In a surprising move, Airbnb has a new partnership with Apple’s former designer chief, Jony Ive. As much as I like this guy’s work, something quite surprising struck me: Airbnb doesn’t sell any form of hardware. The last time I check, Jony Ive’s reputation is not about crafting the best user interface designs in the world, far from it. Who remember the switch to iOS 7? I do. Jony Ive was quite instrumental in the design of iOS 7 and it was a disaster. We are still paying the price today. It will be interesting to watch what comes from this partnership. Press release here.

Great story about the start of the Apple TV remote app that was removed today from the App Store. Reason? Duplicate functionality with iOS Control Center. Time to move on I guess. I love those stories from the inside. Can’t get enough of them.

Photo credit: @badashproducts on Unsplash.

twitter.com/accannis/…

Thanks to iPhone 12, I can’t wait for the iPhone 13. The MagSafe is cool but is not perfect. 5G is nice but comes with a spotty coverage and puts a lot of pressure on battery life. The iPhone 12 Pro is a powerful monster but with fingerprint magnets and fragile glossy edges. Bezels are thinner and thinner but this big notch is still there. I’m skipping this year’s iPhone 12 and anxiously waiting for iPhone 13. Or whatever name they call it. Maybe just: iPhone Pro?

With the iPhone 12 and MagSafe, is Apple training us for a port-less iPhone 13? I think so. The removable of the Lightning port and skipping USB-C would be so Apple, an act of courage I guess. If they do remove all the ports from the iPhone, how do we deal with CarPlay? What about developers who use testing and development devices which requires the fastest transfer speed possible? Is there something in the works at Apple that would mitigates these challenges for the users? Another type of adaptor? Or maybe Apple is just waiting for a more drastic iPhone redesign (no notch?) to bend themselves to USB-C?

Tim Cook once said that all products Apple sell can fit on a table. Well, depending of the table size, maybe. But, you will have to remove products variants from the equation, though. Look at the iPhone product line. Now, think about how it will look next year.

twitter.com/asymco/st…

As much as I like what the iPhone 12 brings to the table in general… edges got my attention. Up until now, I didn’t really like rounded edges since the iPhone 6. I much prefer the square edge on the iPhone 12… but not on the Pro models… they are way too much polished and are probably finger prints magnets.

I want a Pro iPhone with the matte version of the non-Pro iPhone edges.

twitter.com/msfslm/st…

When I first saw the MagSafe snapping into the iPhone, I asked myself: how about taking the iPhone away? Is it hard? Is it gentle? Do we need two hands to separate them? Now listen to the video segment from a guy asking a few troubling questions… should we worry or just wait for the iPhone 12 to ship and see how the whole thing actually works?

I love those feature highlights. Apple started to use them recently (September of last year?). If you look closely at the A14 feature highlights, I wonder what features aren’t required in a Mac? There is so many things that make sense on an iPhone, like everything related to ML. But, on a Mac? I’m not so sure. And, what features should be added to the A14 that doesn’t make sense on an iPhone? Increase high-performance CPU cores? And then what? What features are Mac specific that aren’t already handled by the T2 chip?

Last year, the iPhone 11 lacked 5G networks support. Apple was doomed. This year, the iPhone 12 does support 5G networks. Now the operators are doomed because of spotty coverage. There is something bad to look for if you want to get clicks.

I think 5G is more marketing than anything else at this point. The iPhone 12 will be the enabler of 5G network. People will demand it (even if their use cases don’t require it). This will in turn force operators to accelerate their deployment.

I’ve been thinking of something really wild recently, for me at least: replacing my 2017 21.5 inches iMac with a Mac Pro. Here is why.

I work in IT (information technologies) as a data center related technology architect. Server virtualization, storage area networks, networking technologies are at the center of my professional universe. In the coming months, I’ll have to invest in self-training and experimentations a lot around VMware-related products and services. How can I do that efficiently while working from home? Here comes the Mac Pro idea.

In order to be able to run many virtual machines, a powerful physical computer is required: lots of memory, powerful CPU (more than 6 cores) and fast storage. My current iMac doesn’t meet these basic requirements (it is maxed out at 32 GB of RAM and it has a relatively modest CPU). A Mac Pro with the following specs would easily meet the challenge: at least 128 GB of fast memory, 8 cores CPU, builtin SSD and expandability.

Virtualization will required VMware Fusion Pro running on top of macOS. Then, the sky is the limit as I can then install ESXi hypervisor which will allow me to branch into more complex setup. This type of environment do require a lot of memory (a typical VM is about 4-16 GB each) and multi-cores CPU. Installing ESXi directly on the Mac Pro is not an option as I will need to have macOS running for all other tasks (I’m not even sure if it is att all possible).

How do I get there? Well, I’m still thinking about how I’ll buy that machine and get the additional RAM (I won’t go with Apple’s because $$$). Stay tuned.

Technical datasheet can be found on Apple’s website, right here in PDF format. I don’t want to switch to a Windows machine BTW, I’m too much invested in Apple’s ecosystem for that to happen.