Horace Dediu makes an interesting point about some of the new iPhone 5s features in M is for Mystery:

Perhaps this is why Apple chose to describe the iPhone 5s as “forward-thinking”. The M7 and the Touch ID are like research projects whose actual value will be realized at some future time, in probably different contexts.

Sisir Koppaka takes this idea further in The Most Forward-Thinking Apple Yet. On going 64-bit:

I don’t believe Apple added 64-bit support to iOS 7 and all their apps just to prepare for an eventual transition to 4GB+ memory capacities in future iPhones. I think this was to do with something more impending. Do we know any product category that Apple would be interested in, that would require the use of both iOS and an A-series chip that is 64-bit capable in order to address 4GB+ memory? Apple TV (the one that is yet to come, not the one that exists).

And on the M7 processor:

The new CoreMotion Framework for iOS 7 adds a step counter and a motion activity detector (stationary, walking, running, vehicle or unknown). We know that Apple has been hiring experts in noninvasive blood component measurements. We know they have a patent on a wrist watch. The iWatch must not be far away.

This is a pretty daring thing for Apple to do. Instead of focusing on what is hot now, they are releasing a product that reveals their vision for the future without it having the capabilities needed to deliver fully on that future. It’s a long game, it’s a gamble, it’s gutsy, and it’s probably going to work once developers start experimenting.

I agree with every glorious word in Erika Hall’s How the ‘Failure’ Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation. It’s a brilliant and impassioned defense of making design research part of every product development process:

Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one’s risk of failure.

Part of this may be because the risk of failure is dramatically lower than it used to be. But another reason is that many people don’t actually understand what research is, and have somehow conflated concepts like “rapid prototyping,” “lean startup,” “minimal viable product,” and “[insert] other smart-sounding thing to do” with avoiding research.

It’s really hard to not just go ahead and quote the whole article, because it’s so good. I’ll leave you with just one more bit and an enthusiastic recommendation to read the whole thing:

Maybe knocking out a prototype or building a company is the fastest, cheapest way to learn. But often it’s not. Sure, a prototype can tell us if the user understands the potential solution — but if it’s solving a problem no one has, why bother building it in the first place?

Ok, I lied. One more bit:

It becomes immediately apparent, when we try to understand our fellow humans through research, that we are not rational creatures. But when it comes to making business decisions, research helps address that irrationality and increases our chances to succeed. And make no mistake: in a world where design makes or breaks success, all product design decisions are business decisions. Asking the right questions will lead to useful insights.

More than a few people seem to be confused about the pricing strategy for the iPhone 5C. There are probably only two articles you need to read about that: John Gruber’s Thoughts and Observations on Today’s iPhone 5C and 5S Introduction, and Ben Thompson’s The iPhone is Apple Doubling-Down On What It Does Best.

But even those articles don’t address a complaint that I’ve seen quite a bit of over the past couple of days: that Apple is trying (and failing) to expand into emerging markets. Here’s an example from a bizarre Memeburn article called Dear Apple, don’t try to be Nokia:

…the iPhone 5C — supposedly targeted at the emerging markets and presented as a low-cost device…

And tweets like this are everywhere:

@RianVDM @bokardo – and our customers can't afford ( well the billion potential customers in emerging markets)

— Kirstin Horton (@KirstinHorton) September 11, 2013

It’s important to point out a few things here.

First, everything flows from the pricing strategy, and the only people calling the 5C a “cheap iPhone” are tech bloggers. It’s not a cheap iPhone. It’s an iPhone that replaces the previous strategy of selling last year’s model at a slightly cheaper price. As Gruber points out:

The prices of the iPhone tiers remain the same as last year. What changes with the 5C is that the middle tier is suddenly more appealing, and has a brand of its own that Apple can promote apart from the flagship 5S.

Second, the vast majority of mobile connections in emerging markets are pre-paid, not contract-based. For example, in Africa 96% of connections are pre-paid (source). This means that in emerging markets people buy phones that aren’t subsidized. The cheapest iPhone 5C costs $549 off-contract. This makes it a virtually unattainable phone in the pre-paid emerging market.

Here’s the thing though: does anyone think Apple doesn’t know this? Is the assumption that Apple is trying to break into the emerging market with a $549 phone? That would be insane, right? But that’s not what Apple is doing at all, and they never said that they are.

The iPhone 5C is not about expanding Apple’s share in emerging markets. It’s about increasing their share of the high-end phone market, while simultaneously increasing their profit margins on those phones because of cheaper manufacturing costs.

So, yes. The iPhone is still too expensive for most of the emerging market. But Apple doesn’t need the emerging market to be insanely successful. They just need to keep selling a ton of phones in subsidized markets at a healthy profit margin. And that’s exactly what the iPhone 5C will accomplish.

Keith Houston’s fascinating essay The Ancient Roots of Punctuation begins like this:

The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde. And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #.

Which is why the hashtag is often referred to as the pound sign. Keith also explains the origins of the Pilcrow (¶), the Ampersand (&), the Manicule (☞), and the Diple (>). Great article.

I continue to be fascinated by the smart city movement. The multiplexed metropolis is a very interesting look by The Economist at the pros and cons of connecting cities through open access to all kinds of information:

But clever cities will not necessarily be better ones. Rather than becoming paragons of democracy, they could turn into electronic panopticons in which everybody is constantly watched. They could be paralysed by hackers, or by bugs in labyrinthine software. They could furnish new ways to exclude the poor. They might even put at risk the serendipity that makes cities such creative places, argues Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the LSE, making them “stupefying” instead.

I have to admit that I had to look up the word “panopticon” — and it’s such a great analogy. From Wikipedia:

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without their being able to tell whether they are being watched or not.

Let’s hope we can avoid this…

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I love the phrase “getting caught in the melancholy of the infinite scroll.” That’s just one gem from Alexis Madrigal’s The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook. He explores this strange dark side of “flow”, where we get stuck in an online activity and can’t stop doing it, even though there’s no tangible benefit:

What is the machine zone? It’s a rhythm. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop. It’s a powerful space-time distortion. You hit a button. Something happens. You hit it again. Something similar, but not exactly the same happens. Maybe you win, maybe you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s the pleasure of the repeat, the security of the loop.

We certainly do seem to treat “pull to refresh” like a slot machine in a casino. And the chances of winning something valuable are about the same, too.

Stijn Debrouwere’s Cargo cult analytics is a fantastic talk/essay on how we often get obsessed with meaningless data in the name of evidence-based decision-making. I don’t want to ruin it, because it’s one of those rare must-read pieces, but here’s a small taste:

Pageviews is a vanity metric: something that looks really important but that we can’t act on and that tell us nothing about how well we’re actually doing, financially or otherwise. […]

There’s nothing like a dashboard full of data and graphs and trend lines to make us feel like grown ups. Like people who know what they’re doing. So even though we’re not getting any real use out of it, it’s addictive and we can’t stop doing it.