Hello, people of Backchannel. Steven at your service.
This week had the rare circumstance of two aged-but-still-sprightly competitors unveiling products on successive days. On Wednesday, Microsoft— formerly the heavyweight champion of the personal computer world on the basis of its software—actually introduced its first desktop computer. The Surface Studio is the result of an epically long transfer of Microsoft’s surface technology from research project, to bar room gaming device, to tablet, to desktop. It features a ginormous 28-inch touch-screen and an ingenious dial for precision zooming and menu-selecting. It’s also got a sheen of design haughtiness once unheard of in the precincts of Windows-land. The cheapest version is $3,000.
A day later, Apple ended the long wait for laptop users yearning for an upgrade by unveiling a new line of MacBook Pros. With the exception of a novel feature called the Touch Bar — a multi-touch strip above the keyboard that Disney-fies what function keys used to do — these new machines were pretty predictable iterations of how Apple does generations these days: thinner, faster, and more expensive.
In the wake of these events, a meme emerged: Microsoft is now more innovative than Apple!
I find this conclusion too facile. I do think it’s fair to say that the behavior of both companies is now determined by a different kind of role reversal: whereas Microsoft was once the operating system market leader, now Apple is. Apple, after all, has the most profitable and beloved OS in the arena that matters most, by an interstellar margin: mobile phones. And after repeated bungling, Microsoft doesn’t even have a viable mobile phone OS anymore.
That fact dictates strategies. In the glory days when Microsoft ruled the earth, it was careful not to innovate too far ahead of its legacy customers. Apple was free to take bigger chances. Now, even though Apple knows the importance of cannibalizing its product line before someone else does, the pace of its more dramatic product revisions has slowed from its formerly frantic clip. (Just think how different iPods were in the mid-2000s.) More often, it parcels out its innovations in otherwise-predictable product refreshes.
The difference between being the leader and the challenger is apparent in the two products introduced this week. The Surface Studio is a dramatic rethinking of the desktop computer. Also the particular niche it targets — “creatives” in music and the graphic arts — is the exact one that Apple saw as its high-end core when it conceded the hopelessness of overtaking Microsoft on the basis of its operating system alone. And Microsoft wants to hit the classic buttons once defined by Apple’s fingerprints: lust-worthy design; painstaking attention to details; a sorcerer’s swoop of delight. Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration.
Apple claims that its new Macbook Pro is defined by a similarly impressive technological feat. And yes, the Touch Bar seems a genuine innovation, though I’m not yet sure it’s a successful one; I’ll need to use it over an extended period of time before making that judgement. But two things about it do seem clear. First, Apple has really dug its heels in on the belief that touch screens do not belong on desktop and laptop machines. (That’s something Apple’s head of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller explained to me at length a year ago, when the most recent version of the iMac was about to ship.) But putting one on the keyboard is a different matter.
The second is that Apple is continuing a near-decade-long process of making its PC operating system act like a phone. Apple’s front-loads its innovations into its mobile operating system, which demands a more frequent flow of new ideas. Demos of the Touch Bar are full of shortcuts first introduced on iOS, many of them shortcuts to compensate for the limitations of a small screen and soft keyboard. One of Apple’s best uses of AI is the often dead-on suggestions for a one-touch summoning of the most logical “next word.” I find it fascinating that this feature, created because of the limitations of a tiny touch keyboard, now appears as an addition to a full-size physical keyboard.
In any case, kudos to Microsoft for getting our attention. As someone who’s been following the Cupertino-Redmond rivalry from its earliest days, I’m delighted that those two old warriors are both still in the ring.
Backscatter: In the past 12 months our staff writer—and now contributor— Lauren Smiley has done extraordinary work in documenting the human side of technology, often with portraits of heart-rending empathy, but always with a sharp wit and an unfailing story sense. The Northern California chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists has noticed, bestowing Lauren with the prize for best technology reporting in 2016, for five of her Backchannel stories. We obviously agree.
What we’ve been up to this week:
The News Is Now Literally a Video Game: Andrew Watts explores the GOP Arcade, where the news is gamified — from “Trump Toss,” an exercise in deporting immigrants by flinging them over a wall, to “Thoughts and Prayers,” which focuses on mass killings in the US. Once the election wraps up, GOP Arcade will make way for the Everyday Arcade, which its creators hope will be “the gaming version of The Onion or The Daily Show.”
What Last Week’s Internet Shut Down Really Means: It shouldn’t have taken a massive DDoS attack to get us focused on the Internet of Things — but now that it has, it’s important to make sure we’re developing IoT with the public’s best interest in mind. When it comes to city IoT implementations, Susan Crawford writes, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
How Meetup Ditched Its Boys Club: Meetup’s CEO learned the hard way that the path toward creating a diverse and inclusive work environment shouldn’t include giving copies of Lean In to only female employees. Our Jessi Hempel profiled the company’s path from boy’s club to gender parity — a must read for anyone who still thinks making tech inclusive is an impossible task.
