much richer and type is so much sharper that I don't find myself reaching for my glasses -- something that had practically become a necessity with the Air.

Another reason why I thought it might be better for me to get the Pro is the differences in the laptop body. One of the things that my wife and I can sometimes struggle with is being able to identify which device belongs to whom. With iPhones, we use different models, so it's pretty easy. With iPads, we use different color cases. The Apple product that sucks the most for multiple users in a household is the Airpods, since there's no really easy way to differentiate one pair from another, even though they're uniquely paired to a specific user's devices. Anyway, with one Pro and one Air, it's much easier to identify which system belongs to whom.

There are some issues that I have noticed with the Macbook Pro though. Probably the one that I'm most aware of is the battery life. While the early 2015 era Macbook Pros are supposed to be pretty good on battery life -- or at least supposedly much better than the current generation (I've heard several stories of crap battery life on the USB-C / Touchbar models), the battery life on the Pro is no match for the Air. Even with my couple of years old Air, I could easily expect four to six hours of active system operation before I saw my battery falling into a "really need to charge this" zone. With the Pro, I'm getting below 50% in two-three hours of use. It's sort of like turning over the keys to my high mileage compact and jumping into an SUV. It's a workable battery life, but at this point, I'm thinking I don't want to get too far away from an outlet.

The touchpad on the Pro seems a bit more sensitive than the one on the Air. While I've been using the system, I've found myself accidentally triggering clicks and inadvertent mouse movements. I'm still playing with the settings, so hopefully I can make that work a bit better.

In conclusion, I think that the ideal system would be a Macbook Air with a Retina display. If that system was available, I'd buy one today. Having spent a couple of years getting accustomed to the battery life of the Macbook Air, that feels like a bit more of a critical requirement than the Touchbar designing product team seem to recognize. That being said, I am really appreciative of the Retina display and the extra ports on my Pro, but YMMV.

Apple Releases Bug Fix Overnight

So it looks like Apple jumped through a few hoops last night to patch and release a fix for the Root Access bug that came out yesterday. If nothing else, it's proof that if they prioritize and issue and apply resources, they can still be agile company. Or at least, an agile support organization.

Given that, it's kind of funny that the iOS calculator bug is still there.

I Am Root - Apple Introduces Amazing New Bug with High Sierra Mac OS

When I came across news of this new, critical bug that was discovered in the new High Sierra version of Mac OS, I'd like to say that I was surprised. I might have been in the past. These days, not so much. Truth be told, I'd be surprised if we don't see several more critical bugs discovered in High Sierra.

This is exactly why I've been hesitant to upgrade. Perhaps you're like me. High Sierra is one of those "upgrades" that, I don't think I've seen any really useful "features" that they've added (other than this new "universal access feature"). Apple is engaged in a full-on path of Devolution.

So what next Apple? A glass-bottom Macbook Pro so can wirelessly charge the new extra-rapid-draining batteries fueling a new "Super-sized" Touchbar? Imagine the joys of "the thinnest Macbook Pro ever" that requires you use a thick rubber case lest you crack the bottom and wind up with glass fragments in your laptop. Sounds like exactly what every "Pro" user needs.

In the short term, a great fix would be to stop triggering the pop-ups telling me that I should upgrade to High Sierra. Thanks.

Why Apple Products are a Dark Cloud Over the Tech Industry

You would never know it from the stock price, but Apple, the company who's products we once loved, is falling apart. Design, once a cornerstone of every Apple product, is eroding under the weight of copy-cat features and an arbitrary bend through the iPhone looking glass. And quality?

Consider iOS 11. As of this post, we're on iOS 11.1.2, the seventh release of the 11th version of their iPhone software. Take a look at this MacRumors iOS 11 round-up. This update to Apple's iOS, while described as a "major design change", doesn't bundle huge new feature sets. In fact, the second paragraph of the round-up talks about "subtle design changes to interface elements throughout the operating system". And yet, iOS 11 introduced a broad range of bugs into the OS. Seven releases and they still haven't fixed their calculator animation bug.

Now, some companies might offer the excuse that they don't have enough resources build a perfect product. And yet, Apple, with multiple campuses throughout Silicon Valley, hardly seems to be the resource strapped company that it once was. What's more, Apple is sitting on over $261 Billion in cash, so it's not like they can't afford to hire a few good software developers, if that was what was needed to fix iOS.

Contrast iOS with Salesforce.com. In the past, I've often complained about issues with Salesforce.com, but Salesforce releases an update to it's platform three times a year without breaking it's core feature sets or functionality. In iOS 11, I've had issues where the Mail client indicates that I have unread emails from one of my VIPs, even though none of my recent VIPs have even emailed me. I would call that a bug in the core functionality of the device. And this is simply one more issue -- I wish that I had a way to characterize some of the issues that I've had with the touch screen since iOS 11. These days, my iPhone just does stupid stuff -- like randomly playing audio when I put my Airpods away after a phone call.

The Broader Problem with Apple
At it's core, I think that Apple is struggling with a vision problem. While Apple has long been considered a visionary company, I think the current iteration of the company has lost it's way. Consider the new iPhone X and it's facial recognition capabilities. Have they really done anything beyond adding Microsoft Kinect to a phone? Or the Touchbar that was added to the Macbook Pro line -- do you see that anywhere else in their Mac platform? Essentially, the seem to be grabbing at feature straws, wildly swiping through the air trying to capture another brass ring that might equate to iPhone or iMac gold.

But these are not the moves of a mad genius. Instead, they feel more like the flailing efforts of a committee that seems to reach for a consensus view of what they imagine somebody in a black turtleneck might dream of.

Say what you will about skeuomorphic design, I think that when Apple leaned more skeuomorphic, there was a clearer framework to shape the thinking of the people inside the company.

And while today's Apple may consider designers and "pro-users" to be just "some small segment" of their much broader cash cow, I think that they truly underestimate why Apple products became so beloved within that segment -- and it wasn't simply because Apple offered different color options or a rose gold (pink) version. Fundamentally, the core aspect that made Apple product so much better was good design.

These days, Apple just bolts on products and features to build some arbitrary unity around an ecosystem of unnecessary accessories. If Apple were the Marvel Universe, it would be like having Howard the Duck show up in all of their content because, hey, Howard the Duck. And so, we have the Amazon Echo copy, Apple Homepod, so that you can say "Hey Siri" at home. And you also have Siri making a random, Howard the Duck appearance on the Mac. Hey Siri, can you turn my wifi off for real this time?

I'm sure that over in the halls of whichever Apple campus, that they still have product management meetings. They still make product roadmaps. They track their bugs and they schedule their releases. I'm sure that, when it comes to the formal dance of a product, they go through the steps. And yet, iOS 11.

So what does it mean for other companies more broadly, when a company can have more money than most of us can imagine, all of the resources that they could possibly need, and yet to still struggle so fundamentally in something like this "update" to their iPhone OS? What does it mean when innovation for "the most successful technology company" simply means thinner, or slapping a "Touchbar" on it?

So this is what happens with tech companies grow up.

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce '17 Wrap-up

This is just a quick post to share some of my observations and experiences from this year's Dreamforce with you.

Salesforce Tower at night

Weather
In all, the weather worked out well for this year's Dreamforce. The last time when Dreamforce took place at this time of year, it rained all week, so rain only on Wednesday night was an improvement from that -- though one not made by anyone.

New Announcements
Whether it was the timing of the event, or just that Salesforce has changed the way that they deal with Dreamforce, there wasn't a host of new features announced during the event. From a features standpoint, I think everything that they talked about is already available in the current Winter'18 release. They did talk about a new partnership/closer integration with Google, but they did something similar 10 years ago, so I'm a bit skeptical about what the real impact of this agreement will be.

Crowds
The biggest challenge with Dreamforce -- and has been the last several years -- is the overwhelmingly large crowds. Lines, lines, everywhere lines. On Monday, I attempted to go to a roadmap session, only to find a line of 15 people waiting outside a full ballroom at the Marriott. As is usual for Dreamforce, for whatever reason, the lines and crowds for the breakout sessions are much longer on the first day of the conference, then they lighten up after that. Not that it wasn't still crowded later in the week. On Wednesday, I tried going to a Google advertising session in the Palace hotel, and the line to get in ran more than the length of the hall on the main floor. I left for a bit, convinced that the session would be too full, then came back after the session began to discover that I was able to get in. It was crowded, but still a fair amount of seats in the room.

Einstein AI
This is the second year that Salesforce has been promoting their Einstein AI functionality. Einstein is more visible in Winter'18, but if you're using Salesforce Classic like we are, that functionality isn't available. This year, they've rebranded the Wave Analytics package as Einstien Analytics. They were also showing off some ability to configure Einstein's analysis parameters and build some advanced Einstein capability. For this reason, I sat through several data science and Einstein sessions, only to get to the part in one where they told you, "you need to contact your Account Exec" to enable this feature. In other words, "there is a cost to enable this, contact your AE to find out how much". Considering that Einstein is a carrot to enable the Lightning interface, I found it kind of funny to dangle the carrot, then take it away.

Put another way -- like Salesforce.com Portal -> Community or Wave Analytics -> Einstein Analytics, I'd have to say, "those are some nice features, but I don't think that management would agree to a doubling of our Salesforce costs just for that."

Creative Visualization, Design Thinking, and Drawing to Win
Perhaps the best sessions that I've sat through in a long time and probably the biggest surprises for me were sessions that I went to on Creative Visualization and visual story-telling,  Design Thinking and Drawing. Essentially, these sessions revolved around using visual imagery to present ideas and conceptual frameworks. They were an altogether unexpected bright light for me in an otherwise uninspiring Dreamforce week. With exercises like "draw the toast", these sessions were really engaging. What I found even more surprising was that many of these people came from a team at Salesforce that does exactly what they were presenting -- meets with customers and uses these visualization and drawing techniques to explain, define, and then craft solution plans for customers.

What's more, during the keynote interview with the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, she mentioned that IBM has added a significant number of design teams (I don't remember the exact number). But, as you can see from this design thinking page on their site, design thinking is thematically important to IBM too. In that way, it feels like this is probably representative of a broader trend in business -- or at least in the software industry.

Dreamfest
Of course, what would Dreamforce be without the band / concert experience. As I mentioned in my post about last year's event at the Cow Palace, I couldn't imagine a band that would make me want to go to another Dreamfest event. This year, the band was Lenny Kravitz and Alicia Keys, and the event was held at AT&T park again. Last time they had the event there, the band was Greenday, it poured rain, and most people hung out in the stands trying to avoid the rain. This year, since the event was within walking distance again, I walked to the event just to check it out. Overall, the park experience was similar to the previous time at the venue -- ball-park food, VIPs directed to luxury box level, crazy crowds.

As I've noted previously, possibly the funniest thing about all of this is how surprisingly rudely selfish the Dreamfest concert crowd is. For example, there were huge lines backed up into the alcoves trying to follow designated paths down to the field. At the back end of this, the line became a mass, choking the walkway around the food stands. And yet, there was no give in the mob of people there, no flex to allow people to pass through the walkway. I've been to many other general admission events where the audience was far more polite to one another. It's something in the demographic of this audience. And, at the same time, you have to know that most of these people have been to concerts and events before, but they act like a ravenous mob being thrown a small, insufficient allocation of food -- a couple of steps away from a riot or a stampede.

Needless to say, between the food not being great, the crowd, and the music not really appealing to me, I left after three songs from the Lenny Kravitz set. Perhaps the best part of the night was walking back to the hotel, knowing that I didn't need to stand and wait with that crowd for a shuttle bus to arrive some time later than most would expect.

Keynotes
On the first day, I was on my way from one breakout session to another when I noticed a large line of people on Mission. They were queued from the corner on 3rd back nearly to the Metreon. Isoon realized that this was the line for the opening keynote that was still over an hour away. For the Michelle Obama keynote, I was in Moscone West and the event staff was already redirecting people from the two overflow keynote viewing areas there to the Marriott. It was probably ten minutes after that when I heard them saying the Marriott was full. Needless to say, I found the best way to watch most of the keynote presentations was from my laptop in my hotel room. While I occasionally had drop outs (thanks Hilton wifi), not having to deal with the crowds was a huge advantage. At the same time, it was a little disappointing to know that, when they had a give-away based on a "golden ticket" at the end of the Sales Cloud keynote, I was fairly confident that my hotel desk chair didn't have anything taped underneath it.

For all of the crowds, it's also worth noting that there was a stepped up security presence at this year's conference. You could see security staff at any event you went to, any gathering of people. In all, while it was an ugly reminder of recent events in the world, it was some comfort seeing all of the efforts that were done to ensure everyone's security. In all, it was present, but unobtrusive.

The Expo
In some ways, you had to feel bad for the companies exhibiting at the Dreamforce Expo. This year, the Expo was in the reopened South hall. However, the current layout (and, from my understanding of Semicon West in July, this will also be true through that time) has the only entrance to the show floor down near the 3rd Street side of the hall -- essentially, the 100 - 400 aisles in an event. It made going into the South hall kind of like venturing into a cave, with the far, 4th Street side feeling rather disconnected from the entrance. To make things more accessible, Salesforce opened one of the emergency exits near the 4th Street end out to the Howard Street "Dream Valley" and decorated it with a bit of artwork suggesting you were exploring a cave.

Additionally, most of the sponsors were relegated to using a standard inline 10x10 system, so you had rows and rows of partners, all struggling to differentiate themselves or display some sort of unique identity. Mostly, as somebody walking through, it was like walking through endless white wall partitions. As a result, I found myself spending little time there.

Conclusion
In summary, it was another event and another year. Most of the time, I found little joy in being there. Would I recommend it? Hard to say. There are certainly some interesting take-aways, but at the same time, I'm not sure how well it stacks up against the raw costs in terms of ROI (when you consider the astronomical cost of hotels -- ~$395/night -- and the full $1500 conference cost). When you add in the oversubscribed crowds, you'll probably find that you're asking yourself why you subjected yourself to this -- an even more common thought than, is this worth it.