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Another follow-up post, this one regarding my post yesterday regarding how “greasy”-looking keyboard keys are not, in fact, in need of cleaning, but instead are worn away because they’re made from soft ABS plastic, not hard PBT plastic. DF reader Brian Barefoot Burns wrote me:

Hey, John. Even on keyboards made with PBT key caps, the space
bars are usually still made with ABS. The reason is that PBT
shrinks more than ABS does during the manufacturing process. For
the smaller key caps, this shrinkage can be managed, but it’s so
significant on large keys like the spacebar, that even the IBM
Model M and similar keyboards that used PBT still had ABS
spacebars.

That explains both the visible erosion and yellowing of the space bars on my Apple Extended Keyboard II’s.

Also, there was a discussion on ATP episode 562 back in November about keycap wear, and one of their listeners pointed out that ABS can be made transparent to let backlighting shine through, but PBT cannot. You can make PBT keycaps with clear (ABS-filled) cut-outs for the letters, but that would undoubtedly add cost and complexity. My beloved Apple Extended Keyboard II has no backlighting at all. It’s quite possible that this entirely explains why Apple sticks with ABS despite the shiny-when-worn factor.

It’s also the case that some people’s natural skin oil wears away ABS plastic more than others. That same ATP episode’s show notes link to this extreme (and extremely gross) example. Jiminy. (Poor U, the least-typed vowel.)

 ★ 

Another follow-up post, this one regarding my post yesterday regarding how “greasy”-looking keyboard keys are not, in fact, in need of cleaning, but instead are worn away because they’re made from soft ABS plastic, not hard PBT plastic. DF reader Brian Barefoot Burns wrote me:

Hey, John. Even on keyboards made with PBT key caps, the space
bars are usually still made with ABS. The reason is that PBT
shrinks more than ABS does during the manufacturing process. For
the smaller key caps, this shrinkage can be managed, but it’s so
significant on large keys like the spacebar, that even the IBM
Model M and similar keyboards that used PBT still had ABS
spacebars.

That explains both the visible erosion and yellowing of the space bars on my Apple Extended Keyboard II’s.

Also, there was a discussion on ATP episode 562 back in November about keycap wear, and one of their listeners pointed out that ABS can be made transparent to let backlighting shine through, but PBT cannot. You can make PBT keycaps with clear (ABS-filled) cut-outs for the letters, but that would undoubtedly add cost and complexity. My beloved Apple Extended Keyboard II has no backlighting at all. It’s quite possible that this entirely explains why Apple sticks with ABS despite the shiny-when-worn factor.

It’s also the case that some people’s natural skin oil wears away ABS plastic more than others. That same ATP episode’s show notes link to this extreme (and extremely gross) example. Jiminy. (Poor U, the least-typed vowel.)

Read More 

It’s downright bizarre to think that come this fall, all iPhone 16 models will sport as much RAM as base model Macs.

Following up on (a) my post earlier this week regarding on-device LLM features being RAM-hungry, and (b) my post regarding Mark Gurman’s claim that M4 Macs will start shipping late this year, I will direct your attention to a report from MacRumors back in January that all iPhone 16 models will include 8 GB of RAM. With the iPhone 15 models, the non-pro models have 6 GB and the Pro models 8 GB. If true, one incongruity will be that new iPhones will have the same amount of RAM as most base-model Macs.

This came up on the most recent episode of ATP, and their show notes include these two charts posted to Mastodon by David Schaub, showing (a) the base RAM for all-in-one Mac desktops from 1984 onward; and (b) the base RAM in consumer Mac laptops from 1999 onward. It has always been the case that Apple has been open to criticism for base-model RAM being “one click” too low. E.g. when base RAM was 1 GB, it should have been 2 GB; when it was 2 GB it should have been 4 GB; etc. But it was also always the case that Apple increased the base RAM every two years or so. Not anymore. iMacs have been stuck at 8 GB of base RAM since the 27-inch iMac from late 2012. MacBook Airs have been stuck at 8 GB base RAM since 2017.

I do think it’s true that Apple silicon changed this equation. Perhaps even, as a rule of thumb, by a factor of 2 — that an Apple silicon Mac with 8 GB RAM performs as well under memory constraints as an Intel-based Mac with 16 GB. But base model consumer Macs have been stuck at 8 GB for a long time, and it’s impossible to look at Schaub’s charts and not see that regular increases in base RAM effectively stopped when Tim Cook took over as CEO. Apple silicon efficiency notwithstanding, more RAM is better, and certainly more future-proof. And it’s downright bizarre to think that come this fall, all iPhone 16 models will sport as much RAM as base model Macs. (Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray on virtual memory: “Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it.”)

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Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction
tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to
trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard
about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and
whistles — a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera — that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process
of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind
of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most
about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A
certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less
online required aggressive online digging.

The couple — Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five — saw a business opportunity. “If somebody could condense it and
simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the
switch,” Krigbaum said. In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce
company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories
for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.

Chayka’s story ran under the bold headline “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real”, which is incongruously clickbait-y for The New Yorker:

Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one
recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead on
customer service, he has to use a smartphone — go figure.) They
pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They
have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service
industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand
dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in
March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales
last October, which they speculate may have had something to do
with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of their
popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device
with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and
the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like
something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be
fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).

$70K/month in sales is legit, but far from a boom.

The two things that get me when I ponder, even for a moment, carrying a dumbphone: audio (podcasts/music) and camera. Pre-iPhone I’d leave the house with both a phone and an iPod, and sometimes a camera too. I actually just bought a new pocket-sized camera last year, but it seems ludicrous to even consider carrying a dedicated device just for audio, and with music streaming, people expect their portable audio player to have always-available networking. Also: AirPods. I’m not going back to wired earbuds, especially in the winter.

 ★ 

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction
tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to
trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard
about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and
whistles — a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera — that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process
of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind
of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people who know the most
about dumbphones spend the least time online,” Krigbaum said. A
certain irony presented itself: figuring out a way to be less
online required aggressive online digging.

The couple — Stults is twenty-nine, and Krigbaum is twenty-five — saw a business opportunity. “If somebody could condense it and
simplify it to the best options, maybe more people would make the
switch,” Krigbaum said. In late 2022, they launched an e-commerce
company, Dumbwireless, to sell phones, data plans, and accessories
for people who want to reduce time spent on their screens.

Chayka’s story ran under the bold headline “The Dumbphone Boom Is Real”, which is incongruously clickbait-y for The New Yorker:

Stults takes business calls on his personal cell, and on one
recent morning the first call came at 5 a.m. (As the lead on
customer service, he has to use a smartphone — go figure.) They
pack each order by hand, sometimes with handwritten notes. They
have not yet quit their day jobs, which are in the service
industry, but Dumbwireless sold more than seventy thousand
dollars’ worth of products last month, ten times more than in
March, 2023. Krigbaum and Stults noticed an acceleration in sales
last October, which they speculate may have had something to do
with the onslaught of holiday-shopping season. Some of their
popular phone offerings include the Light Phone, an e-ink device
with almost no apps; the Nokia 2780, a traditional flip phone; and
the Punkt., a calculator-ish Swiss device that looks like
something designed for Neo to carry in “The Matrix” (which, to be
fair, is a movie of the dumbphone era).

$70K/month in sales is legit, but far from a boom.

The two things that get me when I ponder, even for a moment, carrying a dumbphone: audio (podcasts/music) and camera. Pre-iPhone I’d leave the house with both a phone and an iPod, and sometimes a camera too. I actually just bought a new pocket-sized camera last year, but it seems ludicrous to even consider carrying a dedicated device just for audio, and with music streaming, people expect their portable audio player to have always-available networking. Also: AirPods. I’m not going back to wired earbuds, especially in the winter.

Read More 

Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from
2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the
PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines,
and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his
impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the
middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on
its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as
Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate
across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke
of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most
important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to
maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do
that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was
ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall
Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What
Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that
has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently
destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a
tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and
effectively saw the company bow out of the search market
altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for
Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.

 ★ 

Absolutely scathing dissection of what’s gone wrong at Google Search, by Ed Zitron for his newsletter/blog:

In an interview with FastCompany’s Harry McCracken from
2018, Gomes framed Google’s challenge as “taking [the
PageRank algorithm] from one machine to a whole bunch of machines,
and they weren’t very good machines at the time.” Despite his
impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made Head of Search in the
middle of 2018 after John Giannandrea moved to Apple to work on
its machine learning and AI strategy. Gomes had been described as
Google’s “search czar,” beloved for his ability to communicate
across departments.

Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke
of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most
important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to
maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do
that.” And when finally given the keys to the kingdom — the ability to elevate Google Search even further — he was
ratfucked by a series of rotten careerists trying to please Wall
Street, led by Prabhakar Raghavan.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What
Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that
has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently
destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a
tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and
effectively saw the company bow out of the search market
altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for
Yahoo’s search and ads products.

Long story short, Ben Gomes was a search guy who’d been at Google since 1999, before they even had any ads in search results. He was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, who previously was Head of Ads at the company. So instead of there being any sort of firewall between search and ads, search became a subsidiary of ads.

Zitron’s compelling narrative is largely gleaned through emails released as part of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google. Is the story really that simple? That around 2019 or so Google Search’s institutional priorities flipped from quality-first/revenue-second, to revenue-first/quality-second? It might be more complicated than that, but the timeline sure does add up.

And as a truism this feels right: if content reports to ads, content will go to hell. Publications, TV networks, operating systems, search engines — no matter the medium, you can’t let the advertising sales inmates run the asylum.

Read More 

Jeff Gamet on Mastodon:

Know why you can’t clean the greasy spots off your compute
keyboard? Because that isn’t grease. Lots of computer keys are
made from ABS plastic, which is soft and cheaper than PBT plastic.
Those shiny spots are where you polished the keys by typing.

I’m at least somewhat of a keyboard nerd, but somehow I only learned this a few years ago. The way worn-down ABS keycaps looks greasy, even though they’re not, reminds me of how snakes look wet, even though they’re not.

Over the last 30 years I’ve primarily used two Apple Extended Keyboard II’s at my desk (the “e” key’s switch died on my first one in 2006) and the only key that’s gotten a tad shiny on either of them is the space bar, where my right thumb hits it. You can literally see how the space bar eroded on the one I used from 1992–2006, which, not coincidentally, was a time when I played a lot of games on my Mac. The Extended Keyboard II I’ve been using since 2006 — which I’m using to type this sentence — shows some shine on the space bar, but no erosion.

Those old keycaps clearly weren’t made from cheap ABS plastic. But in recent decades, Apple’s keyboard keycaps have been made from ABS plastic (or, at least, some sort of plastic that develops a greasy-looking shine through use). I’d love to see Apple fix this problem. Apple’s just not known for cheaping out on materials.

 ★ 

Jeff Gamet on Mastodon:

Know why you can’t clean the greasy spots off your compute
keyboard? Because that isn’t grease. Lots of computer keys are
made from ABS plastic, which is soft and cheaper than PBT plastic.
Those shiny spots are where you polished the keys by typing.

I’m at least somewhat of a keyboard nerd, but somehow I only learned this a few years ago. The way worn-down ABS keycaps looks greasy, even though they’re not, reminds me of how snakes look wet, even though they’re not.

Over the last 30 years I’ve primarily used two Apple Extended Keyboard II’s at my desk (the “e” key’s switch died on my first one in 2006) and the only key that’s gotten a tad shiny on either of them is the space bar, where my right thumb hits it. You can literally see how the space bar eroded on the one I used from 1992–2006, which, not coincidentally, was a time when I played a lot of games on my Mac. The Extended Keyboard II I’ve been using since 2006 — which I’m using to type this sentence — shows some shine on the space bar, but no erosion.

Those old keycaps clearly weren’t made from cheap ABS plastic. But in recent decades, Apple’s keyboard keycaps have been made from ABS plastic (or, at least, some sort of plastic that develops a greasy-looking shine through use). I’d love to see Apple fix this problem. Apple’s just not known for cheaping out on materials.

Read More 

Cristiano Lima-Strong, reporting for The Washington Post:

Congress late Tuesday passed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, delivering a historic rebuke of the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership after years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks.

The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the proposal to President Biden’s desk — with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden issued a statement minutes after the Senate vote saying he plans to sign the bill into law on Wednesday.

Once signed, the provision will give TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, roughly nine months to sell the wildly popular app or face a national ban, a deadline the president could extend by 90 days.

Finally.

 ★ 

Cristiano Lima-Strong, reporting for The Washington Post:

Congress late Tuesday passed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, delivering a historic rebuke of the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership after years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks.

The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the proposal to President Biden’s desk — with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden issued a statement minutes after the Senate vote saying he plans to sign the bill into law on Wednesday.

Once signed, the provision will give TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, roughly nine months to sell the wildly popular app or face a national ban, a deadline the president could extend by 90 days.

Finally.

Read More 

Apple Newsroom:

Following its critically acclaimed fourth season, which has been
praised as “the best-written show on all of television” and
“superior sci-fi,” Apple TV+’s hit, award-winning space drama
series “For All Mankind” has landed a renewal for season five.
Additionally, Apple TV+ and “For All Mankind” creators Ronald D.
Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi will expand the “For All
Mankind” universe with a brand-new spinoff series, “Star City,”
which will be showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert. […]

A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City”
is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key
moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the
Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But
this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain,
showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the
intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space
program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.

I can’t think of another show quite like For All Mankind. For one thing, there just aren’t many “alternate history” shows or movies, even though I tend to think it’s a great genre — a way to ground fantastic inventions with familiar elements. But the biggest distinction is the way For All Mankind has decade-long gaps in the timeline between seasons. We’ve seen some characters age 30+ years over just four seasons.

 ★ 

Apple Newsroom:

Following its critically acclaimed fourth season, which has been
praised as “the best-written show on all of television” and
“superior sci-fi,” Apple TV+’s hit, award-winning space drama
series “For All Mankind” has landed a renewal for season five.
Additionally, Apple TV+ and “For All Mankind” creators Ronald D.
Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi will expand the “For All
Mankind” universe with a brand-new spinoff series, “Star City,”
which will be showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert. […]

A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City”
is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key
moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the
Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But
this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain,
showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the
intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space
program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.

I can’t think of another show quite like For All Mankind. For one thing, there just aren’t many “alternate history” shows or movies, even though I tend to think it’s a great genre — a way to ground fantastic inventions with familiar elements. But the biggest distinction is the way For All Mankind has decade-long gaps in the timeline between seasons. We’ve seen some characters age 30+ years over just four seasons.

Read More 

Bertrand Serlet — who was Apple’s SVP of software engineering from 2003–2011 and a staple during WWDC keynotes during that era — is now a YouTuber. Great 30-minute lecture explaining how LLMs and AI in general actually work.

 ★ 

Bertrand Serlet — who was Apple’s SVP of software engineering from 2003–2011 and a staple during WWDC keynotes during that era — is now a YouTuber. Great 30-minute lecture explaining how LLMs and AI in general actually work.

Read More 

Happy ending to this saga. Remarkable engineering.

 ★ 

Happy ending to this saga. Remarkable engineering.

Read More 

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

This one is way too close to home. News started to spread this
morning on the MacAdmins Slack, Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder
blog, and Tom Bridge’s site about how our friend and
Take Control author Charles Edge died suddenly and
unexpectedly on 19 April 2024. He was in his late 40s, and yes,
his standard bio picture below gives you a feel for his sense of
humor and irreverence.

Tom Bridge:

I don’t know what we’ll do without him.

But I can tell you how I’ll remember him, always. Charles always
had a kind word for people. He always would take your call. He was
the kind of friend who’d drop everything to help you, or to see if
he could connect you to someone that could if he couldn’t.

I will miss his levity, his wisdom, his inescapable drive for
knowledge, his passion for his friends and family, and his
humbleness.

The MacAdmins Podcast has a nice In Memorium page, collecting a slew of other remembrances. Nothing but good thoughts to all of his friends and family.

 ★ 

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

This one is way too close to home. News started to spread this
morning on the MacAdmins Slack, Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder
blog, and Tom Bridge’s site about how our friend and
Take Control author Charles Edge died suddenly and
unexpectedly on 19 April 2024. He was in his late 40s, and yes,
his standard bio picture below gives you a feel for his sense of
humor and irreverence.

Tom Bridge:

I don’t know what we’ll do without him.

But I can tell you how I’ll remember him, always. Charles always
had a kind word for people. He always would take your call. He was
the kind of friend who’d drop everything to help you, or to see if
he could connect you to someone that could if he couldn’t.

I will miss his levity, his wisdom, his inescapable drive for
knowledge, his passion for his friends and family, and his
humbleness.

The MacAdmins Podcast has a nice In Memorium page, collecting a slew of other remembrances. Nothing but good thoughts to all of his friends and family.

Read More