My M1 Mac mini has been sleeping dreadfully recently. Perhaps it's the thought of one day having macOS Ventura installed on it, or the knowledge that its younger M2 brethren beats it in both performance and power efficiency. Or perhaps, it was something else altogether.
I could tell it wasn't sleeping due to the fact the attached USB storage would endlessly spin up and back down during the day; the Mac min sits under my desk while I work all day on my laptop. One time while it was supposedly asleep and idle, I went to plug a device into it, and could feel the fan blowing out hot air from the back. It wasn't sleeping at all.
Thanks to an app called Sleep Aid, I was able to verify that my Mac was indeed struggling to get to sleep. Even when I put it to sleep manually, it would quickly wake up and not go back to sleep again. Sleep Aid helpfully lists the processes that were active during time awake. In my case, the most active process was something called "com.apple.FileProvider.cache-delete.push".
Armed with this information, I did what any self proclaimed nerd would do; I Googled it. To my surprise, there were barely any hits. Some posts relating to Android, one on the Apple Developer forum about a bug with the File Provider API, but it didn't seem related. I was stumped. Sam Rowlands, the developer behind Sleep Aid reached out to me on Twitter and offered to check that Sleep Aid itself wasn't misreporting what I was seeing. It was not.
Eventually I stumbled across a WWDC video on the File Provider API, and decided to watch it. It dawned on me that this is the API Apple makes for services such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive to use. For years, Dropbox and OneDrive have been using various unofficial hacks in order to integrate with the Finder. In 2019, Apple released the File Provider API and gradually the third party cloud sync providers have been moving to it ever since.
Apart from Apple's own iCloud Drive, I only had Microsoft OneDrive installed. I promptly deleted the OneDrive app and since then, my Mac has not had any bouts of insomnia due to com.apple.FileProvider.cache-delete.push. Problem solved.
My guess is that because I had OneDrive set not to run on system startup, and I had the OneDrive sync directory on an external hard drive, somehow the push notifications that Apple sends to indicate a file has changed were getting stuck. Perhaps OneDrive is supposed to say "I've got the file, you can go back to sleep" but wasn't able to do so.
My Mac still spends a lot of the time it is supposed to be sleeping awake, but this seems to be common in M1 Macs. Thankfully now it does go to sleep for around 40% of the time instead of 0%, helping avoid needlessly wasting energy.
So if you've got a Mac that won't sleep, I recommend grabbing a copy of Sleep Aid to help find the culprit.
Title image generated by Stable Diffusion using the prompt "a man sitting at a laptop falling asleep in a dark room at night, Cinematic" (with some edits).
The vast majority of Worldwide Digital's losses were tied to Amazon's Alexa and other devices, a person familiar with the division told Insider. The loss was by far the largest among all of Amazon's business units and slightly double the losses from its still nascent physical stores and grocery business.
I recall back in the summer of 2017 meeting with some senior marketing executives who worked for a multinational fashion and beauty company. We were there to talk about AI. Voice was central to the discussion. In a few years, it seemed inevitable to most people in the room that voice would be an important “touch point” for consumers wanting to interact with their brands. I felt slightly more cautious, though was easy to get wrapped up in the hype. I always imagine a simple task of ordering a meal in a restaurant. It’s far easier to peruse a menu with your eyes, than to have the waiter read you a list of what they have available to order while you try and remember and make a decision in a reasonable amount of time. In general I subscribe to the view that AI is an accelerator for human-like skills and interactions. It can speed up and automate tasks that humans do, but if those tasks don’t already make for a great experience, then AI by itself won’t make it better, unless speed and accuracy are the cause of the poor experience.
Alexa suffers from this “restaurant problem”. While modern Natural Language Understanding capabilities are very good, they haven’t progressed at the rate it seemed they would back in 2017. This makes Alexa great for simple commands like setting timers and playing music, but useless for anything for more substantial. A common misconception with systems such as Alexa and Apple’s Siri is that they generate the answers using AI. They don’t. Generative AI systems do except (See GPT3 and ChatGPT), but they cannot be trusted to provide accurate answers and because they are trained based on crawling the internet, they are unable to generate answers that require knowledge or recent or future events. ChatGPT won’t be able to tell you the weather tomorrow, and it won’t be able to tell you what time your local supermarket opens. Instead, systems like Alexa and Apple Siri use a form of text classification. After the sound waves from your voice are converted into symbols (letters and numbers) and those symbols are then converted into words, they take this sentence you uttered and classify it into one or more intents. The intent that scores the highest probability from the machine learning model is the one Alexa will presume was your actual intent. That’s why when I recently asked Alexa “At what temperature should I hang washing outside?” it thought I was was asking for a weather forecast. Someone at amazon has to have created that intent and fed the ML model with example utterances for it to be able to detect it. These systems cannot understand intents they haven’t been trained on. Once the assistant knows your intent, the next task is to extract any parameters from your utterance. Examples would be the date and location in the phrase “_Will it rain in Newport next wee_k?”. Once your voice assistant knows your intent and any parameters, it will then perform some kind of logic based on that intent. This is where the AI and machine learning typically stops. If the intent was asking the weather, then the next step would be to query a weather API. If it was to send a message to someone, then it would be to to start whichever process it used to send messages on your device. Of course the weather API itself may use AI or machine learning to predict the weather, but that is totally separate and no different to a weather presenter telling you the same forecast on the TV. This approach is extraordinarily useful for many things: most chatbots and voice assistants work like this. For people who can’t see, or find it difficult to use a touchscreen or mouse, they provide invaluable ways to interact with computing devices.
I use Siri all the time to set reminders, timers and to control my lights. What Alexa and Siri are not so good at is deep and meaningful conversation. This is where it seems Amazon’s hope that Alexa might one day be a shopping destination falls short. When you have a device that is centred around a conversational user experience, it will hit a wall due to current technical limitations and the fact that for many people, speaking is less efficient that using a smartphone when they need to both receive and provide information to complete the task. The fact that Amazon seemingly has no way to monetise Alexa means the experience has been gradually getting worse. Now when I ask it the weather, it responds with the forecast - great - but then immediately starts telling me I can order groceries from it as well. Ads like this are infuriating and a sign of desperation from Amazon.
So were we foolish to think the future of human computer interaction will be voice? No. I think in the long term, when devices are advanced enough to provide human level, meaningful conversation then there is no doubt in my mind that voice will be the one of primary user interfaces we use for some tasks at least. When I ask ask Alexa to order the precise groceries I want and have the confidence to know it will work, and that the device will be capability to ask me for confirm anything its unsure about then maybe I can see it working. But I still can’t help thinking that humans like to see as well as hear things, especially when it comes to making choices. Voice is great for issuing commands and receiving quick updates, but your voice assistant starts talking for more than about 20 seconds, then it’s usually quicker to glance down at a screen and see a text or graphical representation.
I think the future is bright for voice assistants like Siri because they complement alternative user interfaces and are part of a deep ecosystem, and so can integrate with health, home automation, contacts and other information users have provided. Voice based AI is also making large strides in call centres. Unless Amazon changes tact, the Amazon Echo however with its limited ecosystem will remain glorified clock radios for a while longer.
I’ve been using an Apple Watch for over 7 years now, and throughout this time I’ve owned the original Series 0, the Series 2, and Series 4. Recently I decided it was time to upgrade to the latest and greatest Series 8. Each time I’ve upgraded I’ve given the previous model to a family member and so my girlfriend has been wearing my old Series 2 for the past 4 years. Having been originally purchased in 2016, 6 years of daily use was most definitely taking its toll on the Series 2’s battery. My partner likes to cycle and workout, which hammers the battery even more than typical use. She was therefore keen to take on my old Series 4 which still has decent battery life. That left us with her otherwise fully functional 6 year old Apple Watch Series 2, that apart from the knackered battery, still worked absolutely fine and even paired with the latest version of iOS, version 16. I really wanted to give this to someone else in our family, and so decided to pay Apple £85 for a battery replacement.
Before booking the appointment with the Apple Store, I unpaired the watch from my girlfriend’s phone and paired it with my iPhone 12 mini running watchOS 16. This was so the watch would show up in my account under the Apple support web page. With my appointment at the Apple Store booked, I walked into the Apple store with both my Series 8 and the Series 2 paired to my phone to get the battery replaced. It was lucky I did pair the Series 2 to my phone, as the guy at the Genius Bar needed to run some diagnostics on the watch the verify that the battery was indeed knackered, and I guess to rule out any other faults or damage that they might get blamed for if the device were to come back faulty. With the diagnostic check passed, and my battery confirmed to be a dud, he sent it off for a replacement. Just over a week later, I received an email telling me my device was ready to be collected.
In actual fact, my device had been replaced. The box contained a factory fresh (or possibly refurbished) Apple Watch Series 2. Fair enough I thought. I can imagine how replacing the battery in such a tiny device that also has to remain waterproof might not be worth the hassle for Apple. I paid my £85 and drove home. Before handing the shiny new but also old watch to the next relative, I wanted to try and pair it with my phone again just to check everything was working as expected. This is where it all started to go down hill. I would instigate the pairing process, but get to the point where the Watch would insist on being updated, only to tell me it could not connect to the update server and to check my internet connection. I suspected this to be a case of lazy error handling on the part of the Apple developer who wrote this code, as my internet connection was fully functioning. Still, I tried on 4G just to make sure, and to my complete lack of surprise, it made no difference.
After some time Googling the error message, I figured out what the issue was. The replacement watch came loaded with an old version of watchOS which is not compatible with iOS 15 or iOS 16. What I needed to do was find an old iPhone running an older OS (my guess: iOS 14), upgrade the Watch to watchOS 6 (the last version supported on the S2) and then it would pair successfully with my iOS 16 device, as it had done only a week earlier. I tried on an iOS 15 device, just in case, but it made no difference. I didn’t have any older phones, at least none that were so old that they weren’t applicable for iOS 15, and nor did anybody I know. No worries I thought: I’ll go back to the Apple Store. Surely they have some kind of Mac app that can simulate any iPhone and load any watchOS version on the a device as deemed appropriate by a qualified expert?
My hopes were dashed when the geniuses in the Apple Store were equally as confused as I had been at first. They didn’t have any older iPhones and so the only hope would be to send the Watch back to the repair depot. They did have sympathy for the fact I’d paid for a new battery and now the device couldn’t be used, and so suggested I upgrade the S2 to the brand new Apple Watch SE, offering me a generous 50% discount off the price of a new one. I hadn’t planned on treating this other family member that much – but even after factoring in the £85 spent on a new battery, it seemed like such a good deal. I took them up on the offer, but the gentleman who served me said I could always pop back in on a weekday with the Series 2 and they’d still be able to send it back off to be upgraded, so it wouldn’t go to waste. I walked away with a new SE, and an obsolete S2 and got on with my life, and our family member was extremely chuffed with the early Christmas present.
A few weeks later, after seeing this stainless steel Apple Watch that originally cost £549 back in 2016 staring at me from the shelf every day I though maybe I should get Apple to fix it. It was still within its 90 day repair warranty, and the guy at the Apple Store had suggested It could be done. I have plenty of relatives with iPhones who would love a free Apple Watch. At £549, lasting almost exactly 6 years, it cost £91/year to own. That’s actually quite a lot for a watch. I can’t imagine being satisfied with any other Watch or piece of jewellery that cost that much only lasting 6 years. So I dropped it back into the Apple Store, and a week later it was replaced yet again. I went to collect it, and this time tried to run the pairing process in store. This time, the pairing process failed with exactly the same error message as before. The problem hadn’t been resolved, despite the service notes explicitly stating “customer wants to pair this with his iOS 16 device”. I didn’t push the issue with the staff – after all, they did look after me by offering the discounted SE. This was their “solution” to the problem in fact.
This brand new Series 2 was destined to sit on a shelf for ever more. What a waste.
The point of this post is not to complain about Apple or the staff in the Apple Store. The store staff did a good job turning around a bad situation. The point is to raise awareness about how utterly disposable Apple Watches are. I can understand that there must be a limit to how long companies like Apple provide updates to devices for, but a phone without updates will still work for a few years. The Apple Watch however won’t even pair to a modern phone, or even the the original phone I had when I bought the Series 2 (an iPhone SE, which if kept up to date would be on iOS 15).
So if you’re thinking of buying one of the more expensive, premium watches with premium materials, maybe think again.
Every year we marvel at the latest product releases from tech companies, with Apple often leading the way. What is often not said however is that that shiny new device with even more battery life than the previous model will quite likely be a shadow of its former self in little over 2 - 3 years. This is not a conspiracy, and there is nothing evil going on. Batteries, like brake pads on car, are consumable devices that we should expect to have to replace.
Unlike brakes on a car, the cost of replacing a battery can be quite the expense relative to the original price of the device. In many cases, the price of the original (or equivalent) device may have gone down by the time the battery needs replacing further reducing the gap. Why is this bad? The closer the gap between replacing a battery and the cost of a new device makes it more likely for someone to say, “My battery sucks, I’ll just buy a new one”. This is great if you’re in the market for selling new devices, but it’s not so great for the environment.
The chart above shows the price of a new device compared to the cost of replacing the battery, as quoted by Apple on their UK web site on the 15th of September 2022. Where there are upgrade options available (such as storage or RAM), I took the price of the base model. For AirPods, Apple quotes a price per AirPod. I was generous and only multiplied this by 2, my intuition being that customers are less likely to replace the battery in their AirPods case but will need to replace the batteries in the buds themselves.
As you can see, the percentage ranges from 10% for a MacBook Air M2 to a whopping 61% for the AirPods 3rd generation. For some reason it’s cheaper to replace the battery in a set of AirPods Pro than it is with the cheaper AirPods. One might argue that this is simply the price we pay for having cheaper products in the first place. Obviously, the relative cost of a battery for a £2,000 maxed out MacBook Pro will be a lot less than for a £259 Apple Watch. The problem is that the higher the cost of a replacement battery relative to simply replacing the product, the more likely consumers opt for the latter. Don’t get me wrong, there are many other reasons consumers upgrade their devices, but poor battery life surely contributes greatly to that feeling that the device is old and needs replacing.
Perhaps Apple could do more to nudge consumers into making fewer unnecessary purchases by reducing the cost of replacement batteries?
After 21 years, the original macOS System Preferences is being retired. The next version of macOS, “Ventura” will have an all-new iOS style preferences application named “System Settings”. I decided to go all the way back to 2001 and look at the original System Preferences (or “System Prefs” as it was called in the Menu Bar) in Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheeta” to see which of the original 21 preference panes made through all 21 years, and how they ended up in their final incarnation under macOS 12 “Monterey”.
All Preferences
Classic
This one went away in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard.
ColorSync
Since replaced with an app
Date & Time
Date and Time > Network Time
Date & Time > Time Zone
Date & Time
Desktop
Not technically a System Preference pane, but it quickly became one in 10.1 so I've included it here :)
Displays
Dock
Energy Saver (some options missing due to being in a VM)
Energy Saver on a Portable
Energy Saver on a Portable(if anyone knows how to configure UTM to make Mac OS X 10.0 think it's running on a laptop, let me know and I'll add a comparison for that too)
General
Language & Region > Time
Internet
Keyboard
Login
Login
Mouse
Network
Quicktime
Screen Saver
Screen Saver > Hot Corners
Sharing
Software Update
Sound
Speech
Startup Disk
Users
In sum
So, after 21 years it’s fair to say that while System Preferences has evolved and become more complex, a lot has also stayed the same. Teleport someone from 2001 to 2022 and while you might need to explain the concepts of the cloud storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Touch ID, they would probably do just fine working out the basics of macOS. (With the major exception of those who require the use of accessibility options, which wouldn't be introduced until 10.1 "Puma".) Since 2001, many more preference panes have been added. On a clean macOS Monterey installation, I counted 30 preferences panes. This increases to 32 if Family Sharing and iCloud are signed into. That’s an increase of about half a preference pane every year. I can therefore see why Apple might want to move to a more scalable system. That said, part of me will miss the familiarity of using System Preferences, the same application I have used since 2001 at the dawn of the OS X era.
Recently announced iOS 16 will feature a new look Lock Screen. One of the striking features is how notifications are now far less prominent than they have been ever since their arrival in iPhone OS 3.0 back in 2009.
The change is a signal that many users want to control what they see and when, rather than have application developers decide for them. In 2009 it was quiet novel to know instantly when someone liked your Facebook post. After 13 years the novelty has worn off. In fact, many notifications are just superfluous noise that don’t enrich our lives at all.
While there will always be a need for some kinds of notification, my sense is that there will be a shift towards being “off by default” in future iOS releases - much in the same way the Windows system tray ended up being filled with every possible kind of icon and Microsoft ended up just hiding them all by default.
A keyboard! A mouse! But still so many unfulfilled dreams…
As is often the case, Matt Birchler has written something that I agree wholeheartedly with in his post Just Buy a Mac:
Even if Apple goes all the way and lets us resize windows and drag them anywhere we want on screen, I don't think this suddenly turns the iPad into a Mac. After all, macOS, Windows, and Linux all have resizable windows that work 95% the same, but no one is out there saying that these are all basically the same operating system.
(As an aside, I'd love to know how the word 'god' made it into the URL slug - now I really want to know what the original title was!)
What he hits on here is the crux of why the iPad has been a disappointment to me. The first point is that rather than advance tablet computing, Apple seems to have given up and instead opted to imitate the established laptop paradigm. They're going backwards instead of forwards. If we leave that to one side and accept that the tablet has reached its limits and in order to evolve it must act more like a traditional PC laptop, then the iPad still has the problem that its software is just too limited. The first step to remedy this would be to allow software from sources other than the App Store. There is a vast swathe of open source software and developer tools are are just waiting to be ported to the iPad, but current App Store policies forbid it.
I have been an avid podcast listener since it first emerged in the mid-2000s, in the past few years everyone who is anyone it seems now has a podcast. What was once the domain of nerdy introverts is now decidedly mainstream.
The beauty of podcasts is that like the web, they use (mostly) open standards. HTTP, RSS, XML and MP3. Like the web, they also disappear sometimes. In the case of the web, clicking links on pages written 10 years ago will inevitability result in frequent dead links, where a site’s owner has decided to move on. Go back another 10 years the the ratio of working links to 404 errors increases even more. Thankfully Archive.org can be used to recover many dead links on the web.
Like blogging before it, which was similarity open in spirit, economic realities will one day set in for podcasts too. Already there are shows I remember whose feeds no longer exists. The episodes are gone forever.
That's why I've written Podcast Archive. A simple Command-line utility written in .NET that downloads an entire podcast feed in a tidy Year > Month > Date folder structure. It's smart enough not to download files that have already been downloaded, so it's safe to run over and over again without wasting bandwidth. Files downloaded will have their creation date set to the original publish date, so once downloaded you can easily use tools like Spotlight to search by date.
At the moment you'll need to compile the app using .NET 6, but I plan to add pre-compiled versions for Windows, Linux and Mac very soon.
Apple blogger John Gruber isn’t happy about recently agreed EU legislation. In a recent post entitled “E.U. Regulators Gonna Regulate” he wrote:
This is bananas. All third party developers get control over the secure enclave and the software that controls it? Would be good to give them such control over the camera, microphone, and location data, too.
A gatekeeper that is a manufacturer of a device can restrict access to some of the functionalities in that device, such as near-field-communication technology secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms and the software used to operate those technologies, which can be required for the effective provision of a service provided together with, or in support of, the core platform service by the gatekeeper as well as by any potential third party undertaking providing such service.
….
If dual roles are used in a manner that prevents alternative service and hardware providers from having access under equal conditions to the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used by the gatekeeper in the provision of its own complementary or supporting services or hardware, this could significantly undermine innovation by such alternative providers, as well as choice for end users.
The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware. Such access can equally be required by software applications related to the relevant services provided together with or in support of the core platform service in order to effectively develop and provide functionalities interoperable with those provided by gatekeepers.
My admittedly layperson's interpretation of the legislation is that all Apple would need to do is provide API access that would allow competitors to provide equivalent services to those that Apple provide. Just as no modern operating system gives application software direct access to the CPU and memory, Apple won’t need to give anyone direct access to the Secure Enclave if they've designed it well**.** The text explitcly says "A gatekeeper that is a manufacturer of a device can restrict access to some of the functionalities in that device". In the same way anyone can write an application that creates Instagram-like photo filters, the EU is saying that anyone should be able to create a rival to any service Apple also offers, such as a digital wallet application or App Store. But then again I am no legal scholar and could be reading this wrong.
Gruber then goes on to write:
This is profoundly anti-consumer. Consumers aren’t asking for any of this shit. Actual people love their phones more than their computers — whether Macs or PCs — not despite the fact that their phones are tightly controlled consoles, but because they are tightly controlled consoles. These regulators don’t see it that way, because they’re idiots. They think they can legislate their way to a world where the iPhone (and Android, which is also console-like) remains far safer and more reliable than PCs while mandating that all the protections that have made them far safer and more reliable than PCs be removed. It’s absurd.
I would have loved to see a citation when he says "consumers aren’t asking for any of this shit", as I presume he is referring to a survey that was carried at some point. And no, the iPhone and iPad are not consoles. I've covered this before.
Unfortunately, Gruber then makes a 90º turn and drives his argument straight into a brick wall, calling the EU "idiots". Instead of trying to understand the EU position and offer some valuable insights and perhaps an alternative solution, he resorts to petty name-calling.
He then goes on:
Worth noting: “Europe” accounts for nearly 25 percent of Apple’s revenue. That includes 23 countries that aren’t in the E.U. — most notably, of course, the U.K. — but the E.U. is too big for Apple to just tell them to pound sand. I would imagine though, if this comes to fruition, E.U. citizens are going to wind up buying iPhones that operate very differently from those sold everywhere else in the world, and they will suffer for it.
I think this is an overly pessimistic take on the proposals. If Apple were to constructively engage with the EU, then opening up iOS could give the ecosystem a boost and offer some much needed novelty and excitement that has been missing for at least half a decade. I can't remember the last time I installed a new app on my iPhone or iPad that excited me in some way. Between 2010 and 2013 it seemed like every week there was something new and exciting my devices could do with a new app. Now it seems that all we get is more and more refined text editors and to-do list apps. Instead, I fear that Apple will belligerently fight the EU, resulting in poor outcomes for everyone.
I'm not saying I agree with every word of the EU legislation, far from it. The EU has a poor track record when it comes to legislating tech companies. Just look at the Microsoft browser-ballot which was far too late to be effective, and mandatory cookie banners which haven't solved any of the concerns around privacy yet have made browsing the web far more annoying. I just feel that a more constructive discourse that goes beyond "they're idiots" is needed. I don't want to live in a world where my Sony TV only lets me watch movies from Sony Pictures, or a Telsa Car that only allows me drive to some future Elon Musk-owned restaurant chain, yet that's essentially how the iPhone and iPad operate today when it comes to certain vertical markets.
It is possible to be a fan of Apple while resisting the paternal instinct to defend everything it does. Surely a company that can make a UNIX-based wrist-computers and competition-thrashing CPUs can figure out a way to allow 3rd parties take payments, or run App Stores without compromising security?
