John Debay

From The New York Times:

Federal regulators will order operators of Boeing 787 Dreamliners to shut down the plane’s electrical power periodically after Boeing discovered a software error that could result in a total loss of power.

And later:

The company said it was working on a software update that should be ready by the fourth quarter this year.

Boeing has so far delivered 264 787s to carriers including Japan Airlines, Air India and Ethiopian Airlines. It alerted operators about the potential problem two weeks ago.

The plane maker said that power was shut down in all airplanes in service in the course of the regular maintenance schedule, and that it would be rare for a plane to remain with power on without interruption for eight months.

No immediate action is required from operators whose planes had a power cycle in the last 120 days, according to Boeing.

I’m something of a nervous flier, and two weeks ago I flew to Japan on a Dreamliner. When considering the list of man-made disasters that could befall the plane, software glitches were actually top on my list. Not shoddy maintenance, or pilot error, or terrorists. Knowing that the Dreamliner is a new plane, I assume it is very heavily reliant on very complex software for its operation. Knowing further that software is very hard to write, my biggest concern was bugs in the software.

I didn’t think Apple Watch Edition pricing would start at $10,000. Even though John Gruber was confident that was the correct range, and even though when he’s confident he’s almost always right, I still just had a hard time accepting they would price it that high. One of the key reasons to me was upgradability. How on earth would Apple sell a watch for $10,000 when all the technology inside of it would surely be outdated in a few years.

The New Yorker addressed this point in an article on their blog this morning. They compared the Apple Watch to Vertu phones and luxury cars:

Apple will face another challenge with its Edition line. The luxury watchmaker Patek Philippe advertises its watches with the tagline “You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” The point, of course, is that Patek Philippe watches—many of which are priced at twenty thousand dollars or more—are investments. Like art, they don’t lose value as time passes; they may even gain value. It’s hard to make the same case with an Apple Watch; at best, new technologies last for three years or so before they are seen as obsolete. “If you spent ten thousand dollars on an Omega gold watch, theoretically, in two years time, it should hold most of its value,” Bassel Choughari, a luxury-goods analyst at Berenberg, told me. “What are you going to be left with in three or four years time with your fifteen-thousand-dollar Apple Watch?”

Apple executives are surely aware of this issue; it could be one of the reasons the Apple Watch is built with removable straps, which can, at least theoretically, be removed from an obsolete watch and attached to the next version when it comes out. There is also some precedent for attempting to sell luxury tech products. A British firm called Vertu makes high-end smartphones that sell for tens of thousands of dollars. “A phone is more, in a way, like a car,” Vertu’s creative director, Ignacio Germade, told Sam Byford, of the Verge. “You don’t buy a luxury car because you want to buy it for the next 10 years or 20 years or 100 years; you buy a luxury car because even if you use it for two hours every three days, you want to have the best experience that you can have. If you look at the difference between when you buy a car and when you sell a car, you will realize that it’s actually a huge investment for a product that you use a few times a week.” Notably, in his Profile of Ive, Ian Parker quoted Ive’s friend as saying that Ive was “very interested” in Vertu.

This makes some sense, even if I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of Apple entering the luxury market. Indeed, in the magazine’s profile of Jony Ive a few weeks ago, the author explicitly mentioned Vertu in the context of Ive’s interest in making luxury goods:

A few years ago, Grinyer had considered working with Vertu, the British-based cell-phone manufacturer, whose bejewelled but technologically ordinary products sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Vertu’s survival challenged the assumption that inevitable obsolescence removes modern consumer electronics from consideration as luxury goods. Ive was “very interested” in Vertu, Grinyer recalled.

The New Yorker has a very long and detailed profile of Jony Ive. There are a lot of somewhat disturbing references to Ive’s being tired. For example, the article opens with:

In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has a bench-pressing bulk that he carries a little sheepishly, as if it belonged to someone else—has described himself as both “deeply, deeply tired” and “always anxious.”

And closes with:

He was a few days from starting a three-week vacation, the longest of his career. The past year had been “the most difficult” he’d experienced since joining Apple, he said later that day, explaining that the weariness I’d sometimes seen wasn’t typical. Since our previous meeting, he’d had pneumonia. “I just burnt myself into not being very well,” he said. He had discouraged the thought that Newson’s appointment portended his own eventual departure, although when I spoke to Powell Jobs she wondered if “there might be a way where there’s a slightly different structure that’s a little more sustainable and sustaining.” Comparing the careers of her husband and Ive, she noted that “very few people ever get to do such things,” but added, “I do think there’s a toll.”

There are also some inconsistencies. At one point the article quotes Steve Jobs talking about Ive in the Isaacson bio:

Toward the end of his life, Jobs told Walter Isaacson, “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer. That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.”

But the article’s opening paragraph frames Ive’s role this way:

He is now one of the two most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company.

Jobs sure made it sound like Ive has been the second-most-powerful person at Apple for a long time, does’t it? But the latter quote implies his power is new. Sure, he has more power now, effectively taking on Steve’s role as head of product, but I find the phrasing sloppy.

Finally, some interesting, and in some ways disturbing, quotes about product decision making at Apple in the post-Steve era. For example:

That day, according to Ive, they started collaborating on what became the iMac. Soon afterward, Apple launched its “Think Different” campaign, and Ive took it as a reminder of the importance of “not being apologetic, not defining a way of being in response to what Dell just did.” He went on, “My intuition’s good, but my ability to articulate what I feel was not very good—and remains not very good, frustratingly. And that’s what’s hard, with Steve not being here now.”

Losing Steve Jobs is an incomparably terrible event. There is no way around that simple fact. People who try to pretend that the company is no different, or even somehow better off, are, in my opinion, completely delusional. I don’t think one can simultaneously believe Steve Jobs was a genius, and believe that practically any company would be better with him as the CEO.

However, what we can’t see clearly from the outside is howe product decision making at Apple has changed. The Apple Watch will probably give us the clearer view, but it takes years for product pipelines to become established and then to appear in public, and it takes still more years for the product pipeline to strike a divergent trajectory from its original one. Further, it’s not just losing Steve Jobs. That in and of itself is a heavy blow to sustain, but Apple has lost a lot of key executives, including Scott Forstall, Bertrand Serlet, Bob Mansfield (semi-retired), and Ron Johnson.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler:

I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the FCC. These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission.

All of this can be accomplished while encouraging investment in broadband networks. To preserve incentives for broadband operators to invest in their networks, my proposal will modernize Title II, tailoring it for the 21st century, in order to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks. For example, there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling. Over the last 21 years, the wireless industry has invested almost $300 billion under similar rules, proving that modernized Title II regulation can encourage investment and competition.

This is a huge step toward ensuring the internet remains open. Earlier in the article, Wheeler recalls earlier attempts by telecoms to control what goes over the wire:

The internet wouldn’t have emerged as it did, for instance, if the FCC hadn’t mandated open access for network equipment in the late 1960s. Before then, AT&T prohibited anyone from attaching non-AT&T equipment to the network. The modems that enabled the internet were usable only because the FCC required the network to be open.

Companies such as AOL were able to grow in the early days of home computing because these modems gave them access to the open telephone network.

Breathtaking:

The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalelled effort by outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history.

The goal, revealed Monday at the Kochs’ annual winter donor retreat near Palm Springs, Calif., would effectively allow their political organization to operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican parties. In the last presidential election, the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million.

In what universe is this anything other than an attempt to buy an election?

From The New York Times:

While surviving staff members, at an emotional news conference, described their choice of cover as a show of forgiveness, most Muslims consider any depiction of their prophet to be blasphemous. Moreover, interpretations quickly swirled around the Internet that the cartoon also contained disguised crudity.

One of Egypt’s highest Islamic authorities warned that the cartoon would exacerbate tensions between the secular West and observant Muslims, while death threats circulated online against staff members.

A preacher, Anjem Choudary, the former leader of a radical group that was banned in Britain, was quoted by a British newspaper, The Independent, as saying that the image was “an act of war” that would be punishable by death if judged in a Shariah court.

Bravo to Charlie Hebdo for holding up free speech in the face of religious barbarism. Here’s the author of the cartoon speaking about his work:

With this cover, we wanted to show that at any given moment, we have the right to do anything, to redo anything, and to use our characters the way we want to. Mohammed has become a character, in spite of himself, a character in the news, because there are people who speak on his behalf. This is a cover aimed at intelligent people, who are much more numerous than you think, whether they’re atheists, Catholics, Muslims. …

Phrases like “an act of war” applied to a cartoon recalls for me old Christopher Hitchens articles about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. For example:

Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, he did so in the hope of forwarding a discussion that was already opening in the Muslim world, between extreme Quranic literalists and those who hoped that the text could be interpreted. We know what his own reward was, and we sometimes forget that the fatwa was directed not just against him but against “all those involved in its publication,” which led to the murder of the book’s Japanese translator and the near-deaths of another translator and one publisher. I went on Crossfire at one point, to debate some spokesman for outraged faith, and said that we on our side would happily debate the propriety of using holy writ for literary and artistic purposes. But that we would not exchange a word until the person on the other side of the podium had put away his gun. (The menacing Muslim bigmouth on the other side refused to forswear state-sponsored suborning of assassination, and was of course backed up by the Catholic bigot Pat Buchanan.) The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.

Today was my first day working at Twitter! I’m starting as a senior engineer on the iOS team, where I’ll be working on the core Twitter app.

I truly could not be more excited to start this job. I absolutely love Twitter as a product. It’s probably the most important service I use on the Internet. I view it as a truly transformative force in the world, and it’s a privilege and an honor to have an opportunity to contribute toward its success.

My rekindled interest in Star Wars has me reading The Making of Star Wars¹, and within just the first few pages, I came across this choice piece:

“When I was in college I took a creative writing class,” Lucas says, “but I really didn’t like it. My real thing was art, drawing, visuals. When I went to USC, my primary interest was camera and editing. That was what I really excelled in, so that was what I really liked. I was bored by scripts, and most of the films I did were abstract visual tone poems or documentaries—those were the things I really loved.”

For some reason, not really sure why, it feels like he was being sincere.