newsonaut

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Apple category

Thursday, February 20, 2025

There's nothing great about $1,000 for a low-end phone

Go to apple.ca and see the cruel joke Apple is playing on Canadians with their tagline for the new iPhone 16e: “Latest iPhone. Greatest price”

You’re supposed to think of “greatest” in terms of a good deal, but in reality it’s closer to this definition: “of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above average.”

At $899 plus tax, Canadians are now looking at $1,000 for Apple’s cheapest phone. In my mind, that’s way above average. I simply cannot imagine myself, even in my wildest fantasies, paying that much for a phone.

I currently have a second-generation iPhone SE that still works fine, so thankfully I don’t need a new one. But that day will come and, when it does, I expect iPhones to be even more expensive.

Most likely my next phone will be a used iPhone. Telus, for example, has “certified, pre-owned” iPhones for as little as $499. That’s for an iPhone 13, which, for all I know, might actually be a step up from my old SE.


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Friday, January 24, 2025

Raging about Siri has turned into a national pastime

We’re getting another pile-on today about how terrible Siri is. It seems there is no end to the number of ways people can find to hate on Apple's digital assistant.

The popularity of this pastime may be catching up with the National Football League. Don't believe me? Just for fun, I created this Google Ngram.

I made the comparison because the latest round of rage started with Paul Kafasis at One Foot Tsunami, who got spectacularly bad results when asking Siri about winners of Super Bowls. John Gruber picked up on this and added his own test at Daring Fireball. Juli Clover reported on the mess at MacRumors. And the Apple subreddit has at least 3,400 comments about it.

So I tried it myself. I asked Siri to give me Super Bowl results the same way Kafasis did — by using roman numerals. For example, “Who won Super Bowl XXV?” Like him, I pronounced “XXV” as 25.

I did this on a 2017 iMac running macOS 13 Ventura, which cannot be upgraded to a later OS, and thus does not have Apple Intelligence. I asked the questions for several Super Bowls while having Wikipedia’s list of Super Bowl winners open for reference.

At first Siri seemed to be doing OK, giving correct answers along with details of the games. But it got worse over time, and couldn’t give any correct answers.

Now, I’m not a fan of the NFL, but I’m pretty sure even diehards would be hard pressed to tell you the difference between, say, Super Bowl XXV and Super Bowl XXVI. These numbers don’t give any context.

So I tried asking the question in what to me seems like a more normal way — by the year in which the game was played. Instead of asking, for example, “Who won Super Bowl XXV?”, I asked “Who won the Super Bowl in 1990?”. A lot of things happened in 1990. The year provides a frame a reference.

Asked this way, Siri gave the right answer every single time.

This is not about making excuses for Siri. I almost never use it. In a case like this, it makes more sense to use Wikipedia or maybe the NFL's website. Still, if posing a question in a certain way doesn't work, why not try a different way? I do this with ChatGPT all the time.

I guess I just wish that if someone is truly interested in testing Siri they would come up with something a little more rigorous. When I read Kafasis’s post, I thought it made for an amusing anecdote, and I'm pretty sure that's what he intended. Looks like others decided to, ahem, take the ball and run with it.


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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Hyped headlines about Apple Watch don't tell the full story

If you have been following the latest about the new Apple Watch, you may be quite impressed by the sales figures. Headlines everywhere have been announcing that Apple sold a million of the devices in the U.S. alone on the first day they were available for pre-order.

Here are some samples:

But wait a minute — are there weasel words in those headlines? Why, yes there are: “estimated” and “suggests.” So maybe that one million figure is just a ballpark. By citing a “report,” one publication signalled that it didn’t bother to check. If the number is wrong, we can blame someone else’s report.

Another headline doesn’t bother to quibble, stating the one million as fact and drawing conclusions from it: “1+ Million Sold: Why People Covet Apple Watch.”

As it turns out the report making suggestions about sales of Apple Watches came from a company called Slice Intelligence. And it really was just a guess on their part, based on their analysis of online shopping — the methodology of which is not revealed. Never heard of Slice Intelligence? Neither have I. Shouldn’t we wait for an official announcement from Apple itself before bandying about figures like this? Well, yeah, but one million is such a big round number and who knows if Apple will ever divulge anything.

I bring all this up as a way of introducing you to a report that came out earlier this year called Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content. Author Craig Silverman points out that in the Internet age, news organizations are more interested in funnelling readers to their website than they are in building a reputation for accuracy.

He puts it this way:

They scour the web and social media for anything that might generate traffic, and work to get it up and promoted as a fast as possible. Verification and context are someone else’s job, should they choose to do it.

Weasel words become the order of the day:

News organizations utilize a range of hedging language and attribution formulations (“reportedly,” “claims,” etc.) to convey that information they are passing on is unverified. They frequently use headlines that express the unverified claim as a question (“Did a woman have a third breast added?”). However, research shows these subtleties result in misinformed audiences.

Those question-style headlines should be a red flag on any story. The answer is almost always “no” because if it were true you can be sure it would be stated as fact: “Woman has third breast added” is far more likely to draw readers than “Did a woman have third breast added?”

On the other hand, I can see why some editors resort to unverified or less-than-honest headlines. A well written headline, after all, pretty much tells the whole story so why bother clicking on it and reading more? Especially when there are a gazillion other headlines coming out of the firehose demanding our attention.

And seriously — who are these million people who have supposedly bought an Apple Watch? Do you personally know even one of them? That alone should make us wonder whether the whole thing is just hype.


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Saturday, March 7, 2015

Apple just might succeed in getting us to put time back on our wrists

Self magazine with Apple Watch
A recent cover of Self magazine with the Apple Watch strategically placed.

Back in ancient times when everyone had a smartphone except me, I was out boating with one of my kids. I needed to get back at a certain time, but didn’t have a watch so I asked a couple of young people in a nearby boat.

They had forgotten to bring their phones with them, so they weren’t able to help me. They were baffled by the concept of wearing a watch.

I wasn’t wearing a watch either, but for a different reason. I used to wear one all the time, but a few years earlier had accidentally left it in my jeans pocket and put it through the wash. It was ruined.

Lesson learned, don’t ever do that again. Sure enough, I bought a new watch and put it through the wash a few weeks later. Another one ruined.

Lesson learned, I am not meant to own a watch. And really, most of the time it’s easy to get along without one. The time is on clocks in the car, on the wall, on the computer, on outdoor signs. And, of course, it’s on the phone that you can easily dig out of your pocket.

On Monday, Apple is making a big announcement about its upcoming new product, the Apple Watch. Just as smartphones are really mini computers with a phone built in, these watches will be even tinier computers that happen to tell the time.

It’s not like Apple is inventing something new. There are already many so-called smart watches on the market, but none has really captured the imagination of consumers. But circumstances were similar when Apple came out with the iPhone. It wasn’t the first smartphone, but it was the first smartphone that really caught on. Now they’re everywhere.

So now the question is whether Apple can do a repeat performance with the watch.

I had my doubts until I read an article on TechCrunch by Matthew Panzarino called The Apple Watch is Time, Saved. After talking to people who have used a prototype of the Apple Watch, he has concluded that the Apple Watch may become “the primary way you access your iPhone during the day.”

One user told me that they nearly “stopped” using their phone during the day; they used to have it out and now they don’t, period. That’s insane when you think about how much the blue glow of smartphone screens has dominated our social interactions over the past decade.

So in other words, Apple gets us addicted to iPhones and the other smartphones that came after them, then offers a way for us to wean ourselves off them. And it won’t come cheap. Prices will range from hundreds of dollars for the low end to thousands of dollars for the high end. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance where most people wouldn’t simply continue to make due with pulling out their phone.

It definitely seems like a luxury, but this might be where Apple finds success in the market. These watches appear to be nicely designed — aimed at people who not only want to a convenient way to check notifications from their iPhone but also like to flash some bling.

Early advertising seems to point in that direction. The cover of a recent issue of Self magazine, for example, features a svelte young woman looking sporty with an Apple Watch conspicuous on her wrist. It’s declared to be a spring must-have. In Vogue magazine, several full-page ads show close-up fashion points of the watch itself, with hardly a mention of what it does.

Will Apple’s strategy work? Only time, ahem, will tell.


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Sunday, February 16, 2014

Apple might have some big surprises up its sleeve

From the San Francisco Chronicle, a couple of rumours we can sink our teeth into:

But Apple is thinking bigger. Much bigger. A source tells The Chronicle that (Apple) met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Cupertino last spring around the same time analysts suggested Apple acquire the electric car giant.

And from the same article:

The newspaper has also learned that Apple is heavily exploring medical devices, specifically sensor technology that can help predict heart attacks. Led by Tomlinson Holman, a renowned audio engineer who invented THX and 10.2 surround sound, Apple is exploring ways to predict heart attacks by studying the sound blood makes at it flows through arteries.

Apple has about $160 billion sitting in the bank, plus the company is highly profitable. This would be the perfect time to take a chance on branching out into something entirely new.

In any case, it sure beats reading about those ridiculous iWatch rumours.


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