I did this, even though:

• This is clearly a Mac meant to be a replacement for the entry-level 2-port model of the 13-inch Pro. Not the high-end 4-port model I am using to type this.
• A higher-end version (perhaps with the rumored smaller-bezel 14-inch screen) could be coming as soon as next spring.
• 16 GB of RAM max.
• Aren’t we supposed to avoid first-gen hardware?

Here’s why:

• This 13-inch Pro with M1 (if Apple’s bragging is to be believed) is going to outperform my maxed out 2020 Intel MacBook Pro 13-inch, anyway. Particularly at graphics.
• My battery life is likely to be close to double what I’m currently getting.
• I’m betting the better efficiency means the fans will kick into high speed less often.
• I’m betting the lower RAM ceiling doesn’t impact me as much as most people think.
• I’ve been buying first-gen Apple hardware for decades and have never regretted it.

All this, for a price that’s $700 cheaper than the Pro I currently own.

And in Silver, of course. Space Gray is so 2015.

This is but the first step in a long transition for the Mac. And it’s historic. My limited experience with the DTK over the summer has shown me that Apple Silicon is the real deal. Rosetta apps don’t feel like emulation. And given how easy porting to Apple Silicon is, most apps will be native very quickly, anyway.

If the more-expensive small Pro ends up getting announced next year, upgrading again is always an option.

Small price to pay for being on the cutting edge of the Mac’s evolution.

Obviously this is a very short first impression, obtained at those ridiculous Apple Store tables that seem to be the worst possible height for typing while standing. So I’ll clearly need more time to make a final judgement. But it didn’t take long to at least know that this is indeed a bit of a step backwards—in terms of feel—for me.

The best way I can describe the new keyboard is if you drew a line with the butterfly keyboard on one side and the wireless Magic Keyboard on the other, this new MacBook Pro keyboard would fall closer to the Magic Keyboard in feel than the butterfly. No surprise, then, people who hated the butterfly are dancing in the streets.

It’s not completely Magic Keyboard in feel, though. It does manage to avoid the sponginess of the Magic. The keys do feel much more precise. Press down from an off-center position, and the whole key does seem to fire pretty evenly. Not quite as good as the butterfly, but better than the Magic, for sure. That’s quite an engineering feat in a scissor switch.

It’s not a bad keyboard, by any stretch of the imagination. And it certainly tramples the old keyboard on the 2015 and prior models. But the extra travel makes me feel like I’m working harder than I should have to when I type. And the extra space between the keys looks and feels cheaper and older to me. My guess is most people looking at this machine side-by-side with one of the current 13-inch models would say the 13-inch is the newer model.

But looks aren’t everything, of course. I’m just gaining a new appreciation for the reasoning behind the butterfly’s aesthetic.

I have never had an issue with the virtual escape key, but since TouchBar doesn’t lose any functionality by bringing back the real key, I’m happy to see the real key return. Combine that with the space now between the edge of TouchBar and the power button, and it has a nice symmetry to it. No complaints about what’s going on at the top of this keyboard.

The inverted-T arrow keys, do, indeed, look old and janky compared to the full-sized keys on the butterfly. (I never thought it was that big a difference until looking at the two side-by-side again yesterday.) But this is a case where function over form is absolutely the right move. I’m thrilled to see the inverted-T back.

So increased travel, slightly less precision, and poorer looks, balanced against the return of inverted-T arrow keys and the assumption of better reliability. (I know that’s a big assumption. But everyone else seems to be giving Apple the benefit of the doubt on this, so I will, too.)

Overall, I think Apple made the right move. But there’s no doubt in my mind I’ll like the keyboard on my next MacBook Pro a little less.

But probably only a little.

A few quick takeaways from Apple’s Hello Again event:

• Accessibility is one of those things that makes Apple stand out as a company. They’ve cared about it for a long time, but they’ve upped their game even further in the Tim Cook era. Just as they have on environmental issues, diversity, social justice and equality, and on and on. They have a long way to go before they are perfect, but they strive to be better than what they are. And you can’t deny their impact on people’s lives. Some see Apple opening their keynotes this way as a distraction. Or “the boring part.” Some cynical people probably see it as a smokescreen. I see it as a clear, public demonstration of what the company values. And that makes me feel good as a customer and shareholder.
• Apple is out of the monitor business. When Phil Schiller is on stage saying “Hey, check out this cool new LG Monitor” you know Apple has no plans to make a monitor ever again.
• The MacBook Air is done. They may be keeping the 13-inch around to sell out current inventory, but the new Pro is now smaller than the 13-inch Air ever was, and the 12-inch MacBook is already smaller than the 11-inch Air. So size is no longer a benefit. The only remaining benefit of the Air—cost—is answered by the 12-inch MacBook, the entry-level Touch Bar-less MacBook Pro, and my next bullet point.
• The days of the sub $1,000 Mac are done. I thought the Air would stick around for another generation because of this price tier, but then I thought about it more carefully. Low-cost PCs make almost no sense anymore. People who need the power of macOS are becoming a smaller group with every passing year. Prices will continue to reflect the shrinking market. Apple has an entry-level machine for people who are budget constrained, and it’s only $599. It’s called the iPad Pro. That machine does everything the target audience for an 11-inch Air or 13-inch Air would need and more. The MacBook and MacBook Pro 13 with no Touch Bar will cover anyone else, albeit at a slightly higher cost. The price you pay for needing more power than the average person. Pretty soon, the only people who need macOS will be certain kinds of pros. So it’s pro machines from here on out. And those pro machines are going to keep getting more expensive. Don’t worry; you won’t be upgrading them very often.
• Laptops are where Apple sees pros moving forward. I don’t think they’ll kill the iMac soon, necessarily, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac Pro were truly dead this time.[1] The Touch Bar is a perfect demonstration of where Apple wants to innovate. And it’s likely a laptop-only feature. Sure, they could put a Touch Bar on a Bluetooth keyboard, but I’m not 100% sure they will.[2] Which means even the next generation iMac will likely be missing out on this incredibly cool and useful new input device. Meanwhile the MacBook is likely to get a Touch Bar as soon as it’s cost-effective. Apple clearly sees portability as being an important value to professionals. Some may spend 90% of their time sitting in a room alone working, but many other professionals need their machines to go wherever they do. And with Thunderbolt 3, it’s easier than ever to take one cable and plug into power, external display, multiple USB peripherals, web cam, and more when at your home office. The laptop becomes as powerful as a desktop workstation in a second with one cable, yet still retains the ability to be taken elsewhere when needed.
• The Touch Bar is a big deal. I’ve heard some say they aren’t sold on it yet, but once they get one, I think they’ll change their tune. This is the first input device for macOS since the trackpad that will change the way we use our laptops. Because it’s built in. And it’s in the perfect place, just above where my hands already are. If developers are smart about the controls they put up there, and people can customize as much as it appears they can, it’ll soon be hard to imagine life without the Touch Bar. So much so I would say that even using your MacBook Pro in clamshell mode with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse is going to become less popular. The Touch Bar will be that useful, and you will notice when it isn’t there. I’m so stoked about the Touch Bar that I’m considering not replacing my iMac next year, as I had planned. Instead, I’ll get a 13-inch or 15-inch Pro and finally consolidate into one Mac again, after six years of using a 2-Mac setup.
• The Touch Bar is not cheap. Apple created a “dumbed-down” MacBook Pro to help bridge the gap between Air buyers and Pro buyers. It’s telling that they left in the gorgeous new wide-color display and the Thunderbolt 3, but took out the Touch Bar as a cost-saving measure. There’s nothing “Pro” specific about the Touch Bar itself. The emoji alone will appeal greatly to consumers. But this input device is debuting on the Pro because it’s a costly add-on for Apple, and the highest-margin machines are the easiest place to add such a feature. I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s MacBook only gets the Touch Bar on the high-end model, too.[3]
• The new MacBook Pros have finally gotten thin and light enough to make the 12-inch MacBook less appealing to me. People make fun of Apple’s obsession with thin, but this is a massive deal to people like me. I use my laptop every single day. I travel around New York City with it, on crowded subways and busy sidewalks. On busses, trains, and coach-class airplane seats. And it’s seldom the only thing I’m carrying. My laptop can never be thin enough or light enough. If I had the last generation of MacBook Pro, I’d be leaving it home much more often and opting for my iPad when moving around. The new Pro seems to have crossed the threshold of light and small enough to become my one-and-only Mac.[4] I could not be more excited about this.
• Apple’s long-term strategy for the Mac could not be more clear. They are consolidating all the various models into one line in three sizes: 12-inch, 13-inch, and 15-inch. The larger ones will be more powerful and expensive, the smaller more portable and cheaper. Choose accordingly. In a few years, I suspect there will be exactly that many laptops—and perhaps just that many Macs in total—from which to choose. This makes perfect sense for a category of technology that, frankly, is becoming more niche by the minute. Keep making it more powerful and more portable, and add innovative features like Touch Bar that give you the benefits of multitouch input, but in a way that makes sense within this form factor. It may not be your ideal picture of the future of macOS, but it’s definitely a strategy, and one that Apple thinks is best for its long-term business. And looking at the evolving market, it sure seems like they know what they are doing.

Yesterday, I mentioned I could probably replace TextExpander with the built-in Mac and iOS text replacements, given that I generally don’t use the more advanced features of TextExpander, anyway.

So this morning, I fired up my MacBook, opened System Preferences and TextExpander side by side, and created shortcuts for my most-commonly used TextExpander snippets in the built-in system. There were a few shortcuts I had created that could fill in forms, or put the cursor in the middle of the text replacement (two features that the built-in replacements can’t do) but I thought there was a good chance I’d get over that minor inconvenience quickly.

Then, a few hours later, I took a look at my iPhone’s text replacements. Given that these are supposed to sync over iCloud, I expected to see all my new replacements right there on my phone.[1]

Not quite.

Oddly, about half of them had synced, while the other half were missing. One duplicate that I had deleted was still there. As of this writing, the missing ones are still missing. On my home iMac, none of the new shortcuts have appeared. My iPad Air 2 seems to have one or two of them. My iPad Pro has none.

Maybe Smile wasn’t crazy to make sync the tentpole feature of its new subscription service, after all.

1. Okay, I’m lying. I fully expected the iCloud sync to be a disaster, since text replacements have never synced properly for me on any of my devices. But I thought maybe there was a minute chance Apple had addressed this in the most recent updates. Nope.  ↩

9to5Mac claims that Helvetica Neue is on its way out as Apple’s system font for OS X and iOS.

Helvetica Neue looks pretty crappy with its custom kerning in OS X, especially on non-Retina screens. (Which a majority of Mac users use and will use for years to come.) I don’t know how San Francisco will look on a non-Retina screen, but it would very likely be no worse.

Personally, I never thought standardizing on one font for all of Apple’s platforms was necessary. But if they’re going to do it, better San Francisco—which was designed for the screen, at least—than Helvetica Neue.

The extremely shallow key travel is partly to blame, but so is the keyswitch feel. They’re more like clicky buttons than keyboard keys, feeling almost like the iPhone’s Home button. They don’t engage or actuate — they snap. This makes it harder to modulate downward force while typing on them, especially from your weaker outer fingers.

I can type on the MacBook, but I’d rather not.

(via Marco Arment)

Where was this article when Marco and I were supposed to have an on-stage argument at Úll this year?[1] I basically disagree with every single one of his conclusions in this piece.

I love the keyboard on my new MacBook. I have no issues with the trackpad. The weight and size reduction is well worth any compromises in speed, etc. I’ve written already about how much I like this thing. I’ll even take it a step further and say that I’ve developed an actual affection for the MacBook, the way I have for my Apple Watch. The way I did for many of my early Macs. My first iPod, etc.[2]

I want to find more reasons to use my MacBook. I spend more time in cafés working rather than running home to my big 27-inch iMac screen most weekdays. I’ve even gotten into the habit of doing some late afternoon work in the living room, with the MacBook on my lap as I sit on the couch.

But that’s the thing. This machine is polarizing. It makes perfect sense that someone who has been using a 15-inch Pro for the past few years would have a harder time making the transition. It makes sense that reactions to the keyboard are all over the map.[3] As someone who travels on the New York subway every day, I not surprisingly prioritize the weight and size difference more than others might.

Laptops have matured well past the point where there’s any one machine that could appeal to all of us.

And that’s why I’m glad the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros still exist. Perhaps the one thing I agree with Marco about on the laptop front is that Apple is likely to evolve the Pros closer to this MacBook moving forward, and that is unfortunate. The new MacBook Pro released yesterday is merely a delay in this transition (thanks to Intel), but the MacBook-ification of the Pro line is inevitable. I would prefer that Apple continue to branch out and make varying machines for varying preferences, rather than continue along the path of unification along the entire line. Why not make a thicker MacBook Pro that gets 12 hours of battery life? I’m not going to buy it, but clearly other people would.

Maybe the Apple Watch will be a good influence on Apple in this regard. Perhaps having to cater to different fashion preferences will open Apple’s mind a bit about their technological preferences.[4] But I’m not holding my breath.

1. Coincidentally, I was actually sitting next to Dave Wiskus having a drink when Marco published this piece. Dave, of course, staged our Úll discussion hoping that the two of us would have a full smack down disagreement session, a sort of Crossfire for tech geeks. But we ended up agreeing on pretty much everything we discussed. If only we had waited a few more weeks. Sorry, Dave.  ↩
2. Unlike my iPhone 6, which I still actively dislike. I remain convinced that five years from now, the 6 will be considered one of the weakest designs of iPhone, second only to the 3G.  ↩
3. Read the reactions to the keyboard by Rene Ritchie, David Sparks, and Jason Snell to get the full spectrum between my enthusiasm and Marco’s active disdain. It’s not often you get this much disagreement within our own community over a single feature in an Apple product.  ↩
4. I’m selfishly hoping for this so I can get a proper 4-inch iPhone screen again, too.  ↩

Many reviews have already been written about the MacBook by people far more qualified than I, making a comprehensive review by me pointless. But I did have a few thoughts over the past few days that I wanted to share [1].

The New Keyboard:

Lots of debate on short throw vs. long throw. My approach to typing is much like my approach to any musical instrument. If I want to play fast, I need economy of motion. The less distance my fingers need to travel, the faster I can play. That’s physics. Typing is no different. If you’re used to pounding on Cherry switches, though, you’re probably going to disagree. That’s okay. We’re allowed to disagree on this.

Based on what many reviews suggested, and my own experience typing at the Apple Store for a few minutes, I thought it would take me a day or two to get used to the new keyboard. In reality, it took seconds.[2]

Because of the lower height of the keys, and the fact that they are sufficiently recessed into the unibody, this is the first laptop I’ve ever owned that doesn’t have the nasty habit of leaving keyboard-shaped grease stains all over my screen whenever I close it. I can’t tell you how significant an improvement this is. There’s virtually no grease on my screen, and that’s without putting a cloth over the keyboard when I close the lid. As someone who has been a laptop user since 1996, I’m practically weeping with joy over this. I’ve been cleaning that grease off of various screens regularly for years, and now I don’t need to worry about it nearly as much. Future of the notebook, indeed.

Backlighting is not just nicer, but significantly nicer. Having each key illuminated with its own source results in far less light leak around the keys, which makes the keyboard far less distracting in low-light situations. Combine that with the improved font (San Francisco) on the new larger keys, and you get a far better low-light experience using this machine.[3] It’s almost as if the text on the keys isn’t artificially lit up, but rather just happens to be visible in the dark.

My only issue with the keyboard is the arrow key situation. Specifically, the “up” key is pretty hard to find by feel alone. That’s a bummer.

Space Gray

I’m usually a plain old silver kind of guy. For whatever reason, I usually like the silver iPhone, the silver iPad, etc. The whole Darth Vader thing never appealed to me. (I even ordered the silver steel link bracelet for my Apple Watch.) But when the Space Gray MacBook was announced, I thought, “What the hell. Might as well do something different for a change.”

I think if I had seen the MacBook in person before ordering it I would have chickened out and gone for the regular aluminum color. That’s not to say that I’m regretting ordering the Space Gray. But I would recommend people have a look in person before ordering.

The gold was a non-starter for me. I think it looks nice enough, but I can’t have all that yellow reflectivity hitting my eyes as I’m trying to choose colors in Photoshop.

I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about the Space Gray that I don’t love, until my colleague Tim said it for me. He said it reminded him of one of his old PC laptops before he became a Mac convert.

Now, I’ve never owned a PC, but I immediately understood what he was talking about. This MacBook is way too pretty to be a PC, but we’ve been looking at aluminum Macs for so long that any Mac laptop that isn’t that specific shade of silver just doesn’t look like a Mac. At first glance, it looks like a PC that’s trying to be a Mac. I suspect that will change over time as we get more and more models in this color.

Meanwhile, having a Space Gray Mac does make me want to use Dark Mode in OS X for the first time. And it makes me wish all that much more that Dark Mode were a true dark UI, not just a change in menubar and Dock. (Hopefully, Apple will consider enhancing Dark Mode to include the entire UI in a future OS X release.)

And, oh my, does this darker Space Gray ever show fingerprints. Not just on the non-illuminated logo on the lid (Which is an absolute fingerprint magnet) but the entire body of the machine. (The keyboard, too, even shows prints far more than the other laptops.) So while I’m cleaning my screen far less often, I’m wiping down the rest of the machine on a regular basis now. (One step forward…)

USB-C

I understand that Apple wants to keep making licensing money on Lightning accessories, but having the diminutive USB-C connector and Lightning coexist seems silly. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually iOS devices just go USB-C. Maybe not this year or next, but eventually, it would make sense.

The one port thing has been talked about to death. It’s not much of a factor for me and my workflow, but I’m sure it’ll be a nuisance from time to time. My guess is it’s a temporary situation with this first model.

As far as losing MagSafe goes: yeah, definitely a step back. It’s obvious why it had to happen, though. This MacBook is far too light for MagSafe to have worked well, anyway. It would be hard to imagine that even a redesigned “MagSafe 3” connector for this machine wouldn’t have either disconnected too easily and become annoying, or too hard to save your laptop from a trip over the cable. And adding a magnet connector to the universal USB-C standard really wouldn’t work for other USB peripherals. USB-C is a snug fit, so that cable isn’t coming out unless you want it to.

Give it time, and USB-C will be everywhere, so the adapters and such are another temporary issue. There are already some good options on Amazon.

The biggest annoyance for me, actually, regarding this new universal port: The lack of an LED to indicate when the MacBook is charging. Obviously, this couldn’t be incorporated into the cable, as it makes no sense for other USB-C peripherals. But just a little light laser etched into the side of the MacBook case near the port would have been very handy. The MacBook does play a sound when you plug in the power, but only if the machine is not on mute. (My Macs are always on mute.) Not being 100% sure that the machine is charging is the sort of thing that drives a nerd like me nuts.[4]

The Lid and Hinge

Opening the new MacBook, you can tell they got much closer to nailing the balance in the resistance of the lid vs. other Mac laptops. It opens fairly easily with one hand, and you don’t have to hold down the bottom of the laptop to keep it from popping up and then slamming back down onto the table as you open it.

The metal hinge (as opposed to the old black plastic) also adds to the fit and finish of this machine. The Unibody construction just keeps getting more and more solid, and Apple just keeps getting better at mass producing gadgets with increased levels of polish.

Size

Don’t let the 12-inch screen fool you. This machine is smaller than the 11-inch Air in almost every dimension, including the most important one: width. It fits better into my portable Muzetto bag than my Air ever did. Once Apple can get the price down on these machines, neither model of the Air will need to stick around.

Speed

This is another one of those things that is mostly a matter of opinion and workflow. My biggest fear in replacing my 13-inch MacBook Pro with this machine was the apparent step back in terms of performance. Having used it for a few days, though, I can say that my fears were overblown. This MacBook has yet to feel “slow” at any point since I’ve started using it. Even with Xcode (albeit with my relatively simple iOS apps) the machine performs such that I don’t notice any sort of decrease in speed. I keep the display at the “More Space” 1440 x 900 setting, so I’m getting more real estate than I did with my old 11-inch MacBook Air, too. I’d say that if you’re working with an Air right now, there’s no reason to worry about performance when switching to the MacBook. Migrating from the 13-inch Pro, of course, is another matter. Again, it depends on what you want to do with your laptop.

The fact that I’m not really noticing a difference in my day-to-day use, though, is a testament to just how little processor speed means for most people nowadays. Maybe I don’t push my laptop nearly as hard as I do my iMac, but I do more processor-intensive stuff than the average person by a long shot.

I did get the build-to-order 1.3 GHz option, though. So this is as fast as the MacBook can currently go. I don’t imagine it’s that much faster than the base 1.1 or the mid-range 1.2, but getting the Turbo Boost up to 2.9 may make some difference.

I’m sure when I do some video work in Final Cut Pro I’m going to notice the difference much more. But for UI design in Photoshop, working on web sites in Coda, Keynote, the Omni Apps, etc.—all the things I tend to do in coffee shops on my laptop instead of on my iMac at home, the decrease in size and weight easily trumps the performance tradeoff in my mind. The same way it did when I first switched from a 15-inch MacBook Pro to an 11-inch MacBook Air many years back.

Overall

Here’s the thing about this MacBook: I’m drawn to it. I don’t know if it’s the small size of the thing that just makes it more lovable, but I’m already finding more excuses to use this machine than I ever did with my 13-inch MacBook Pro. Nothing against the folks who love the sweet spot that the 13-inch offers in size and weight to performance ratio, but I just never became fond of using that machine the entire time I owned it. The MacBook is as close as Apple has ever come to making the right laptop for me. What I thought I wanted more than anything a year ago was a MacBook Air 11-inch with a Retina display. But this is so much better than that. I can’t wait to see how this new machine evolves over the next few iterations.

1. I’m not saying that no one else has written about any of these things. I’ve just been getting lots of questions from people about my reactions to this machine, so I thought I’d offer some of my own perspective.  ↩
2. I think my trouble with typing at the Apple Store was the low tables they use there. Puts the keyboard at a terrible angle for someone my height. Any keyboard would be hard for me to use in that environment.  ↩
3. Those of you who know me know that low-light is my preferred work environment, so this qualifies as a big deal to me. I want Apple to make a wireless Bluetooth version of this keyboard immediately, so I can use it with my iMac.  ↩
4. Ditto for the non-illuminated Apple Logo on the lid which makes it impossible to know if the machine has actually gone into sleep mode when you close it. You know the old adage about the refrigerator light? Same thing here.  ↩

You can’t swing a dead cat today without hitting any number of (at least a dozen so far) reviews of Flexibits new version of their popular calendaring app…

That’s what the Loop’s Shawn King had to say about the release of Fantastical 2 from Flexibits today. He’s not wrong. My Twitter stream is also full of Flexibits today.

And that’s exactly why I always watch Michael Simmons very closely when he’s launching a new product. The guy never fails to get great press coverage. And it’s not by chance.

Having spent some time chatting with Michael on different occasions over the years, one thing is clear: He knows how to make you feel like he values your opinion. Even if he were faking that (and I don’t suspect he is), it’s a remarkable skill. Most of us suck at even pretending to care what other people think. But Michael has a natural enthusiasm for his work, and he wants you to feel it, too. And he really does want to know what you think.

Now, multiply his chats with me by the dozens of other people he must have similar chats with, and you start to see that he’s investing an incredible amount of time—pre-launch—to getting other people invested in his products. To gather feedback, listen to suggestions, and, of course, fix bugs. By the time the launch happens, you can’t help but be rooting for him. And, as a result, you end up tweeting, blogging, pitching in with the promotion yourself.

It’s brilliant. And it obviously works. But only because it’s genuine. And only because he’s willing to put in that time. That incredible amount of time. Not coding. Not designing. (That’s all getting done, too.) But good old-fashioned marketing.

Notice I haven’t even mentioned anything about the quality of Fantastical 2? It’s, of course, an amazingly good app. Took away my final few reasons to ever want to launch the built-in Calendar app. But you know that already, if you’ve read any one of those dozens of reviews out there.

But at the same time, I could easily see an app this great sitting on the store shelves, getting ignored, if it weren’t being marketed properly by an experienced expert. As Shawn King might say, You can’t swing a dead cat on any day without hitting an app that is incredibly well crafted, yet a complete financial failure.

If you’re out there building great products, don’t short-change their chances of success. Start caring about promotion. The best products deserve it.

John Saddington on the first 63 days of selling his blogging app Desk:

The bottom-line, though, is that it means that it is quite possible to “make it” as an indie developer and eek out an income that is substantive and worthwhile. I hope this report, if anything, gives some encouragement to all of those that are interested in seriously (or semi-seriously) pursuing an independent app that creates great value for users and customers.

You won’t get rich off of it (maybe, but… that’s pipe-dream stuff) but you can make a living and with a little creativity and a lot of luck you can make it work. It does work and now I know this first-hand in an intensely-personal way. I am so very, very blessed. The thought of making, on average, ~$500 a day via an app that I love is really stinkin’ cool.

But it doesn’t mean that I’ll be quitting my “day job” any time soon. This is because I really like the pace at which I’ve created for Desk and the very modest growth that I’m experienced is just the right amount of growth that I can personally handle and that I am interested in experiencing.

Desk generated $65,654.85 of revenue in 63 days. Many of us would be very happy with that level of success. Note, however, that he’s not not taking the app full-time, and he’s happy to continue with slow and steady growth.

Lest you think Apple featuring Desk as one of the Best Apps of 2014 led to all this revenue, read Saddington’s entire piece to see how he actually managed to make it happen. It’s a very active strategy that goes way beyond sitting back and waiting for Apple to do his work for him.

For instance, although the app made $65k, he spent $28k in ads and marketing materials. Let that sink in for a while. He invested almost half his revenue back into the product in the form of advertising dollars and other marketing efforts. How many of us are doing anything close to that?

One area in which I’m always ready to admit I’m weak is advertising. I’m basically clueless about this entire arena, especially when it comes to apps. But I’ve been taking notes from Saddington’s recent posts:[1]

• He didn’t buy one ad. He placed several ads in various different places.[2]
• He doesn’t need thousands of sales to make it worth the investment. Desk is a productivity tool, not a 99-cent casual app.[3]
• He advertised with well-known bloggers. Makes sense, since he’s selling blogging software. I doubt a Daring Fireball ad would do Teleprompt+ as much good. But are there influential indie film blogs that would be effective for us? Probably.
• Not all ads are created equal. The Daring Fireball ad cost him a lot more than the others, but it also had a much larger impact. Like any other product, you get what you pay for with advertising.
• He didn’t take out an ad expecting to make his money back immediately. Ads have long-term effects you can’t measure with a simple equation. (This is what makes advertising difficult to stomach for engineers.) An ad you purchase today might get you a sale three months from now. You’re raising awareness. It’s not something you try once, decide it doesn’t work, and then drop.[4]

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to set aside a giant advertising budget to succeed. But it sure looks like it helps.

It’s too early to tell what the long-term picture is for Desk, but if you look at the sales charts, Desk doesn’t look like one of those apps that will make the bulk of its money at launch. Yes, there are spikes, but there’s also growth after the spikes. Putting some money back into advertising is already paying off and should continue to do so in the long run. I’m willing to bet Saddington’s marketing skill is going to help Desk settle into a nice steady monthly revenue over the next year. As momentum picks up and word of mouth starts taking off more, the percentage of revenue he needs to reinvest to keep the momentum going should be reduced. I hope he reports back in at the end of this year to let us know how it pans out.

It’s also worth noting that Desk gets a lot of marketing (at the cost of the creator’s time, rather than money) in addition to paid advertising. Saddington blogs frequently, has a regular email newsletter, and releases short videos quite often. All of which are full of great advice for indies. Highly recommended.

1. Not just this Year in Review piece, but also his excellent Does Sponsoring Daring Fireball Actually Work? A must-read.  ↩
2. Ever wonder why Squarespace advertises on so many podcasts at once? They know the same people listen to ATP and The Talk Show. But four people you trust recommending a product to you are far more effective than one.  ↩
3. Some might look at that and say that ads aren’t a good idea for their cheap apps. I say it’s a good reason not to make cheap apps.  ↩
4. Obviously, it’s not easy to risk large chunks of money this way. One ad for Daring Fireball cost Saddington $10k. That’s a lot of money to put into one spot for a small indie. The fact that Desk is a part-time business helps make these investments a little easier, I imagine. Which is why I think he’s keeping it that way for now. Try not to pay your bills with a new app’s revenue for as long as you can, in other words.  ↩

I remember back in the early 2000s, when OS X was an infant and the Apple Retail Stores were just starting to take off, I would lament with many of my longtime Mac faithful friends about the decline in reliability of Apple’s products. Many of my friends were convinced that Macs were failing at a much greater rate than they had been “in the good old days,” and that the software was buggier than it ever had been. Of course, Apple was starting to sell many more Macs than it ever had, and it had just replaced the core of all of its software in a relatively short period of time, so it stood to reason that the number of duds coming off the assembly line would increase, and that bugs in the software would become more commonplace as well.

How could Apple possibly continue to grow and succeed without a corresponding decline in quality? This is a universal struggle for all companies, and most end up falling apart eventually because of it.

I bring this up not because I disagree with Marco Arment’s post from last night about the recent decline in Apple’s software quality, which is undeniable. I just think it helps to remember that mass market success and decline in build quality pretty much go hand in hand. And that we’ve been here with Apple before. Many times.

Apple is now hundreds of times larger than it was back when I was complaining with my friends, and the software and hardware, despite not being perfect, aren’t hundreds of times more buggy and unreliable than they were then.

Somehow, Apple always manages to right the ship before the quality assurance issues get completely out of control. Maybe we’re in a particularly bad phase at the moment, and maybe that struggle to keep the quality up is harder than it was in the past, but if history is any indication, it’ll get better.

Almost two years ago, I suggested that Apple would be better off slowing down and taking a year off to fix bugs and enhance already existing features, rather than continue the fevered pace of innovation that it had maintained for so many years. Clearly, Tim Cook ignored my advice. And how could he not? After Jobs’ death, the world consistently questioned Cook’s ability to keep the company in its role as the richest, most powerful, and innovative tech company in the universe. He had a lot to prove. There were expectations that needed to be met, and so he met them.

Unfortunately, meeting those expectations has had consequences.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t stay way ahead of the curve and not introduce some bugs along the way. This decline in software quality is a side-effect of the current strategy. It’s a compromise Apple has made in order to reassure the general public that the company isn’t “doomed” without Steve Jobs.[1]

The only question now is how does Apple balance the speed of innovation against the need to maintain quality moving forward? As the Apple Watch starts shipping later this year, and the critics of Cook finally quiet down about Apple’s inability to have a hit new product, will Apple shift gears a little? Will the organization realize that it’s out of whack and start to feel the need for a Snow Leopard moment? I think it probably will.

How Apple accomplishes this feat—slowing down the upgrade cycles just a bit, adding more people, introducing fewer new features per release, etc.—is an open question. Regardless, Apple can’t simply stop moving forward. They can’t just take the year off to fix bugs, as I had naively suggested. That’s what I and many old fans of the platform would love to see, but it’s not realistic for the continued success of the business. Apple has no choice but to push ahead.

I’m not apologizing for Apple. I think the leadership has a lot of work to do. But it’s not as simple as “fix everything” or “stop making new stuff until the old stuff works better.” You can’t ignore the fact that Apple has real competitors who aren’t standing still. And you can’t ignore the consequences of spending too much time fixing bugs and denying the always fickle masses the new and shiny bits.

The unfortunate reality is that “Here’s a new version that’s the same as the old version, except now everything works” is a tough sell.

In the meantime, Arment and others are right to point out these glaring software issues, and we’re right to debate them. Apple’s reputation is indeed taking damage, although that may have been unavoidable. Let’s just not get impractical about solutions or pretend that this is an easy thing to solve. And let’s not assume that Apple doesn’t have a sense of the problem.

1. Ironically, the decline in quality is now going to be used to spark a whole new round of “doom and gloom” stories about Apple. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  ↩

I didn’t appreciate this when I was beta testing OmniPresence (because the beta was Mac-only and didn’t involve the iPad) but The Omni Group has really done something amazing with this new synching software. In essence, they’ve married the best of Dropbox and iCloud, and they’ve given it away for any developer to use.

The Problem with Dropbox

Dropbox is no question a rock-solid solution for synching files. And it’s about as simple as a synching solution can get on the Mac. Create a folder. Put anything you want in that folder. Everything in that folder is available everywhere. Perfect, right?

Well, it’s perfect on the Mac, but when you then move over to accessing your files with your iPad, things get a little clunky. And not just because of Apple’s restrictions about sharing data between apps. I actually believe in what Apple is trying to do with removing the file system on the iPad. No matter how much we nerds scream about it, the file system is probably the biggest barrier average users have to learning to use a Mac. There is an elegant simplicity to opening an app on an iPad and seeing only the files that app understands and nothing else. Using a solution like Dropbox on the iPad always feels like a step backwards, no matter how you slice it. Navigating folder structures just feels wrong. It’s simply not native to the platform.

The Problem with iCloud

iCloud, at the same time, is much better on the iPad than it is on OS X. It was created with the removal of the Finder in mind. That’s fine on the iPad, but we expect and want to use the Finder on our Macs. We get frustrated when we can’t simply see a folder with all our files in it on the Mac. Where did my shared files go? How to I share them with anyone else? iCloud is downright confusing and extremely limiting on the Mac.

The Solution

What OmniPresence manages to do is behave like Dropbox on the Mac and iCloud on the iPad. And that’s just brilliant. On your Mac, set up a folder, just like you would for Dropbox, drop anything you want in there, and it syncs. Move it around, make subfolders, whatever. But then open any OmniPresence-enabled app on your iPad, and you see just the files pertaining to that app in your document list. Make changes on either device, and the file gets auto-updated, just like with iCloud, even while open. Even if you create subfolders on the Mac, the documents all show up in your list natively on the iPad without having to drill down anywhere. And you’re not copying the file from your Dropbox app into the iPad app, making changes, and then manually syncing back; all changes are synched back in seconds automatically.

As if this weren’t cool enough, Omni then takes it another two steps by 1) allowing you to sync to your own server instead of Omni’s and 2) releasing the synch software as open source, so anyone can do whatever they want with it. This removes any ambiguity about security or monetization motivations. Don’t trust Dropbox or Omni with your files? Fine, just set it up and run it on your own server.

This may all sound like a commercial for The Omni Group, but I’m just stunned they’ve managed to pull this off so cleanly. I hope a lot of other app developers realize what an opportunity this is and start embedding this functionality into their apps.

A little while back my friend Charles Perry and I decided to try our hand at putting together a podcast. While we’re fully aware there are lots of great tech podcasts out there vying for your precious listening time, we thought together we could offer our own spin on things and add a bit more to the conversations going on in the independent iOS and Mac development communities.

I’m a big believer in giving back to the community in any way I can. While my occasional rants on this blog are one of my favorite ways to do that, I also thought maybe it was time to start using my physical voice as well as my internal one. Plus, having a discussion with another developer who might actually disagree with me on occasion could certainly be interesting and beneficial to shaping my views. Charles is a really smart, opinionated guy, so hashing out these topics with him made perfect sense to me.

Release Notes, then, will be a weekly half-hour-ish show geared towards fellow independent developers. Those who are new to the game looking for tips and tricks, and those who are just curious to hear from two other people in the same boat. It’s not a technical show at all; our tagline is “everything but the code.” Rather, it’s about the business of app development.

Episode one covers tech conferences. Why one should or shouldn’t attend them. How to get the most out of them. Even some specific conferences we recommend.

Next week, episode 2 will cover the scary prospect of quitting the day job and going full-time independent.

After that, given the timing, we’re going to talk WWDC. (And I’ll give away some of my secret tips on where to find the best coffee, bourbon, and Scotch whiskey in San Francisco.)

Hope you enjoy. We’d love to have your feedback. We’re just getting started with this thing, and already I can feel the conversations are just going to get better and better over time.

Find out more about Release Notes at releasenotes.tv.

Subscribe via iTunes, or search for us in your favorite podcatcher software. Our feed is http://releasenotes.tv/feed/podcast/.

I know the trend lately is to suggest that Apple is not moving fast enough. That it should be releasing brand-new groundbreaking products every year or two. That iOS needs a complete design overhaul so it won’t be so “boring.” Where’s the Apple TV? Where’s the iWatch? And so on.

Down with Skeuomorphism! Flat Design FTW!

Forget all that. What Apple really needs to do is slow the hell down.

The Mac was released in 1984. The iPod in 2001. The iPhone in 2007. The iPad in 2010. Sure, the revolutionary new products are coming faster now than they used to, but is that a good thing?[1]

Apple has introduced some incredibly cool technology over the past several years that hasn’t come close to reaching its potential. FaceTime, Passbook, iBooks Author, iCloud—just to name a few—were all so promising when they were introduced. But most of them have failed to be completely successful, not because they aren’t great ideas, but because Apple isn’t doing a whole lot to either improve or evangelize them.

If the pattern used to be “release, then iterate, iterate, iterate,” it seems like Apple is not giving itself enough time for the “iterate” part of that process. It’s being pressured to move on to the next thing. And that leaves us with a lot of half-baked products and a ton of unrealized potential.

Let’s take a look at some of these in more detail.

FaceTime

The first time you use FaceTime to talk to your family members from across the globe is a pretty magical experience. We’ve all seen the commercials and gotten teary-eyed. Anyone who has used FaceTime can see the value in making free long-distance video calls, right? But what’s holding FaceTime back from wider adoption?

When Jobs introduced FaceTime, he said that it would eventually be an open standard, that anyone could use the same technology and thus it wouldn’t matter if your kids or wife or whoever also had an iPhone or iPad. You could call people on Android, Windows, etc. What happened to that? Did the standard get rejected? Did Apple ever bother submitting it?

And why is FaceTime still a one-on-one conversation? I can do a video iChat with three people over AIM, for crying out loud. And I can’t share my screen during a FaceTime call, either. The Mac app hasn’t been updated since it was in beta, really. And the carriers are only now opening up and letting us use it over our cellular data plans. Considering how long FaceTime has been around, it’s stunningly similar to what it was at launch.

Update: Rene Ritchie from iMore has informed me that Apple is in the midst of a lawsuit involving FaceTime, and that may have had a strong effect on Apple’s ability to improve the technology, and to open source it. That certainly would explain the lack of progress there. Thanks for the tip!

Passbook

The four times I’ve used Passbook were some of the most delightful retail experiences I’ve had. Who wouldn’t love the idea of never having to worry about losing paper tickets or waiting in line at Will Call again? Every time I buy tickets to a movie, concert, or comedy show, I scan the confirmation email, hoping to see a Passbook link. And more often than not, I’m left disappointed.

I’d be using Passbook a lot more, except few companies seem to be adopting it. This one is a real head scratcher, as from what I can tell the technology isn’t difficult to implement. It appears as if Apple actually got the hard part right, but no one at Apple is selling it enough. I know that Passbook is relatively new, but is anyone out there pushing companies to try it? Does Apple even have Evangelists anymore?

It would help if Apple Retail at least adopted Passbook for Apple Gift Cards and in-store pickups. Talk about eating your own dogfood.

Update 2: @hmk on App.net pointed out that last November, Apple did start allowing online Apple Gift Cards to be transferred into Passbook. The physical cards you buy in Apple Stores and other retail locations are still not transferrable, however.

iBooks Author

Phil Schiller said Apple wanted to reinvent the textbook with iBooks Author. And what have we gotten since? Is Apple taking this book revolution seriously anymore? Maybe it is, but it’s hard to tell when Apple has been basically silent about it ever since, minus one update that didn’t address most authors’ needs.

Maybe footnotes would be a good start.

iCloud

Lots of stories lately about how Apple is blowing it with iCloud, so I don’t need to belabor the point here. Everyone seems to agree that contact, calendar, and preference syncing is mostly okay, though not perfect. But the real issue is more complex data sync, which is both broken and next to impossible to implement.

iCloud needs developer adoption, and right now the top developers are telling everyone to stay away from it. This is a huge problem for Apple. I know the tendency for Apple is to think of users first, then Apple, then the devs, but this is one case where putting the dev first is actually going to help Apple and the users more. If Core Data sync is truly unfixable, replace it with something better under the hood. Keep calling it iCloud, because no one outside the developer community will know you changed anything. They’ll just be happy it started working.

Conclusion

Behind every one of these products is a brilliant idea. This is not a Ping situation, where Apple saw it had made a mistake and quickly cut it loose. Every one of these and many more could easily become world-changing, competition-killing features with the right amount of polish and some proselytizing. But Apple can’t do that if it starts to adopt a more Google-like “throw it all up against the wall and see what sticks” attitude. This would be harmful not only to the users who get burnt as their favorite new technologies die on the vine, but also to Apple itself as people start to lose their faith that everything new Apple does is golden. It’s also destructive to the talent within Apple who come up with these things. You can’t retain talented people if you abandon the projects they work so hard to deliver.

When the iPhone was first released, and it didn’t have cut, copy, and paste, I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried there were no third-party apps. I knew that would all happen eventually. I want to be just as sure about Apple’s newer products.

Even on the hardware side, we’re just scratching the surface of iPad adoption. There are far more people who don’t own a tablet than who do. It’s clear that tablets are destined to become the primary computing device for most people; but not if Apple is already putting all its attention on wrist computers and not addressing the shortcomings that make the iPad impractical for average users’ needs. The current iPads are awesome, but they’re not done. There’s plenty more to improve.

If Apple took the year and worked on half of its existing prodcuts rather than trying to introduce new ones, they’d be doing themselves and us a much bigger favor. If they spent the year fixing the unbelievably sloppy bugs that still exist in iOS and Mountain Lion (I’m talking boneheadedly simple things like drag and drop on the Mac), rather than bringing five new half-baked apps like Podcasts to the platform, our phones and our laptops would be better at surprising and delighting us.[2]

I’ve loved jabbing Adobe for its many flaws over the years, but when they took a step back with Photoshop CS6 and spent the majority of the release fixing all the teeny little annoyances we were complaining about for decades rather than peppering it with a thousand useless new features, you could feel the collective joy from the user base. We were thrilled that Adobe was finally fixing most of the broken stuff. Apple would be wise to take some time to do something similar with iOS and OS X. All those little irritations add up, and every new product you introduce that doesn’t get more love later is yet another breeding ground for discontent.

Maybe that’s not sexy enough to gather all the right headlines. Maybe new features in iWork for the first time in seveal years won’t keep Wall Street or the idiot analysts happy. Maybe the competition is too fierce to afford the time to slow down and get some perspective rather than plowing forward at breakneck speed. (I seriously doubt it.) But all this rushing, all this spreading of resources too thin is starting to show. Allowing pressure from others to set the pace of innovation at Apple would be a very costly mistake.

1. Personally, I think the iPad was released a few years earlier than it should have been. Jobs wasn’t going to be around much longer, so it made sense that he wanted to see it out in the real world before he passed, but the more I use my iPad mini, the more convinced I am that the mini would have been what Apple released as the first iPad if it had waited a few more years to refine the product to its usual standards.  ↩
2. The release of the new and improved Podcasts app actually gave me hope. Most of the press only cared about the killing of skeuomorphism, but the more significant UI changes and new features in Podcasts demonstrated that Apple knew exactly what was wrong with the app and how best to fix it. If Podcasts is an indication of where iOS is going in general, then I’m not worried. Let’s hope we’ll see more of this sort of methodical polish in the near future.  ↩

At WWDC, context matters for hardware announcements | Macworld:

If Apple has a similar kind of update in the works for one its Mac products, then, it seems unlikely that such an announcement would get any stage time at WWDC—not when there’s Mountain Lion and a likely update to iOS to discuss. Besides, Apple could hold off on announcing a modest-but-welcome update to one of its Mac products for a week or two after WWDC and be guaranteed coverage from an Apple-hungry press corps. Tacking on a laptop with a processor bump to whatever else Apple has planned for WWDC doesn’t really fit with the company’s way of doing things.

Which is not to say Apple won’t have any hardware to unveil at WWDC. It’s just that if the company does, you can bet it’s going to feature something that appeals to the multitude of developers on hand.

(Via www.macworld.com)

Phillip Michaels for Macworld, outlining a very similar argument to mine from the other day. I’m not sure I agree that Retina Macs would warrant any special attention for developers, though. I mean, what’s there to talk about, beyond making @2x versions of everything? Can’t see Retina requiring a lot of developer talks to train developers to implement. But who knows?

To me, Retina Macs are an inevitability, and maybe even press worthy, but not a big deal to developers. If you are a designer of Mac apps, you should already be working on your Retina graphics. Maybe there’s more to it than I think, though.

The chart at the end of the above linked article is telling. Notice every single Mac in the current lineup was announced via Press Release.

Now that these iOS 6 banners are making their way around the Internet, I’m reminded of why I’ve been skeptical that Apple would release new Macs during the WWDC keynote next week. I’m particularly skeptical that they’d release updates to almost the entire lineup, as many have predicted.

Apple only does about 4 of these live press keynotes a year. They like to make them count. And by that, I don’t mean that they like to jam pack them with 50 different announcements that generate tons of stories about various topics. Quite the opposite. In recent years especially, Apple has focused these events on just a handful of new products, so that there’s only one or two clear stories for the press to write about. Tons of stories either way, but since no one but a nerd like me is going to read them all, it’s best to have 10 stories about iOS 6, say, than one story about the Mac Pro, one about the iMac, one about the MacBook Air, etc.

Releasing new Macs, unless there’s some really important new hardware feature that they all have in common, doesn’t make for a good press day, in other words. It mucks up the focus and squanders the opportunity to control what the press writes. If you’ve got one shot at making the local evening news, you don’t give the editors ten different options. You want to make sure they’re all talking about the same thing all over the world.

I’m not saying there definitely won’t be any new hardware; I’m just saying that if you listen to all the hoopla surrounding the Keynote this year, you’d be expecting new Mac Pros, new iMacs, new MacBook Pros, new MacBook Airs (with retina screens), a new MacBook line that’s neither a Pro nor an Air, a new Apple Television set, and the announcement of the next iPhone that won’t ship until later this year. And that’s before you start talking about Mountain Lion and iOS.

Does anyone think it would be a good idea to announce all that at once? How long is this keynote going to be? Six hours? And what’s Apple going to do for the rest of the year, go to Maui?

And if you’re David Pogue, which one of those things makes your column next week?

If I had to bet, I’d say that 90% of the Keynote on Monday (after the customary update on market share, the Retail stores, etc.) will be devoted to Mountain Lion and iOS 6, and particularly how both of those relate to iCloud. And maybe, since it’s WWDC, and there are an awful lot of TBA sessions, some new area where developers can start writing apps, such as the AppleTV.

The demo of the new Maps feature in iOS 6 alone is going to take at least 20 minutes.

(I can totally see the live blogs and my Twitter stream, after we’re 40 minutes in, and Craig Federighi is still demoing Notification Center. “WE’VE SEEN ALL THIS BEFORE!!!!” “WHERE’S THE GOOD STUFF??!!” etc.)

Hardware just seems like a distraction. Even to spend two minutes putting up a slide saying, “hey, we’re updating all these Macs today” detracts from the more important story of where Apple is taking its two OS platforms this year. Save that for a press release.

I had guessed that Apple would have updated the Mac line THIS week, ahead of WWDC, as they have in the past, just to get that out of the way. Perhaps they’ll do it the week after this time around. I don’t know. Maybe all those Mac updates will be trickled down over the coming months.

Unless there really is a common link between all those updated Macs and whatever Apple really wants the story to be. I never put it past Cupertino to surprise me. But to me, if there isn’t that common thread, it would be a mistake to announce so much at once.