Tag: Apple

People are spreading unfounded rumors of Apple cancelling their investment in Indonesia

Apparently people are spreading misinformation that Apple has backed out of its Rp1.6 trillion ($100 million) investment in Indonesia and canceled plans to build a resource plant after Tim Cook’s visit to Indonesia last month, based on a clickbait headline.

First of all, that plant cancellation story was lifted from news coverage from early 2023 when an official from the Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry claimed that Apple approached the government in 2016 about building a lead processing plant but the company reportedly said that the government must get rid of illegal mining operations and meet the company’s environmental, social, and governance guidelines. The government’s failure to comply with that request meant that plans to build the plant were shelved, the official said. That is old story, nothing about that is new. There was also no investment amount mentioned because it never came to that point.

Secondly, the $100 million investment has been spent gradually since 2018 on establishing and running three Apple Developer Academy sites with another one expected to open in Bali next year. It’s an ongoing investment as part of regulatory compliance to meet the local component requirement necessary continue selling 4G and 5G smartphones in the country. Back in 2016 Apple reportedly committed $44 million on establishing an Apple Developer Academy in the country within three years, the first of which opened in 2018.

This investment is indeed small compared to the amount of money spent by Indonesian consumers on purchasing iPhones in 2023. Figures from the Ministry of Industries revealed that out of the nearly 2.8 million smartphones imported by Indonesia last year, 85% of them had been iPhones because despite domestic manufacturing of 50 million smartphones a year, Apple’s smartphones are fully imported.

Apple supplier Pegatron was once reported to invest $1 billion to open an Apple manufacturing plant in Batam in 2019 but that report was either inaccurate or that the company drastically changed its plans in short order. While Pegatron’s consumer electronics plant did open in Batam, it has yet to manufacture Apple products to date.

Certain government officials and critics have pointed out that the amount invested by Apple in the country is minuscule in comparison, especially when other Apple products are included. Additionally, with Apple’s newly announced $250 million investment in Singapore to expand its original campus in the country and the company’s increased investment in Vietnam, where the company has spent nearly $16 billion since 2019, Apple’s Indonesian investment numbers and plans are incomparable.

It’s for this very reason that President Joko Widodo has assigned his most senior aide, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investments Luhut B. Panjaitan, to ensure that not only will Apple’s investment plans come to fruition but that the country can play a bigger role in Apple’s manufacturing and development operations.

In short, it’s simply not true that Apple already canceled its recently announced $100 million investment. All the commotion came about due to the conflation of a government official’s statement in early 2023 and the recently cited investment figure for Apple’s Developer Academy.

Super Apps in America might be different from the Asian ones

In this Vergecast episode they keep saying Apple doesn’t allow super apps on iOS so they won’t have to concede the market to something like WeChat which made the hardware mostly irrelevant. They also said the banks are prevented from using the payment feature directly so they have to sign a deal with Apple to use Apple Pay.

I get that it’s an American perspective but don’t publish misinformation. China’s WeChat and Southeast Asian “super” apps like Grab, Gojek, and Air Asia all work on iPhones with no problems whatsoever. We use these apps daily to book a car, a bike, order food, arrange for courier deliveries, pay for stuff, etc.

Highlighting that last part, we use these apps to pay for things. The retail finance world in Southeast Asia is probably a world away from the American one. We don’t just use our bank accounts to make payments, we often send our money to multiple digital wallets and other finance-enabled apps allowing us to pay for utility bills, insurance, car registration, installments, paylaters, and many other payments, and earn ourselves points or cash back just like credit cards.

Our shopping apps are also payment apps. Imagine using your Amazon, Uber, or Temu app to pay for your city ordinance, cable, neighborhood services, and many other bills.

Most banks and digital wallets in Southeast Asia skip Apple, Android, or Samsung Pay altogether because Android is dominant so they all adopt QR payments in their respective markets.

Right now a common QR payment is being rolled out across almost all of Southeast Asia so whichever Southeast Asian bank or wallet you use you’ll be able to use your account to pay for almost anything anywhere in the region that accepts QR payments.

I regularly use my Singaporean UOB account to pay for things like groceries and gasoline in Jakarta by scanning the QR code on the merchant terminal and it’s as seamless as using your card. Sure it’s not as fancy as tapping your phone or watch to pay for stuff but in terms of financial inclusion, it’s so much wider since cheap Android phones are on board.

There’s also no good reason why Uber and Uber Eats have to be different apps! If anything Uber is one of the few American companies that know everything about super apps because they competed with Grab and Gojek in Southeast Asia before retreating and merging their local ops with Grab. They were also in China, the original super app market.

Apple is not preventing super apps from existing or working on your phones. Is anyone even trying it in the US? It’s not Apple who’s actively preventing it, it’s the “western” digital culture, the market, it’s Americans who don’t want them. What you might prefer to have instead in the US are integrated services or features around a specific theme or category.

Like Google Maps gives you direction but also information about venues and locations including place reviews, prices, photos, opening times, transit and traffic information, and so on.

Right now Spotify is trying to be some sort of a super app by offering not just songs and lyrics and information about musicians and bands but also music videos and podcasts, and now they’re trialing online education courses in the UK.

Who knows maybe Netflix will also add education courses or classes or live sports and events aside from streaming movies, series, documentaries, and games because those are things you do on your TV.

Think of what you can do in Fortnite or Roblox already and expand that outside the narrow boundaries. I mean Fortnite and Roblox already hosted concerts, Duolingo added maths and music courses.

See what I’m getting at? The category expansions app developers are trying in the “western” markets are not all encompassing like in Asia but they grow out of a central theme.

FWIW, you can lump Instagram into this category because it’s a photo and video sharing app that has direct and group messaging, audio and video calls, online shops, and gives you information about venues and locations. Who knows what else will Meta be adding to Instagram in the near future?

iPhone Design Chief Joins Jony Ive’s LoveFrom

Losing 20 designers to Jony Ive must be a significant blow to Apple but it’s certainly a testament to Ive’s leadership as a design executive. And now the tech giant loses another senior design executive. 

What Ive and his team built at Apple are unquestionably iconic, from the groundbreaking original iMac and its weird puck mouse to the oddly designed Magic Mouse and Lightning Apple Pencil, but with Ive’s and his former team members’ departures, Apple has to rebuilt the design team with new leadership and direction.

With almost none of Ive’s former charges left in the company, Apple’s award winning Ive era is over and if they want to return to that level, it’s going to take a lot of work.

It’s unfortunate that Apple is no longer a design focused company the way it used to be in the 90s to the 2010s having reorganized the team under Operations instead of its own vertical under the CEO but they’ve decided to take this path following Ive’s departure.

This is already a new era at Apple where product design is more iterative and functional than inspirational and if they aim to reclaim their crown as one of the most iconic industrial design companies, it will require a new batch of outstanding designers and design leadership.

Senator Elizabeth Warren Targets Apple for Shutting Out Beeper

Sorry Senator, nobody is stopping anyone from using alternative messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger (which apparently had just been rebuilt using Signal’s end to end secure messaging protocol), Telegram, Snapchat, or any other cross platform ones that are available on both the App Store and Google Play. Shutting out Beeper from iMessage isn’t anti-competitive.

It may be inconvenient that many Americans are on iMessage while their Android friends and colleagues are being shown as unsecured green bubbles but the rest of the world don’t have this problem because they use other messaging apps.

There is no antitrust problem here. Just because people refuse to use clearly available alternatives doesn’t make it an antitrust problem.

If the Senator thinks iOS and Android users should be able to communicate securely without having to download other apps, maybe the Senator should consider finding out why the RCS protocol is not inherently secure? Google only recently made RCS secure on Android and it’s had a complicated past.

Will the Senator admonish Microsoft for not allowing Google Docs users to collaborate directly on Office docs and vice versa, or am I giving her a terrible idea?

Nothing is Bringing iMessage to its Android Phone

This is also called introducing MITM (man in the middle) attack vector into your Apple ID and iCloud accounts thereby opening up potential breaches to your account.

“Would you like to compromise your account privacy security? Tap here to let your account be accessed by some random authentication server not maintained nor authorized by Apple somewhere”

Here’s why a 15-inch MacBook Air would be a good addition to the Mac lineup

With all this talk of a 15″ MacBook Air I have one small concern that the screen resolution might stay the same as for the 13.6″ version at 2560×1664 or thereabouts. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it’s not like they haven’t done it before.

It’s a long time ago and an entirely different executive team, but when Apple introduced the 14″ iBook G4 they kept the screen resolution at 1024×768, the same as the 12″ iBook and the 12″ PowerBook G4. Those who bought the 14″ iBook didn’t get any more work space than those who bought the 12″ version.

The larger iBook had a bigger screen size, bigger hard drive, a SuperDrive that burns DVDs and CDs instead of a Combo Drive that can read DVDs but only burns CDs, and 450 grams heavier, and a higher price.

Apple didn’t want to cannibalize the slightly more expensive 12″ PowerBook G4 which had almost identical specs and they certainly didn’t want the iBook to encroach on the Pro Mac space, so they couldn’t give the 14″ iBook a higher screen resolution.

There’s little chance that someone would pick the 13″ M2 MacBook Pro if Apple makes a 15″ Air available, because frankly, why would you? Even the 13″ M2 MacBook Air is a slightly better machine overall and with a slightly lower price.

Will a 15″ Air pose a threat to the 14″ Pro? Not in the slightest. The 14″ and 16″ Pro machines carry the much more powerful M2 Pro or Max chips and they also have much higher resolution screens with the XDR display. They also have more connectivity or ports. The Air lineup will not have those.

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Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave and Jony Ive crying his eyes out.

Oh Apple, how far you’ve fallen in product design and user experience.

if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy

Apple CEO Tim Cook 

From  Watch to Phil Schiller. 2014 Apple products in one image.

Kidding aside, aesthetics is probably why they decided to omit the iPod series, the Mac mini, Apple TV, and the Mac Pro. Those products likely don’t fit the imagery they wanted to pass on.

Although if it’s simplicity that they were after, they certainly didn’t show it with the 2014 iPad offering. That’s about as confusing as it gets when it comes to an Apple product series, more so than the  Watch because even though the Watch has a ridiculous number of choices, technologically it’s really only one product with two different physical sizes whereas the iPad series goes back four generations.

iOS default icons throughout the years

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