Spoiler warning: The following contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

If I had to pick one criticism of the New York Times, a paper that I pay for only as a means to help fund journalism, it would be how many of their headlines normalize, flatter and even empower Trump. Just yesterday, the paper ran a story entitled Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines. This comes in a week of Trump related headlines that include: White House Press Secretary Makes Steely and Unflinching Debut, Defying Legal Limits, Trump Firings Set Up Tests That Could Expand His Power, and Amid the Chaos, Trump Has a Simple Message: He’s in Charge.

Describing how The Times and the wider mainstream media treat Trump is tricky. After all, none of the headlines I mentioned are factually inaccurate. It’s not so much their substance, but their tone. A subtle difference in tone can drastically change how a given headline reads.

The last two entries of The Legend of Zelda, The Breath of the Wild and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, are a great example of how slight differences tone can greatly impact meaning. Both games have an open world, that is to say you can practically go anywhere and fight anyone at any point. I have spent hours upon hours in both games killing countless monsters created by the game’s villain, Ganon. Lest the world of Hyrule run out of these monsters, both games use a mechanic that respawns them — the blood moon. In Breath of the Wild, the titular Zelda first notifies Link of the event with the following monologue:

Link… Be on your guard. Ganon’s power grows… it rises to its peak under the hour of the blood moon. By its glow, the aimless spirits of monsters slain in the name of the light will return to the flesh. Link… please be careful.

Zelda’s tone unambiguously warns and shows concern for our protagonist. The blood moon is bad.

Her monologue during the blood moon in Tears of the Kingdom is quite a bit different.

Witness the blood moon’s rise. When its red glow shines upon the land… the aimless spirits of slain monsters return to flesh. Just as they did in a war long past. The world is threatened once again.

Can you spot the difference? This is not so much a warning as it is a pronouncement, and there is zero concern for our hero. The blood moon is exciting. It turns out this change of tone has a very good reason — that isn’t actually Zelda. It’s a puppet doppelganger controlled by Ganon.

I don’t think The New York Times is a puppet of the Trump administration, but I do think the tone of these headlines betray that the paper might be a bit too excited by the prospect of getting to cover whatever bad things Trump and his cronies will do to our country.

Most people love their smartphones more than they do their personal computers. The biggest reason by far is that smartphones bring the internet to them everywhere, but another less obvious reason is that using smartphones is like driving an automatic¹. They are way less demanding than Macs or PCs running Windows, and I don’t just mean maintenance. Certainly running updates and installing software is more manual in macOS and Windows, but that occasional maintenance pales in comparison to the constant manual user intervention involved with merely using those platforms. Where should this file live? Which of them sync? How should my windows be arranged? When should I close them? What should I even do with the desktop? Which apps actually need full disk access?

By contrast, the default experiences of iOS and Android don’t really demand any manual intervention or decision making from their users. There are no windows to deal with or files to manage. Any need for user intervention is optional and progressively disclosed behind apps and/or features. Photos, notes, music, and other documents are typically managed within their respective apps. Both iOS and Android have any number of settings that can be tinkered with. People can intervene more with their smartphones, but they don’t have to.

Personal computers do have a more automatic platform of sorts, the web. Like with smartphones, many people prefer web apps over traditional native ones. Web based apps are so automatic that they are effectively on demand. No one has to install GMail, Google Docs, or Slack. They just go to some website where they always get the latest version of whatever app when needed. Web apps also don’t require users to deal with windows or files. Their emails, flow charts, conversations, and other documents are all self contained within one browser window. Like smartphones, users can customize their experience and manually manage their documents, but again, they don’t have to.

Given most people prefer automatic platforms, why hasn’t Android, iOS, or the web completely overtaken macOS and Windows? Why aren’t offices filled with Chromebooks and iPads? I think most people who prefer automatic platforms end up using manual ones on personal computers for three reasons: familiarity, apps, and cross-app productivity. They want something familiar with what they already use and need specific apps that all work cohesively with the other ones they use.

Google’s ChromeOS found on Chromebooks is very familiar to many people who are already using web apps like Gmail, Google Docs, and Slack. ChromeOS has even visually converged with Windows. The problem is ChromeOS has limited software support outside of web apps and while web apps do support a growing number of use cases, gaps remain. This is why, I presume, Google is merging ChromeOS into its non-web based Android platform.

iPadOS has much better app support, but is unfamiliar and often times cumbersome to someone coming from Windows or macOS. In other words, iPads are a little weird for those who already have an expectation of what a computer is. This is best illustrated by the fact that Apple still doesn’t sell an iPad with a keyboard and trackpad included. They are optional add-ons that need to be purchased separately. Part of me wonders how many companies would jump at the chance to buy their teams a laptop running iPadOS in lieu of similarly priced MacBooks or even cheaper PC laptops.

That said, I think many professionals would still cling to macOS and Windows even in a world where ChromeOS was merged with Android or Apple did release a laptop running iPadOS, because neither would inherently address or improve those platforms’ limitations when it comes to cross-app productivity. Furthermore, I suspect most avenues of improving cross-app productivity on these platforms would be in tension with what makes them so automatic to begin with². ChromeOS, Android, and iOS (including iPadOS) are automatic largely because they defer the complexity of manual intervention to apps that mostly exist in isolation of one another. This simplifies the platform, but makes working across apps much more cumbersome. I wrote about this when addressing Catalyst apps’ lack of cohesion in macOS.

The more complicated Mac builds ease almost entirely through cohesion. Wherever possible, Mac applications are expected to share the same shortcuts, controls, windowing behavior, etc… so users can immediately find their bearings regardless of the application. This also means that several applications existing in the same space largely share the same visual and UX language. Having Finder, Safari, BBEdit and Transmit open on the same desktop looks and feels natural.

By comparison, the bulk of iOS’s simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side.

I do think personal computers will become more automatic, either through the evolution of macOS and/or Windows, or the advent of some other platform. Apple once thought that “some other platform” was going to be i(Pad)OS and Google seemingly still believes it’s going to be some amalgam of ChromeOS and Android, but I don’t think either can overtake today’s manual incumbents. They’ve achieved being more automatic largely by only supporting one app at a time. That is perfectly suitable for smartphone and web apps, but for multiple apps running side-by-side on personal computers, people need an automatic platform that won’t slow them down.

Justin Long is back again, this time for Qualcomm. Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:

Apple’s former “I’m a Mac” actor Justin Long defected to Intel a few years ago, and now he’s looking to switch to a Qualcomm-powered Windows PC.

Which is worse? Being the butt of a joke that is only effective because lots of folks remember your ads from over a decade ago or being spared because no one remembers your ads from just three years ago? Back when Intel featured Long in their ads, I observed that the campaign ultimately showed how commoditized they were. I can’t think of a better illustration of that point than an actual competitor of Intel also using Long to promote PCs, and oh by the way, no one cares because most people don’t even remember Intel even ran those ads.

In my last post, I likened hypothetical macOS virtualization in iPadOS to Mac OS X’s classic mode. The more I’ve thought about it however, the more I think classic mode isn’t the right analogy. Classic mode was for anyone migrating to Mac OS X, which was practically every Mac user at the time. I don’t see virtualized macOS as something for every iPad user. A better analogy would be Boot Camp.

Boot Camp was (and seemingly still is) an optional feature that made it possible for technically inclined users to install Microsoft Windows on Intel-based Macs. It wasn’t for everyone. I would wager most everyone that seriously used Boot Camp strongly preferred macOS, but needed access to Windows to perform some function of their work. This is exactly the type of audience I imagine virtualized macOS would support. Technically inclined users who prefer the iPad, including iPadOS, but still need to occasionally access macOS to do some bit of work. The only difference is that Boot Camp installed Windows as a parallel system OS that required rebooting into. That was fine for 2006, but obviously doesn’t make sense in an era where virtualized environments can be just as performant while effectively running in an app.

With the most recent round of “holy shit these new iPad Pros are really powerful” naturally came “I just really wish iPadOS weren’t so limited”. One idea that is currently making the rounds to make iPadOS less limited is to have some sort of virtualized Mac mode a la Mac OS X’s Classic Environment wherein higher end iPads could run macOS when connected to a trackpad and keyboard. I am not opposed to the idea and agree that virtualized macOS would serve as an “escape hatch” of sorts. Instead of physically fleeing to Mac hardware at the first sight of a complicated task, users could merely flee to macOS while using the same iPad hardware. I also think virtualized macOS is a way better idea than using macOS as a tablet OS because it would be a distinct mode where touchability isn’t expected.

That being said, I think supporting of virtualized macOS on iPads would only serve power users who are not necessarily pro users. While the two aren’t mutually exclusive — there are undoubtedly countless pro users on the Mac using things like Homebrew, Applescript, and all sorts of other utilities — I would wager most pro users aren’t power users. To them, the computer is merely a conduit to the apps required to do their job. To non-power users, pro or otherwise, virtualized macOS on iPad would be messy. How do updates work? Can the two environments access each other? What happens to Mac mode when you yank the iPad out of the Magic Keyboard? Would virtualized macOS be allowed to run in the background? I think many power users would recognize and be fine with the trade offs involved, but how would anyone, including Apple, go about explaining them to vanilla iPad users. “Well you can use these other class of apps, but only if you are connected to this $300 accessory. Oh and by the way, these apps are different than the ones you’ve been using on your iPad, even the ones with the same names. No, they don’t talk to each other.”

Virtualized macOS would serve Apple power users rather than raise the limits for professionals using iPadOS.

One of the main arguments for supporting virtualized macOS on iPads is that it would take some of the pressure off of iPadOS to do all the things a Mac does. That’s a fair argument, but I think there are other ways to take the pressure off of iPadOS without introducing a second operating system just for power users. While many of iPadOS’s numerous limitations can and should be addressed across the line — a better files app, sound from multiple apps at once, etc…– there is one foundational limitation that Apple can’t address in software alone, and that is the physical screen size. This is an area where I think Apple could relieve the pressure on iPadOS by changing its constraints.

In an ideal world, iPadOS would somehow deliver professionals and power users an experience that satisfies three requirements:

1. Is information rich enough to support a handful of apps on one screen
2. Remains touch friendly
3. Does the above on an 11-inch screen

If satisfying all three is impossible, and right now it sure seems impossible, what I think Apple should do is try to satisfy just two of those requirements. Virtualized macOS does this inherently. macOS can be information rich on 11 and 13-inch screens specifically because it doesn’t support touch. In theory, iPadOS could also become information rich at the expense of touch friendliness whenever a trackpad and keyboard are connected. Modern iPads already offer display scaling and it’s easy to imagine a future where this sort of scaling could change based on peripherals, orientation, and/or whether Stage Manager is enabled. While I don’t like the idea of diminishing touch in iPadOS, it would still be way better than running an entirely separate OS. Merely toggling scale modes when disconnecting an iPad would be way more elegant than suspending macOS running in a virtual machine.

That being said, what I have been arguing is for Apple to sacrifice number three. Have a “multi-app” mode available only when a Thunderbolt enabled iPad is connected to a large external display and offer what would be an absurdly expensive Studio Display Touch¹. Plugging in an iPad wouldn’t have to switch scaling because the screen would be large enough to be information rich and have touch friendly controls. Power and pro users could work across multiple apps on the same screen or have a single luxuriously large app. Tying multi-app mode to having a display connected naturally lets an unconnected iPad just be an iPad. Apps that are windowed on an external display would merely go back to being full screen when the iPad is disconnected, and a vast majority of people who love their iPad for what it is would likely never see this multi-app mode.

All this isn’t to say I think Apple shouldn’t support virtualized macOS on iPads. My position is more of a “yes, and”. Let high end iPads run virtualized macOS and still address the limitations that exist in iPadOS. Virtualized macOS would delight the minority of power users while go largely unnoticed by vanilla iPad users, pro or otherwise. It would be helpful to some and harmless to most. That said, I also think Apple still has to raise the limits of iPadOS, even if that means revisiting the trade offs inherent in an 11-inch touch first device.

If you told people that Meta would start licensing their headset platform less than three months after Apple released the Vision Pro, most would assume that Apple’s headset must of sold like gangbusters. Not only has that not happened, it couldn’t happen based on supply chain constraints. So why license now? I have two thoughts: that Apple still disrupted Meta and that both companies are necessarily in it for the long game.

Meta’s first gambit was to dominate the market by being the first mover. After buying Oculus, Meta quickly established itself as the preeminent company in the very nascent headset market. At this time last year, they were touting a line of consumer and high end hardware that was coupled with their OS. Without any meaningful competition, Meta could play the long game merely by continually releasing products over time, because they would undoubtedly be the default people chose when headset sales eventually took off. The Apple Vision Pro didn’t need a bunch of sales to disrupt this strategy. As crazy as it sounds, it did so by merely existing. Meta couldn’t just idly wait for headsets to take off anymore because the longer that took, the more time Apple would have to bring its compelling and tightly integrated offering down market.

Meta responded to Apple Vision Pro in two ways. They effectively shitcanned its high end line and more importantly, lowered prices of its consumer line. Undercutting the competition to dominate an industry is a classic and often very successful strategy, but only if there is an industry to dominate. Meta’s problem is that no one is buying headsets in meaningful numbers. The whole point of selling hardware on the cheap is that everyone comes to your ecosystem instead of the other guys’, but that doesn’t work when no one is buying. By cutting prices, Meta was trying to drive headset adoption to happen now so they could maximize their first mover advantage. That apparently didn’t happen so the company is necessarily pivoting.

By licensing their platform, Meta is embracing the long game. They are still hoping headsets will catch on this or next year, but their goal isn’t to be the default headset choice. Now it’s to be the default headset platform. Meta is betting that if headsets do take four or five years to take off, whatever Apple does won’t matter when every other headset on the market runs their Horizon OS. It worked for Microsoft. It worked for Google. It’ll probably work for Meta too.

I recently connected my AirPods Pro to our Apple TV, something I usually do on the occasion that my wife wants to sleep rather than unwind with some show. The resulting sound is always exceptionally good, even when it’s not immersive. In this particular case, the AirPods didn’t try to envelop me in sound because I was watching an older show. Instead, the stereo audio was augmented in such a way to suggest the sound was more or less coming from the TV. This is actually what I want most of the time. Some home theater enthusiasts may balk at reading that, but I don’t want to be enveloped in sound while trying to wind down. All I want is clear dialog and not to be jarred by suddenly loud musical scores and sound effects. In other words, I just want my TV to sound right.

The CRT televisions of my youth didn’t sound good, but they sounded right. Despite only having one or two laughably small speakers, I rarely had any issue interpreting the sound of whatever movie or show I was watching. By comparison, the flat screen televisions of my adult lifetime never sounded right. Their audio quality was better, sure, but they all sounded wrong. Dialog was quiet and often obscured by other audio tracks. Increasing the volume helped, but at the expense of jarringly loud moments.

Edward Vega, did an excellent YouTube video for Vox explaining this phenomenon, and specifically why dialog in particular has gotten increasingly hard to hear. He lays out several reasons, but the parts I think are most germain to televisions not sounding right are dynamic range…

[A] big thing that [filmmakers] want to preserve is a concept called dynamic range. The range between your quietest sound and your loudest sound. If you have your dialog, that’s going to be at the same volume as an explosion that immediately follows it. The explosion is not going to feel as big. You need that contrast in volume in order to give your ear a sense of scale. But the thing is, you can only make something so loud before it gets distorted. So if you want to create that wide dynamic range you have no choice but to push those quieter sounds lower instead of pushing the louder sounds louder. So explosions go up and dialog comes down.

…and the large number of tracks necessary for modern surround sound.

The content that we watch [on our televisions and smartphones]is not mixed for us, primarily. Rerecording mixers mix for the widest surround sound format that is available. typically like big release films. That is Dolby Atmos, which has true 3D sound up to 128 channels. The thing is, if you’re not at a movie theater that can showcase the best sound Hollywood has to offer, [then] you can’t experience all of those channels. So after the movie is mixed for the 128 Atmos tracks somebody, has to create a separate version of the film’s audio where all those same sounds live on one or two or five tracks.

Basically, those who make movies and shows produce audio for multi-speaker theater setups, home or actual, and do so at the expense of more typical setups that involve just the TV’s built-in speakers¹.

Edward concludes his video by saying the issue is intractable and gives the audience three options:

So the solutions we have are:

1. Buy better speakers and only go to theaters that have impeccable sound.
2. Take a chill pill and try to just worry a little bit less about picking up every single word that gets said.
3. Just keep the subtitles on.

Suggestions two and three are absurd, as is the notion of exclusively going to theaters. The only real suggestion is to buy speakers, but that begs the question what kind of speakers does one need just to make the TV sound right? Those producing content would seemingly have everyone buy and install a home theater with capabilities as close to an actual theater as possible. My problem, beyond cost and wires, is that I don’t always want a theater-like experience for home viewing just like I don’t want a concert-like experience for home listening. Most of the time, I don’t want an experience at all. Again, I just want my TV to sound right.

“Sounding right” seems like table stakes for any home theater system, but I’ve found it to be elusive. My previous receiver with two decent bookshelf speakers never sounded right, even after I added a center channel. In hindsight and given the aforementioned complexity and priorities of audio in modern movies and shows, I now don’t see how those three dumb speakers ever could sound right. In fact, it seems the only way to make shows and movies sound right with dumb speakers is to use an ever increasing number of them. That’s fine, even exciting, if you are a home theater enthusiast, but a bunch of dumb speakers is not the answer for me.

The answer for me, and I would wager most people, is computerized speakers².

“Computerized speakers” is the term I am using to mean speakers with built-in computerized audio processing. This is in contrast to what I am calling “dumb speakers”, which merely reproduce already processed audio being sent from another component, typically a receiver. Having the smarts built-in make computerized speakers more flexible and less finicky than their dumb counterparts. With dumb speakers, more is necessary³. With computerized speakers, more is merely preference. You can have a single soundbar or fill the room with a bunch of computerized speakers for better immersion, and everything can sound right regardless. I’d wager most people don’t buy any speakers for their TV and that a majority of those who do just buy a soundbar.

Soundbars range in both quality and price. Some are cheap and probably sound like crap while others are expensive and reportedly sound quite good. Within this range, I think Apple is making some of the best computerized speakers⁴ for home theater on the market for their price. The HomePods that we typically use when watching TV also just sound right., all the dialog is clear and I still hear everything without being jarred by some overly loud sound effect or music cue.

While the HomePods can only can to kinda sorta fake surround sound, the AirPods Pro reproduce a remarkably spatial surround sound experience. “Spatial” is the word that Apple uses and one that I think is very apt. Like with stereo, surround sound with AirPods Pro can feel like it’s at a distance where the audio is set further back in the soundscape. Unlike stereo, this distance varies depending on what’s happening in the video. A close up sounds close while a medium shot sounds further away. Apple’s deliberate use of distance is best illustrated by a third example of Apple’s exceptional computerized speakers.

I don’t own a Vision Pro, but a friend let me try his a few weeks ago. Top on my list was to sample some of Apple’s immersive video. Immersive video is not the same as 3D video. 3D video still comes from a rectangle and is therefore still directional. You look toward the rectangle to watch the 3D video. Immersive video has no rectangle. The video is all encompassing, and you watch by looking all around. With non-immersive video, the Vision Pro’s audio pods kept some sound at a distance just like when I watch my Apple TV with AirPods. With immersive video however, the sound is more often right there, which makes sense because you are right there.

Time was you could just buy the TV and have everything sound right. You could optionally add two decent dumb speakers and have everything sound good too, because everything you were watching was stereo or mono. The sound in modern movies and shows has gotten too complicated to sound good on two dumb speakers. Getting decent home theater sound with only one or two speakers requires good computerized speakers and right now Apple is making some of the best computerized speakers for the buck, especially if you just want everything to sound right.

Someone tried to pull a “shoebox” scam on me while I was traveling in NYC this week for work. By “shoebox” scam, I am referring to Charlotte Cowle’s The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. If you haven’t done so already, I implore you to read it.

I don’t typically answer many calls from unknown numbers, but one came in while I was at work that was very possibly from our kiddo’s spring camp. Upon answering, a person on the other line identified himself as a deputy with the county sheriff. After confirming the name and address that this person already had, I was told that I had missed a summons. The implication being that there was some warrant out for my arrest. Already suspicious, I politely told the person that I would call him back at the number listed on the sheriff’s website. He seemed bothered by this and my suspicions were confirmed when he demanded that he call me back from that number. This experience was exactly like one Charlotte had described in her piece.

He told me his name was Michael Sarano and that he worked for the CIA on cases involving the FTC. He gave me his badge number. “I’m going to need more than that,” I said. “I have no reason to believe that any of what you’re saying is real.”

“I completely understand,” he said calmly. He told me to go to the FTC home page and look up the main phone number. “Now hang up the phone, and I will call you from that number right now.” I did as he said. The FTC number flashed on my screen, and I picked up. “How do I know you’re not just spoofing this?” I asked.

“It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.”

Caller ID can be spoofed, even government numbers. Sure enough, before I could get my call out, another call came in from the number on the website. I could have ignored it, but answered out of curiosity. The person on the other side was not the same person who I was talking to before, but a different man. This man had a southern sounding accent, apt for Texas, and was immediately more intense. When I reiterated that I would call the number back, the intense southern sounding man became threatening. I don’t remember his exact wording, but it was something along the lines of “if you hang up this call, I am going to send a squad car right now and have you arrested.” His threat didn’t really worry me and not because I was in New York at the time, but because it was clearly a gambit to keep me from calling the number. Spoofing Caller ID is just that. It makes a phone call from one number look like it came from another number. In my case, the number spoofed at this point was the one for the actual sheriff’s department so any call back would be received by the actual sheriff’s department and not the scammers. My adversary surely knew this, so his only move was to try and bully me into staying on the call he had started.

I hung up on him and called the actual sheriff’s department using the number listed on their website. Eventually a nice operator sent me to non-emergency dispatch who told me they were aware of the scam and asked if I had given any money to the perpetrators. I told him I hadn’t and asked if there was any way to actually confirm whether there was some sort of summons I missed for ultimate peace of mind. The dispatcher wasn’t really sure, but didn’t seem too worried about it. I then called my wife to let her know what happened, lest the scammers tried her next. Alas no one called her, I assume because they correctly figured that I would warn her immediately.

I have been privately skeptical of Charlotte’s account and not because I thought these scams didn’t exist, rather because there are many aspects of her story that require her to fall for some truly unbelievable aspects. The most notable of which for me was that the FTC/CIA was going to let her take cash out before freezing her accounts, or as redditor Creative_Instinct put it:

CIA: We’re probably freezing your assets because you’re under investigation or under arrest. I don’t even know anymore. But I like you. So. Go take all your money out. This is standard protocol. We warn you, THEN freeze your assets.

That said, I find her more believable having now experienced this sort of scam in person. I was definitely a little rattled by the experience despite having identified the scam early on and can’t imagine what I might have done had I not. Furthermore, that I did suss it out was at least partially due to having read Charlotte’s piece in recent months. I don’t know if I could have been rattled to the extent of putting $50,000 dollars into a shoebox, but having her account top of mind certainly helped regardless.