Here’s the opening of Satya Nadella’s statement, as reported by The Verge

After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft. Panos has had an incredible impact on our products and culture as well as the broader devices ecosystem. Under Panos’ leadership, the team created the iconic Surface brand with loved products. More recently, as the leader of Windows, the team has brought amazing services and experiences to hundreds of millions with Windows 11 on innovative devices including those from our OEM partners. He will be missed, and I am personally very grateful for his many contributions over the years. Please join me in wishing him well.

I have mixed opinions on Panos Panay.

On the one hand, my sense is that he was a, if not the, driving force behind Microsoft’s Surface hardware. While not a success in marketshare, I think the Surface has been immensely important to the PC industry. In 2015, I speculated it was a “Reference Design” that the rest of the PC could follow that wasn’t just “offbrand MacBook Air“.

On the other hand, I think Panay has a track record of grossly over promising and under delivering outside of the core Surface line-up, and that these frequent missteps have been largely glossed over by the wider tech press because of his undeniable onstage presence and charisma.

Given these mixed opinions, I don’t have a sense for how much Panay was a great product leader versus an overpromising pitchman. Maybe he started out more the former, but ended up being more the later? In either case, the people I know with Microsoft Surfaces love them, and I can’t help but feel Microsoft is worse off without Panos Panay.

1. Launch Origin, which can’t update, log in, or reset password.
2. Search the web, find that Origin has been rebranded to “the EA app” (I think “Origin” is a better name, but whatever.) Download and install the EA app, which requires the PC to restart. Nothing suspicious there.
3. The newly downloaded EA app requires a password reset. Given the existing password was some weak variation of “busywork”, I suspect the previous Origin password a) had requirements that prevented it from being all that secure and b) was generally a pain to set up. No matter. The reset process here was relatively straight forward and I could use a much stronger password.
4. Finally launch Mass Effect.
5. The screen goes black.
6. The screen remains black even after various keyboard shortcuts to go back to Windows.
7. Restart the PC, which has now defaulted to 1024×768.
8. Try to change the resolution back to 4K and Windows says it did a great job, but the it’s still 1024×768.
9. Poke around in Windows Settings to find that HDR has been enabled. Disabled HDR and successfully changed the resolution to 4K.
10. Launch Mass Effect again.
11. The screen goes black again.
12. Pull out HDMI cable and see it’s rather flimsy as well as GE branded.
13. Try a newer HDMI cable.
14. I CAN SEE!
15. Audio doesn’t work.
16. Exit to Windows. See that HDMI audio output is selected. This is good. This is what we want and yet there is no HDMI audio output.
17. Meditate.
18. On a lark, try switching the output to built-in audio before switching right back to HDMI audio.
19. I CAN HEAR!
20. Graphical glitches abound.
21. Do the same thing with the game’s graphics settings as I did with the system audio. (It worked once already!) Toggle the resolution and HDR settings to something else before immediately changing them back to their original settings.
22. Play Mass Effect with working graphics and sound.

To my great surprise, I find myself agreeing with a take from The Verge, where Allison Johnson writes…

I don’t think we’ve seen everything that the Dynamic Island can do. More apps will start using it, especially if the whole iPhone 15 lineup adopts the feature like the rumors suggest. But it’s definitely not an exciting new way to interact with your phone — it’s just a handy tool alongside some other new features that make your phone a little less annoying to use. And that’s fine.

While Marco, John, and Casey echoed the same “optimism despite limited app support” take during ATP’s exit interview, their overall tone seemed down on the feature. My thinking aligns with Allison’s. Sure the lack of app support may be disappointing, but a Dynamic Island is still way better than a static peninsula even without app support.

While I have switched to HomePods for other rooms in our house, they aren’t really suitable for our kitchen due to limited counter space. For that room, I have been using a traditional receiver and speakers above the cabinets. This isn’t acoustically ideal, but it works well enough. The main issue I’ve had with this setup is that my receiver didn’t support AirPlay 2. This meant it couldn’t be part of any multi-room audio and more importantly, couldn’t be automated. What I’ve long wanted is to have music already playing as I come downstairs for breakfast.¹

Receivers with AirPlay 2 support have existed for years now, but they’ve been stupidly expensive given my otherwise basic needs. “Stupidly expensive” followed by “supply chain issues” kept me chugging along with my non-AirPlay 2 receiver until just this weekend, when the Denon DRA-800H went on sale for the still expensive, but not stupidly so price of $500².

Setting up the new receiver was easy enough with the exception of one glaring problem, I could not for the life of me figure out how to add it to Apple’s Home app. The process usually involves some code, either by scanning some QR-like blob or through manual entry. This receiver did not have such code nor did it advertise itself as “Works with HomeKit”. At this point it was reasonable to assume this receiver didn’t work with HomeKit and therefore couldn’t be added to the Home app. Naturally, the Home app cannot automate a device it is unaware of. I could attempt to use a personal automation, but I have never reliably streamed music from my iPhone. Even if I could, the whole idea that I’d have to use my iPhone in a house filled with Apple TV’s and HomePods is absurd.

To say I was frustrated would be an understatement.

Eventually, I searched the web for a workaround and to my great joy, I found this post by Tim Hardwick on MacRumors. It turns out you can add any AirPlay 2 “speaker³” without the usual code by tapping “More options…” in the Add Accessory prompt. While this process was super easy once I found it, I don’t understand why it was hidden in the first place. Why can’t the Home app more prominently surface new speakers once they’ve been added to the network? Why not include the Home setup when adding the receiver to the network using iOS’s specific feature for adding speakers to the network!?

The whole rigamarole reminded me of how poor of a job Apple’s done getting AirPlay 2 adoption. To me, HomePods are like the apps that come with iOS and macOS, in that they are good enough for most people. What makes Apple’s platforms really sing is the rich set of third party solutions for customers who want to do more. AirPlay 2 should similarly be for customers who want to do more with their home audio. I think it’s close, but Apple needs to further streamline adding AirPlay 2 devices to the Home app and work with device makers to ensure that streamlined setup is better communicated to their mutual customers.

Time was many people, myself included, replaced their smartphone every two years and even upgrading annually wasn’t uncommon. Early new models of iPhones added significant features that greatly benefited ever customer — eponymous 3G networking, massive performance increases, and Retina displays, to name a few. As with other kinds of computers, the need to upgrade lessened as the platform matured. Right now I am using an iPhone 11 Pro, which I purchased in 2019. It’s the first iPhone I have used for four years¹.

How good is this four year old iPhone 11 Pro?

This iPhone 11 Pro replaced my then three year old iPhone 7². Since there was no possible way the “Space Gray” model was ever going to look as cool as the Jet Black one it was replacing, I decided to get the silver and white model. Some tech bros frown upon white, but I always liked Apple’s white products and wanting everything in dark colors smells of toxic masculinity in the same way that wanting everything in camo does. Also this white iPhone looks amazing with the rainbow logo.

In addition to looking good, everything about the iPhone 11 Pro feels premium. The steel frame is substantive and the frosted glass back is velvety smooth. These premium materials aren’t without trade-offs. This iPhone is a bar of soap, especially when compared to the much lighter and much grippier Jet Black iPhone 7 it replaced³. Being a bar of soap means that I have dropped this phone a handful of times over the years, which is particularly scary given I don’t use a case. Neither its screen or back has ever shattered, which I attribute to both luck and the engineering involved. The biggest sign of wear is that its screen is littered with scratches that have developed over the years, the most noticeable of which happened within the first few months of usage. I don’t know if “softer glass” is a thing, but if so, this phone has it.

With some exception and outside of rare mishaps, I would describe my smartphone usage as being on the lighter side of typical. According to Screen Time, I mostly use this iPhone to listen to podcasts, surf the web, post on social media, take pictures, read email, play workout videos, and watch YouTube. After almost four years of this, I can report that I still have plenty of battery most nights after about 15 hours of being off the charger. Battery Health reports it has 89% capacity. I have noticed certain apps, Overcast and Knotwords specifically, lag upon opening. I don’t think that is related to any battery throttling as other apps seem to run just fine.

This is also my first iPhone X style model, in that it has a notched edge-to-edge OLED screen, new gestures, FaceID, and a camera system with multiple lenses. As expected, the display has amazing blacks and is great for watching videos. The new gesture based navigation came naturally to me. That said, I was blissfully unaware of OLED black smearing until using this phone. As for FaceID, I bought this phone 6 months before the start of the pandemic and while there were definitely times where I missed TouchID, I think FaceID is a huge improvement. As annoying as dealing with a mask was, that was always going to be a temporary inconvenience whereas the limitations of TouchID were everlasting. I don’t often wear a mask now in 2023, but I still do the dishes.

The camera system has held up surprisingly well. The biggest feature that tempted me in the last few years has been macro mode, introduced with the iPhone 13 Pro, but this iPhone 11 Pro supports macro photography with the help of the excellent app Halide. Halide’s macro feature isn’t some parlor trick either, and I have gotten a some very good shots with it. I have also used nightmode to great affect when capturing pictures of our adorable sleeping kiddo. Portrait mode has remained hit or miss, but regular and live mode photos come out looking reasonably good. The same is true with the videos I take. While I am genuinely excited at the prospect of taking noticeably better looking pictures and video, I don’t lament the ones I am taking today.

The camera improvements along with all of the other features I’ve forgone out of frugality these past years, like macro mode, the dynamic island, and not to mention 5G networking, is why I am upgrading to this year’s iPhone Pro 15. I am also looking to the rumored improvements coming with this year’s models, like USB-C and a presumably lighter titanium frame. That said, I don’t need a new iPhone anymore than I realistically need Thunderbolt on a phone. I am moving on from this four year old phone because I want to, not because I have to. The excellent screen, all day battery life, more than satisfactory performance and still decent cameras make for a perfectly good iPhone, even in 2023.

So how good is this four year old iPhone 11 Pro? Easily good enough to be a five year old iPhone 11 Pro.

Meta’s Quest 2 supports a resolution of 1832×1920 pixels per eye and costs $300. Sony’s VR2 headset supports a resolution 2000×2040 pixels per eye and costs $550 plus another $500 for the Playstation 5 to drive it. Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro supports more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye and will cost $3500. There is a lot more to headsets than just pixels, but I think the Vision Pro’s significantly higher resolution is worth specific examination, especially considering the displays involved are reportedly the product’s highest costing and most limited component. Apple clearly believes this display and its 23 million pixels that deliver incredibly clear text and graphics is the only one to meet what they believe is the threshold necessary to do spatial computing right.

Requiring high resolution in an immensely anticipated platform is not new to Apple. They’ve done it at least one time before and I’m not talking about the iPhone. While the iPhone was without a doubt revolutionary and had a significantly larger screen, that screen’s pixel density was actually in the ballpark of other small-screen phones of the day. Those other phones sucked by comparison for other reasons. No, the product I am referring to is the Macintosh.

The original Macintosh that was famously released in 1984 sported a 512×342 display that delivered a whopping 72 square pixels-per-inch. This meant the Macintosh could deliver incredibly clear text and graphics necessary to do a desktop graphical user interface (GUI) right. It’s why System 1.0’s design looks modern compared to other GUIs of that era and has held up for almost four decades now.

Despite its high resolution and being the first mass market personal computer with a graphical user interface, the Macintosh did not bring the graphical user interface to the masses. The reasons for this have been discussed ad nauseam. Macs weren’t compatible, were more expensive, and suffered from increasingly boneheaded leadership.

But what about Windows?

Windows was released in 1985, just a year after the Macintosh. It was compatible with millions of already sold PCs, supported cheaper hardware, and benefited from incredibly competent leadership at Microsoft. Windows was the platform that ultimately brought desktop GUIs to the masses, but not in the 80s. In fact, fewer people used Windows in the 80s than owned Macintoshes. A good illustration of this is Sim City. Sim City was a very popular game released in 1989 for both Macintosh and MS-DOS. The first Windows version didn’t appear until 1992 because no one really used Windows until the 90s. A major reason why is also illustrated by Sim City, whose 1989 MS-DOS version initially only supported the following graphic modes in MS-DOS:

EGA color graphics in both low-resolution 320×200 and high-resolution 640×350, as well as monochrome EGA 640×350, CGA 640×200, and Hercules 720×348.

Some unfamiliar with the era might look at some of those resolutions and wonder how they never noticed that PC monitors from the 80s had widescreen aspect ratios. That’s because PC monitors of the era weren’t widescreen. They had a display aspect ratio of 4:3, which was very much standard at the time. These resolutions worked not by making the displays wide, but by making the pixels tall. Most PCs sold in the 80s primarily measured their displays in lines and columns. Pixels obviously existed, but only in the context of rendering command line interfaces.

Arguably, Windows biggest advantage in the 80s was that it made multitasking between different programs much easier. Even though Microsoft managed to pull this off in software, the hardware limitations of low resolution CGA and EGA graphics with chonky rectangular pixels made multitasking clunky to the point of being unusable. I don’t have the statistics to prove this, but I would bet good money that the rise of Windows 3.x correlates very heavily with the adoption of VGA’s 640×480 graphics mode and SVGA. SVGA in particular delivered 800×600 resolution that roughly amounts to 72 square pixels per inch on a 14″ display, a size that I recall was fairly common in the early-to-mid-90s. Not only that, but I would also wager heavily that Windows 95, which started development in 1992 and included an overhauled GUI that just so happened to drop support for anything less than VGA, was a massive success because it was the first version of Windows that was really designed for the 72 PPI threshold.

The Macintosh illustrated the importance of 72 PPI because of how its GUI didn’t need to change. Windows illustrated the importance of 72 PPI because of how much it did change.

Many people have and will instinctively compare Apple Vision to the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, but those were mass market devices from day one and priced accordingly. The Vision Pro is not a mass market device. The closest thing I can compare it to is the Macintosh, and the only thing I can compare spatial computing to is desktop computing. Desktop computing took a decade to come to the masses. It may not take a decade for spatial computing and I am sure Meta and Sony will continue to sell many headsets in the intervening time. I am also confident that every headset will inevitably exceed this new threshold set by Apple, just as PCs eventually exceeded 72 PPI, but I would bet that any headset that isn’t just a video game console will offer an experience closer to Vision OS than anything else on the market today.

From Chris Welch, at The Verge:

Let’s get right to it: the 5K display, which is being positioned as a prosumer option meant to rival monitors from LG and Apple, will cost $1,599.99 and you’ll be able to purchase it from Samsung and other retailers in August.

$1,599 is the same starting MSRP as Apple’s Studio Display — also a 27-inch 5K monitor.

The first 5K iMac was released in 2014. Apple at the time touted the engineering of making 5K possible. That it’s almost a decade later and Samsung’s entry is only the third truly¹ 5K display on the market really highlights how ahead of the curve Apple was able to get with the integrated iMac. Furthermore, while originally priced at $2499, 2015 brought models priced as low as $1799. That’s only a hundred dollars more than the Studio Display and this new Samsung 5K display.

Speaking of price, I do expect this Samsung display will get more frequently and heavily discounted than the Studio Display². It also comes with a matte display and an adjustable height stand out of the box³, two features Apple charges extra for. Furthermore, the Samsung entry features a DisplayPort in addition to Thunderbolt 4, which should make it ideal for anyone who uses both a Mac and a gaming PC.

Regardless, I hope these Samsung displays sell like gangbusters. 5K is way better than 4K at 27″, even on Windows, and I would love for this display to be the first of many new 5K options.

Neil Jhaveri, on Mimestream’s blog:

Mimestream combines the power of macOS with Gmail’s advanced features for a new kind of email client that lets you move through your email effortlessly. Unlike other email clients that use the decades-old IMAP protocol, Mimestream uses the Gmail API for a new kind of lightning-fast experience that’s full of features. Built using the latest technologies from Apple, using Mimestream is a breath of fresh air that you’ll see and feel.

I feel like many, if not most third party email clients that have come out in recent years took the approach of trying to reinvent email. They never appealed to me because I didn’t want to reinvent email. I just wanted a great email client. Mimestream is a great email client. If you and/or your work use Gmail, Mimestream is a no-brainer and is an absolute steal at $30 a year.

A large part of the consternation surrounding Apple’s purported AR/VR headset is that it falls short of the real killer product, AR glasses. While writing my last post, it dawned on me this consternation is reminiscent to that surrounding Apple’s various notches. Tech enthusiasts want Apple to deliver a true edge-to-edge experience with the camera, FaceID, and other sensors somehow behind the display. I am using the present tense “want”, because it’s been over five years since the notch was introduced with the iPhone X and no one, including Apple, has been able to meaningfully deliver a true edge-to-edge experience.

Calling an AR/VR headset “a notch for your face” sounds like snark and while it does make me chuckle, I think it’s incredibly apt in that I suspect the realities of AR glasses today are the same realities of true edge-to-edge displays in 2017. The capabilities just aren’t here and it’s reasonable to assume that they aren’t going to get here for years to come. The choice for Apple isn’t “do a headset or do AR glasses” just like the choice wasn’t “do the notch or do edge-to-edge.” In both cases, it’s “do something incremental or do nothing.”

I think people have become too married to the idea that AR/VR needs to be ubiquitous to be considered a success to the point where it’s distorted our whole thinking about the product category. This is why their ideal headset needs to be priced in the mid-hundreds, because that’s the price where ubiquity is possible. A $3000 headset, no matter how good, can’t become ubiquitous and therefore has already lost before even entering the race with that narrow line of thinking.

This “ubiquitous or bust” bar of success applies doubly for Apple because of the iPhone. For many, everything Apple does is framed by the success of the iPhone. They don’t want to hear that the iPhone’s ubiquity is largely because the need for a pocket computer turned out to be ubiquitous. They singularly focus on whether such-and-such Apple product is as ubiquitous as the iPhone, then write it off when it isn’t. Folks who still overlook the Apple Watch, a device that topped 10 million in sales and dominates in marketshare, are going to be apoplectic over a headset that doesn’t hit a million sales in its first year.

Along the lines of “Apple never releases two new products the same way”, I don’t think we have a model for how a premium AR/VR headset will perform in the market. As revolutionary as the iPhone was, it’s momentum was driven by a very clear model for success when it was announced. Handheld devices like cell phones and iPods had already been selling like gangbusters for years and so everyone knew a device that served both roles just as well or better was also going to sell like gangbusters. The closest Apple product launches I can think of is the original Macintosh and the Newton. People didn’t quite know how they were going to use a personal computer, and they didn’t know how they were going to use a PDA. Personal computers didn’t become ubiquitous until the-mid 90s. PDAs never achieved true ubiquity and ended up being a stepping stone toward smartphones.

I don’t think AR/VR headsets are ever going to become ubiquitous, even if they are priced in the mid-hundreds, because I can’t imagine most people (many of which were hesitant about AirPods) will get comfortable strapping goggles over their face. That said, I don’t think ubiquity is the only measure of success. The Mac has never been ubiquitous. A headset that sells at low volumes, but becomes the de facto standard for professionals is still successful. A headset that over time gives Apple the chops to become the de facto standard in AR glasses, something that I think does have a high chance to become ubiquitous, is a no brainer.