A battery breakthrough would explain the Apple car

▼ The latest Apple rumor is that they're working on a car. A rumor that is easily dismissed:

The fantastic Apple Car is a fantasy.

But is it? What would it take for Apple to start making cars?

Cars are a huge market and they're very expensive. That's exactly the type of market Apple needs to enter if it wants to continue growing its already unprecedented profits. However, cars aren't very profitable for the companies that make them today. So Apple needs to bring something unique to the table to allow it to reach the margins it's grown accustomed to.

There are already very nice high-end cars, and there's just not that many people who can afford them; selling a better car for a higher price isn't going to give Apple the numbers that it needs. What Apple needs to do is make a better car cheaper, so it can be sold for a regular price but at an Apple-like margin.

The insides and outsides of a car are determined by its function and the fact that it must push through the air at a relatively high speed. There's not much that Apple can do here. Maybe Apple has come up with some new user (driver?) interface paradigm that will revolutionize driving, but somehow I doubt that.

Maybe an Apple car is going to be self-driving? Not impossible. But Google has been working on that for some time, and they use existing cars. Also, Google's driverless cars are described as "trains running on invisible tracks": they're not very autonomous, but rely on extremely detailed maps. Is Apple confident enough in its mapping abilities to think they can pull this off?

But maybe they just build a better car. Apple isn't going to improve the motors used in electric cars, simply because those are already pretty much perfect: they weigh a fraction of what an internal combustion engine weighs, run at 90% efficiency and they last pretty much forever with little or no maintenance. Most of the other electronic and mechanical parts are small potatoes.

However, there is one thing in an electric car that could be improved: the battery. A better battery that stores more energy for the same size/weight would be a big deal. Or that can be charged faster. Or lasts longer before it has to be replaced. Or is simply cheaper.

We read about research breakthroughs in battery technology all the time, but we rarely see those translate into real-world improvements. Obviously, Apple has been interested in batteries for a long time. So what if Apple has developed a significantly better battery? That's sure going to help the Apple Watch, and we could all use a bit more battery life in our iPhones.

But if you're looking to monetize a battery technology breakthrough, look no further than the electric car.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-16

Star Trek Voyager

▼ Twenty years ago, on January 16, 1995, the first episode of Star Trek Voyager was broadcast in the US. The series would be on the air for seven seasons. I'm not sure when I started watching, but I ended up buying all 172 episodes on VHS. Every Tuesday I would go to the Free Record Shop to buy a tape with two new episodes for ƒ 29,99, later € 13,61. So I must have spent 1170 euros on Voyager. I was actually about to buy that week's tape when my brother called me on my first Nokia cell phone to tell me an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

At about 250 grams a piece, this collection weighed in at 21.5 kilos, and I got rid of it when I moved to Spain. However, last week I re-bought Voyager, on DVD this time. The box set weighs 1.25 kilos and cost me € 105. At the time of this writing, you can get the Star Trek: Voyager - The Full Journey box set for £ 85 from Amazon UK, but in the US you'll have to shell out $271 for Star Trek Voyager: The Complete Series on Amazon.

I never really watched the original Star Trek series, which is 49 years old now. The few times I caught an episode, I had trouble suspending disbelief because the sets looked so improbable and the effects are terrible. I mean, they can't even get the space ship model to travel in the direction it's facing.

However, I was a loyal Star Trek The Next Generation viewer. I even recorded every episode on VHS tape, and I still have those tapes. (Well, I missed the last two episodes, but I got those on tape, too.) I think I re-watched them once, but now that ST:TNG is available in high definition on blu-ray, it's unlikely I'm going to revisit those home recordings. Also, TNG isn't that great. The the story lines tended to get repetitive and characters are fairly bland. I especially disliked Data.

I liked Voyager a lot better. First of all, there's a real mission: getting home from the delta quadrant—although they sure get side tracked a lot. But the great thing about this conceit is that Voyager actually gets to explore some unknown places, something that The Next Generation didn't really do much. The characters also work much better. Captain Janeway is a great character, warm, but also tough. Tuvok works much better than Spock or Data because the whole lack of emotions thing is no longer explored to death. And, emotions or not, he does have a sense of humor. The characters all have traits that propel stories forward organically. The desire get home before they die of old age allows them to do stupid things from time to time (as needed for the plot) for understandable reasons.

The biggest limitation of Voyager is that most episodes were written to allow for out-of-order watching. As such, the (life-changing) events in one episode are forgotten the next. However, there are some longer-running story lines where the crew has to deal with a certain adversary throughout a season or two. My favorite seasons are 3 - 5. Season 3 slowly leads up to the first encounter with the Borg, and then in season 4 Seven of Nine gets added to the crew. This shakes things up nicely until the writers start to spend too much time on Seven of Nine and the doctor.

Even though Voyager is pretty good TV, it's not great science fiction. The big problem with Star Trek is that they're just too powerful. The technology is basically magic and can do anything. Often, first half of the ship has to break before there's any sense of danger. It also makes things way too easy: scan a planet 20 light years away from signs of human life? No problem. Not only do most aliens look human, they also speak English (for all intents and purposes). I'd love to see a show that takes a more realistic approach to space exploration, where space is actually big and empty—even when navigating it faster than light speed—and visiting a new planet is a huge deal rather than something that's over and done with in 43 minutes.

In these days of widescreen high definition TV, it takes a little getting used to to watch Voyager in 4:3 narrow aspect ratio, and of course the image isn't super sharp. The live action parts aren't too bad, though, and it helps that Voyager predates the trend to make TV and movies super dark so you can't tell what's going on. The CGI doesn't fare so well: it tends to be noticeably soft.

Having to navigate through menus and being force fed unskippable disclaimers is pretty annoying. Then again, simply inserting the DVDs without having to worry about managing storage on my computers has its advantages, so I don't think I'm going to rip the entire series.

Time to watch some Star Trek Voyager!

Permalink - posted 2015-02-15

iPhone 6 accessories

▼ For a long time, I used my iPhone 5 without a case. But one day, I pulled it out of my pocket by the headphone cable and it dropped on the street. It landed on its corner, which left a little scrape, but otherwise it was fine. But since then I pretty much always used a rubber case when leaving the house. If it had been the iPhone 6, that fall could easily have been much worse with glass curving around the edge. So when I got my iPhone 6, I got one of Apple's cases. I looked at both the silicone and the leather cases, which seemed to be very similar in in feel. In addition to protecting the phones against drops, these cases also add some extra grip so it won't slide out of your hand or pocket as easily. So I saved $10 and got the white silicone case, which nicely wraps around the edges of the phone but leaves the screen and the bottom free.

Apple's silicone case is great for day-to-day use, but it doesn't provide the kind of protection that I need when I go inline skating, where there's always a risk of high speed falls—right on top of my iPhone. So I also got a Trident Kraken AMS case:

Full disclosure: I got the iPhone 5 version for free. That one has three parts: a soft silicone/rubber inner part, and hard plastic front and back parts. It's very thick and heavy, but incredibly sturdy. The iPhone6 version doesn't have a separate silicone/rubber inner part, but rather uses a slightly softer plastic on the inside that sticks out at the corners to absorb impacts. It's much slimmer and only weighs 53 grams. (The iPhone 6 itself weighs 125 grams and Apple's silicone case 17 grams.)

The front part of the Kraken has a plastic screen cover, with a cutout for the fingerprint sensor. The case is supposed to be somewhat splash-resistant; it has covers for most of the openings in the iPhone, but I still wouldn't use it in any kind of serious rain. You also have to be very careful with sand or dust, because this can get in through the hole t the fingerprint sensor and then get wedged between the screen and the plastic cover, possibly leading to scratches. To avoid this, I removed the plastic screen protector. It's glued to the inside of the front part with glue that is easily scraped off. After this, you can still use the case with the screen protector, as it'll stay in place with the phone in the case even without glue. I'm not entirely sure how you're supposed to open the Kraken. The only way that works for me is with the tip of a knife, and even then it's not easy.

On the back of the Kraken you can attach accessories such as a suction cup for sticking the phone to a car dashboard or windshield, a tripod attachment or a bicycle steer attachment. I got the latter:

This allows me to use my iPhone to help me navigate when cycling, which I'll talk about in a later post.

The last accessory I want to talk about is one that's not really compatible with the iPhone 6: the iPhone 5S dock. I really liked putting my iPhone 5 in the dock on the nightstand to charge overnight and play some music through the AUX in on my radio alarm clock. Also, my third-party lightning cable works well when I connect it to the dock (with the iPhone 5), but it's never worked when I connect it directly to the iPhone 6. So I took my Swiss army knife and cut away the sides to allow the iPhone 6 to fit in the dock:

It's not going to win me any design prizes, but it works:

The iPhone 6 still complains about the non-authentic cable, but it charges just fine off of it, and the audio out through the dock's 3.5 mm port also works.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-06

My podcast listening workflow: iTunes/Podcasts, Pocket Casts and (not) Overcast

▼ In 2013, I wrote a pretty long story with advice to podcast app developers. Today, someone on Twitter asked me if I ever found a good solution to the "catching up" use case. I guess the short answer would be "no", but did settle on a podcast listening workflow that works fairly well. So let me explain how I listen to podcasts these days.

After switching from an iPod to the iPhone, I continued to use Apple's built-in podcast functionality for many years. Of course Apple couldn't resist messing with a good thing, so they released the Podcasts app. For a while, you could still use the Music app to listen to podcasts, but that hasn't been possible for a few years now. A few years earlier, Apple had rejected the first third party podcast podcast app, and later changed their minds about that. A few years later, there was a healthy niche of podcasting apps in the store. And then last year Marco Arment released Overcast.

After I reviewed a bunch of podcast apps for Ars Technica three years ago, I settled on Pocket Casts as my main podcast player. However, I never abandoned Apple's Podcasts app, for two reasons.

First, sometimes I can't use my iPhone, and then it's nice to be able to listen to podcasts using my iPod. So for that reason alone I keep a few podcasts around in iTunes on my computer and sync those to my old iPod as well as my iPhone. Second, going through feeds and selecting which episodes to download and which to skip is easier on a computer with a big screen and a keyboard. Also, long lists of back episodes that I accumulate for a rainy day don't get in the way on iTunes and the Podcasts app. However, iTunes keeps getting harder to use, and Podcasts is far from perfect, especially now that it keeps around old episodes for 24 hours. And not being able to use the headphone clicker to skip ahead can be very frustrating.

When Overcast came out, I obviously wanted to try it out. I found the $5 price for the full version a bit steep, and I don't like the whole in-app purchase thing. The Overcast unlock is my one and only in-app purchase. But I decided that I'd be writing about Overcast here on my blog so the $5 would be worth it. And then I didn't write about Overcast and stopped using it, so it wasn't...

The first week, my main problem with Overcast was that many functions were extremely non-obvious to me. I've forgotten which functions were so problematic, but there was definitely a learning curve involved. However, eventually I figured things out and the app became much more usable. I like the smart speed, which speeds up playback by removing pauses. In theory, I also like the idea of normalizing the volume, but in practice I didn't use it. Another thing that's great in theory but doesn't really do it for me in practice is the smart playlist ordering. Yes, there are some podcasts where I immediately want to cue up a new episode, and others where I'm not in a hurry to listen. But in practice I keep changing the order so often that the feature doesn't really help much. Manually adding/removing episodes from a playlist is way too hard.

However, the one thing that made me stop using Overcast is that it always insists on continuing to play—even after you reach the end of your playlist. I find that insanely annoying. Yes, you can make Overcast stop playing at the end of the current episode, but there is no workable way to play a bunch of episodes and then stop.

So I went back to Pocket Casts. I like the look of Pocket Casts better, and in the current version "up next" works very well: when you add episodes, they're put at the end of the "up next" list. You can easily do this with a long press on an episode and then one additional tap. Unfortunately, removing episodes from the up next list is much harder. You'd think that a swipe to the left would do it, but that marks the episode as played, which is pretty much never what I want in the up next list.

To finally answer the question on Twitter: Pocket Cast doesn't handle catching up exactly the way I'd like, but it works. When you subscribe to a podcast, the latest episode shows as new and all older ones as played. When I decide I want to catch up and listen to all old episodes or some old episodes, I just scroll to the bottom of the episode list, tapping "show older episodes" as needed. I then download a few, and listen to those. I have to take care that I go back and download more before I listen to all the ones I downloaded, because having at least one downloaded but unplayed episode allows me to keep track of how far in the feed I got.

Yes, it would be nice if more episodes would be downloaded automatically as I listened to older episodes, but downloading them manually is no big deal. The only annoying part is that the downloaded episodes move to the "new" section at the top of the episode list, so it's not obvious where in the "played" section the oldest unlistened episode resides. A solution would be to mark the whole feed as new, but then all the unlistened episodes would clutter up my "all" list, which also isn't great.

Update: it turns out that the swipe-to-the-left gesture that normally marks podcasts as "old" also marks old ones as new.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-05