"Can't innovate anymore, my ass!"
June 11, 2013 9:02 AM Subscribe

At Apple's keynote presentation at the WWDC yesterday, scorn for Scott Forstall – their recently-fired VP of iOS software – ran rampant. His preference for skeuomorphic design (calendars that look like leather and so-on) was mocked repeatedly by Craig Federighi: “Look! Even without all that stitching, everything just stays in place.” But the real shocker was the completely redesigned iOS 7, created under the supervision of Jonathan Ive, who prior handled all of Apple's hardware design and none of its software. Previously Ive and Forstall were much at odds, reportedly refusing to even meet with each other—and it should be noted that Ives' famous idol, the legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams, famously rejected artificial wooden furnishings with his breakout design, the record player that was nicknamed "Snow White's Coffin" for its transparent lid. Forstall's ousting placed Ive in charge of interface as well as industrial design, and it was expected that the shift would lead to a change in iOS design philosophy. But the change was perhaps more radical than expected—a complete overhaul that looks simple to the point of cartoonishness, with abstracted icons and stark layouts. Some critics are already complaining that iOS 7 goes too far in the other direction; others note the deep rigor of its new rules-based design. You can hear Ive talk about his design here [warning: obnoxious Apple promo video]. And Apple threw its support behind Ive with an unexpectedly lovely short video about the design process [warning: possibly also obnoxious]: "We start to confuse convenience for joy, abundance with choice. There are a thousand no's for every yes."
posted by Rory Marinich (302 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite

(The title comes from an off-the-cuff remark by Apple's Phil Schiller made during a different part of yesterday's keynote.)
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:04 AM on June 11, 2013

The "can't innovate" comment was, I think, about the new Mac Pro, which is indeed very, very different. I'm not quite convinced by it yet, but if people wanted Apple to step up and do something new and interesting in the workstation space, they definitely did that.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:07 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

That's got to be weird for all the rank-and-file employees like designers and developers. The stuff you worked so hard on last year is now being openly mocked in public by management.
posted by smackfu at 9:08 AM on June 11, 2013 [29 favorites]

Well the new interface has got my approval. So Jony Ives can breathe easy on that front.
posted by mazola at 9:08 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I'm surprised the X Mavericks' and MBA's design focus on lower energy usage weren't getting more attention. I'm hard-pressed to think of any other conventional laptops that get anywhere near iPad-like battery life (without dragging around multiple battery packs). Pretty interesting direction to go towards, in that people expect a long charge out of an iPad, and one goal seems to be bringing that to regular laptops, refinement by refinement.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Those icons are not pretty, though.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Other than the gradients. I think it looks good. Granted, I have a big poster from the Helvetica documentary on my wall. The old design was definitely getting long in the tooth.
posted by thecjm at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The stuff you worked so hard on last year is now being openly mocked in public by management.

Apple has always been at war with skeuomorphic design.
posted by jaduncan at 9:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [69 favorites]

I don't know how much I can comment on an OS I haven't actually used yet, but it should be remembered that one of Dieter Rams' "10 Commandments" for good design is:

Good design is long-lasting.

Sometimes I wish more emphasis would be put on "If it ain't broke don't fix it" I'm not saying not to mess with anything, but I mean, were all those built-in app icons so terrible that they had to be changed so utterly that when my Mom upgrades, it's going to turn into half a dozen calls like "What icon do I click to look at the web now?"
posted by gwint at 9:10 AM on June 11, 2013 [15 favorites]

Give me a dot-matrix display and a theme that looks like System 7
posted by hellojed at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2013 [14 favorites]

The icons look like how an anime would depict smartphone icons. I feel like they'll either be super obnoxious and irritating to look at, in which case Apple'll fix them by the fall or else they'll be so obvious that after a few minutes you forget you're even looking at them. In either case it's fun to see them swinging for the fences—Apple's way more fun when it's fucking shit up than when it's conservatively iterating on the same damn thing for the tenth year in a row.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2013 [30 favorites]

I'm surprised the X Mavericks' and MBA's design focus on lower energy usage weren't getting more attention.

Linux and Windows already do adaptive task and wakeup scheduling, and the longer life in MBAs is more a function of Haswell. It does all appear nicely executed though.
posted by jaduncan at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

All that infighting sounds a lot like Microsoft.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

The repeated cracks against their old interface design were weird and unprofessional and came off as sycophancy. It's like Apple is that person who says, "hey, here's this thing I made that I'm really proud of, do you like it?" and you say "no" and they respond "oh, yeah, I pretty much always thought it sucked, I was hoping you'd agree with me on that."
posted by invitapriore at 9:11 AM on June 11, 2013 [15 favorites]

Odd how the chatter emphasizes iOS7's "flat" interface, when in fact it's not flat at all.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 9:12 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

(and the corollary to my comment is that it seems more like tech journalists are the ones always clamoring for a "new look and feel" rather than actual users)
posted by gwint at 9:12 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

the new mac looks truly amazing. also an increased emphasis on building a product in the US

and i'm suitably impressed with 7. it looks like an almost complete rebuild. there are substantial functional improvements, while updating the arguably aging design.
posted by ninjew at 9:12 AM on June 11, 2013

Well the new interface has got my approval. So Jony Ives can breathe easy on that front.

...but I was ok with 'OS X Sea Lion' though, so calibrate your 'taste' meters accordingly.
posted by mazola at 9:12 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

I am a registered developer. I have it in my hands. It's different. Parts of it look to me like Windows Phone. Parts look like Android.

In general, it feels like iPhone, while looking a bit different. Differences I've noticed are better.
posted by Mad_Carew at 9:13 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Who wants to watch nerds argue over pixels?
posted by boo_radley at 9:13 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

Now can I delete the accurséd Newsstand?
posted by sidereal at 9:14 AM on June 11, 2013 [31 favorites]

Apple has always been at war with skeuomorphic design.

With high-ranking double agents:
Steve Jobs Calculator Construction Set
"Needs more textures"
posted by now i'm piste at 9:14 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

You know, every headline or article I've read about the iOS 7 redesign has been all "ZOMG RADICAL," but as somebody who uses iOS 6 every day on my (old-ass) iPhone, to me it just sort of looks the same, but flatter.

Granted, 98% of my time is spent in Safari, but I think for a lot of people like me, whose interaction with the OS isn't particularly deep--who don't use calendaring or native email or send hundreds of iMessages--the experience will be pretty much the same. Which I guess is the idea.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:14 AM on June 11, 2013

what in the world.
posted by boo_radley at 9:15 AM on June 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

simple to the point of cartoonishness

So now we are admitting it? Oh, just the new design?
posted by DU at 9:15 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The screenies look very Microsoft to me.

Also, "Mavericks" is the worst name for an OS release ever. What's the next update going to be called, "Icemen?"
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:16 AM on June 11, 2013 [17 favorites]

Who wants to watch nerds argue over pixels?

It's not about pixels, it's about design. I am an enormous fan of Ives' industrial design work – speaking as somebody who follows a lot of industrial design, I think he's by far one of the greatest designers alive today – and I was excited to see what his take on software design would be. But I was expecting something flatter or colder: iOS 7 feels like cotton candy. (I'm playing with my developer preview now and it has so many little unobtrusive animations everywhere! It's wonderful!) And what fascinates me is that he achieved that warmth without sacrificing any of the severe modernist design tenants that got him his start in the first place.

In a lot of ways this reminds me of his original iMac, the ones with candy-coated backs.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:16 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

That's parallax, boo_radley.

I'm just excited about the hi-res iMac/Thunderbolt display hints.
posted by now i'm piste at 9:17 AM on June 11, 2013

Next after Mavericks is Spurs, followed by Rockets and then Jazz. Ray Ozzie will be in charge of Jazz.
posted by Mad_Carew at 9:17 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

what in the world.

Oh yeah, that parallax thing is super-freaky. I don't really get it.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:17 AM on June 11, 2013

Now can I delete the accurséd Newsstand?

YOU CAN STICK IT IN A FOLDER. I JUST DID THAT. It's sad that that is such exciting news BUT IT IS.

(You can also have multi-page folders, so now one single "bullshit" folder will contain all your bullshit at once!)
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:18 AM on June 11, 2013 [30 favorites]

The "rules based" thing harkens back to the HIG, which feels like a win....and those comments are encouraging, Rory.

You can also have multi-page folders, so now one single "bullshit" folder will contain all your bullshit at once!

So long overdue.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:18 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm glad that they're ditching skeumorphic design. It's ugly and clunky and has never looked or felt "Apple" to me. That said, this doesn't look like Apple, either; it looks like Microsoft doing a pretty good copy of Apple. Which, well, I like MS's Apple copies, so I'm down with it.

What I really wish would happen, though, is I wish Apple would take one or another of their recent-ish designs (phone or computer, and just freeze that sucker in amber. Market it as a rock-solid instant classic and don't mess with it. At all.

I was hoping that was their long-term plan when they came out with that one OS X release that had no new features whatsoever, but then the "everything must be like a tablet" disease hit...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:18 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Gotta say, (as a happy iPhone / Mac user) the blurred background looks very Android to me. I wonder if Apple is joking on Samsung / daring a lawsuit.
posted by gauche at 9:19 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

So, is the new Mac Pro based on the KF 20 coffee maker, or not?
posted by The River Ivel at 9:19 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

No more twee fake stitching and leather and heavy cardboard stock? Great.

Secretly Metro (or Windows 8, or whatever it's called now) is the best UI design for touchscreen devices.
posted by 2bucksplus at 9:19 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

For a few hours after the announcement, I didn't know "Mavericks" was a surfing spot in the Bay Area, so all I could picture was Tina Fey as Sarah Palin winking at the camera. Now I guess we have to exchange the "OS X Housecat LOLOL" jokes for "OS X Fresno LOLOL" jokes.

Looking forward to the features of iOS 7; not sure about the design yet.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:20 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I think we'll decide what's obnoxious or not.
posted by mysticreferee at 9:20 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Jony Ive re-designs the dollar bill. Via Waxy.org
posted by ColdChef at 9:20 AM on June 11, 2013 [32 favorites]

To be honest, it doesn't look all that different to me from any other phone OS; mostly icons crammed together.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's kind of funny that the "kill skeumorphism" release ends up having a UI that is a lot of physical layers, some of which mimic frosted glass.
posted by smackfu at 9:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Apple's way more fun when it's fucking shit up

Sit back and enjoy the next ten years.
posted by colie at 9:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

Okay, freaky thing about the parallax backgrounds: it's not JUST the backgrounds that move. The icons shift subtly from side to side as well.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I really did not think the visual refresh of iOS would be this polarizing. Personally I like it a lot, especially the mid-century modernish icons for the default apps. I think what's causing some people's negative reaction to it is that because Apple wants iOS 7's UI to remain familiar to current customers, they've sort of made the iOS 7 look a bit too uncanny valley compared to the current iOS design.
posted by gyc at 9:22 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Mavericks

which is.. not an animal name.

it was also a movie (based on a true story that's fairly significant in the surfing world)
posted by ninjew at 9:23 AM on June 11, 2013

It's kind of funny that the "kill skeumorphism" release ends up having a UI that is a lot of physical layers, some of which mimic frosted glass.

Makes more sense on a glass touchscreen than stitched leather.

I, for one, will miss the whimsy of the better-executed skeumorphism.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:23 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Secretly Metro (or Windows 8, or whatever it's called now) is the best UI design for touchscreen devices.

Exactly what I was thinking. The first thing I thought when I saw the one link was "Gee, it's Win8 with curves. How... novel..."

[Sidenote - I detested Windows 8 initially. I must admit, now that I have a work supplied Surface Pro and a home PC running it, it's starting to grow on me. That's not to say my Slackware partition is going anywhere anytime soon. I'm just saying... our hatred for Windows 8 may not have been premature, but I think we've been a touch stubborn, as well. XBox One still sucks, though.]
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 9:23 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Okay, freaky thing about the parallax backgrounds: it's not JUST the backgrounds that move. The icons shift subtly from side to side as well.

The little brushed-metal knobs in IOS 6 do that, too.
posted by gauche at 9:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Holy crap the new Mac Pro is stunning. I’ve been sticking with my old one for a while, but I’m eventually going to have to get one of those.

I’m just amazed that the cheese grater design Mac Pro still looks so good after 10 years, and I wondered how they would update it. I didn’t see this coming at all.
posted by bongo_x at 9:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

now i'm piste: "That's parallax, boo_radley.

I'm just excited about the hi-res iMac/Thunderbolt display hints."

I know it's parallax, it just seems stunty to put it in the background of a phone's homescreen. Distracting. I really like the control center and the multitasking change, but that homescreen effect is crazy.
posted by boo_radley at 9:24 AM on June 11, 2013

It's colorful and flat. So, it looks an awful lot like Windows 8 to me.
posted by oddman at 9:24 AM on June 11, 2013

Whoops, I misread. The highlight on the knobs does that in IOS 6. Not the knobs themselves.
posted by gauche at 9:24 AM on June 11, 2013

The icons look like how an anime would depict smartphone icons.

There's a whiff of retro-space-age sixties about the icons, to me. Purely aesthetically, I'm digging it.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:25 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

"At the Iron Throne's keynote presentation at the tournament yesterday, scorn for Eddard Stark – the recently-fired Hand of the King – ran rampant. His preference for legitimate succession (princes who look like their fathers and so on) was mocked repeatedly by Cersei Lannister ... "
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:25 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Anyone else notice that some of the icons have the gradient lighter on the top while some are lighter on the bottom? Seems kind of sloppy.
posted by octothorpe at 9:26 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

So, is this going to be Apple's Warring States period? It feels like it, especially when looking at a similar Microsoft period post-Gates.
posted by selfnoise at 9:26 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

For twenty years we've wrangled the z-axis into our interface designs. Modal dialogs, alerts, popups, opacity effects, drop shadows, bevels, embossings, and textured backgrounds have served as crude visual cues to separate planes of attention. They're often a chore to implement and impact performance on low-power devices.

Apple looks to free us of these ornamental constraints through parallax. Knowing Apple, their implementation is less gimmicky and more subtle than past attempts, and the idea that Ives has incorporated 3D into iOS's design language gives designers a frame of reference to do it right.

But I can't know for sure until I have a device in my hand.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 9:26 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm predicting some blowback for this from the folks who have irrational emotional investments in the dealings of large cap corporations, but so much of this is obviously Android-inspired. The tab-switching interface in Safari is very much like Chrome's, the multitasking interface is an axis-adjusted version of the task view in Android, and the transparent-overlay notification pane is right there too. And you know what? I'm okay with that. At this point I'd love a version of Android with a working audio stack and that doesn't crash the launcher two out of the three times I hit the home button on a developer device that Google had a hand in designing. Not to mention how the progress they made with the "look Android is responsive now!" release was swiftly undone with the next point release.

I really don't see the comparisons with Windows. Metro completely threw out the implied z-axis as a visual indicator and organizational scheme. iOS 7 just gets rid of superfluous gloss.

And re the Mac Pro, the only problem, and a problem that I've noticed with some other Apple designs in the past, is that it looks like nothing else that will be surrounding it, making it kind of an awkward thing to have on your desk.
posted by invitapriore at 9:27 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

Am I the only one that doesn't really like the new Mac Pro? This might just be a gut reaction to the radical redesign, but the shell just looks like.... nothing.

It does look totally badass and evil when they pull it open, though.
posted by graphnerd at 9:28 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

That new Mac Pro is pretty retro-futuristic in an awesome way. Especially when the Tron led lighting kicks in around the ports.
posted by 2bucksplus at 9:28 AM on June 11, 2013

Am I the only one that doesn't really like the new Mac Pro? This might just be a gut reaction to the radical redesign, but the shell just looks like.... nothing.

I love the aesthetics, but hate that it's basically like a laptop with regard to upgrades.
posted by jaduncan at 9:30 AM on June 11, 2013 [13 favorites]

So, is this going to be Apple's Warring States period? It feels like it, especially when looking at a similar Microsoft period post-Gates.

No; the Warring States was the last year or so, and it's over now.

So basically what happened is that Scott Forstall, the guy who's chiefly responsible for a whole lot of the original iOS interface, had a reputation for a long time as the "person most like Steve Jobs who isn't dead now", AKA he loved skeuomorphism and was also a complete dicknut to every single person. Brilliant guy, but he fought with EVERYBODY. In the struggle post-Tim Cook's taking the reins, Apple radically simplified its executive structure, and put Ive in charge of all design-related things, Federighi in charge of all engineering-related stuff, and Eddy Cue in charge of all services (AKA online) stuff. I think I have that right. And all the other senior VPs report to one of those three.

This was the first post-shuffle keynote, and there was a HUGE emphasis on Apple's saying, "Yeah, we're still good at innovating and stuff, maybe even better now because we got rid of all the assholes." Lots of emphasis on California and catching waves and changing the world, even more so than usual.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:31 AM on June 11, 2013 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: a thousand no's for every yes.
posted by mazola at 9:32 AM on June 11, 2013 [12 favorites]

I'm not going to fully judge the icons -- indeed, the entire thing -- until I can see them on the device and make whatever customizations I want (Forex, there will not be a face on my screen.)

There is one I am going to judge on. Making the Safari Icon look more like a compass? When you have a compass app? That's bad.

It does look totally badass and evil when they pull it open, though.

Just put a miniature wrap around couch and it'll look like a Mini Cray 1

-E
posted by eriko at 9:32 AM on June 11, 2013 [12 favorites]

The Mac Pro initially looked completely gimmicky to me, but on further review it does seem fairly functional (as well as gimmicky) while still being modular. So that's good.

iOS7, for good or ill, barely looks like iOS aside from things like the icon for the Internet still being a compass.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:32 AM on June 11, 2013

MetaFilter: possibly also obnoxious
posted by brundlefly at 9:34 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

the multitasking interface is an axis-adjusted version of the task view in Android

Both of which are ripping off the OS that got it right the first time: WebOS. Palm were the ones who introduced card-based multitasking, and it was *brilliant*. (Even better than the basic UI innovation was that it was true multitasking; you could start loading a webpage, flip to a different card, and the page would keep loading.)
posted by asterix at 9:35 AM on June 11, 2013 [16 favorites]

graphnerd: "It does look totally badass and evil when they pull it open, though."

I was thinking it looks like something that could be in the ice skate case in Ronin.
posted by brundlefly at 9:35 AM on June 11, 2013

iOS7, for good or ill, barely looks like iOS aside from things like the icon for the Internet still being a compass.

They should have made the Safari icon a working compass just like how the calendar and clock icons are functional.
posted by cazoo at 9:36 AM on June 11, 2013 [10 favorites]

I'm not that much of a Mac guy and they had me pretty convinced, so there's that.
posted by Artw at 9:37 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

It does look totally badass and evil when they pull it open, though.

It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:37 AM on June 11, 2013 [25 favorites]

I'm already pathetically craving the Mac Pro, but also can't stop thinking "Every time I press one of these black controls, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let me know I've done it."
posted by Erasmouse at 9:37 AM on June 11, 2013 [44 favorites]

OSX 1.10: Galactic Hyper-Hearse
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:39 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

If, as I suspect, this new Mac Pro supports a Retina display, I am going to have to buy it. Then it can be the "last last desktop computer I ever buy hon, honest" to replace this bulging Mac Pro 2008.
posted by bonaldi at 9:39 AM on June 11, 2013

I like the new Mac Pro design, but I think the real problem with it will be that you can't stack anything on it. Set a file folder on top and either the computer will overheat or your folder will catch on fire. I also imagine there will also be a rash of Big Gulps spilled straight into the guts of the computer, and that might be even more likely if you place the tower under your desk.
posted by stopgap at 9:40 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

If you want to try out the neato parallax wallpaper before Ios 7 comes out, there's an app in the Android Market that does the same.
posted by octothorpe at 9:41 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

When Forstall got the axe and Ive got bumped up from industrial design god to human interface god we all knew what was coming. They have finally managed to purge all of Jobs' touches, I mean he was the guy who loved calculators with buttons and calendar apps with faux leather.

Whatever, this is like people arguing over Versace and Louis Vuitton to me. I've dabbled at the edges with my baby apple stuff, iPads and iPhones. Haven't been able to convince myself to go all the way. It is getting kind of embarrassing showing up at Starbucks with my Dell though. I guess I need a macbook to go with all my other lifestyle accessories at this point.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:41 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

So the middle bit's where you put your cup of coffee to keep it warm.
posted by 2bucksplus at 9:42 AM on June 11, 2013 [6 favorites]

The new Mac Pro is a fucking embarassment for professional users. Four memory slots, fetishistic Thunderbolt peripherals that are completely MIA, plus it looks like a fucking ashtray, and has no release date. What the fuck.

Looks aside, given the number of Thunderbolt ports, I'm reminded of the first iMac, where its USB ports drove adoption of the format by peripheral makers. One way to drive peripheral support and finally get Thunderbolt rolling, maybe. Intel isn't really helping matters much, probably to keep USB 3 alive.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:43 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Given all the hate flowing through the net for all this new stuff I predict huge success.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2013 [28 favorites]

Last year on a vacation I went a few days without using my phone at all. I hadn't looked at it in days. The thing I remember most about grabbing it and using it for the first time after the break was that I couldn't believe how brightly colored the home screen icons were. Stuff like the bright green messages and phone icons, they were almost glowing, the whole thing looked very Fisher-Price kids toy. After a few days that feeling wore off.

My first response on seeing the iOS7 screens was much the same, the colors of icons seem even brighter, the green messages icon really does look day-glo bright now. Overall I like the movement towards flatter design and I'm generally pleased to see the new direction (I love the Windows Phone UI since it came out) but I really wish I could slap a 25% de-saturate filter on the home screen and mellow out the colors on all those icons.

I also wonder how this will affect app icons going forward. When the OS debuts, will my phone look strange with realistic icons on most apps? Will Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram debut new muted flat icons by the time this gets released?
posted by mathowie at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2013

That Moment When iOS Became Android

In general, iOS 7 is a newly skinned version of iOS that finally matches up to current mobile design trends. Gone are the leather notebooks and green felt gaming tables – in is a minimal flat aesthetic. And to be perfectly honest, it does look beautiful. Jony Ive and his team did a fantastic job at skinning iOS and turning it into a modern looking mobile UI.

But every time Apple does this song and dance, we seem to sit throughout the keynote going, “Whoa, that’s been on Android forever.” Or even, “Umm, that looks just like how Android works.” Today was no different. While iOS 7 looks nice from the outside, many of the new goodies remind us a lot of our favorite mobile OS.

And not that we should need to remind you, but don’t take this too seriously. We’re just having some fun and pointing out things that gave us a chuckle. We are happy to see iOS evolve, just like we will be happy to see every other mobile OS evolve. Companies pushing boundaries and taking features to new levels is what we love about this industry.

Apple's iOS 7 'copied' everyone - and that's a good thing

Apple certainly did a little shopping around when they decided what new features to include, and even how they will all look. Android's represented well, as is Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS and even Meego. Fans of all these operating systems are taking to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to express their feelings over "the borrowing", and there is quite a little uproar being made. But not from me.

I think what they did is a good thing.

Cherry picking features from the competition means the users of that same competition might get a few laughs at your expense, but it means much more than that. It's validation for the designers and engineers who came up with it first, and it delivers great stuff that looks good to the end users.

While iOS 7 may look like a blend of Holo Light with MIUI icons, that flat card inspired interface is a great way to traverse your way through what your phone has to offer. We love it in Google Now and the other updated Google applications, and iOS users will love it when they get the update this fall. And the folks who originally designed it, wherever they may be, can know that they bring joy to millions with their design. The same goes for the Pandora inspired iTunes Radio, or the wireless sharing originally thought up by Bump, or HTC Sense 4's lock screen notifications. Those are features everyone wants, and now iPhone users can have them.

While you're reading through the lists of what Apple "stole" and who they stole it from, try to remember that in this business everybody steals from everybody else.

posted by zombieflanders at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

2bucksplus: "So the middle bit's where you put your cup of coffee to keep it warm."

It would have to be. Apple hasn't included a cup holder in their computers IN YEARS.
posted by m@f at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2013 [13 favorites]

asterix, webOS was amazing, and I miss my time with it. They really did it right. I was secretly hoping that Google would buy up all the webOS assets and make it a front end for Android.
posted by deezil at 9:47 AM on June 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

Just put a miniature wrap around couch and it'll look like a Mini Cray 1

I wonder if Cray Inc had massive internal struggles between the guy that insisted supercomputers should always have sofas built-in and the guy that hated sofa-ism in design.
posted by colie at 9:49 AM on June 11, 2013 [37 favorites]

Sofa-morphism.
posted by mazola at 9:50 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

also the physical design of the new iPhone is pretty excellent. It's almost like a bezel-less tv set in appearance.
posted by boo_radley at 9:51 AM on June 11, 2013

And to be perfectly honest, it does look beautiful. Jony Ive and his team did a fantastic job at skinning iOS and turning it into a modern looking mobile UI.

And this is what it has come to - evaluating an OS based on how pretty the icons are.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:53 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Does the iOS 7 Photo app kill the Places tab, with the map? If so, I am sad---I loved that map. Pulling it up and seeing my road trips was one of life's great joys.

As for the Mac Pro: No way to upgrade graphics cards? No way to install more internal drives? God dammit, Apple, now I hate you again.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:53 AM on June 11, 2013

I'm reminded of the first iMac, where its USB ports drove adoption of the format by peripheral makers

The difference being that the iMac was an everyman's computer, not the top-of-the-line workhorse. I think this iteration is going to be a tough sell to audio and graphics pros, who are used to outfitting the towers with stacks of hard disks and PCI cards and as much RAM as they can handle.

Having to buy an external Thunderbolt chassis for any of that stuff would be sort of a bummer. I almost wonder if they'll also offer a tower or rackmount version.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:54 AM on June 11, 2013

I actually have a wp8 phone now, and I gotta say I miss the iOS icons I had where I could tell what stuff was. I don't know why all my icons have to be the same color, except for randomly Kindle, Netflix and GPS. Is it part of the HID specs that icons can be blue or orange and nothing else?
posted by Ad hominem at 9:54 AM on June 11, 2013

I was hoping that Apple would make iOS more modular, i.e., allowing apps to communicate more closely, providing services at a more fine-grained level than the app. It didn't happen, though there are hints of iOS moving that way; multitasking is less locked-down than before, and Apple have announced audio/MIDI sharing between apps; and then there was the ability of apps to provide navigation services (borne out of the necessity of the Apple Maps cockup). Perhaps in iOS 8, apps will be able to offer to provide other services, such as, say, letting the user send/share/upload text/images/documents to app-defined endpoints (imagine if the Flickr or Dropbox app could appear as a standard option in 'share' menus) or even offer alternative text-entry methods à la Swype.
posted by acb at 9:55 AM on June 11, 2013

also the physical design of the new iPhone is pretty excellent. It's almost like a bezel-less tv set in appearance.

The new iPhone that came out last September?
posted by acb at 9:55 AM on June 11, 2013

Cool details:

— When you're zooming in and out of Maps or rotating them around, a little bar appears at the top to show you the current scale of the map in tenths of a mile.

— Compass calibration has changed from "rotate this around in a loop like an idiot" to showing you a circle whose compass points light up when they've been successfully calibrated. It's really cool.

— The Compass app also includes a level. Hehehehe.
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:55 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

imagine if the Flickr or Dropbox app could appear as a standard option in 'share' menus

It's not? That's another feature ripe for adoption from Android, then.
posted by jepler at 9:56 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I was hoping that Apple would make iOS more modular, i.e., allowing apps to communicate more closely, providing services at a more fine-grained level than the app.

Yeah, this is a good point, and it's what all the chearleading about surface-level nonsense misses. Intents are a huge usability advantage that Android has over iOS, and the absence of that type of data-sharing is frankly ridiculously regressive and inexcusable from a software design standpoint. But of course that's nitpicking next to discussions of icon gradients and parallax.
posted by invitapriore at 9:58 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Ive is so hardcore minimal he cut the apostrophe.
posted by notyou at 9:58 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

His torso isn't minimal though.
posted by colie at 10:00 AM on June 11, 2013

asterix, webOS was amazing, and I miss my time with it. They really did it right. I was secretly hoping that Google would buy up all the webOS assets and make it a front end for Android.

I was with you until the last few words.

The one thing putting me off trying Android is that everything is written in Java. If Google would (due to the Oracle lawsuit or some other impetus) abandon Java and replace it with a better language, it'd be a great improvement. But Java is a horrible language; a sort of dumbed-down Fisher-Price C++ designed to be explicable to management types in a PowerPoint slide deck, created at the height of the OO fad, and consequently dogmatically requiring that everything be done with objects and classes, even if it makes no sense. (“Hello World” in Java involves defining a class with a method which calls system.out.println("Hello World");.) It's a mediocre language which slows everyone down to the level of the average. I don't want any part of a future that's written entirely in Java.
posted by acb at 10:01 AM on June 11, 2013 [14 favorites]

Looks aside, given the number of Thunderbolt ports, I'm reminded of the first iMac, where its USB ports drove adoption of the format by peripheral makers. One way to drive peripheral support and finally get Thunderbolt rolling, maybe.

uncleozzy got it right: that's not what the Mac Pro is for. If that's what they were trying to do, they should have kept at it (and they probably will) with the iMacs; the Pros are for people who want or need to customize their machines and build them out with options Apple doesn't support from the factory.
posted by asterix at 10:02 AM on June 11, 2013

I love that a flashlight is now included at the OS level, one double click away. I still have a productivity app on my phone that I don't use, except for the simple flashlight feature it included (without ads or tricks or anything other crap I found in other flashlight apps). Now I'm glad I won't have to go to a second screen and fiddle with locating the app whenever I need a little light.
posted by mathowie at 10:02 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

phaedon: "The new Mac Pro is a fucking embarassment for professional users. Four memory slots, fetishistic Thunderbolt peripherals that are completely MIA, plus it looks like a fucking ashtray, and has no release date. What the fuck"

I'm a pro, and while I'm not totally sold yet, I'm cautiously optimistic.

You do know that 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports basically translates to 12 8x PCIe 2.0 slots with full dedicated bandwidth, plus the ability to daisy chain even more devices that will share that bandwith, right?

They weren't kidding when they said this is the most expandable Mac ever, it's just not expandable inside the case.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:02 AM on June 11, 2013 [14 favorites]

The mac pro suffers from the same thing all Apple desktops suffer from: it looks great on a podium with nothing connected. Once you start actually using the thing, all the pretty industrial design goes right out the window. OK, you can turn it around and it lights up -- but if you have 12 cables tucked into the back of it, how the hell are you going to turn it around easily? Yeah, it looks nice, but once you have all sorts of crap stacked up beside it (because it has no internal expansion, and it's a *pro* box), it's going to look like the head of squid which passed through a pile of floating cardboard boxes. Maybe that's the intent, who knows?

iOS7 looks like fun. I'm wondering what they really mean by "multitasking" here, and how battery life is going to be impacted. I didn't see any change is usability, except for maybe the drag up control panel. Yeah bling... but I like bling.

Mavericks is a shitty name even if the idea of switching to places makes a lot of sense. The biggest applause was for bringing back the multiple monitor support that lion took away. That kind of irked me -- he went on to demo it like it was magical, and all I could think of was how presumptuous it was to pretend you didn't fuck up by taking that exact feature away several years earlier. Other than that, it seemed like a release designed to support lower wattage devices, which is a good thing.

I was waiting for new macbook pros. The 13" will benefit greatly by getting a lesser wattage higher performance (higher than the airs ) haswell part -- assuming they use the part that is analogous to the ivy bridge part they used. Sigh...
posted by smidgen at 10:03 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm okay with the new iOS look. Its simplified icons should look pretty nice against my equally-simplified art. I might even lose my jailbreak for it when it hits the streets, though I know I'll be missing the hell out of f.lux at night. And honestly half the new features they added were things I've been missing like crazy since switching from Android - I'm really hoping that the hint of scrolling I see in the "share panel" means that apps can register as places to share things, like Android.

But the new Air, with its extreme emphasis on battery life, was very much SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY for me. I had my 2010 Air on a Genius bar just last week, contemplating getting a new battery. Now it's getting replaced with one that'll have a whole DAY of use, and will have a 512g drive as a $300 upgrade - SSDs are finally dropping into the realm of affordability! I might replace the old one's battery anyway, as it's gonna get given to an acquaintance who's pretty damn broke.

Plus I get a backlit keyboard and ambient light sensor again. Really, the only thing I'll be wanting after this machine is an e-paper display so I can sit outside in the sun to draw.
posted by egypturnash at 10:05 AM on June 11, 2013

The only thing I need from Apple right now is a retina-class desktop monitor at 27-30".

Okay, and the admission that Objective C is a heaping, steaming, evolutionary dead end that will be summarily dropped in favour of a suite of three or four vastly more useful and efficient languages because the LLVM back-end in Xcode means that all ObjC really has been for the past mmm 3 years or so is just a parser. Can we please PLEASE start using something with much less syntactical horse-shit as well as abandoning the 40 year old header file happy "I Tell You Three Times" coding model? Oh and how about some really meaty functional easing? Blocks are a joke.

k thanks
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:06 AM on June 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

For anybody wondering, the word 'rigor' in the context of design means 'bullshit'; it's one of those words you put into a sentence when you don't have enough syllables. The basic emotional urge behind this approach to design is to subjugate subjectivity by making arbitrary rules and then arbitrarily sticking to them - in theory this creates a whole which reflects its parts, but in practice, everything is left to taste, nothing lines up and everything needs to be tweaked.

Spoken either like a non-designer or like a shitty one.

"Rigor" in the context of design refers to understanding the purpose behind your interfaces. The more options you're going to give your user, the more interfaces you're going to need to display them, and it becomes the role of a designer to understand the purpose of all these choices, the contexts in which they'll exist, enough that users will be able to work as many of them out intuitively as they can.

I am enormously grateful that Apple took some of Android's best design features, for instance, but I have an 80-year-old grandfather who bought a Nexus tablet for some damnfool reason and the man can't figure out how to make it do anything. There's no clear indicator that pushing a button has launched an app, or taken you to a new place, or whatever it is the button does. It's confusing. It confuses ME on occasion, and I am such a cyberpunk that I flamed me own dad.

iOS has been better than Android for pretty much ever, since it had quite a head start, but it had some very confusing choices. The various linens that appear either underneath or on top of your screen, for instance: sometimes they slide over your screen, sometimes your screen slides up to reveal it. It's a small detail that confuses somewhat how a phone's interface sticks together. And there were a lot of choices which weren't BAD, but they were still kind of loosely fitted into the whole.

From my cursory playthrough with iOS 7, it's kind of incredible how much tighter it is at fitting things together. Windows always exist ABOVE the home screen, and when you're switching between apps you don't get the carousel transition: you see your various windows floating over the top. Meanwhile, both notifications and options slide over the top of your screen, blurring the screen rather than hiding it so you always know it's underneath. Keyboards work the same way. And some of that was taken from PreOS and Android, but a lot of it is new. Some of iOS's unique design choices have been toyed with, and the result is software that feels much more "solid", which is a tough thing to make a series of abstracted buttons and icons feel like.

"Rigor" is THE important thing in the context of design at the scale that an operating system requires. When critics discuss things in OSes that feel weak or faulty, they tend to talk about the lack of structure underpinning a design choice. Finder has been routinely criticized, for instance, for hiding your directory path from you; in doing so it can make navigation throughout a complex computer structure difficult, and finding things tough as well. Most of Linux is just a big ole design mess because until recently, few distros had a serious design lead looking over them all. Even now, the people working on Ubuntu and Kubuntu aren't nearly as experienced about this stuff as Ive is.

Stop acting like design isn't a rigorous field of study/engineering just because you don't understand it. As the article I linked in the FPP points out, rigor is much HARDER to attain when you're dealing with the abstractions of software, because you can ignore any rules you want to and that often leads to a total design muddle. Software UI is hard. I don't know if it's any harder or easier than hardware, but it certainly presents unique challenges, and those challenge don't just go away because UI is arbitrary. (We can get into how UI ISN'T arbitrary if you'd like, how it's the nebulous bridge between the actual mechanical functions that a computer can perform and the limits of the human mind/body, which is why accessibility design – something Apple utterly excels at – is such an important field, but hopefully that is a nit that nobody here needs picked?)
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [27 favorites]

Watching the iOS 7 demo, I just kept thinking of Dieter Rams's designs for Braun. This may be in part because of my lack of exposure to Android as an iPhone user, as well as lack of exposure to Windows 8 (my IT department is not even acknowledging its existence, as far as I can tell).

When they were showing the redesigned iOS weather app at first I thought they were showing the Yahoo weather app. It seems that Yahoo was anticipating the design direction of iOS 7.

(And the new Mac Pro? Hello, Power Mac G4 Cube.)
posted by needled at 10:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

bonaldi: "If, as I suspect, this new Mac Pro supports a Retina display, I am going to have to buy it. Then it can be the "last last desktop computer I ever buy hon, honest" to replace this bulging Mac Pro 2008"

They said several times that it could drive "3 4k displays", and there's apparently some 5192x2880 background images in the Mavericks beta, so it's looking likely that there'll be a 27"-30" display to go with it when it comes out.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:10 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

When that picture of the Mac Pro kept showing up next to the WWDC headline in my feedly, I thought feedly had screwed up somehow.

"Why is there a photo of a shiny plastic bushing there?"
posted by notyou at 10:10 AM on June 11, 2013

Love the new MacPro - new-school Unix workstation.

Because, I used to do Unix workstation support. The servers I'd upgrade with more disk or RAM every now and again, but by the time the users noticed the box needed more RAM or disk, it was time to upgrade the whole box anyway. The only time I'd need to add a card was if we were repurposing it as a server - usually something with a fuckton of serial interfaces or NICs. When the workstation went obsolete, and everyone switched to PC's - they weren't upgraded or expanded once deployed. They are generally retired exactly as they were spec'd at time of purchase.

Hobbyists who like to think of themselves as Professionals tinker endlessly with high-spec systems, mixing and matching hardware and taking great pride in getting their upgrades to work - but actual pros, people for whom a high-spec box is a means to an end, they buy a box, ride it for two or three years, and then stick it in the corner as a departmental server, QA box or make the intern use it. They might request a RAM or HDD upgrade a year or two into it.

What's more, everyone in Apple's target market is using Drobo RAIDs and a couple of RED cameras... 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports, a full PCIe2 channel per pair... I don't think most users are going to miss old fashioned knuckle-slicing slots and bays. Apple is wagering there isn's much of a market for über-power-users who actually need and can afford to fill 6 PCIe3 slots with cards running at full speed - and those are likely to be custom Linux applications, anyhow.

For a hi-po pro system aimed at animators, multimedia editors, and photographers - it hits the sweet spot in a lot of ways.

It needs dual 10GBase-T ports, tho... Gigabit is old and weak. Also, it needs a clear case, because the outside is boring. The assembly inside is gorgeous - like something out of a science fiction movie.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:12 AM on June 11, 2013 [16 favorites]

I don't mind Objective C; especially since they added blocks.

Though the fact that everything goes through LLVM does look like a Chekhov's Gun for the replacement of Objective C. Or even an architecture switch; perhaps at some point, Apple will retool XCode to generate App Store submissions in a LLVM bytecode format, with the App Store compiling it to the purchaser's architecture at download time. Which could allow Apple to turn on a dime and say that the iPad 7 will be Intel-based and/or the next MacBook Air will be ARM-based, with App Store apps updating automatically.
posted by acb at 10:12 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

GameCenter update: completely redesigned, still hideous. Is this just because I'm not a big multiplayer gamer something or does Apple just not understand gaming?
posted by Rory Marinich at 10:13 AM on June 11, 2013

I don't know what GameCenter is even supposed to be besides a thing I can't delete.
posted by 2bucksplus at 10:16 AM on June 11, 2013 [26 favorites]

The reason I thought computers had skeuomorphic design was because there was not a platonic ideal for what a "scheduling application in a computer should be" or "what a place to store electronic texts should look like". If we want to make them look like "calendars" or "bookshelves" it's because there's some human need to make it more of itself so to speak. And yeah it can be kind of hokey if it's over the top. But these pitch ideological battles over this seems sort of bad even when it's the designers.
posted by ishrinkmajeans at 10:16 AM on June 11, 2013

acb: "The new iPhone that came out last September?"

No. This thing. It's all over images from the keynote.
posted by boo_radley at 10:19 AM on June 11, 2013

So is this going to be confusing if I update? Is the functionality of the iPhone any different now, or just the appearance? Because holy shit, if it's anything like what they did with iTunes...Apple, please stop fucking with iTunes. You had it right like 10 years ago. These redesigns have just made it take more effort to find my music.

I think maybe I just got old.
posted by Hoopo at 10:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

No. This thing. It's all over images from the keynote.

That's just a closeup of an iPhone 5 with the top and bottom of the phone cut off by the camera?
posted by mathowie at 10:21 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

mathowie: "That's just a closeup of an iPhone 5 with the top and bottom of the phone cut off by the camera?"

Huh. I did not recognize that. It's a good look for the iPhone.
posted by boo_radley at 10:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Objective C is a heaping, steaming, evolutionary dead end that will be summarily dropped in favour of a suite of three or four vastly more useful and efficient languages

Really curious what languages you think are reasonable replacements. As far as compiled languages go, I don't see a whole lot of options.
posted by kiltedtaco at 10:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I like that Apple has a consistent design philosophy and tries to stick with it. It gives the user a sense of predictibility.

The most frustrating thing about Windows is that everything still feels entirely arbitrary. You never know what shit will do and features, and even basic OS functionality, seems tracked on in strange places. Like why do I have to hit ctrl-alt-delete to change my password or bring up task manager.

That is the real argument against skeumorphic design, that it eliminates predictibility. Some buttons randomly have textures, some apps have knobs that look like something off a 70s stereo, some apps have cutesy 8 segment led displays.

The downside is that it seems limiting. Computers are everything machines right? So why only two shades of icons guys. Yeah I know it is for my own good, but I want some of my icons to look different.

I guess it is a constant struggle.
posted by Ad hominem at 10:24 AM on June 11, 2013

The one thing putting me off trying Android is that everything is written in Java.

I don't think this has been true for a long time.
posted by Slothrup at 10:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Ars Technica's first look at the new Pro. Long story short: Shiny and Darth-Vadery, but the emphasis on Thunderbolt for expansion will not be kind to the people who upgrade early.

I don’t do much video work, and the four internal drive bays of the existing Mac Pro enclosure became a comfy standard for me and my work. Anything more seems like too many—but zero extra drive bays is, to put it mildly, too few. Now I will be forced to replace my existing eSATA RAID enclosure since eSATA/Thunderbolt adapters are stupidly expensive and there are no PCI slots in the machine to accommodate an eSATA adapter card. Considering the still-high price of external Thunderbolt enclosures, the price of the Mac Pro better be reasonable because it’s clear that many of us will be forced to take this route as well.

posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:25 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

If the extent of improving your OS is its icons - meh.... really...

Is it more functional? Does the user experience actually improve? Did they improve (not just change) the development platform? Does it support future hardware improvements?

Apple has had it right when it comes to providing things at people's fingers - but thus far all I see is them blowing smoke up people's asses about design with this. Window dressing is good to get right if you've got it wrong the first time. They didn't. Explain to me how this actually makes user's lives better. Are they just polishing a turd?
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:28 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Slap*Happy: "What's more, everyone in Apple's target market is using Drobo RAIDs and a couple of RED cameras... 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports, a full PCIe2 channel per pair... "

I was just my friends post-production house, he was finishing working cutting a new HBO show and showed me his workflow. Using a Mac Pro, which isn't at his desk, they are all in the server room, and he mounts the shares, cuts in Avid. He's cutting using ProRes and mounts the SAN disks from a linux filestore.

Himself never worries about formats, that's the I/O departments job to transcode and ingest the media.

Effectively, he as a "pro" doesn't touch the hardware, that's the IT guys job.

The FX unit all has their own workstations, but I'd imagine in a scenario they would put all their Quatros & Red Rockets in a thunderbolt enclosure. When it's time to upgrade, you just "emtpy the trash" and get a new trashcan Mac Pro.
posted by wcfields at 10:29 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

The one thing putting me off trying Android is that everything is written in Java.
I don't think this has been true for a long time.

? The underlying systems software isn't, but every native Android app is written in Java for sure, even if you're targeting the NDK.*

Meaning that even in cases where your app is partly written in C/C++, not all of it will be.
posted by invitapriore at 10:30 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

every native Android app is written in Java for sure, even if you're targeting the NDK.

Ish.

The NDK is a toolset that allows you to implement parts of your app using native-code languages such as C and C++. For certain types of apps, this can be helpful so you can reuse existing code libraries written in these languages, but most apps do not need the Android NDK.

Before downloading the NDK, you should understand that the NDK will not benefit most apps. As a developer, you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks. Notably, using native code on Android generally does not result in a noticable performance improvement, but it always increases your app complexity. In general, you should only use the NDK if it is essential to your app—never because you simply prefer to program in C/C++.

Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on. When examining whether or not you should develop in native code, think about your requirements and see if the Android framework APIs provide the functionality that you need.

posted by jaduncan at 10:33 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's really flat, more matt. It looks like there's still gradients on some of those icons. Personally, I don't like it - but what do I know - I'm still nostalgic for the OS 9 windows - double click at the top to get the blinds to roll up ...
posted by carter at 10:33 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The first thing I thought when seeing the new Mac Pro:

"Cool, but they just made even more difficult to rack-mount the goddamn thing. 'Pro' my ass."
posted by Argyle at 10:34 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Ha, sorry jaduncan, I was editing my post regarding that misspeak when you posted that.
posted by invitapriore at 10:35 AM on June 11, 2013

Rory - I am actually a shitty designer, well spotted, but I was not referring to the rigorous adherence to design standards in the context of an operating environment (a situation which still requires constant judgement calls and decision making, even if there is a framework in which to make these decisions) but rather the claim of rigorousness in the design elements which border on aesthetic - it is possible to say that color choices reflect a rule-based approach, for example, but in reality color is context dependent, emotion dependent, individual dependent, mood dependent - in other words you are only making rules to avoid admitting that the rules are meaningless.

A claim can be made that the new interface is more self-similar, and I agree that this is a worthwhile goal in a system that does a million different things, but self-similarity can also lead to an environment where everything looks like everything else. At what level of differentiated functionality do you differentiate visually? These are never easy questions, since they require an understanding of the user's understanding, which of course cannot be known.

My point about the word 'rigor' still stands, however, it is one of these words which has grown like kudzu in this vocabulary and often means less than better words (consistency, predictability, etc.) The word rigor is used in place of these words, and this is only my opinion (if one guided by constant exposure to people using it in this context) to dispel precisely the myth about design being completely subjective that you are eager to dispel. However, design cannot and will not be scientific, it will at best be scientistic, having some of the qualities many of the affectations but not really the same thing. If it were, there would be nothing to argue with people over the internet about. You will notice the story about childish designers refusing to speak to each other at this billion dollar publicly traded corporation; that should tell you something about the nature of the subject at hand.
posted by Teakettle at 10:35 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

I'm a developer and we just installed ios7 on one of the phones in our office. So far we all agree that the overall aesthetic and changes in form and function are badass and we're stoked about the new features we're going to be able to incorporate into our apps. The biggest things we find atrocious are the icons. They are too neon, too simple, and in the case of Calendar, Reminders, and Calculator, ugly as all hell.

But being able to put Newsstand in a folder is the be all end all success of iOS 7 for sure. :P
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 10:39 AM on June 11, 2013

Using a Mac Pro, which isn't at his desk, they are all in the server room

How does this work? A separate, low-powered workstation acting as a thin client? Or just really long video cables?
posted by stopgap at 10:40 AM on June 11, 2013

I was so excited when I saw the first picture of the Mac Pro because I thought they were going for the cyberpunk-belljar look but was quickly disappointed when it was revealed to be Darth Vader's ashcan.

That's an interesting casemod idea though...
posted by Therapeutic Amputations at 10:40 AM on June 11, 2013

I'm a developer and we just installed ios7 on one of the phones in our office. So far we all agree that the overall aesthetic and changes in form and function are badass and we're stoked about the new features we're going to be able to incorporate into our apps. The biggest things we find atrocious are the icons. They are too neon, too simple, and in the case of Calendar, Reminders, and Calculator, ugly as all hell.

On a scale of 0 to |, how ugly are we talking?
posted by Teakettle at 10:40 AM on June 11, 2013

Really curious what languages you think are reasonable replacements. As far as compiled languages go, I don't see a whole lot of options.

If the intermediate form is LLVM bytecode, theoretically you could use anything, such as Python, Ruby, Haskell or JavaScript. Even PHP, if you're a masochist.
posted by acb at 10:41 AM on June 11, 2013

Like they came courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art, circa 1998.
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 10:42 AM on June 11, 2013

Radical design to a trusted object like the new Mac Pro only comes from a few companies like Apple its sad to say. On hearing that the designers had made it 8 times smaller most other companies would have reacted with:

"So what do we fill up the 7/8ths with guys?"
posted by 0 answers at 10:42 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

On a scale of 0 to |, how ugly are we talking?

Does that scale go from "zero" to "clubbed by a pipe"?
posted by stopgap at 10:43 AM on June 11, 2013

too neon, too simple
My thoughts too. That and the teletubbies background.
Imagining the text below the icons in katakana, though, automatically makes it more cool.
posted by carter at 10:43 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was hoping that they'd get up to 10.9 with Smilodon and then switch at 10.10 to dogs or something. Grey Wolf, Red Wolf, Dingo, Stray, Mutt, Rabid, etc.

I think the new iOS looks really good, but I use an Android, so my opinion doesn't matter.
posted by Hactar at 10:49 AM on June 11, 2013

ninjew: "the new mac looks truly amazing. "

I dunno, looks like the latest fancy Simple Human trash can at Bed Bath & Beyond to me. Now don't get me wrong. I like those trash cans and own several of them.

Just saying that this is an odd design for a mac.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 10:49 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

I don't like the icon colours, the overall colour balance has veered off from warm yellow towards magenta and it's frankly painful to look at them for too long. For readability and reduced eyestrain you really want to minimise the amount of blue you're pushing out; it's a great accent colour but making people look at it for long, especially without any green mixed in, is not great.

I can kind of see where they are trying to get the common aesthetic from, but I don't think the icons really hold together well beyond the colour balance. They're flat. That's about it.

Oh, and I am really pissed about the fact that there's still no apparent third party SDK support for reactive icons. It's so fucking stupid to have just two or three icons able to change and none of the others can. So I can see what time it, and what day it is, on the home screen, but I'm supposed to just be disappointed that the weather icon isn't real-time? There's so much more to be done there.

(As the the language question, I'd happily take a statically typed Javascript sort of thing, and I don't see much harm in allowing Python or Ruby with a few hold-your-horses-there tweaks that similarly allowed for native code compilation. I'm a big fan of Lua but there's really no way to compile it to native code and have it run safely. C# is almost as stupid as Java, but at least it doesn't have the header file problem.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:50 AM on June 11, 2013

Oh yeah, that parallax thing is super-freaky. I don't really get it.

Then your mind's going to melt when you get your hands on a Nintendo 3DS.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:50 AM on June 11, 2013

too neon, too simple

The '90s are back...
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:51 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Just started texting with my editor friend to get a better view from a pro.

* EEC memory PCIe flash storage no bueno for our apps
* Thunderbolt 2 expansion not compatible with our Fibre architecture. How would you zone the switch?
* Seems like hardware version of FCP X
* None of us like AMD FirePro GPU, everyone likes NVidia (CUDA)

But he has said, their current solutions are out-of-date. Running a previous version of Avid and a 10.7. Using local RAIDs to push/pull until completion. I suspect it's the same at most post-production houses here in LA: they are all running "just good enough" workflows utilizing outdated tech only because it works, and it has to get done and shipped today.
posted by wcfields at 10:52 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

On codenames:

If you're from the Bay Area, clearly the names after "Mavericks" are "Gilroy Garlic" and "Folsom Street".

On the Pro:

I think it looks pretty great. If you're still hung up on internal vs external expansion, check what Thunderbolt can actually do (as others have noted). It's got HUGE bandwidth and will be able to drive high-speed I/O for the foreseeable future. I think the design looks OK and the huge aluminium PRISM in the middle is a really interesting design (and probably not monitoring your electronic communications).

I would buy one except it's really too much computer for my personal use. Maybe they'll make a Mac Mini that looks like a Coke Zero can.

On iOS 7:

It copied Android a lot and WebOS a little and Windows Phone somewhat but at some point they would simply be stubborn for not including features like better multitasking and decent notification system. I thought the default colors shown were not great but I'm pretty sure everyone gets to pick their own background image if you don't like the gelato-flavoured one they demo'ed. I'm not an IOS user much and nothing in this demo enticed me to "switch teams" but I'm sure it will be a lot of useful stuff for iOS users. I am, however, in the market for a new iPad and I kind of feel like a new one is perpetually around the corner after the iPad 3-4 release cycle. They've certainly managed to accelerate the buyer's remorse cycle.
posted by GuyZero at 10:52 AM on June 11, 2013

By comparison, Ive's office.
posted by 2bucksplus at 10:52 AM on June 11, 2013 [15 favorites]

I was secretly hoping that Google would buy up all the webOS assets and make it a front end for Android.

Well, Google hired the most important asset, Matias Duarte, and put him in charge of user experience. I think he's done a great job improving things so far although I must say things still feel slightly clunky compared to WebOS. I far preferred the WebOS back gesture to the Android back button.
posted by grouse at 10:57 AM on June 11, 2013

Thunderbolt 2 expansion not compatible with our Fibre architecture. How would you zone the switch?

With one of these...

There are a lot of interesting Thunderbolt gizmos out there already - the new MacPro design will make them cheaper.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:57 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

the design seems to be focused on heat dissipation and energy consumption. Apple.com :

The new Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core. Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them. No computer has been built this way before. And yet it makes so much sense, it’s now hard to imagine building one any other way.

and

An incredible amount of innovation went into designing a fan system capable of cooling such a high-performance device. Instead of adding extra fans, we engineered a single, larger fan that pulls air upward through a bottom vent. As air passes vertically through the center of the device, it absorbs heat and carries it out the top. It’s simple and elegant — and also astonishingly quiet. To achieve that, we had to consider every detail: the number of blades, the size of the blades, the spacing of the blades, and even the shape of the blades. By minimizing air resistance throughout the system, we were able to design a fan with backward-curved impeller blades that runs at fewer revolutions per minute, draws air more efficiently as it spins, and creates considerably less noise.

i could easily adjust to that design on my desk. i'm actually surprised it's a black monolith. wonder if you'll ever be able to get one in white.
posted by ninjew at 10:58 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

wcfields: "Thunderbolt 2 expansion not compatible with our Fibre architecture. How would you zone the switch? "

I'm not sure what he means by "fibre architecture", but you're not supposed to replace your existing infrastructure with Thunderbolt. You use something like a TB adapter for either 10GbE or Fiber Channel (the two things I assume he might be referring to). Atto has those ready-made, or you can just put a PCIe adapter in an external enclosure. The mLogic mLink is 400 dollars, for instance.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:00 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

ninjew: And yet it makes so much sense, it’s now hard to imagine building one any other way.

Seems to suggest we can expect the aesthetic to trickle mini-wards.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:02 AM on June 11, 2013

Is the Mac Pro not going to have drive bays?
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 11:03 AM on June 11, 2013

I agree, Rock Steady. The new Airport Extreme design doesn't match the Mini any longer, but if they can reduce the Mini down a bit they could easily come up with a stacking-white-towers effect that might look pretty good. Each layer would need an air gap but that would add to the aesthetic. Why not?
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:04 AM on June 11, 2013

If that's what they were trying to do, they should have kept at it (and they probably will) with the iMacs; the Pros are for people who want or need to customize their machines and build them out with options Apple doesn't support from the factory.

And almost all of that gear plugs in as...

1) USB (with 4 USB 3)
2) Thunderbolt (with 6x20gbps -- that's a staggering amount of bandwidth)
3) Firewire (you'll need a FW->TB converter.

I'm betting that Apple saw that most Mac Pro buyers never put anything into the case that wasn't shipped other than hard drives, and TB2 hard drives are a *faster* interface than what the old Mac Pro had for its disks. So, now you stack your disks external, either via USB3 if you're cheap, or TB if you need performance.

Now, those 18 users who actually had PCIe or PCIx fibre channel cards in, they'll need a Thuderbolt to FC converter. That's a slightly annoying expense, but if they were going to have to buy a new card anyway, what difference does it make that it's cabled via TB rather than shoved into a slot.

And if you Really And Truly have a PCIe card that you have to use, you get a Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis and you have it. Even the Red Rocket users are already covered.

And the rest of the people, who never stuck a card into a Mac Pro, aren't pay the very real costs of slots -- space, power, cooling, etc.

It's actually what we've always wanted -- but the external interfaces never had the bandwidth to pull it off. Now they do. Given that a 16x PCIe slot has 32gbps, and the aggregate interface speed of the Mac Pro is 120gbps. The only thing you don't have 32bnps in one slot -- but the thing that typically lived in the 16x slot is the video card, and it already has two of them. Now the computer isn't carry the power load, the cooling load, or the case space for a given number of expansions. Everything bolts to the outside, and if you don't need that FC controller, you're not paying for the heat, the case space, or the power.

And those saying those can't be replaced. My gut feeling is "wanna bet?"

The one thing I was initially surprised at, but it makes a ton of sense, is that there isn't 10 gig ethernet on board. The problem here is that there's too many valid interfaces for 10 gig, so you either ship with an SFP+ slot (and make the user pay for the interface they need) or you bolt it onto one of the TB2 ports.
posted by eriko at 11:09 AM on June 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

Is the Mac Pro not going to have drive bays?

Have you not seen it? It's as tightly packed as the Mini.
posted by GuyZero at 11:09 AM on June 11, 2013

Looks like it has an upgradable flash drive.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:13 AM on June 11, 2013

Is the Mac Pro not going to have drive bays?

No. Neither does any other Mac! If you want more, plug them into the USB3 or TB2 ports, just like any other Mac user does.

I'm rather amused by this "If it's not inside the case, it isn't a *professional* expansion" attitude. Lord knows big FC systems don't live in the case.

Seriously. The new Mac Pro has six expansion slots, providing 10W of power and 20gbps bandwidth, with passthrough. If you already have the hardware, buy the external case. If you don't, buy the external version.
posted by eriko at 11:14 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

"We start to confuse convenience for joy, abundance with choice. There are a thousand no's for every yes."
posted by ennui.bz at 11:16 AM on June 11, 2013

"Cool, but they just made even more difficult to rack-mount the goddamn thing. 'Pro' my ass."

This is the only drawback I see, and I wonder if there isn’t going to be a rack mount version. Couldn’t you take those three boards and lay them out flat side by side on a heat sink and get a 1U rack server type thing? Someone do the math, please.
posted by bongo_x at 11:17 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

A side note that people might have missed: iOS now has MFi gamepad support. (Which means it has to be made specifically for iOS devices, but still.) The iCade stuff that we had before used terrible keyboard hacks and didn't support analog controls. With this change, perhaps we'll start seeing more "core" games released.
posted by archagon at 11:19 AM on June 11, 2013

It's whiter than a KKK convention!
posted by symbioid at 11:24 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The problem here is that there's too many valid interfaces for 10 gig, so you either ship with an SFP+ slot (and make the user pay for the interface they need) or you bolt it onto one of the TB2 ports.

Yeah, this is where Apple had a chance to declare a winner, and get a jump on the competition. 10GBase-T looks like where the end devices are going to land, tho... workgroup switches are under a grand, and compatible with Gigabit and 100Base-T. (Go away, 10Base-T. Everyone hates you. I bet you're still a hub, not even a switch.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:31 AM on June 11, 2013

With crossflow ventilation you could checkerboard maybe nine of the new Pros up in a rack drawer (how many U would it need? Probably fewer than 9) and they wouldn't burn themselves up. The cables would just all come in from the back and they'd sit in there shining like little robot eggs, humming and throbbing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:31 AM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm amused at how many of the new iOS7 features seem lifted from longtime jailbreak tweaks. The control center with built-in settings is just like NCSettings, the app-switching with live previews is pure Auxo, and my jailbroken 4S has had an Activator-powered double-click-sleep-button-to-activate-flashlight since forever. I also wouldn't be surprised if parallaxed wallpaper effects were squirreled away in Cydia somewhere.

It's weird how aggressively Apple fights against jailbreaking, considering how often the community serves as an unofficial, uncompensated R&D test lab.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:33 AM on June 11, 2013 [11 favorites]

Circles are coming.
posted by Callicvol at 11:37 AM on June 11, 2013

If I may add some of my random reactions to the pile:
-- "Mavericks"?! WTF. I'm calling it "Sea Lion", marketing be damned. Naming future releases after animals native to California might be a good compromise, no? The name they released yesterday sounds far too insider-ish, like it's still an actual codename for internal use (as all the big cat names were originally).
-- The new Mac Pro makes me think of the Cube and the Twentieth-Anniversary Mac before that, i.e. designs that were too clever by half. I fear for its reception, though I recognize the desire to have desktop design take another huge leap.
-- I'm very pleased with the direction iOS7 is taking the UI. For the past year or more I've been toying with the (for me) heretical idea of getting an Android device, but iOS7 will keep me in the Apple camp. (That, and the grandfathered unlimited data plan with AT&T that I intend to take with me to the grave.)
posted by The Nutmeg of Consolation at 11:38 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

"Okay, and the admission that Objective C is a heaping, steaming, evolutionary dead end that will be summarily dropped in favour of a suite of three or four vastly more useful and efficient languages because the LLVM back-end in Xcode means that all ObjC really has been for the past mmm 3 years or so is just a parser. Can we please PLEASE start using something with much less syntactical horse-shit as well as abandoning the 40 year old header file happy "I Tell You Three Times" coding model? Oh and how about some really meaty functional easing? Blocks are a joke."

Eh? What are the "more useful and efficient" languages you're thinking of? Personally, I've always found Objective-C very pleasant to use. Headers help define your API, while blocks are very powerful for callbacks and casual concurrency, especially when paired with Apple's frameworks. Sure it has its share of problems, but so does every other language I've used.
posted by archagon at 11:39 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Headers are a really crappy substitute for namespacing IMO.
posted by invitapriore at 11:41 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Is the Mac Pro not going to have drive bays?

It kinda/sorta has one, in the form of an onboard PCIe-based SSD. But no spindles, as far as I can tell, and no traditionally-interfaced SSDs.

I've never used a PCIe "drive" like that though, so I'm not really sure how they work. Years ago, there were very fast RAM drives ... basically expansion cards with lots of memory slots (for SIMMs, naturally) with some sort of storage controller on it, and it would take all the memory sticks and let you treat them as a drive. I think they had some sort of battery backing so that they'd persist when the computer was shut off ... but if you unplugged the system for too long, everything on the "drive" would evaporate. You really didn't want to use them without backups, but they were good for scratch files / working documents and stuff. I could never afford such an extravagance myself, but I played around on some workstations that had them.

It's not clear to me whether the underlying memory in the PCIe SSD is Flash or regular volatile RAM. If it's the latter, then I assume there will have to be some sort of backup system to preserve the drive state if/when power is disconnected. But it certainly would be fast as hell, especially for writes.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:42 AM on June 11, 2013

Plus all the method names are like sentences in Hawthorne.
posted by invitapriore at 11:42 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

ios 7 looks pretty good, i'm sure they'll tweak various parts here and there eventually - i actually jailbroke my ipad and then realised it didnt really need jailbroken, so used was i to having to sort out windows/android bloatware in the past.
posted by sgt.serenity at 11:43 AM on June 11, 2013

I'd rather have full autocompleted names than int x = f(). But maybe I've been brainwashed by Apple.
posted by archagon at 11:43 AM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

The Nutmeg of Consolation: The new Mac Pro makes me think of the Cube and the Twentieth-Anniversary Mac before that

Yeah, I get a big whiff of Cube off the new Mac Pro, but I loved that design too. As you said, I think you have to take chances with desktop design.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:43 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

New phone look? iMac G5. Très innovante!

The icons demonstrate that preferences going-out-of-style is a Bad Thing.
posted by Twang at 11:45 AM on June 11, 2013

Also the new Mac Pro needs a subwoofer in the bottom of it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:46 AM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

I'd much rather have full autocompleted names than int x = f(). But maybe I've been brainwashed by Apple.

Right, it's not the writing of code that I'm concerned about, but the reading. I find that level of verbosity really distracting, and I don't think it's an either/or choice between that and single letter variables everywhere.
posted by invitapriore at 11:46 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also the new Mac Pro needs a subwoofer in the bottom of it.

Back when the first iMac came out, I remember Harman-Kardon putting out a subwoofer that looked like a jellyfish. That's what the Mac Pro looks like, but a little bit streamlined (and obviously a different color scheme).
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:48 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

GameCenter update: completely redesigned, still hideous. Is this just because I'm not a big multiplayer gamer something or does Apple just not understand gaming?

Apple has pretty much never done anything good for gamers.
posted by Mister_A at 11:49 AM on June 11, 2013

"Right, it's not the writing of code that I'm concerned about, but the reading. I find that level of verbosity really distracting, and I don't think it's an either/or choice between that and single letter variables everywhere."

You're right, I was just being needlessly snarky. :)

I know some people take issue with it, but it's never been much of a problem for me. In fact, I find it much easier to come back to an ObjC codebase a few months down the line, since it's pretty explicit about what it's doing.
posted by archagon at 11:51 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Blazecock Pileon, I won one of those at a vendor show years ago, and it's happily doing its thing on my Windows 8 box at home. Maybe I should bring it to work to sexy-up my MBP/Thunderbolt combo.
posted by wintermind at 11:58 AM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Interesting comments re the hardware architecture. In the 90s I helped sell and support an editing system that was cards in a Mac (Quadra i believe), and Apple would send us into a tailspin every year or so when they abruptly announce a hardware change, after we spent almost a year learning to work with one Mac model. Grrr.

I know I'm losing my programming edge when I read the Java hate in here. I'm currently doing a Django/Python project. Yecch. I never liked Ruby/Rails either. And Javascript should have been smothered in the crib, but no - it's all respectable now with jQuery and other crutches to hold it erect. I'll take Java or even C# over those.

Yes my phone's an Android.

(Ok I'm an old fart. Get offa my Math.ln())
posted by Artful Codger at 12:11 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's not clear to me whether the underlying memory in the PCIe SSD is Flash or regular volatile RAM.

It's a normal SSD (flash), but sitting direct on PCIe, not on (slower) SATA routed eventually through PCIe. If you've followed the recent history of SSDs, most of the improvements in speed in the last few years have come from giving the flash a bigger pipe to the computer, so non-volatile memory isn't the bottleneck. SATA connectors top out at ~600MB/s. PCIe? 950MB/s per lane, a PCIe connector can have 16 lanes -- although right now, the SSDs are probably only using one of them.

The new macbook airs have PCIe connected SSDs. The latest benchmarks show 800MB/s or so.
posted by smidgen at 12:16 PM on June 11, 2013

I thought the big news was in iWorks. Platform-agnostic, thru-the-browser, MS Word-compatible(?) page layout. I should think the MS Office team is sweating.

Pages is more like InDesign than Word. And a lot of people try and fail to use Word like InDesign. A lot of people would be much better off using Pages.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:32 PM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Snarky comments overheard and offered by me here at work:
"The new Apple i-Roll!"
"You can put a dryer sheet in it and blow your weed smoke through it!"
"Why is Lord Helmet's picture next to a MacPro?"
"Dyson Pro!"
"Sweet, they took the Pro out of the MacPro."
"This will look great next to my bazooka bass cannons."
"Airflow? Since when, the Mini?"
"The MacPro 5,1 just jumped in price."
"Made in Kentucky. Inspired by a spittoon."

(Full disclosure: Despite my snickering, I'd actually throttle a litter of puppies for one of these.)
posted by hypersloth at 12:42 PM on June 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

A lot of people would be much better off using Pages.

Funny you say that - my wife does a mid-sized school newsletter. After going crazy with Word I got her to use Pages instead and it is indeed much better for layout tasks.
posted by GuyZero at 12:44 PM on June 11, 2013

No slots, less volume than a Dell. Lame.
posted by hoople at 12:45 PM on June 11, 2013 [13 favorites]

I also felt the OS X updates were all of the "fixing what we fucked up" variety. Tabs in Finder. Labeling. Multimonitors. Guh. All that stuff should have been done ages ago.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:45 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

the new mac looks truly amazing.

Indeed. It looks like a pencil case, an outdoor ashtray, and a trashcan all at the same time.

I personally don't care what any of my workstations look like since I never look at them. I usually look at the screen and the look of a thing usually says very little about it. Nice hardware though.
posted by juiceCake at 12:46 PM on June 11, 2013

I don't get the hate for the new Mac Pro. They packed a phenomenal amount of performance into a package about the size of a tall spindle of DVDs that runs almost silently. That's pretty damn impressive. Who really needs a bunch of drive bays anymore? Most data lives on a server or in the cloud. Most peripherals are external or can be made so. You've got less heat and less airflow restrictions in the case, and with a known design, you can plan for really efficient and quiet cooling. When you cram a bunch of cards and drives into a case, who knows how much real airflow you'll get, or if it will be adequate?

I bought the external SuperDrive with my new iMac, and in the few months I've had both, I used the drive once, for about a minute, to install a legacy Windows app on a VM.
posted by xedrik at 12:46 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Macpro is a SFF PC. I've got a few dozen of them around the office.

They don't have hand crafted artisanal fan blades or anything, but they are small, quiet and reasonably powerful. It's a bag of compromises, though - whenever something breaks on them it is a pain to get it apart and back together and any upgrade discussion is inherently a replacement discussion.

Personally, I like a large PC. When the cat is playing with the cables, there isn't as much chance he'll pull the thing over on top himself.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 1:01 PM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

One legitimate complaint about the Mac Pro is that you are going to be paying a lot for those super high-end GPUs even if you are buying it for the Xeons.

Counterpoint is that in the old Mac Pro, people who just needed high-end GPUs got stuck paying for very expensive Xeons when an i7 would have done the job.
posted by smackfu at 1:05 PM on June 11, 2013

I don't get the hate for the new Mac Pro.

What hate?

Nice to see the new desktop OS will use SMB2 by default.
posted by juiceCake at 1:07 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm amused at how many of the new iOS7 features seem lifted from longtime jailbreak tweaks.

Every smart company I've ever known has looked at what hackers/customizers are doing on the edges of their product and worked in the best bits for the mainstream later on. That includes car companies, computer companies, software companies, etc.
posted by mathowie at 1:07 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

Does anyone buy a Mac just for cores anymore? If all you want is cores buy some cheap beige box with Linux or rent some space on AWS. It seems to me that the core market for high-end Macs generally wants GPUs.
posted by GuyZero at 1:08 PM on June 11, 2013

Every smart company I've ever known has looked at what hackers/customizers are doing on the edges of their product and worked in the best bits for the mainstream later on.

Every smart company except Apple, up until this point.
posted by GuyZero at 1:09 PM on June 11, 2013

What the hell are you talking about? They're notorious for it.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:11 PM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Nice to see the new desktop OS will use SMB2 by default.

For communication between Macs, SMB2 will only be the default between two machines running Mavericks — AFP isn't going anywhere for a while, yet. For people interested in this, this is explained in more detail at Ars Technica.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:14 PM on June 11, 2013

The new Macpro looks like Darth Vader's coffee grinder. Specifically the Braun KSM1.
posted by Callicvol at 1:24 PM on June 11, 2013

The problem with 10gig-T is that very very few workplaces are going to have the Cat-7 or Cat-7a cableplant necessary to support 10gig over copper at 100m. Plus the gbics are insanely expensive ($2500 or more for Cisco- I know price premium). Even if you have power users that can produce that sort of network traffic engineering it so that you have a 40-gig or 100-gig backplane to your storage array or servers is incredibly expensive. Yeah there are probably some research applications where this would be cool or some video processing but most of the high end researchers are probably going to do this on a linux platform that actually fits in a rack.
posted by vuron at 1:24 PM on June 11, 2013

You can put a dryer sheet in it and blow your weed smoke through it

it even has a fan at the end! although i'd hate to have to clean the resin buildup off those sensitive components.

isn't there a slang term for that tp roll 'invention'?

btw, i can't wait to see how let down everyone is when they roll out iOS 7 on an iPhone 5s, and not a totally new iPhone 6. although so far the rumors are trending towards to the one big feature being a fingerprint reader in the home button.
posted by ninjew at 1:43 PM on June 11, 2013

Actually, it looks like the Braun KF-20 coffee maker.

Jony Ives' "design skills" seem to be "appropriate a Dieter Rams design from 30-50 years ago, then go get a sandwich."
posted by stenseng at 1:43 PM on June 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

I disagree. Momentum behind 10Gb-E is very high, and we're moving to 100Gb-E and LACP backbones already. Managed workgroup switches are under a grand at the moment - it was fancy and high end three years ago, now it's not all that exotic.
posted by Slap*Happy at 1:44 PM on June 11, 2013

It's a mediocre language which slows everyone down to the level of the average. I don't want any part of a future that's written entirely in Java.

The word you're looking for is "Scala".
posted by flaterik at 1:58 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Audio work. The GPU, that makes the pictures on the screen, right?

But... how many cores do you need for audio work? I mean, I really don't know. Is it one of those perfectly parallelizable tasks that scales well with CPUs? Does someone really need 24 cores for audio work?

Also, in theory, GPUs can do stuff like audio processing pretty well.
posted by GuyZero at 2:04 PM on June 11, 2013

The GPU, that makes the pictures on the screen, right?

GPUs are already used in speeding up genomics tasks, particularly sequence alignment and genome assembly. Another reason Apple may have kept Nvidia off the MP, as this would help drive OpenCL-based development over CUDA.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:08 PM on June 11, 2013

Also, in theory, GPUs can do stuff like audio processing pretty well.

Unfortunately, not for real-time applications. The latency is way too high since you have to copy everything you need to operate on from main memory to the GPU and then copy it back again.
posted by invitapriore at 2:09 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Having just installed the beta, iOS 7 feels like a bit of a mixed bag. I think notification centre and control centre or whatever it's called are great improvements. I think the new font choices are solid, and the redesigned native apps generally look better to my eyes.

On the other hand, as others have noted, the colours all feel "off" to me - too much, too busy, and just in stark contrast with the otherwise 'minimalist' feel typically associated with Apple and Ive in particular. I've also noticed that a single home button press no longer gets you back to the homescreen, it just moves you back one 'level'. That will cause some confusion I think for people like my mother, and changes what was one of the killer features of iOS for neophytes - no matter what goes wrong, hit this button and you'll be back to the screen where you can make calls and send messages. Of course, if you hit the home button twice in succession too quickly in an attempt to get back to the homescreen, you instead open up up the multitasking tray, which is annoying.

I've also noticed that if you open up the multitasking bar, there is no longer a way (it appears - i could be wrong) to force-kill any open apps as there used to be.
posted by modernnomad at 2:36 PM on June 11, 2013

"Unfortunately, not for real-time applications. The latency is way too high since you have to copy everything you need to operate on from main memory to the GPU and then copy it back again."

I think AMD's HUMA aims to fix this. I've heard that the PS4 does this already. Maybe we'll get to see it in future Mac Pros?
posted by archagon at 2:37 PM on June 11, 2013

So a double-press gets you to the notification center, long press takes you to Siri (Except in the iPhone 4, I suppose)...is there no way at all to go straight to the homescreen if you're more than one level up? That seems like a pretty big oversight.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:38 PM on June 11, 2013

Oh yeah, hUMA looks really cool, I didn't realize it was that close to production. So is the GPU cache just a write-through clone of the CPU cache or something?
posted by invitapriore at 2:42 PM on June 11, 2013

Oh I guess it's a little more complicated than that since the GPU is able to see changes made elsewhere. Cool stuff.
posted by invitapriore at 2:44 PM on June 11, 2013

You thought that remark was off-the-cuff? That was carefully planned.

BTW, the Mac Pro expansion whiners are way off track. Stop thinking about your stupid old Mac Pro, it's obsolete. The options you want are obsolete. In 3 years, this type of performance will be in a Mac mini for under $700. But this is currently a Pro model. For example, I know of people experimenting with Thunderbolt external SSD RAIDs, this will fly on Thunderbolt 2 and expansion is practically unlimited. I figure the internal SSD will outperform those early SSD RAID experiments, the internal flash memory is essentially a mini RAID, at the chip level, but with a massively improved bus.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:49 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

designerscomplaining.tumblr.com
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 2:54 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Given the number of Thunderbolt ports, I'm reminded of the first iMac, where its USB ports drove adoption of the format by peripheral makers.

I realize that you would like to rewrite history in terms of all things Apple, but this just is not true. USB was developed as a joint venture between Intel and Microsoft with a few PC makers along for the ride. Conspicuously absent from the development was Apple. There were tens of millions of PCs using USB devices before the iMac was even released. There were hundreds of peripherals developed for USB before the iMac was released. Apple was and still is a tiny percentage of the USB market. Apple had nothing to do with the adoption of USB and nothing would be different in the USB market if Apple had never existed. It's adoption was driven by primarily by Intel and Microsoft for the dominant PC market.

In fact Apple's first USB device was its reviled hockey puck mouse which was so bad that users cobbled on ADB to USB adapters so they could use their pre-USB Apple mice. So no, Apple didn't drive the adoption of USB. That train had long left the station before Apple hopped on.
posted by JackFlash at 3:00 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

> Combustible Edison Lighthouse: designerscomplaining.tumblr.com

Wow, that's some comedy gold there. How on earth are people so invested in *hating* something they've (at best) barely used? And yes, "polarizing" was an accurate prediction, I guess.
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:15 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

JackFlash: "So no, Apple didn't drive the adoption of USB. That train had long left the station before Apple hopped on."

However, AFAIR, they were the first PC maker to move completely to USB for keyboard, mouse, and so on. Actually, Wintel PC makers are still including the PS/2 crap on their boxes.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:28 PM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

I found this article very interesting:

I had the good fortune of being an intern at Apple, which gave me the opportunity to spend an hour (along with a few hundred of my closest intern friends) with every member of the leadership team, including Jobs and Ive. Cook was, by a significant margin, the most impressive of all of them.

It’s difficult, in retrospect, to explain why he was so impressive, but I find my struggles eerily similar to the struggles business historians and sociologists have in explaining what company culture is, and why it matters. Tim Cook, at least to my young, rather unjaded eyes, was Apple. He spoke to me – and to every person in the room – as if I were the only person in the world, and that he truly wanted me to understand what made Apple unique. Oh sure, the words were there – he spoke about Apple’s focus, and willingness to say “no,” and about design – but it was the way in which he said it that made you believe. For me anyway, his reality distortion field was far more powerful than Jobs’.

It was obvious that Cook understood Apple, loved Apple, and was clearly the right man to make the decisions necessary to preserve Apple.

Decisions like firing Scott Forstall.

Forstall spoke to the interns as well. It was an incredibly impressive talk, and an incredibly disturbing one. Forstall was clearly the smartest person in the room; what was disturbing was that he obviously knew it, and wanted us all to know it as well.2 When the news broke about his firing, I was totally shocked, yet totally unsurprised.

Still, imagine what guts it took to fire him. Forstall is, more than anyone on the planet – including Jobs – responsible for the iPhone (for this reason alone I found the potshots taken at Forstall, particularly by Craig Federighi, to be in poor taste). He is an incredible engineer – legend has it he could write, or rewrite, nearly any part of the iOS source code on command, and would routinely do so to win disputes in managerial meetings – and a NEXT man, and the closest thing to a Steve Jobs 2.0.

Yet Cook fired him anyway.

posted by Rory Marinich at 3:32 PM on June 11, 2013 [9 favorites]

I've also noticed that if you open up the multitasking bar, there is no longer a way (it appears - i could be wrong) to force-kill any open apps as there used to be.

Flick a window open to remove it. Pretty sure they took that directly from PreOS.
posted by Rory Marinich at 3:37 PM on June 11, 2013

Gave that a try, but on 4S flicking the window just seems to crash the device every time. Hopefully that bug will get squashed sooner rather than later.
posted by modernnomad at 3:40 PM on June 11, 2013

However, AFAIR, they were the first PC maker to move completely to USB for keyboard, mouse, and so on. Actually, Wintel PC makers are still including the PS/2 crap on their boxes.

Crap? You can't be serious. The first true NKRO keyboards didn't come out until about last year (or maybe they still don't exist, it is the kind of thing that requires skepticism about claims and personal testing). PS-2 is much much better for keyboard connection.
posted by Chuckles at 4:05 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Does iOS7 allow for wifi site survey software, like InSSIDer? That was one dumb-ass restriction. Not as bad as omitting the RJ-45 connector from the MacBook Air though.
posted by Chuckles at 4:09 PM on June 11, 2013

The first true NKRO USB keyboards, that is.
posted by Chuckles at 4:15 PM on June 11, 2013

The word you're looking for is "Scala".

Can Scala target the Dalvik VM? Is it possible to use the Android APIs from it?

I'm not interested in investing my time in getting really good at patching Java's internal works just so I can use another language (even one that's JVM-targeted) with Android. If I need to touch Java, it's a deal-breaker.
posted by acb at 4:26 PM on June 11, 2013

There seems to be a lot of misinformation in this thread about what kind of performance Thunderbolt 2 can actually do, compared to PCIe.

namely these two comments:

Joakim Ziegler: "You do know that 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports basically translates to 12 8x PCIe 2.0 slots with full dedicated bandwidth, plus the ability to daisy chain even more devices that will share that bandwith, right?"

eriko: "It's actually what we've always wanted -- but the external interfaces never had the bandwidth to pull it off. Now they do. Given that a 16x PCIe slot has 32gbps, and the aggregate interface speed of the Mac Pro is 120gbps. The only thing you don't have 32bnps in one slot -- but the thing that typically lived in the 16x slot is the video card,"

The new Mac Pro has 3 thunderbolt controllers. I can't tell if these controllers share the 20Gbps between the two ports, or if each has it's own. I am inclined to believe based on this thunderbolt 1 block diagram that they will share bandwidth. If they do, then the thunderbolt expansions will provide only 60Gbps total, while if each port gets 20Gbps each, then the whole setup will indeed have 120Gbps.

That said, PCIe 2.0 (which most PCIe cards use these days) provides an effective bandwidth of 500MB/s (4000mbps) per channel, double that of PCIe 1.1. This means that an 8x PCIe 2.0 slot provides 32 Gbps (same as a 16x PCIe 1.1 slot). PCIe 3.0 doubles the bandwidth again, so a 16x PCIe 3.0 slot would have 128 Gbps.

Claiming that the Mac Pro can provide 12 8x PCIe 2.0 slots is an absolute falsehood. The Mac Pro would need to supply something like 20 thunderbolt ports to be able to hit that much bandwidth (assuming that the ports don't share bandwidth at the controller level, otherwise it would be 40).

By way of comparison the HP z820 workstation, which is a pretty good example of a mac pro equivalent workstation from the PC world, has:

3 PCI Express Gen3 x16
1 PCI Express Gen3 x16 mechanical/x8 electrical
1 PCI Express Gen3 x8 mechanical/x4 electrical
1 PCI Express Gen2 x8 mechanical/x4 electrical

That is (4 + 4 + 8 + (16 * 3)) * 8Gbps = 512Gbps of PCIe bandwidth, with a maximum of 128Gbps in a single slot. Pretending that these are 2.0 slots, you still get 256Gbps of bandwidth total / 64 Gbps in a single slot. the bandwidth demands of high end Pro video and audio hardware is not going to be getting any smaller as time goes on, with bigger and faster RAIDs, SAN solutions and rendering requirements. the HP would be able to take that in stride, but a Mac Pro would run out of options much quicker.

The Red Rocket uses a 4x PCIe 2.0 slot, so would barely fit on a thunderbolt port. If they make it any more data hungry, it's going to saturate your thunderbolt port. Also add in that you will have to have an expensive, bulky and potentially flaky PCIe to thundebolt adapter chassis to connect PCIe peripherals to your mac pro, and things get even less exciting.

I really, really like the Mac Pro, it looks fancy and takes computer design in a new and interesting direction. If I could get it with consumer-grade CPU/RAM/Videocards, I would almost certainly buy it. That said, it is basically a laptop in a desktop chassis as far as upgradability and expansion goes, and is far behind the cutting edge compared to other pro-level rigs. It seems like it will be woefully inadequate for the professional market.
posted by grandsham at 4:26 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I suspect that the bus is shared too, based on the support for three 4K displays and the bandwidth they consume.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:42 PM on June 11, 2013

Can Scala target the Dalvik VM? Is it possible to use the Android APIs from it?

I haven't used it, but these guys wrote a pretty nice android game in scala and have some good blog posts on the issues they faced. It's perhaps getting a little out of date now though, it's over a year old.
posted by markr at 4:43 PM on June 11, 2013

Sit back and enjoy the next ten years.
posted by colie

I really shouldn't respond to this kind of snark, which can be found on almost any tech blog. But do you have any opinions to back this up? Or is it just a zinger to hopefully garner a few favorites?

It's folly to believe we can predict these sort of things. I'm pretty sure Apple is going to be okay in the next several years. After Jobs there was and is going to be a period of adjustment. But I'm not sure even under Jobs if the last few years would have been that different.

But you're not predicting Apple will fail during an adjustment period. You think they'll fail for 10 years. You may be right. Apple might not even be around in 10 years. But you've given no reasons behind your incredible gift of prognosticating a decade into the future.

And please don't cite failures like apple maps. Jobs had his share (exs. mobileme, the cube). And please don't start with the 'they're not innovating' line. The Jobs innovations happened over a decade, not 2 years.

Any company could face trouble in 10 years, but Apple is (at the very least) as set up for success as any company currently in business (even if growth does slow down). I know it's easy to throw out predictions when in 10 years no one will remember if you're right or wrong, but I'm really interested on your thoughts behind your claim, if there are any.
posted by justgary at 4:44 PM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

(And the new Mac Pro? Hello, Power Mac G4 Cube yt .)

The Brilliant Insanity Behind the New Mac Pro's Design
posted by homunculus at 5:10 PM on June 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Besides the weird restriction on function names and the strange pre/post-generics stuff, what's wrong with Java, really?

Okay, it doesn't have sum types. And null is a member of every class.

So, er. what's up with Rust these days?
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 6:13 PM on June 11, 2013

Can Scala target the Dalvik VM? Is it possible to use the Android APIs from it?

Sorry, I was just thinking about languages, not exactly how they fit into the android ecosystem. I write primarily Scala and would probably murder someone if I had to deal with Just Java, so when people make any of the perfectly reasonable complaints there are to be made about it I bring up what has allowed me to escape (most of) them. (Type erasure is still a force made of pure evil that can barely be bargained with). I have neither an android device nor a desire to develop for one, just an interest in programming languages.
posted by flaterik at 6:36 PM on June 11, 2013

Not as bad as omitting the RJ-45 connector from the MacBook Air though.

How would you accomplish this, physically? The Air just isn't thick enough.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:07 PM on June 11, 2013

Actually, Wintel PC makers are still including the PS/2 crap on their boxes.

Which ones? I haven't seen a PS/2 connector on a motherboard for years. Perhaps I'm just looking at the uncommon ones.
posted by juiceCake at 7:17 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Just for giggles, here's the proportion of models WITHOUT a PS/2 port for motherboards with Intel's most recent "enthusiast" chipset, the Z87, which supports Haswell (by manufacturer):

Asus: 4/14
MSI: 1/8
Asrock: 0/10
Gigabyte: 0/10

(source: Newegg search)
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:37 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

My Asus M5A97 R2.0 motherboard has a PS/2 port (two, actually).
posted by dirigibleman at 7:50 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I am just looking forward to a new Think Different ad featuring James Garner in Western attire.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:07 PM on June 11, 2013

So I'm just buying the new motherboards without legacy stuff on it. Do these motherboards have new types of ports as well?
posted by juiceCake at 8:14 PM on June 11, 2013

I was wrong about the bandwidth. Each TB 1 port has two 10Gbps channels. TB 2 doesn't double that, but it allows devices to use both channels, for a total of 20Gbps per port. The 20Gbps is per port, not per controller, so the Mac Pro has 20Gbps * 6 = 120 Gbps TB bandwidth. I thought TB 2 doubled the bandwidth, with 2 20Gbps channels, thus my comment about 12 slots (although my comparison with PCIe 2.0 8x slots was also a bit optimistic).

So each port has bandwidth somewhere between a 4x and an 8x PCIe 2.0 slot (it's equivalent to a 5x slot, if such a thing existed). If you daisy chain devices on each port, they'll share the bandwidth (as I understand, dynamically, so if one device is mostly idle, another can use that bandwidth).

Of course, there are relatively few devices that actually use more bandwidth than 20Gbps. The RedRocket is a 8x PCIe 2.0 card, but it works just fine in a Thunderbolt 1 enclosure, because the 4k video it needs to send back to the host computer is around 8 Gbps or so. As another example, I have some high-end Areca RAID controllers that I use with 24 drives in RAID6. They're 8x PCIe3.0 cards, and I get around 1.8GB/sec reads and writes sustained from them, which translates to 14.4 Gbps, so 20Gbps should be quite enough to run that.

In short, 20Gbps is enough for most peripherals except perhaps GPUs. Even if you need to use both channels to get that, you still have 6 such ports.

I think having 6 20Gbps ports with the possibility of daisy chaining is far more useful for expansion than the 4 PCIe 2.0 slots in the old MacPro, even though the latter have much more cumulative bandwidth.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 8:15 PM on June 11, 2013

dirigibleman: "My Asus M5A97 R2.0 motherboard has a PS/2 port (two, actually)"

I have some SuperMicro servers that have only one, and then you can enter the nice text mode BIOS to choose if you want to use it for a keyboard or mouse.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 8:16 PM on June 11, 2013

For communication between Macs, SMB2 will only be the default between two machines running Mavericks — AFP isn't going anywhere for a while, yet. For people interested in this, this is explained in more detail at Ars Technica.

Indeed. That's the article my comment linked to. Thanks for the repeat.
posted by juiceCake at 8:31 PM on June 11, 2013

juiceCake: they probably all have some USB 3.0 ports, since the Z87 has 8 integrated, plus a bunch of USB 2.0, some combination of HDMI/displayport/VGA, maybe some eSATA ports, optical/coaxial audio outputs, etc., etc.

Manufacturers tend to be pretty kitchen-sinky and are slow to drop old interfaces: many z87 motherboards still have PCI slots; my Gigabyte board from 2009 still had an internal serial header.

It makes sense, since many of their customers are serial-upgraders who are likely to keep their old peripherals (e.g. that old PCI sound card) around for a while. At least as of a few years ago, having a PS/2 port could be useful because you could use a keyboard even if the USB controller failed to initialize correctly.

It's also a weak point of the custom PC industry; manufacturers are really hesitant to do away with old interface long after they should have ditched them. Case in point: 5.25" bays on gaming cases, which are to 2013 as floppies were to 2003.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 8:33 PM on June 11, 2013

Indeed. That's the article my comment linked to. Thanks for the repeat.

For those really interested in learning about the details, they should consider reading through the Ars Technica link I cited. There's a fair bit more info there, but granted it may not be to everyone's interest.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:37 PM on June 11, 2013

How would you accomplish this, physically? The Air just isn't thick enough.

Make it thicker, obviously. Or, use the little slide out PCMCIA type connector. Or just include the damned adapter in the box.

Hell, the Air is almost certainly thick enough for something creative, and still a lot more robust than those slide out things, if they just cared to bother.
posted by Chuckles at 8:39 PM on June 11, 2013

"The first true NKRO keyboards didn't come out until about last year"

Huh? I was under the impression that NKRO was based entirely on the design of the keyboard controller, not the plug. I don't think you'll suddenly have an NKRO problem if you plug a good PS2 keyboard into a PS2-to-USB adaptor.
posted by archagon at 9:14 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Make it thicker, obviously. Or, use the little slide out PCMCIA type connector. Or just include the damned adapter in the box."

It's right in Apple's HID guidelines to design for the 80%. I'm certain that the vast majority of Macbook Air users are perfectly happy to sacrifice an ancient Ethernet connector for a slimmer, less fiddly design.
posted by archagon at 9:20 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

The most frustrating thing about Windows is that everything still feels entirely arbitrary. You never know what shit will do and features, and even basic OS functionality, seems tracked on in strange places. Like why do I have to hit ctrl-alt-delete to change my password or bring up task manager.

You don't! You can change your password in the control panel, and you can bring up the task manager by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing "Start Task Manager" or by hitting Ctrl-Shift-Esc.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:45 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

I just want to delete the Stocks app.
posted by theuninvitedguest at 9:45 PM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

grandsham,
A 4x PCIe 2.0 slot is 2 GB/s or 16 Gb/s, which is well under the 20 Gb/s that Thunderbolt 2 offers. The marketing copy on Apple's website says that the Mac Pro has up to 40 GB/s of PCIe bandwidth, or 320 Gb/s. Not quite the 512 of the HP, but also not using that bus in the same manner. They also doubled the memory bandwidth to 60 GB/s, which is pretty damn nice, so you can at least saturate the PCIe bus with data from main memory, so no more bottleneck of copying data from main memory to your peripheral devices. If they are saying you can connect up to 3 4K displays, that means you have at least 3 dedicated 14 Gb/s data channels, since full 4K is roughly 12 Gb/s to push at 59.95 frames per second, full frame. That is a hell of a lot of bandwidth. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. As for the external PCIe cases, so far, Magma and Promise have some pretty solid cases, though they are only Thunderbolt 1, they work fine for the dual 10Gb NIC cards I'm using in them and hooking up to the 2011 iMacs.

The PCIe flash drive is peaking out at 1250 MB/s on a direct PCIe channel, instead of having to go through a SATA controller. You will pay out the nose for that for your PC. OCZ just released a VeloDrive 3 PCIe Gen 2 SSD drive that is 600GB that retails for over $2000. And that only gets a max read/write of around 1000 MB/s. So, yeah, that's pretty sweet as a STANDARD part for a system, instead of a spinning disk RAID and the bottleneck of a SATA controller.

I am waiting to withhold my judgement entirely, though, depending on the price. Given the caveats of having to go 3rd party for external PCIe, I'm am hopeful it will hit the sweet spot of around $3500 for the mid to top end model. I also hope I can find a reliable RAM supplier, since I really don't want to pay the Apple premium for their RAM.
posted by daq at 9:58 PM on June 11, 2013

I'm using Windows 7 here so goodness knows how it's changed for Windows 8, but you can get the Task Manager by activating the Start button, typing "task manager" and pressing enter.

You can change your password by activating the Start button, typing "password," and selecting "Change your Windows password."
posted by grouse at 9:59 PM on June 11, 2013

vuron:
You don't need CAT7 for 10gig-T, just CAT 6e.

Also, that price for the gbics? Yeah, someone needs to call the FTC on that, because a year ago, those gbics were under $500 a piece for the Dell equivalent (I work in a sadly all Dell network, legacy, blahblahblah), and last month every freaking vendor boosted the prices through the roof. I was lucky to already have all the fiber gbics I needed when I bought my latest 32 port 10gig-T switch. If I hadn't, it would have added nearly $10k to my purchase.
posted by daq at 10:02 PM on June 11, 2013

Another point, if you price out the top end Mac Pro available today, with the fastest 12 core processors and the max RAM, plus 4 512GB SSD drives and dual display cards, it comes in at well over $10k. The new Mac Pro will, in it's basic configuration, pretty much eat this machines lunch. Double the memory bandwidth, and from a single internal drive, read/write speeds that you have to spend thousand of dollars to come close to (and that's relying on software RAID to boot, nevermind trying to get an Apple RAID card, or going 3rd party with a CalDigit RAID controller). On top of that you still lose something like 10 to 15 percent of your throughput to RAID overhead and SATA bandwidth limitations.

This really is a pretty awesome update, making huge leaps over the existing technology in the Pro space.

Also, my coworker wants to decorate his like a Dalek, while my boss wants hers to look like an R2 droid.
posted by daq at 10:09 PM on June 11, 2013 [3 favorites]

Also, my coworker wants to decorate his like a Dalek, while my boss wants hers to look like an R2 droid.

Heh. I wonder if any of the designers at Apple hoped for this reaction all along.
posted by homunculus at 10:12 PM on June 11, 2013

And while I'm hogging everything, I really hope the second generation of these ditches the gig-E for 10gig-E. If you are working with HD video, you freaking NEED 10gig in order to get anything delivered on time. Even with horrible overhead from crappy OS's and bad driver support, cutting transfer times down from 2 hours to 15 minutes has made life so freaking much easier.

Also, also, the SMB2 thing is great, since my NAS is an Isilon, and that thing loves SMB2. Like, whoa.
posted by daq at 10:12 PM on June 11, 2013

10gig base T has some weird DB loss limits which lead me to suspect that a decent number of installations of 6e might need to be reterminated in order to get those sort of distances. Working in a Cisco shop I know I'm always going to be a year or two behind and pay through the nose for equipment but right now the idea that I'd be able to get 10gig to the desktop anytime soon is laughable and I suspect most companies are going to be in even worse shape.

Yeah some high end video production firms will probably be able to throw a ton of money into driving 10gig to the desktop because they have some powerusers that might actually come close to pushing that sort of throughput but even then they are probably talking a small number of users that are relatively close to the server farm and SAN not getting 10gig out to every office.

I guess you could probably do a cheap version of a 10gig network with netgear of the shelf equipment but I'm not sure I'd ever trust it in the sort of realtime video editing applications that these type of users like to use. We already have issues with Dell 10gig switches in SAN applications having all sorts of buffer and latency issues, I'd hate to throw in something even lower end.
posted by vuron at 10:20 PM on June 11, 2013

I'm certain that the vast majority of Macbook Air users are perfectly happy to sacrifice an ancient Ethernet connector for a slimmer, less fiddly design.

I bet there aren't 100 people who care. It’s called the MacBook Air. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
posted by bongo_x at 10:33 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I'm certain that the vast majority of Macbook Air users are perfectly happy to sacrifice an ancient Ethernet connector for a slimmer, less fiddly design.

Holy crap, until this very second I never even realised that the Macbook Air that I use doesn't have an Ethernet port. I've never had occasion to try and plug an Ethernet cable in.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:36 PM on June 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

It’s called the MacBook Air. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Also, there are a number of Thunderbolt docks available that have built in Gig-E ports, PLUS firewire 800 and USB 2 (and sometimes USB 3), and eSATA, and even a DVD-R drive.
posted by daq at 10:37 PM on June 11, 2013

Did Apple just ally with Microsoft against Google?
posted by Artw at 11:49 PM on June 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Erasmouse: "I'm already pathetically craving the Mac Pro, but also can't stop thinking "Every time I press one of these black controls, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let me know I've done it.""

Because, you know, blacker than the blackest black...
posted by Samizdata at 12:07 AM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

They must have been gnawing their elbows with excitement during the 200+ days of PR silence leading up to this.

That Phil Schiller quip was a fantastic "drop the mic" moment.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:30 AM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yep. Best keynote since the first iPhone.
posted by panaceanot at 5:20 AM on June 12, 2013

The only time I use Ethernet is to debug and configure my wireless router.
posted by smackfu at 5:31 AM on June 12, 2013

smackfu: "The only time I use Ethernet is to debug and configure my wireless router."

Not me, thanks. I prefer wired as I love to move a lot of data around my network.
posted by Samizdata at 5:36 AM on June 12, 2013

I'm just glad Schiller said "Can't innovate anymore, my ass!" and not "Can't innovate my ass anymore!"
posted by mazola at 6:47 AM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

I am really jealous of these people who apparently walk around continuously enveloped in so much high-quality WiFi that they have no occasion to need an Ethernet cable.

Between shitty hotel wireless internet, shitty office wireless internet, shitty client-site wireless internet ... if there's an Ethernet port available, I don't even bother with WiFi. (Except on a phone.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:18 AM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

The Apple USB-Ethernet adapter is $29 and works fine. This is a trivially solved issue.
posted by GuyZero at 7:32 AM on June 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

Isn't that just 100Mbps?
posted by bonaldi at 7:52 AM on June 12, 2013

Yes. It's a Macbook Air, not a high-end workstation. There's also a thunderbolt to gigabit adapter if you really need that much network speed.
posted by GuyZero at 7:55 AM on June 12, 2013

And the gigabit version is, surprisingly, also $29.
posted by GuyZero at 7:56 AM on June 12, 2013

Yeah, I've been mostly pretty happy without ethernet on my Air. The one case where it does bite (and bites hard) is during observing trips to radio telescopes, where (obviously) you can't have WiFi. Or cellular phones either - it's like the dark ages. So chalk me up as one of the handful of people who actually needs an ethernet jack on a relatively regular basis.

But I knew that going in, and I'm happy with the trade-off of a slimmer everyday machine vs having to carry a stupid ethernet dongle on trips to radio-quiet zones. So are most other astronomers I know - Airs are ubiquitous at meetings.
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:49 AM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the real tension is when it is decided that something is a niche feature and a dongle or workaround is just fine, but it's something that you use every day. That's when these changes have a real impact.
posted by smackfu at 9:09 AM on June 12, 2013

Do MacBook Pros still have Ethernet ports? My last (2007-vintage) one has one, though I remember only using it half a dozen times at most. My Air doesn't, and I can't say I've missed it.
posted by acb at 9:20 AM on June 12, 2013

My unibody macbook from 2010 does, but my mbp from last year does not. Case is too thin.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:26 AM on June 12, 2013

Non-retina ones do.
posted by invitapriore at 9:38 AM on June 12, 2013

More iOS 7 weirdness I've noticed - I can no longer play "all songs" by an artist through the music player. I also cannot see a list of albums once i have clicked on a particular artist - I have to scroll through (ie) all the tracks of 5 entire albums to get to the 6th album. Annoying. Siri also seems to currently not respond to "play $artist", and instead plays a song that happens to have the name of the artist in it. I assume this is just a bug, but the first two points about the music player are steps back in functionality, though the player itself looks improved.
posted by modernnomad at 11:15 AM on June 12, 2013

Has the awful podcast app been vaporized?
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on June 12, 2013

It's the new podcast app from a couple of months ago which is much improved from abomination that was Apple's first attempt at a standalone podcast app. However it is very buggy at the moment, at least on a 4S - probably the most 'crashy' of the native apps at this point.
posted by modernnomad at 11:20 AM on June 12, 2013

Siri also seems to currently not respond to "play $artist", and instead plays a song that happens to have the name of the artist in it. I assume this is just a bug,

Always assume user error. Siri commands have a syntax. Try "play artist $artist."

Siri is damn brilliant. Here's a recent exchange:

"Play old man blues"
"Playing 05 - Young Man Blues."

Yeah, that's what I meant.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:49 AM on June 12, 2013

Always assume user error. Siri commands have a syntax.

That's not what Apple claims:

Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands.

It's not surprising that the reality doesn't match up to Apple's marketing, but it's a bit much to blame that on the user, rather than Apple's marketing.
posted by grouse at 12:01 PM on June 12, 2013

grouse: "That's not what Apple claims:
Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition software that requires you to remember keywords and speak specific commands."

Try this: "Siri, do me a solid and lemme know I gotta get my dry cleaning when I turn on broadway."
posted by boo_radley at 12:08 PM on June 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

English has a syntax too. If I tell you "Play Death Cab for Cutie," will you play a song by the band, or the song by the Bonzo Dog Band? Hint: on your computer, only one is in a column marked "Artist."

Computers are efficient, you can reduce to simple syntax and strip out redundancy. So the command "timer two minutes" has the same effect as "Siri, please set a timer for two minutes, if you don't mind." Nonspecific commands may not be interpreted in the way you expect, but the response is perfectly logical and correct. If you say "Play a song" you will get "Playing all songs."
posted by charlie don't surf at 12:18 PM on June 12, 2013

If I tell my device "play X" I would much rather it interpret the command to be "play all songs which include X" instead of "assume I meant to ask for XYQ and play only that."
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:32 PM on June 12, 2013

And your interpretation is obviously incorrect. Siri is not clairvoyant. It makes reasonable assumptions about what you want.

"Play songs who"
"Now Playing 'Who Are The Mystery Girls'"

"Play who"
"Playing Who" (starts playing The Who Live at Leeds).
posted by charlie don't surf at 12:45 PM on June 12, 2013

"Siri is not clairvoyant" is my whole point. The computer doesn't have telepathic insight into my intents, so when I give a general command, it should produce a general result rather than automatically leaping to a specific conclusion. (And IIRC this is how Google Voice Search works, although I haven't used it to play music since Gingerbread so Google Now may have changed that.)

"Death Cab for Cutie" is a special case, obviously.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:51 PM on June 12, 2013

Trying to tell Siri to play songs by The Band is like an Abbott & Costello routine.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:37 PM on June 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

To be honest, the whole "play music" part of Siri has got to be a bitch to program. Thousands of song titles, hundreds of artist names, weird grammar, partial sentences, etc. Even more impressive that they used to do it pre-Siri.
posted by smackfu at 2:30 PM on June 12, 2013

Siri works great.

Me: "Play Daft Punk"

Siri: "Playing Daft Punk"
posted by panaceanot at 7:25 PM on June 12, 2013

I don't think you'll suddenly have an NKRO problem if you plug a good PS2 keyboard into a PS2-to-USB adaptor.

While that panacea may have finally come to pass recently, this has not traditionally been the case. Not at all.
"Make it thicker, obviously. Or, use the little slide out PCMCIA type connector. Or just include the damned adapter in the box."

Try reading up on it here:

PS/2 vs USB Technical Limitations

Keep the following in mind if you have an n-key rollover keyboard that can be hooked up to your computer through either USB or a PS/2 port:

USB protocol limitation - A max of 10 simultaneous key presses are recognized, 6 non-modifier keys ('w', 'a', 's', 'd', etc) + 4 modifier keys (Shift, Caps, Ctrl, etc). Although you are limited to 6 regular keys you are still guaranteed that any combination of keys will be recognized properly if you have an n-key rollover keyboard. I would guess that most people would not need support for more keys than this. I would also guess that the 6 key limit may have had something to do with braille input requirements rather than someone choosing an arbitrary limit (although that doesn't explain why the limit exists in the first place).
PS/2 - There are no limitations when using a PS/2 connection with your keyboard. You will truly get full n-key rollover support.

When given the choice between using PS/2 or USB, it is generally recommended to choose PS/2 since it doesn't have the rollover limitations. However, if you enjoy hotplug support which PS/2 doesn't have, USB may very well be the better choice for you.

It's right in Apple's HID guidelines to design for the 80%. I'm certain that the vast majority of Macbook Air users are perfectly happy to sacrifice an ancient Ethernet connector for a slimmer, less fiddly design.

Until you call me and say "my Internet doesn't work, fix it now, FIX IT NOW." And after asking what the lights are doing on your modem, I ask you to connect your computer directly to it. You say, "connect what where?" So sorry, the MacBook Air does not support me fixing your connection for you. Goodbye.
posted by Chuckles at 7:58 PM on June 12, 2013

Unless you buy a $29 dongle that is completely standards based and supports Gig E. Really, it's not the end of the world. This isn't something like an iPad where you have no options.
posted by smackfu at 6:33 AM on June 13, 2013

Ars has published A Critical Look at the new Mac Pro.

Like any other system it will appeal to some and not to others. To those it doesn't appeal to I'm sure they don't think it's the end of the world any more than including a PS/2 connector alongside multiple USB 3 and eSATA connectors on a modern motherboard for those that might need it is not the end of the world or having to buy a dongle for your slim portable computing device.
posted by juiceCake at 9:41 AM on June 13, 2013

I'm glad to see iOS 7 will be lifting some of my favorite things from Pre. I loved the Palm Pre interface, especially the "cards" metaphor which let me quickly and with one hand navigate and quit open apps.

The major problem was that it ran on the Pre, a slickly designed but unreliable and cantankerous piece of hardware. I went through three of them in 2 years.
posted by The Deej at 9:56 AM on June 13, 2013

Unless you buy a $29 dongle that is completely standards based and supports Gig E. Really, it's not the end of the world.

Well sometimes it is the end of the world. But Apple already anticipated that.

I had a friend with a Macbook Air that crashed. System corrupted, and worse, her Time Machine backups were corrupted. Note: do not format your Time Machine volume as Case Sensitive, and who the hell would even do that? I managed to get the data off the Air using Recovery Mode and the Terminal (tar to a USB hard disk, hooray for Unix). But I could not get the Air's recovery partition to reinstall the OS. I had a way to reinstall the OS from a flash drive, but I couldn't get the specific version required for that model.

But Apple anticipated that scenario, you can reinstall the OS via a network and use Apple's server as your recovery partition. It's slow, it's a last resort. I was at the last resort. But I could not get the Air to attach to my wireless network. Okay, maybe I need to relax my wireless security temporarily, turn off MAC address auth and maybe even turn off ALL security since I could not get the damn thing to connect. Didn't work. Time to get an Ethernet adapter, if it doesn't work I'll just return it. Crap that didn't work either. It turned out the motherboard was fried. Fortunately Apple has flat fee depot service, you fedex it to them and they'll fix anything but water damage or cracked screen for $350. Which is nice because my only local repair site is totally incompetent. I would not go to such lengths except to keep someone out of their clutches. They quoted me $900 until I discovered the depot service program.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:18 AM on June 13, 2013

USB protocol limitation - A max of 10 simultaneous key presses are recognized, 6 non-modifier keys ('w', 'a', 's', 'd', etc) + 4 modifier keys (Shift, Caps, Ctrl, etc).

To be pedantic about this: the "6 non-modifier keys + 8 modifiers" is a limitation of the USB HID boot/legacy keyboard protocol, which is a simplified version of HID intended to support BIOS implementation. (8 modifiers because HID distinguishes between the left and right modifier keys.) The non-boot HID protocol has no such limits for non-modifier keys.

But: boot protocol is good enough for most purposes; so I suspect it's all that most keyboards implement. So much in USB is like this -- "good enough / works with Windows" becomes the de-facto standard for implementers.

(And as archagon says, regardless of protocol you're also limited to what the keyboard controller and key matrix can detect. Cheap is cheap, and 2-key rollover is very cheap.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:28 PM on June 13, 2013

Garbage Can That Looks Like the Mac Pro Is a Hot Item in Japan
posted by homunculus at 4:54 PM on June 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

I almost wonder if they'll also offer a tower or rackmount version.

What i'd REALLY love to see would be a say, two slot PCI-E x16 thunderbolt enclosure that was an official apple product. Make it super spiffy with a built in power supply and a quiet fan.

I know it would be $499 or something insulting like that, but it would be awesome since you'd also be able to use it with the macbooks.

I'm really interested to see what comes out of this whole thunderbolt business. The idea of potentially, essentially unlimited(or well, 30+) external PCI-e bays is awesome. The trick is getting actually affordable, and good ones out there. The only one i've seen so far was like $799 or 999 or something...
posted by emptythought at 6:22 PM on June 13, 2013

I also wouldn't be surprised if parallaxed wallpaper effects were squirreled away in Cydia somewhere.

I've definitely seen something at least kinda like that, although i know part of the purpose of it was in addition to the parallax, to have one super wide wallpaper that scrolled between all your home screens.

The command center thing is a rip of NCsettings + blurriedNCbackground though. example photo from my phone which also has a few other tweaks(the flashlight button, etc).

I'm not upset with them at all for taking some of this good stuff and blending it back in, but you are correct that it's pretty amusing how wholesale they just went "Oh, that's cool. Can we make that flavor with what we have here?"
posted by emptythought at 6:59 PM on June 13, 2013

What's Wrong with the iOS 7 Icons?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:49 PM on June 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Huh, thanks for the clarification on USB (HID) n-key rollover problems. Never knew that.
posted by archagon at 12:19 AM on June 15, 2013

Apple TV gets HBO Go and WatchESPN
posted by homunculus at 1:31 PM on June 19, 2013

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