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Tag: Siri

  • Week 37.26

    Week 37.26

    The annual iPhone update

    I knew going into this week’s Apple Fall Event that I’d find the iPhone Duo impressive but wasn’t likely to buy one because it wouldn’t have a telephoto lens. Now that it’s been shown, that sentiment hasn’t changed but boy, it’s a very fetching device and the design team has done some incredible work to redefine the foldable smartphone — it’s full of thoughtful user experience innovations that have been lacking in Android foldables. Those guys have been doing this for over five years but without the pressure of competition, and so there aren’t even graceful transitions from one screen to the other. I didn’t know how bad things were until Cong shared screenshots, and I saw other videos of Android apps flat-out restarting when a phone is cracked open because they can’t switch screen sizes on the fly. Opening an Android foldable is like Russian roulette; you never know if your work will survive.

    Meanwhile the iPhone Duo has one of those “obvious once you see it” ideas: an interaction model that treats the two screens as one surface. When closed, the outer screen appears like a transparent window ‘looking through’ to the inner screen. Unfolding the phone “adds” more screen to the left side, creating the illusion that the whole device is glass, sold with a sublime blurring animation bordering on magic. So instead of conceptually switching from one small screen to a bigger one, you’re simply expanding a screen you were already looking at, and it’s seamless rather than disorienting.

    Alas, even putting the eye-watering price aside (nearly $2,500 USD in Singapore before AppleCare+), I can’t see myself jumping on this first-generation version because of the aforementioned camera compromise. Not only does it lack the Pro’s 4x optical zoom, but the Duo, like the iPhone Air, doesn’t support shooting ProRAW photos or Apple Log video. It’s rumored that the Duo’s camera sensors are smaller than even the Air’s, and more in line with the iPhone 17e’s, so that could be why.

    My prediction is that next year’s Duo 2 will also have only two lenses, so as not to pull attention away from the rumored 20th anniversary iPhone, which I expect will merge the functionality of the Pro with the thin, elegant aesthetics of the Air. I’m guessing the Duo 2 will improve its two cameras, maybe add Face ID, and further improve the folding screen. So unfortunately it’ll be 2028 before I get one, because my iPhone is my primary camera these days. I have shaken off all desire for further Fujis, Leicas, and Ricohs — which I only ever used as compact point-and-shoots anyway.

    So where’s that leave me this year? A silver iPhone 18 Pro Max (sadly we still get the version with a physical SIM slot and smaller battery here in Singapore), and an Apple Watch Series 12. The iPhone replaces a perfectly good silver 17 Pro Max — but don’t worry, I’ve fully justified this with boy math: it simply makes more sense to sell an iPhone early than to hold it for two years or more, and this way the upgrade costs me less than a dollar a day! The larger main camera aperture and updated Photographic Styles are exciting, but early benchmarks are putting the A20 Pro above even Apple’s own M5 chip in single-threaded performance. Coupled with a 40% faster GPU and an additional Neural Engine, these are outlandish improvements.

    The Watch replaces an aging Series 8 that barely lasts a whole day now after four years. I could replace the battery and use it a while longer, but I’m keen to try this new “AI wearable” use case that was shown, like being able to invoke Siri AI on my wrist, and getting recaps of an entire day’s conversations. It’s worth noting that for people who only want silver watches that this is the second time Apple has skipped offering a silver aluminum model (the Series 7 was the first). I thought that I might get a cheaper aluminum one this year to justify an earlier upgrade next time, but since they only come in black, gray, bronze, and gold aluminum, I decided on titanium instead. IMO Apple Watches are at their best when they’re shiny.

    Next week will be an eventful one because on top of setting up new devices, it’ll also be time to install the new ‘27 OS updates for Mac and Vision Pro. I’m looking forward to macOS Golden Gate, which will fix the egregious misgivings of former design lead Alan Dye, who I hope is gumming up the works over at his new employer, Meta. And on the Vision Pro, I can’t wait to revisit my library of panoramic photos, taken over the years, as 3D spatial scenes that feel like how I remember them.

    Finally, I thought John Ternus did a great job at this, his first event as CEO, and appreciated the callback to Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” strategy for the Mac — this time reframing the AI-enabled iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub”. The text was a little drier than I’d like, but his comfortable, easygoing energy and connection to the products was evident throughout. It was also good to see newly elevated design leads Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay, looking like the kind of people who get down to work instead of creating drama and getting corner radii wrong. It all paints an optimistic picture for Apple’s future.

    That’s enough of that

    • I got a new pair of glasses made from frames that didn’t fit Kim very well. When I went to pick them up, I noticed that the left lens was too close to my eye, on account of not being made of the most expensive high-index material. The store was busy at the time, and I could tell the employee serving me was probably not much more experienced at optical matters than me. I asked him if there was simply nothing that could be done about it, and he answered no, short of making a new thinner lens and paying $200+ for it, there was nothing we could do. I said I’d think about it and left to get lunch.
    • An hour later, still dissatisfied, I described the situation to Gemini and asked if he was right. With supreme confidence, the AI told me that a professional optician had several options to resolve this, such as adjusting the pantoscopic tilt of the lenses, the seated position of the lenses in the frame, and the curvature of the arms to push one side more forward than the other. Thus armed, I decided to go back to the store and speak to a more senior employee now that the lunch crowd was gone. And wouldn’t you know, they fixed it quite easily. I could have just gone home and had a terrible experience if not for having a consumer advocate in my pocket. When things fall apart and we take to the ruined streets to battle megacorporations and their metallic humanoids, take heart: standing side by side with us will be a few rogue AIs who love fighting the status quo.
    • I switched mobile telcos yet again because Giga’s app and site weren’t loading properly on my iPhone — supposedly due to an expired certificate. Taking that as a bad omen, I moved to M1’s Maxx service. Where many others have raised prices and made their plans less attractive lately, Maxx is bucking the trend. For S$12/mo, I’m now getting 600GB of data that I can use at home or in 9 other Asian countries including Japan. Do you understand how insane that is? I should probably start looking into a Tokyo apartment timeshare.
    • I’m rereading Neuromancer with my book club, in advance of the Apple TV series coming out in January. It’s surprising how little of its story and characters I remember, and what I retained mostly concerns its cyberpunk atmosphere and prescient world building. Just try to imagine being in the early 1980s and writing like this about living in a networked world, about AI and a post-human age, and you’ll realize what a miracle William Gibson pulled off.
    • Last week I talked about stocking up on canned food. Well, back in June I noted a nationwide sardine shortage, and although stocks were replenished soon after, they were never very strong and we’re now facing empty shelves yet again. Even Ayam’s basic staple product, sardines in tomato sauce, is running low in every supermarket I’ve checked. Olive oil versions are completely out, and King Oscar can only be found in low quantities in some places. Rob tells me the same is happening in his part of the UK, and a little research suggests that low yields have been a problem for the past year, with overfishing in Morocco and other hotspots compounded by global shipping problems/war.
    • I’ve been enjoying Bill Callahan’s new album, My Days of 58, which coincidentally complements the new Lambchop album Punching the Clown very well. Both share a loose, chamber-folk feel with deadpan humor. Check out these lines from one of Callahan’s songs: “As time wore on, I found myself increasingly turning to my guitar / Instead of other people in times of loneliness and sorrow and confusion / I started to wonder, is this creativity or pathology? / Am I the Pathol O.G.?”
  • Week 36.26

    Week 36.26

    • Drinking a lot of wine last Saturday night at what I thought was the end of my illness was not a smart move — my immune system probably felt like frontline troops betrayed by friendly fire, and by Sunday night I began feeling the stirrings of a new illness.
    • The return of the seasonal haze — caused by intentional forest fires in Indonesia — certainly hasn’t helped my throat and nasal membranes. It’s looking to get worse in the coming weeks, but one pretty side effect is a rather cinematic bloom over the city lights at night.
    Look at the daytime haze, and this is “moderate”
    • I thus spent most of the week laid up in various poses, moving between states of aching, coughing, and mucusation. So there’s really not much more to report this week, but let me wring this diaristic serviette dry anyway; let me lean heavy on the word press’s crank with my phlegmatic body.
    • One of my sad meals was a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, eaten cold out of the can. But instead of the usual Heinz, I decided to try regional brand Ayam’s slightly cheaper rendition, and learnt that the version I’m used to (less sweet, with vinegar) is called an “English recipe” in their world. The verdict: pretty good and I dare say indistinguishable from Heinz’s without a direct comparison. Caveat: I was sick.
    • This new bean acquisition was part of a larger canned food stockpiling effort that I embarked on after reading some doomsaying posts such as this one from The Guardian. Coincidentally, I learnt shortly afterwards that James had also started doing the same. That made me wonder what vegetarians stockpile, because my pantry is mainly filled with sardines, tuna, chicken, and pork products. I got my answer on Saturday when I saw him for Peishan’s birthday celebration: lots of bean-like stuff such as lentils and chickpeas. In any case, we’re not prepping on any meaningful scale — the goal would be to avoid being caught out by a sudden food shortage, for maybe a week at best. After that, the attractiveness of survival in that world probably drops off quite steeply.
    • Oh, I also found and enjoyed this video on the history of everyone’s favorite canned meat, Spam. As a lifelong aficionado of the ‘spiced ham’, I already knew many of these facts, but did not know that its main ingredient, pork shoulder, was considered a cheap off-cut back when the product was being developed.
    • I finished reading all 1,600 virtual pages of Reamde within a week, and it was an absolute blast. A very bingeable book, and one that I realize underlines a trend in my recent media habits. A couple of months ago, I was reading and playing a lot of detective and murder mysteries. Right now it seems I’m on a techno-thriller and espionage kick.
    • After finishing Tiny Bookshop last week, I started playing Jack Move, an indie cyberpunk RPG with very nice modern pixel art graphics. It’s currently on sale at a tremendous discount for the Nintendo Switch, so take a look.
    • I also bought 007 First Light for the PS5 (20% off sale) but haven’t gotten around to starting on it yet. My hopes are high not just because of the developers’ pedigree (IO Interactive, of the Hitman games), but because in making a game about James Bond as a junior agent, focused on spectacular action set pieces, they seem to have also made a game that looks like Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies.
    • The best spy thing of all has been Seasons 1 and 2 of The Agency, which I just finished over the weekend. Michael Fassbender is in top form throughout as a ‘magically’ charismatic manipulator in the CIA, slipping between accents and allegiances as he tries to navigate an ever-expanding web of complications. I also loved Saura Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Daniela Morata/Acosta, a rookie agent sent on a dangerous undercover mission — a setup I alluded to as a ‘less stupid Lioness’ a few weeks ago. I liked that the show spends time looking at the psychology of the people who sign up for this job, all carrying some marvelous, self-destructive defect that makes them head towards things others run away from.
    • You know who else had a secret identity and was persecuted when he went public? That’s right, I’m talking about the original sleeper agent. We went to see the new production of his story, Jesus Christ Superstar, on its last day at the Marina Bay Sands. Tickets were bought impulsively and spontaneously by Kim, and we had a good time despite some of that rock music being quite dated now in not the best way. It was also consistently over 95dB during the fuller songs, so we used our AirPods Pro in Transparency mode to provide hearing protection while maintaining audio quality. They are super handy, and I’ll never attend a show without them.
    • As of September 1, Apple entered a new era. It’s hard to believe that Tim Cook’s been CEO for 15 years already, and I wonder if that’s because his term was marked by many smaller ripples adding up, rather than big waves that shook the world and demanded attention. I look forward to seeing how things turn out with Ternus. As for the upcoming product event next week, I’m still doubtful I could commit to a first-generation folding iPhone without a telephoto lens. After getting used to having 200mm of reach on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, giving it up for a larger screen doesn’t sound like a great trade. Let’s see if they offer any novel use cases beyond “watch bigger videos”.
    • But I saw a tweet saying Tim was asked what his legacy would be, and he answered neatly that a legacy is what others decide about you, not something you choose for yourself. Which got me thinking: I probably used to believe it was important to make good things and leave them behind to have had a worthwhile life. While I still think that’s a noble pursuit, history will happily separate you from your output if pushed. At best, people will now say ‘Annie Hall is a great movie’ or ‘Thriller is a solid album.’ The product doesn’t rescue the person’s reputation, it just stands on its own merits. It’s probably more important to try and be a good person than to write the great Singaporean novel.
    Look Ma, no memorizing and switching apps and searching and clicking and switching back!
    • In any case, iOS 27 is going to be a huge upgrade for anyone with an eligible phone. I’ve been using Siri AI to answer my everyday questions during the beta period, and I’ll say again it’s good enough to replace whatever service you’re using now, e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT. The fact that it’s more private than those other services should be reason enough. And last night when I came across an Instagram reel recommending a handful of albums (I get these quite often now), I just paused it and asked Siri to “Add this album to my Apple Music library”, and it did. These are tasks some of us maybe naively expected to be able to ask of our devices years ago, but soon learned to stop trying when they failed to understand, or suggested that they could ‘show us some web results’ instead. Well, now we get to unlearn all that and figure out where the new limits are.
  • Week 26.26

    Week 26.26

    • Whew, I’m still buzzing from the fact I managed to place my order for a new M5 MacBook Air just before Apple raised prices (thanks to AI firms driving up the cost of RAM). When Tim Cook gave the WSJ a heads up, I thought we had maybe a month, but decided to bite the bullet sooner rather than later. I don’t have the cost breakdown to know exactly what I paid for my upgrades, but I think that decision saved me over S$500.
    • It was Amazon Prime Day and I got some accessories: a Belkin USB hub, and a 1TB Sandisk external SSD for the same price I paid to get a better 2TB Samsung one just two years ago. This chip crunch is the worst.
    • The computer arrived yesterday and restoring my old system to it via Time Machine on an external SSD was surprisingly quick and painless. Under an hour, I’d say. One of the first things I did was to install Geekbench and compare it to my old M1 model. It’s true: the M5 is twice as fast. Old habits like picking up my phone to reply because opening Messages.app on the Mac took too long will need to be unlearnt. I also installed ollama and did some local AI inference using a Gemma model, just ‘cause.
    Farewell to my old sticker collection
    • One of the things I never relied on my old M1 MacBook Air to do was play games. I was a PC gamer until I switched to a Mac, at which point I became a console gamer out of sheer necessity. They fare a bit better today thanks to technologies like Apple Silicon and Metal, but it’s not something I’ve paid attention to. This week I decided to fire up Steam for the first time in years and discovered 1) games on sale go even lower in price than they do on consoles, and 2) I can play games on my Mac and view them on a giant screen in Vision Pro. HMMMM! I picked up Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition for just S$4, and will find some time later next week to play it for the first time since the days of my Xbox 360.
    • I finally got access to the new Siri AI on my iPad Pro running the iPadOS 27 developer beta. I did a few tests, like recreating the 2024 WWDC scenario by asking it when Kim would be returning from her business trip — it aced it, finding her hotel stay in our shared calendar, and although there were no flight details, it correctly assumed that she would be returning the same day she checked out.
    • One of the things I was excited to use Siri AI for was as a general purpose research/answers service, like, you know, a little app called Perplexity that allegedly planted rumors in the press that Apple wanted to buy them. I redeemed a free year of Perplexity Pro at some point and have become accustomed to using it several times a day. But that’s yet another USD$20/mo AI subscription I’d be glad to be rid of. It reminds me of when Steve declined to buy Dropbox and told them they were ‘a feature, not a product’.
    • So did Apple succeed in making Siri AI work just as well by licensing Google’s homework instead of buying Perplexity’s wrapper? Signs point to yes. I tried to trip it up by asking who the man appearing in the new Utada Hikaru music video was, just a day after it landed on YouTube. I fully expected it to fail, since the question involved very current information that probably wasn’t in its indexes or training data (remember, Apple says Siri doesn’t rely on Google’s search or world knowledge). But it answered correctly! It cited info from a fan site, and was even able to answer a follow-up question about his (Hiroto Kohmoto) career highlights.
    • On the weekend, we took a few nephews and nieces to see Toy Story 5 in a theater, and I’m happy to report that some of that Pixar magic is still alive. Well, another way to put it might be that Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is still alive and working at Pixar. As you may already know from the trailers, this installment has old-fashioned toys going up against today’s attention and confidence-destroying tech, in the form of gaming on tablets, socializing on the internet, and even generative AI. The tech toys start out looking like villains, but the film seems to contend they’re here to stay and can support an existing, healthy imagination (should your child be blessed enough to have one).
    • An old idea came back to me as a possible new vibe coding project, and I’ve started working on the prototype. It’s a generative art concept, and maybe I’m overthinking it and there’s a simpler way than how I’m approaching it, but at present it’s doing my head in. This one might take a while.
    New shareable bookshelf images, for 1–12 books.
    • I also decided to revisit my Shelf Expression project and changed up the approach so that all assets like book covers are fetched and cached just once on build, rather than loading them from internet sources each time a visitor arrives. This dramatically sped up the experience, to the point where I can’t recall why I did it the other way to begin with. I also made a collage tool so users can create shareable images of their shelves, support for custom covers, better AI summarization, and other stuff. So my Bookshelf page (and yours, if you use it) should be much nicer now.
    • What am I reading? I finished Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and am now on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis. I loved Chiang’s first collections of sf short stories so much that I kept Exhalation on my list for years, too afraid to read it and have nothing left to look forward to. But there’s the risk of suddenly dying and never getting to do all the things you were saving up — so I read it, and it was worth the wait. Katabasis, like Babel, is a book that draws on Kuang’s time at elite universities. Cambridge, Oxford, and now Yale. They say you should write what you know, but it’s beginning to feel like trauma dumping rather than a deliberate choice to set her stories in academia.