The End of the Jony Ives Era

6FPS V3#11 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
November 8, 2021

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Last issue I noted our house in Silicon Valley had gone on sale and we’d accepted an offer. I’m happy to note that the sale closed on time with no complications, and so I no longer have any things tying me to California. That also allowed us to close the purchase of the undeveloped land next door, so my real estate operations are done for the forseeable future. We now own about 4.5 acres here, mostly undeveloped trees, and I’m happy to have some property I can maintain for the habitat and keep unbuilt.

The birdfeeder is going gangbusters, and a recent fall arrival has been a male Pileated Woodpecker, which has stopped by twice. They are huge birds, relatively speaking, and I’m estimating its wingspan at about 18”.

We have pretty much settled in. I finally talked to the right people at PODs and my container has reached Washington and soon I’ll be hiring some folks to unload it into the garage, which mean more boxes, but access to the Christmas stuff and the hockey books to go into Laurie’s office.

We are making some changes to the house, but fairly minor. We have new window coverings on order for the great room and a new one for Tatiana’s room so we can stop closing the window off with foamcore. We’re talking with contractors about a stair lift between the two floors, which right now I’m guessing won’t be finished until after the new year, and to add a pellet stove downstairs where the old owners took their stove with them, and in the garage where there’s currently a basic woodstove; since we have a pellet stove in the great room, this would get us with a single fuel source and with minimal futzing.

Now that the weather has turned fallish, we also see why having stoves in the house is a good idea, but all of the groups I’ve been talking to have been heavily loaded with jobs and fighting supply chain issues. I’m hoping we can get the stoves installed and operational in December, but it’s not sure yet. The window coverings, normally 4 weeks to delivery, are running 8-9 weeks; the stoves not much better. We’re also looking to update some of the appliances in the kitchen, and again, availability is… interesting.

Next vendors I need to talk to is the electrician to get the work in the shop started; and I figured out who installed our furnace and hvac systems, so I want them to come out and inspect and PM things. Since I don’t know what it was last looked at, getting relationships in place and a service schedule going before things break seems a good idea.

Things are progressing a bit slower than I’d hoped, because my vertigo (which I was diagnosed with a couple of years ago) decided to join in the fun, and it’s taken me and the doctors some time to get things dialed in to keep it on the sidelines. That has slowed my writing down a lot this last month, and I have a bunch of things I’ve wanted to write that I haven’t gotten to.

If November goes better for me on that, hopefully I’ll start catching up.

One thing I’m thinking of doing next issue is an Ask Me Anything area, maybe do that once a year. If you have a question on something, drop me an email or poke me on twitter with it, and I’ll add it to the list to try to answer.

I recently bought one of the new M1 Max 14” Macbook pros, and so far, I’m loving it. I’ll be talking about that down below in more detail, since it’s indicative of some major changes in what Apple is doing that I am really liking to see.

Why I print books like 2020.1

I had someone ask me about buying a paper copy of my new book, 2020.1, and why I didn’t have it for sale.

The short answer is I do the chapbooks primarily for myself, since I wish to have a good printed version of my favorite photos every year, and I’m not really interested in trying to sell things to people; I’m happy to give away the e-books to any and all instead.

The reality is, there’s very little market for a book of my photos, and in small quantities, they’re very expensive; getting my single copy of 2020.1 printed at Blurb was about $140. I would have to get that cost way down, and I’d have to start worrying about all of the details of trying to sell things — from logistics to marketing to handline sales to… to all of the crazy details money would involve — that I simply have no interest in doing so.

I would rather put my time into creating things than selling things, to be honest, and I don’t think attempts to sell would generate enough revenue to warrant the hours needed to make it happen. I am happy not feeling like I should turn things into money somehow; I’d rather focus more on creating tangible things others will like. So please, download and enjoy the e-books!

(Don’t) Print Your Photos

I’ve long been a proponent of printing my images and encouraging all of you to buy and use a printer. In the last year, I upgraded my photo printer to Canon’s new Pro-300, which I really love, and which I’ve used…

Twice since moving to Washington. Not including the 90 minutes I spent with Canon support debugging an error it started throwing due to being moved to a new state (hint: it turned out to be a slightly mis-aligned print cartridge, and removing and reseating them all fixed it).

In promoting this idea, I’ve followed the lead of photographer David duChemin, who’s long been an influence on my thinking, so I was a bit surprised when his latest Contact Sheet newsletter arrived, and he admitted that he had stopped printing his images.

He’s still working with printed copies of his images, but he’s decided that for most images, shipping them off to a lab to get printed makes more sense.

I admit that I love printing images and seeing my best images printed up to 13x19 or so. I also admit that I find doing prints well can be time consuming and fussy, which is why I’ve only hauled the printer out twice (and one of those was, honestly, to test it after the move).

David’s right here — for routine images, lab printing will cost a bit more, but save a lot of time and energy, and so shifting to printing via a lab (I’ve typically used Bay Photo, but want to warn you that around the holidays I’ve had them miss promised delivery deadlines a couple of times, but they do very good work overall).

So I’m changing my advice and following David’s lead here: I still think there’s a lot of value to having printed images in your hand, and I also think there’s a lot of value in working to make a great print through printing it out yourself, studying it and optimizing the print through a few iterations — that’s made me aware of a number of things that make a print better (even online) that I never noticed when only evaluating it on screen.

But I’m now reserving printing it myself to my wall-quality works. For routine stuff? It’ll go to a lab, and I’ll get a set of 8x10’s or similar to work through as part of the process of deciding what the portfolio pieces are going to be.

It’s a bit of time vs money tradeoff, but then, time is the thing I’m constantly short of these days…

Natural Landscape Photography Award Winners

A few months ago, a group of photographers (including Sarah Marino, Alister Benn and William Neill, all of whom I’ve talked about here in the past) announced the creation of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, intended to reward the creating of images showcasing realism, and as a counterpoint to so many awards that seem to have turned into “how good are your photoshop chops?” awards.

The first set of winners have been announced, and I am quite impressed. Two photographers that I’ve long used as guides and mentors on my own journey placed well in the contest: Ben Horne as runner up for Photographer of the Year, and Michael Frye won 1st place in the Grand Landscapes category.

There is some stunning imagery here but it’s imagery that honors the landscape and not the photographer. I think this inaugural contest was a stunning success, and I hope it continues and flourishes into the futures.

The New Chuqui Workshop

I’ve started working on building out and organizing my new shop, which I will be setting up to do woodworking and especially woodturning. I’ve found I’ve been fascinated by bowl turning, especially some of the work going on with segmented and hybrid wood/epoxy bowls, and so that’s the direction I’m starting out towards.

The new place has a dedicated shop area, more or less 20’ square. I need to get an electrician in to update the outlets (they are 110 520r outlets which seem to be an older and out of fashion design), and over time, I expect to take down that existing counter as I rethink the design, but I’ll be starting on the other side to the right of the stove with a miter saw station and storage area, which will also probably hold a router table system down the road.

Other phase 1 adds will be a table saw (either a deWalt worksite saw or perhaps a Laguna contractor style saw), drill press, with the lathe, a planer and a jointer added to the mix, along with dust collection. This is going to take me a few months to hash out completely, of course, but I now have enough of an idea of what I want to get started…

My woodworking skills are 15 years out of date, and my lathe work maybe double that, so this is effectively starting from scratch. I’m sure I’ll be talking about it as I do things, but this is really, for me, a thing that gives me a creative outlet that I can do inside (unlike birding) and away from computers and computer screens — although I must admit both laser cutter systems and 3D printers and CNC systems have caught my eye, but — later, once I really know how I might use them.

Remembering Steve

It’s been ten years since the death of Steve Jobs, and Apple remembered him in a video, mostly in Steve’s own words. I highly recommend watching it.

I spent 17 years at Apple, including much of the time when Steve returned and restored the company to greatness, and have spent most of my life involved with or making my living through the Apple Ecosystem. Steve’s impact on who I am and the life I’ve been able to live cannot be minimized, and I want to say I’m grateful to have been able to be in his sphere of influence all these years — even if, fortunately, at just enough distance that I never directly got to see the less positive bits of Steve directly — because Steve, like all of us, was a complicated person. But one I am grateful to have had influencing my life.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

  • Sigh. It was that kind of month, I guess.

The End of the Jony Ives Era

A couple of people have asked whether I bought anything new with the release of all of the new products this fall. They also were curious what I thought about the new Macbook Pros just announced.

The short answer is — I’m typing this on a new 14” Macbook Pro, with a Pro Max processor. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the rumor mill, but I will admit that the rumors about these upcoming devices had my anticipation up — and that so far, this device exceeds my expectations.

I was quite happy with the M1 Macbook Air, and it did 95% of what I needed just fine; the only time I could get it to struggle was when I was in Lightroom and fired up multiple long-running tasks at once (for instance: convert 100 images to DNG while creating both 1:1 previews and smart previews for those images). I am not at all surprised something like that hit the M1 processor with only 16 gigs of RAM hard, and I’m not criticizing it for struggling a bit there.

With the new Pro, I also upgraded to 32 gigs of RAM and upgraded to a 2 terabyte SSD, which will probably give me four or five years of headroom, before even thinking about having to clean up the disk.

I’m handing off the M1 Macbook Air to Laurie to upgrade her somewhat older Intel Macbook Air, and I expect she’ll be very happy with the results of that change. The M1 chip is perfect for 99% of what she does, and it’ll improve her workflows a fair bit.

This means I’m also using the Monterey release, and so far, it’s been a painless upgrade. I’ve heard it described as “Big Sur Lion”, and I think that’s a good take — it really is a performance/cleanup/bug fix release for the most part, and there are no big compatibility worries with it.

I won’t go into detail on either, because fortunately, I don’t have to. Sixcolors.com (Jason Snell and Dan Moren) have it covered:

I recommend these to you if you want to learn more.

As to other purchases this fall buying season, originally Laurie and I both held off upgrades to the iPhone 13, we’re quite satisfied with the 12’s overall. That said, we’re both on the Apple Upgrade program which kept reminding us we were eligible, and I decided to go ahead and upgrade mine, and so we both are getting new phones sometime in November.

The main reason I decided to upgrade was that I wanted to shift from the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which is huge, to the iPhone 13 Pro, which has a smaller form factor, and also give me access to their new macro mode, which I’m curious about. Laurie is upgrading her iPhone 12 pro to the iPhone 13 pro as well.

Once we have these phones in hand, my plan is to (finally) move off AT&T to T-Mobile, and pay off the upgrade program loans, in some ways, that simply makes it a bit too easy to upgrade every year — it’s more of a “why not?” decision than a “why?” one, and I’m ready to get off the upgrade treadmill. And while I’ve been with AT&T since my phone plan was with Cingular, I’ve been meaning to shift for a while, but never really had a strong reason to, since they were “just fine”. But with the iPhone 12, they tweaked out their plans to really boost the monthly bills to get to 5G access, and while I held off on that for a while, when we were moving and I was on the road I wanted to upgrade my data plan, and found out I couldn’t change that without updating to a new 5G plan, either, which really annoyed me. And then recently, we found out AT&T was a primary funder of the OAN network, which — okay, that is more than enough to stop giving them money. I’ll be done with them by the end of the year.

How does this all tie in to the end of Jony Ives at Apple? Well, in many ways, it doesn’t, except indirectly.

If you read Jason’s review, he calls out how similar this new Macbook Pro looks to the old Powerbook G4, and it’s clear to me that return to an older design style is intentional. This new generation of laptops seems a clear repudiation of the previous generation, where the design goals were simplification (USB C for all the things, and dongletown to make it all work), Apple’s belief that thin and light overruled other considerations, and well, the entire butterfly keyboard fiasco.

And the touch bar. Remember that? In 2016, Apple released it to huge fanfare (you can watch the keynote here) and seemed really proud of what is, in its way, some amazing technology. But it was a technology in search of a reason to exist, and it very clearly and loudly laid an egg with most Apple fans, including myself. 99% of my use of the touchbar was using the Touch ID sensor; the rest was a waste of space (and the removal of a physical escape key was an insult to the devices serious users).

To me, it was obvious that Apple quickly figured out it was a dog, because it didn’t take long for it to get moved to the back stage of future keynotes, and then kind of ignored; there was never any follow up by Apple enhancing or improving it — they cut their losses and moved one. The problem, of course, is that removing it would both be admitting it failed, and require major hardware revamping, starting at redesigned cases, and that’s expensive (and costly to corporate egos); so Apple just let it live on through that design generation of laptops, from 2016 through 2021. And now it’s dead.

Also, Jony Ives is no longer with Apple. These are related.

If there’s a common thread to the 2016 era laptops, it is that design decisions became the primary purposes for the devices: making it thinner and making it lighter overruled all other considerations — including usability and repairability. And to me, that means that inside the Apple decision hierarchy, the design team (run by — Jony Ives) had become so powerful they could ignore or veto the wishes and needs of the other teams.

The end result? We had a generation of laptops that were thin and light, but required us to carry a bunch of dongles to connect to the free world. We got the butterfly keyboard, because it was thinner and lighter, which many of us hated to type on, and which constantly broke, and which was quite expensive for Apple to repair. And we got the Touch Bar, which was a fascinating piece of technology very few people wanted or found any real use for.

Jony Ives drove a lot of the decisions that led to the release of the 2016 laptop generation — and in general, Apple’s user base hated the results.

And if you look back at that time, it was shortly after that we heard Ives had transitioned to focus on the design and building of the Apple Park spaceship HQ (in 2017), and then left the company to start his own. I think, honestly, he was pushed, or maybe nudged, more than he left on his own, but unless someone involved comes out and says so, that’s just speculation — but the timing here is suggestive. Ives made a generation of laptop that satisfied him as designer, but not the end customer, and Apple quickly recognized this and started quietly shifting direction again.

Why did it take five years to make this design shift back to a functional and usable computer? In part, the transition to the M1 chips: it makes not business sense to do two generational designs, and I think I’d agree with Apple’s thinking that bringing out this new design with Intel chips and then a year or so later migrating to M1’s would mute our enthusiasm for them. So Apple just gritted its teeth, worked on the M1 and the redesign, and tried to pretend nothing was wrong until these new generation computers could hit the market.

And this time, they guessed right, and by unwinding five years of decisions where design overruled all over decisions, we now have what I think all Apple fans can be happy with: powerful, functional devices that allow us to get our jobs done with minimal compromises.

I, for one, am thrilled to see this, and hoping Apple never loses sight of the fact that we expect great design — but not to the degree it means we can’t actually use the computers to get things done. In the previous generation, that need often got lost or ignored and left us finding ways to make do…

But I’m seriously happy to say that the “let’s kick butt” mentality is back with these new designs, and I expect this laptop can solve my needs for at least four or five years before I might start thinking about needing an upgrade (of course, wanting one is another matter…)

Photo Wednesday

Every Wednesday I'm posting an non-bird image from my collection and talking a bit about the image. And on Fridays, I'm posting a bird image as well. So twice a week I'm now starting to share my images again to the world at large with some bit of story about how and why the image came to be.

To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Health and Fitness

  • Quitting Youtube — as someone who’s worked at launching a Youtube channel multiple times and always walked away from the project, this does a good job of explaining why I always came to the realization that wasn’t what I wanted my future to be. Although, frankly, it’s still tempting, in theory.

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month, a few resources I use to keep up to date with Apple and the Apple Ecosystem:

  • 512pixels.net: This is the home of Stephen Hackett, co-founder of Relay.fm and a chronicler of the history of Apple. He does a lot of writing about Apple both today and in the past, and does it really well. This year, he did a kickstarter for a calendar of older Apple gear which is awesome (and sold out, unfortunately). If you are an Apple fan who is interested in how Apple became what it is today, he’s a good person to follow.

  • sixcolors.com: Founded by Jason Snell, who worked for and managed Macworld magazine for many years, this is my go to resource for staying up to date. Jason, and fellow Macworld alum Dan Moren, sift through the constant tidal wave of rumors and the many sites and pundits who talk about Apple, and have a really good sense of which bits and pieces deserve to be highlighted and how to put them in context. Jason’s analysis of what this all means and what he thinks Apple is doing is the kind of thoughtful writing I wish more Apple folks would do, so this is really the key piece that allows me to not have to try to sort through all of the other sites trying to figure out what I should be paying attention to. Dan and Jason do that for me.

  • Upgrade: This podcast features Jason and Relay.fm co-founder Myke Hurley in a weekly discussion about Apple. The two bounce ideas and opinions off each other in fun and interesting ways, and it is a podcast I tend to fire up and listen to each week as soon as it arrives on my phone.

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.
 

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues.