10/10/2022
Pix is an undeniable success. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Launched in October 2020, Pix is Brazil’s instant payment system based on phone apps and Internet Banking, largely adopted by the majority of Brazilians since then.
Brazil’s Central Bank, the “father of Pix”, maintains an updated page on its website showing the Pix evolution according to lots of metrics.
It is an impressive sight:
- In less than two years, almost 130 million (>50%) people and just over 11 million companies have made at least one transaction with Pix.
- This audience has created more than 500 million “Pix keys” — shortcuts to facilitate Pix transfers. A Pix key can be a phone number, an email, a national ID (and its equivalent for companies), or a random number.
- Close to BRL 1 trillion (~USD 200 billion) was moved in 2.2 billion transactions — the majority, 68%, between individuals (P2P).
Financial institutions adhered to Pix unconditionally, even though they lost the (little) revenue they had with similar, more archaic methods of electronic money transfer, such as “TED” and “DOC”. Today, almost 800 of them support Pix.
And despite the magnitude of the system, Pix has shown itself to be agile in implementing new features, such as withdrawals, changes and recurring payments, and to make adjustments due to unforeseen events, such as flexible value ceilings to inhibit nighttime robberies.
Is it perfect? No, but it is way better than anything that existed before and that showed up later, such as WhatsApp Payments. More than that, Pix is an example to the world. Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which is developing a similar system for cross-border payments, praises the Brazilian Pix.
Pix began to be developed by the Brazil Central Bank in 2014 with an open model for dialogue, consisting of a discussion forum, working groups and even an open source repository on Github.
It is true that Brazilian banks, despite all the power they have, shrink next to the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, such as Meta, Apple, and Google. Even so, they are really powerful and yet were all in. For all these reasons, Pix can be a reference to another conundrum that we face on a daily basis: the multiplicity of messaging applications.
In the first half of this year, the European Union advanced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a new law created to curb the unbridled power of American big tech and restore competition in the sectors in which these companies operate.
Among other requirements, the DMA demands for interoperability between messaging apps made by big companies. iMessage will have to talk to WhatsApp, and both will have to talk to… whatever Google’s messaging app is at the moment.
It seems as unlikely as it was in Brazil until 2020 to transfer a few bucks, free of charge and instantaneously, between rival banks accounts on a Sunday night. Difficult? Certainly, but not impossible.
And although difficult, it is not unprecedented. At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Apple and Google teamed up to create an API for tracking contagions. On Tuesday (4), the Matter standard, which creates a “common language” for Internet of Things devices and has Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung among its members, was finalized.
For messaging, we need a “common language” that understands the basic functionality of this kind of app, such as exchanging messages, creating groups, and making calls. The rest — stickers, reactions, mini-apps, etc. — is up to each application. These would be the differentiators.
A common base for messaging apps would approximate the functioning of this market to that of music streaming, but without the commercial barrier (the agreements with the record labels that allows them to stream millions of popular songs). Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, and Tidal compete not in catalog/content, but in features, apps, and integrations.
There are already open protocols that enable interoperability between messaging applications, such as XMPP and Matrix. What is lacking is good will, which it seems we will only get from the big companies thanks to a little push from state regulation in Europe. May this path lead to a result as good as our Pix.
Discuss @ Hacker News.
27/9/2022
It would be great to start the day with a personalized newsletter — not by an algorithm, but by ourselves. With news from our area, latest posts from our favorite websites, Twitter summaries, and more.
Mailbrew, a service I recently discovered, allows this. After registering (using an email or a Twitter account), you see a screen where can create “brews”, which is what they call the digest/newsletters — you can create several if you want.
It’s very intuitive. The first step is to define the periodicity of the e-mail (daily, weekly or monthly) and the time you want it to arrive in your inbox.
After that the fun begins. A wall of information source buttons appears. Just click on the desired one and adjust its settings. Some, like Twitter’s, contain many settings, which helps refine the content selection. There are also visual settings, to display more or fewer images in emails.
After setting your “brew” up, click the Done
button in the upper right corner. At this point you will receive the first issue of your newsletter, and from then on, the next ones will drop into your e-mail in the established periodicity — which can be changed at any time, by the way.
![Print of Mailbrew's creating “brew” screen, in macOS' Safari, with a RSS settings opened.](/assets/2022/daily-newsletter-mailbrew/mailbrew.png)
Mailbrew also has two other features: one for reading newsletters within its web interface (it gives you a special email address for this) and another for saved/read-it-later articles (like Pocket or Instapaper).
They are nice features, but inferior to other apps specific to these purposes. The best of it is the personalized newsletter. And the good thing? Mailbrew is free.
Discuss @ Hacker News.
16/9/2022
![The Verge's post announcing its 2022 new layout, presented in a macOS' Safari window.](/assets/2022/the-verge-new-site/the-verge-2022.jpg)
I tried to stop myself, but I couldn’t: over the past few days, I have spent way more time than would be healthy reading the comments on the post in which the US tech website The Verge announced its latest radical redesign.
With a bold new look, bright colors, and notes that link out, the goal, according to editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, is to “revolutionize the media with blog posts.”
A very noble cause and one that has my full support, but it seems that its new fancy look have not been well received by Verge’s most voracious readers.
Nilay states in the announcement that “sometimes you just have to blow things up and start over.” Perhaps this was not the case for The Verge, a reference site in consumer technology, the source which almost all sites covering this area drink from.
The Verge’s home page, the most widely read of the Vox Media conglomerate, has become quite… different. Besides their original reporting and takes, it now has little boxes with links to other sites and bits of social networks (Twitter, Reddit, TikTok) embedded. They are grouped in a thing (?) called the StoryStream.
It’s a quirky layout. Sometimes the content is on the left, sometimes on the right, the original reporting mixed with the little notes with external links; more than once, I noticed a story both in the StoryStream and published as an original post. And it’s heavy. Each Tweet or TikTok video is an entire extra page loaded inside the one you are on. The people there can’t help themselves either. A couple days ago Nilay posted an 11 MB animated GIF on The Verge’s home page.
To Axios, the editor-in-chief said that the new Verge is the result of the idea that, today, it doesn’t compete with other publications, such as Wired or the New York Times. “Our competition is Twitter and other aggregators of audience.”
Maybe the problem is that they have drawn too much inspiration from these new competitors. Let’s face it, Twitter is not a design paradigm for anyone, much less for an editorial site.
A comment that resonated a lot among readers, aside from complaints of ruined pupils and the feeling of disorientation on the home page, is that if they wanted to read Twitter posts, they would go to Twitter.
Redesigns of this kind interest me for several reasons: I love the web, I have a product that I subject to similar redesigns once in a while, and on a deeper level I like to think about information flows and the best ways to communicate in text.
The new The Verge looks like something out of the mind of Joshua Topolsky, one of the co-founders who long ago went down other paths and now heads the equally confusing Input Magazine. It is form over function, aesthetics drawing attention where it should be transparent.
It’s been in my mind that this problem has been solved for a good few years, maybe decades, especially within the premise presented by Nilay that the new Verge wants to “revolutionize the media with blog posts.”
What is a blog if not a long list of posts displayed in reverse chronological order?
The Verge’s redesign must have been driven by something else. In his post, Nilay declines to debate this, saying that such work attracts questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and “other extremely boring vocabulary words.” Instead, he goes on, the only goal here is that The Verge should be fun to read, every time you open it.
I disagree somewhat with his statement, particularly when it comes to “a giant site that makes a bunch of money” (his words). The fact that we are drowned in trackers and intrusive and abusive ads on the web, which makes it toxic if you are not behind a good ad blocker, is because of the direct influence of these “extremely boring vocabulary words.”
Were it not for this, we would have more editorial/content sites like my Manual do Usuário (Portuguese) or the “lite” version of CNN — I mean, less flashy, yes, but way more readable, organized, and really lightweight.
Topolsky, the former editor-in-chief of The Verge with a penchant for lysergic layouts, had a brief stint at the traditional Bloomberg. It’s been said that his bold ideas were met with resistance from the publication’s management, which led to an inevitable clash, and ultimately to his premature departure before completing a year in the job.
In every publication, the comment space represents a tiny slice of the audience, not infrequently with loud but distinct opinions from the majority. This perhaps hides a better reception of The Verge’s new look. Or maybe it doesn’t. From the volume and intensity of complaints, which I’ve been eagerly reading since new layout’s day one, I’d bet on at least some changes to the home page, to something softer and more traditional.
On Twitter, Nilay Patel boasted that they “made everyone talk about a open web redesign in 2022.” True, see us here, still talking about it. He also said, in the same post and as if it were a testament to quality, that The Verge’s home page had double the average traffic on the launch day. True too, but I don’t know if this is positive. Every catastrophe attracts a lot of curious eyes.
Discuss @ Hacker News.
9/9/2022
After presenting us to the medical terrorism, once again reinforced at its “Far Out” event earlier this week with another batch of Apple Watch users saved by their watches from heart attacks and… bears (?), Apple’s marketing has expanded the types of terrorism it subjects consumers to in its eagerness to sell more phones and watches.
Let’s start with existential terrorism. Priced from USD 799, the newly announced iPhone 14 is capable of sending SOS messages to satellites, even in places where there is no carrier signal or any Wi-Fi network nearby.
Without an iPhone 14, Apple threatens, what will you do when you find yourself lost in the middle of nowhere?
Later on, Apple introduced us to car terrorism. The new Apple Watch and iPhones have a unique feature that can detect car crashes and call emergency automatically.
The company claims that many accidents happen in remote areas and involve only one car, which means that if you don’t have the latest iGadget, you are in danger of dying alone, agonizing inside your car.
There is something different on Apple’s storytelling. Their classic ideal consumer, that happy person who takes pictures of their friends at fancy parties and goes on vacations in heavenly landscapes, has given way to a myriad of personas, from the paranoid who think they will die around the next corner if they don’t have an Apple Watch on their wrist to those who aspire to be something “Pro” without going to the hassle that is generally expected of someone considered “Pro”.
Take the Apple Watch Ultra, the new version of the company’s watch focused on adventurers, an audience that until now was better served by rival Garmin. With a more robust finish, a larger battery, and features designed for extreme situations, the Ultra is, as someone jokingly commented, an Apple Watch for ten people in the world — those who participate in Iron Man, who climb the Mount Everest, who cross the Sahara on foot.
Of course, Apple doesn’t expect to sell just ten units of the Apple Watch Ultra. It has equal or more appeal to a much larger audience — those who would like to be more adventurous, who plan or even go for longer walks from time to time, who aspire to be like the characters in the top-notch commercial Apple prepared to sell a USD 799 watch that will be outdated next year.
The new super camera of the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max, with 48 megapixels and several “cinema” features, is another example of aspirational functionality.
No matter how good a phone camera is — and I truly believe they are the best for most people —, it is hard to imagine a professional photographer or movie studio discarding their huge and expensive cameras to use an iPhone, even a “Pro” iPhone. For those for whom camera quality makes a difference, any iPhone released in the last five years makes good enough pictures.
It is no longer enough to just flaunt an iPhone, an indictment of ~haters that has been made since forever, a claim theorized by Thorstein Veblen, who christened this behavior “conspicuous consumption” in the late 19th century, long before Steve Jobs took the stage to announce the first iPhone in 2007.
The real upgrade of the iPhone is its transformation from a status symbol into a (supposed) lifesaver and a prism that reflects multiple aspirations of its owner: someone concerned about health, someone adventurous, a person sensitive enough to notice insignificant aesthetic subtleties and value photography as art.
Even the purchase itself imbues an aspirational element, of someone who cares about the climate emergency. For each new product it announces, Apple throws on the screen a bunch of data and promises to “decarbonize” its production line by 2030, a fallacy that justifies greedy and hostile attitudes to the consumer, such as removing the wall charger from the iPhone box, and sweeps under the rug practices much more aggressive to the environment as hindering the reuse of components (another terrorism, this one commercial), discontinuing support for perfectly capable products and preventing the rescue of discarded equipment.
In Apple’s eyes, the ideal owner of an Apple Watch Ultra and/or an iPhone 14 Pro is like that driver who thinks he needs a huge pickup truck or SUV, even if he only drives from home to office, office to home, and never hits a dirt road. (Related note: the ranking of best-selling cars in the United States is dominated by huge pickup trucks and SUVs.)
While justifying its annual release cycle with complex craziness of extremely limited use, Apple has to deal with more pressing and mundane issues, such as the global recession and the stagnant phone market that threaten its market value. These things are closely related.
iPhone prices have risen everywhere except in the United States. The end of the “mini” version and the arrival of the iPhone 14 Plus increase the average selling price of the line and concentrate it even more in the top range market, which is immune to any crisis and has always had fat margins, and that still growing, Apple in the lead.
The strongest sign of Apple’s effort to sell more of its most expensive iPhones is the unprecedented distinctions between the Pro and regular iPhone 14 lines.
For the first time, the new iPhones use different chips. The new one, the A16 Bionic, was reserved for the Pro line. The regular iPhone 14 reused the same 2021 A15 Bionic used in the iPhone 13. For all intents and purposes, except for the Plus model’s huge screen, the iPhone 14 is almost indistinguishable from the iPhone 13.
Nothing better represents this Apple effort, however, than the “Dynamic Island”, the marketing name for the interactive animations that play with the new cutout in the screen that houses the Face ID sensors and front camera.
The same notifications displayed on “Dynamic Island” exist on every iPhone in use, but only on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max are they so pleasing, so “creative,” a show apart.
Instead of hiding it, Apple rubs the cutout in the user’s face. Is it cool? Yes, very. And genius too, a testament to Apple’s unparalleled mastery of the art of making cool phones.
Android manufacturers have spent years using the same kind of cutout in the screen for the front camera. They had plenty of time to come up with something cool like this. The best they came up with? A few static Galaxy S10 wallpapers that incorporate the cutout. That you don’t remember this is no accident.
Nonetheless, Dynamic Island is — I repeat — a preciosity that helps to justify phones that cost USD 1,000 or more in the face of other devices, including some from the same company, that do the same things and cost up to 70% less.
The various terrorisms of Apple’s marketing, the new products’ features that serve tiny groups of consumers treated as essential, even the smoke signal, I mean, the satellite signal available in the very rare event that you get lost in the woods, all this hides an inconvenient truth for the industry, for Apple: our phones, the ones we already have, already in use, are very, very good.
Discuss @ Hacker News.
6/9/2022
Brazil’s Ministry of Justice forbid Apple from selling iPhones in the country due to the lack of wall charger in the phone’s box and fined the company in BRL 12 million (~USD 2,3 million).
Senacon, a consumer secretary of Ministry of Justice, said on its decision, published this Tuesday (Sep. 6th), that Apple infringed consumer laws when it removed the wall charger from iPhone 12 onwards, starting in 2020.
All iPhone models are forbidden to be sold in Brazil. Senacon also asked Anatel, Brazilian communications regulatory agency, to cancel all iPhone models certifications of conformity in the country.
Senacon also asked for help of Ministry of Foreign Affairs to broadcast today’s decision to European Union, United States, and other countries of South America.
Read the decision here (in Portuguese).
3/9/2022
People say that “early adopters”, those consumers willing to be the first to buy or try a new product, only get screwed. By submitting themselves to things not yet tested by more people, they are exposed to the risk of design errors, failures in the manufacturing process, high costs etc.
Such cases are so frequent in the industry that waiting is considered good practice. Instead of buying at launch, wait. In the worst case scenario, you can avoid walking around with a phone-shaped bomb in your pocket, as happened to the early adopters of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 in 2016.
Some changes, however, reach all adopters, early or late, those who wait for the trendiest product to become obsolete. Take my case: seven years after Apple retired the diversity of ports on its laptops, replacing them with just one type — the USB-C/Thunderbolt —, I felt the impact of this “evolution” on my skin, or rather, in my pocket.
An evolution, I must say, that has already been reversed in the company’s most expensive line of laptops. The 2021 MacBook Pro brought back the MagSafe connector, the HDMI port, and the SD card slot. On its cheaper models, we still have to make deal with a few USB-C/Thunderbolt ports and countless adapters.
I’m not saying that USB-C/Thunderbold is bad. It is actually quite handy to plug and unplug just one cable on my desk when switching between “laptop” and “workstation” modes. To the USB-C hub I connect keyboard, mouse, and monitor — sometimes my headphones, a pen drive, a Yubikey, and a SD card, none of them having a USB-C plug. Before, there were at least three cables that I had to plug and unplug all the time; now it’s just one.
But these things doesn’t need to be mutually exclusive. Apple could, for instance, keep a USB-A port next to the USB-C ones, which would save me from having to carry an adapter for when, in “laptop mode,” I need to use a flash drive or my Yubikey
(Note, by the way, that even the 2021 MacBook Pro full of ports doesn’t have a USB-A, a format sentenced to death by Apple, but still widely used.)
![A wall charger from Baseus on a blank surface, with a partial book on the left and an out of focus plant on the right.](/assets/2022/apple-cost-accessories/carregador-celular-baseus.jpg)
With phones, the drama was similar. Under the pretext of “saving the environment,” as if there was nothing better to be done in this regard, in 2020 Apple removed the wall charger from the boxes of the iPhone.
In the company’s official store, that 5W charger that used to be “free” is sold for USD 19. Interestingly, the 20W USB-C model comes out at the same price.
I opted for an alternative, from a brand called Baseus, which comes with a Lightning cable, at a lower price than Apple’s solo charger.
Alongside a few others brands, such as Ugreen and Anker, these Chinese companies have been filling the gaps created by Apple and followed, in parts, by other manufacturers — it’s starting to get hard to find chargers inside Android phone boxes.
The cost-effectiveness of alternative brand accessories is great not because they are the cheapest (they are not), but because they are cheaper than the official ones and often better.
![A picture from above of a USB-C hub filled with cables.](/assets/2022/apple-cost-accessories/hub-usb-c-ugreen.jpg)
Apple’s “multi-port adapter” costs USD 69 at its official store and expands a USB-C to a trio of ports — USB-C, HDMI and USB-A. For 1/3 of this price I bought a USB-C hub from Ugreen without USB-C, but with two USB-A ports, HDMI, RJ-45, and SD and microSD card readers.
In any case, I would rather not to have to deal with it. It’s not an unreasonable wish. The laptop I bought in 2015 and the phone of 2017 were “self-contained,” they both came with all the ports and essential accessories out of the boxes.
Too often companies sell ideas of “progress” that are actually setbacks, but with such good marketing that they pass as such. For these two cases, the laptop without ports/connections and the phone without charger in the box, there is no explanation, fanciful or otherwise, that is at least convincing.
Discuss @ Hacker News.