How hard is it to leave Apple’s walled garden? It turns out that it is very hard even for the technology saavy. What’s worse, because the walls have grown slowly over many years, the magnitude of the effort gets hidden behind the proverbial beautiful trees lining the walls. “Wow, my iPhone photos are already on my MacBook!” “Great, I can use my iPad to respond to the text message I received on my iPhone!” “Phew, my Apple Watch can provide turn-by-turn directions from Apple Maps!” This video from Marques Brownlee’s popular YouTube channel provides an excellent summary of the issue and highlights several negative consequences.
We have all noticed how electric vehicles (EVs) have rapidly moved from a niche market to the forefront of global transportation discussions. Unfortunately this transition isn’t just a technological evolution; it’s deeply intertwined with political dynamics. I recently came across this video from the popular “State of Charge” YouTube channel and the bottom line seems to be that “social acceptance cuts both ways.
During this hot summer, we often opted for dishes that could be cooked outside on the grill. But how much meat and fish can be grilled before “food paralysis” sets in? You might know the feeling, it’s when a cheese plate and wine begin to feel like two of the major food groups. So I began to expand the grilling menu to a variety of grilled vegetables, squashes, and eventually to a dish that most people do not associate with grilling, Spanish Paella.
A company simply called Arm might be the smallest, least known company with the largest influence on microprocessors ever. It began with humble beginnings 35 years ago creating a CPU for their own computer. Since then it has ridden out storm after storm in the turbulent semiconductor industry to eventually compete with Intel and be at the core of some of the most popular devices in history. The entire story is told in an incredibly interesting and detailed three part article in ArsTechnica (1, 2, 3). Part 1 starts with a very readable primer on CPUs focusing on Arm’s breakthrough idea of RISC - Reduced Instruction Set Computing (as opposed to Intel’s CISC - Complex Instruction Set Computing). Part 2 details their rise to fame in the exploding mobile device market of the early 2000s. And Part 3 brings the story to modern times explaining breakthroughs such as the fact that the processor in the original iPod, based on Arm’s designs, eventually led to modern CPUs that have surpassed the power of Intel’s best offerings while using only a fraction of the electricity. Now almost all of Apple’s desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets are using this same underlying technology for their microprocessors and it all started with Arm.
Do we really need yet another article on Apple’s “Disaster in the Making” or how Apple just gave “millions of users a reason to quit their iPhones?” Maybe it would be more useful to write about “how few who have passed comment understand Apple’s proposals?” But why trust third party explanations when you can read Apple’s own announcement of the why’s and how’s of what they call “Expanded Protections for Children?” Clearly even Apple doesn’t think this is enough because there are ten more references at the end of this announcement including a six page Frequently Asked Questions document and a 14 page technical analysis, “Security Threat Model Review of Apple’s Child Safety Features.”
Even though I’m a technical writer sometimes I stray away from writing technical papers, user manuals, and datasheets and find myself writing copy destined for marketing. It’s definitely a different mindset. While it still requires distilling product complexity into a “user friendly” form, writing for marketing requires actionable facts rather than explanation. For example, a manual should clearly explain the various functions of a sound level meter and how to use its features: levels, frequency, and weighting networks. However marketing copy might focus on the benefits of using those features in a specific industry like automotive or telecom.
Recently, as part of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an unusual short session was presented late on Thursday afternoon: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. It was sandwiched between technical sessions with titles like “Use Async/Await With URLSession” and “Explore WKWebView Additions.” It seemed so out of place that I began to ask myself why Apple would spend valuable developer time and money to create a half hour video on a topic so removed from its packed, highly technical agenda.
Before becoming a technical writer, I spent years working in the field of industrial acoustics. When non-technical people found out that I was an acoustic engineer they would often ask: “Cool! What bands have you worked with?” or “You must have an amazing stereo system!”
First, two massive companies, Google and Oracle, went head to head recently in a battle of epic proportions. Very few people probably noticed or understood the topic, “Are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) protected by copyright law.” It’s a fight that has been going on for over a decade that finally ended up in front of the US Supreme Court with Oracle seeking billions in damages from Google. The allegation was that Google copied “37 API design specifications and implementations and 11 source code files” from Oracle’s Java programming language when Google created the Android mobile operating system.
As you all know, I enjoy keeping up with technological innovation, but I also love art, and luckily I’ve learned a little bit about Bitcoin (see my articles “A Tiny Bit of Bitcoin” and “Mining Bitcoin with a Pencil and Paper”). This is fortunate because earlier this month I came across The Verge article “NFTs, explained” that contained a large number of unfamiliar concepts and I remember thinking, “These are my areas of interest and expertise, how could I have missed this?!”