I announced Basil three weeks ago, and the response has been terrific. People seem to “get it”—a no-nonsense application that makes cooking easier. It’s incredibly gratifying to hear from customers that it’s the recipe app they’ve been looking for and they love cooking with it.

I want to talk a little about why I chose to make Basil.

Why a Cooking App

Simple: I love to cook, but couldn’t find the app I wanted, so I built it. That’s not the only reason, though—that bit of frustration was the catalyst, but there’s more to it. Making a cooking app doesn’t seem very exciting; it’s not pushing the boundaries of what the iPad is capable of, it’s not one of those apps that’s going to blow the minds of geeks (like me), and it doesn’t promise to radically change how we work or communicate with people or anything like that. It’s a cooking app.

In his review of Basil, though, Federico Viticci concisely explained what excited me about it and these sorts of apps. He wrote:

Basil is one of those apps that bring a solid, concrete meaning to Post-PC.

The iPad is a device that can make tasks that haven’t changed much in a while—like cooking recipes—better and more enjoyable in a way the PC never could. There are a number of recipe applications for the Mac, and of course there have been recipes online for a very long time, but the problem was that using a PC while cooking isn’t very nice. You have to find room for it on a crowded tabletop, and you have to use a trackpad while chopping, mixing, cooking on the stove and in the kitchen, often with hands covered in food. Using a trackpad or keyboard while in the kitchen just isn’t fun, and it’s not something many people want to do, so even for people who saved recipes from the web on their computer, many just printed them out on paper before cooking.

Effectively, while the PC and Internet gave us incredible power we never had before, it didn’t apply to the kitchen.

The iPad completely changes that. With its small footprint, it’s pretty easy to find a place on the table, and with its large screen, it’s perfect for viewing recipes. And, of course, touch is a much better interface when you’re focused on something else. What this means is that we can bring computing into the kitchen, and we can use it to make cooking a little easier and more enjoyable. People can store all of their recipes and the recipes they find in one place, the recipes are always organized, and they can see the recipe in big, readable text so it’s easy to reference when you have five different things going on at once.

In other words, I see an opportunity to use the iPad to make something a lot of people do better and more enjoyable for them. It’s not going to change the world, but we can make it better for a lot of people. That’s awesome.

What’s unique about the iPad, too, is that it doesn’t feel like a computer, cold and abstract. When done right, applications begin to feel very physical to users, visceral and human. They can mold themselves to how people think, so they don’t have to think. They can just do. I wanted to create an app that starts to feel like that.

That’s what excites me about the iPad: we can build applications which make things regular people do all of the time better, easier and more satisfying for them. We can make people’s lives a little better. That’s why I built Basil. That’s why I love this platform.

Last week, Marcelo Somers wrote that when designing a product, you should begin with the experience, not the features it has. You should think primarily about what the product’s purpose is—that is, what is the high-level task in someone’s life that it accomplishes. Marcelo calls this what the product is being hired to do, and I think that’s a great way of thinking about it.

This distinction between designing for a product’s purpose and designing based on its features may seem trivial, so let’s consider an example to illustrate it: the MP3 music player. Here are the music player’s central features:

• Plays back audio files through a 3.5mm headphone jack
• Allows user to put audio files on the device and remove them

Here’s the music player’s purpose:

• Conveniently listen to my music wherever I am

Note how much more the purpose guides your design decisions than the feature list. How should the user physically interact with the device? How should their audio files be organized? What should its physical design be? I don’t know. The feature list just tells you what it should literally do, not what it should accomplish.

But if you start with the music player’s purpose, it begins to answer a lot of these questions. How should the user interact with the device? In a way that’s quick and simple to do, so they can go back to what they were doing as quickly as possible. How should their audio files be organized? Since it’s for playing their music, they should be organized by how we think of music—artist, album, genre, et cetera, and they should be organized in such a way that it’s fast to find exactly the album or song I want, because I’m primarily using it while doing something else. How should it physically be designed? Since it’s for listening wherever the user is, it should be as compact as possible, and it should have a large enough screen for moving through the user’s music.

Focusing on the product’s purpose does even more than begin to answer the very literal design questions, though. What’s truly important is it frames the entire product with a very simple, very easy to understand intent. That intent—in this case, “conveniently listen to my music wherever I am”—is a sort of maxim used to guide and judge the entire project. It’s a lense to look at the project through, and it tells you whether you are succeeding or not. Rather than design each separate part of the product as an autonomous piece separate from the rest, the purpose integrates every part of the product, however small or large, into a cohesive whole.

That frame is what allows customers to immediately understand what a product is for, how it fits into their lives and how it would make their lives better. It does that because every bit of the product was designed to serve that purpose, and when a product’s been designed that way, it’s like a very clear thesis: people see what it’s for from the product itself. They don’t have to figure out what it’s for and what they could use it for, because it’s immediately obvious.

So when considering creating something new, don’t think about it as what it literally does. Think about what it will accomplish for people. Make this your project’s defining thesis, its reason for existing. And once you’ve settled on what that purpose is, design ruthlessly for it. Don’t compromise it. “I can listen to all of my music wherever I am” is much more powerful than “a device which stores and plays audio files.”

For the past ten months, I’ve been working on an application for the iPad. It’s called Basil, and you can check it out here. I am so excited to finally share it with all of you.

Here’s the idea: Basil is for saving recipes from the web, organizing and cooking them. You can save recipes from the biggest sites with one tap, and your recipes are always organized, because Basil auto-tags them with the main ingredients and makes it quick to add the meal and cuisine type, too. That way, you don’t have to waste time categorizing your recipes. You can spend it doing what you really want to do—cook.

Here it is:

Basil is $3.99, and you can check it out on the App Store here.

If you’d like to hear a little bit more about what it does and why, keep reading. And then go check it out on the App Store!

The Details

I cook quite a bit, which you probably know if you follow me on Twitter.¹ Cooking is really fun, because there’s always something new and different to try, always something to learn. But there was something that annoyed me a lot while cooking: When I’d find a new recipe from the web and wanted to cook it a while later, it was a pain finding it again. Sometimes I’d save it to Instapaper, and other times I’d go spelunking across the web trying to find it again. Either way, it was a pain—when I really wanted to be shopping for groceries or cooking, I was searching the web. And sometimes I couldn’t even find the right recipe again.

I tried a few different apps to see if they solved it, but none of them quite worked for me. Either they didn’t make it simple to add new recipes, or they had so many features that it obscured the whole point of the app: cooking.

So I decided to make the app I wanted: one that makes it really easy to find new recipes, save and cook them.

Basil isn’t filled to the brim with included recipes. There’s plenty of other apps that do that. Basil includes just four recipes (from Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray’s great Salt & Fat), since it’s meant for the recipes you want. It really is what you make it.

Finding new recipes to cook is easy, because you can search across all of Basil’s supported sites with one tap. When you find one that sounds good, tap Save, and Basil will save it (and any tags the website uses) in just a few seconds, and then ask you to set the meal and cuisine type (if the website provides them, they’ll already be filled in):

As a result, your recipes are always organized. Instead of spending a bunch of time categorizing them, Basil does it for you. If you want to see all of your breakfast recipes, for example, you just tap “breakfast”:

It’s pretty cool. What’s really powerful about this is you can combine any of them. Say you want to see your Chinese soup recipes: just tap “Chinese” and “soup,” and and they’re all there. Or your breakfast recipes with bacon. Whatever it is you want. It’s a really great way to move through your recipes, because it’s instant, and you can re-discover ones you forgot you had.

You can also search through your recipes with full-text search, too. This makes it really easy to find a recipe even if you don’t quite remember the name, but you remember where it came from or some part of the directions.

One of my favorite features is—appropriately—favoriting recipes. Instead of spending time deciding whether a recipe is 4 or 5 stars, you just favorite the ones you really love. That’s it. Simple. And once you do, they’ll always be in your favorites tab, ready to cook.

And what about cooking?

Let’s Cook

When I’m cooking, I usually have a few things going at once, so there’s not much time to read a recipe with small text. What I want is for what really matters—the ingredients and directions—to be as clear to read as possible, and preferably readable at a glance from a distance.

So that’s how the recipe view is designed (click on it for a larger size):

Ingredients and directions are set in big, readable text.

You might have noticed that in step 2, “1 hour” looks like a button. Well, it is. And if you tap it, this slides in from the bottom of the screen:

Any time directions become buttons, and they start a timer for that amount of time. Doesn’t matter if it’s “1 hour,” “one hour,” or “1 hour and fifteen minutes.” There’s no need to fumble around with your phone or the microwave to set a timer—Basil takes care of it for you. It’s one of my favorite things, because it makes cooking a little easier.

I really hope you love using it as much as I do. It’s been such a great experience learning how to develop iOS applications, designing it, and solving design issues and bugs. I love using it, and I hope you do, too!

You can check Basil out on the App Store.

1. I started because my girlfriend and I got sick of eating out every time I visited her while she was away at college, and she’s a really good cook. [↩]

The number of rumors that Apple is working on a small, 7-8″ iPad have increased recently. DigiTimes posted another today.

I wanted to address the idea of a small iPad because I’m sure it’s something Apple has thought about a lot, and it’s an interesting question whether it’s a good idea or not.

I have no doubt that Apple is working on a small iPad, but that’s a separate question of whether they will actually release it. Let’s think through it.

Why A Small iPad Makes Sense

The iPad is big and a bit heavy, so holding it in one hand for an extended amount of time isn’t comfortable. This makes the iPad rather inflexible for reading or watching video, because it requires holding it with two hands or propping it up on something (like your leg). A smaller iPad would fix that. It’d be great for watching video or reading because there would be many more ways to hold it that are comfortable, which is reason enough for some people to want one. A smaller size and weight would also make it that much better of a travel device.

A smaller iPad would also (presumably) be cheaper—say, $249 or $299, $100 less than the iPad 2 costs today. A sub-$300 price opens the iPad to even more customers. It’d be a web-browsing, video-playing, book-reading, game-playing device for less than $300, which is much easier to justify as a gift or for convenience and entertainment.

The last reason is also a good one for why it makes sense for Apple. Apple’s strategy tends to be to introduce a product that’s really, really good, and then as time goes on, expand the product to fit price-points below and/or above it. With the iPod, Apple introduced it at $399, then a second generation at $299, then an iPod mini at $249, and then the iPod shuffle at $99. Each new model had a slightly different purpose, and they expanded the iPod’s potential audience. Someone who could only afford an iPod shuffle might purchase a regular iPod the next time.

That logic could make sense for the iPad, too. The 10″ iPad is the do-anything iPad, the 8″ is the entertainment iPad. A slightly different intended purpose, and a lower price-point, could expand the iPad’s potential customers to include people who initially were considering Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes and Noble’s Nook—someone who wants to read, watch video and maybe play games, but doesn’t want to spend very much money. And when they realize how much they love their iPad mini (or whatever they call it), they might buy a regular-sized iPad the next time.

That’s also attractive, of course, because it would blunt the Kindle Fire’s demand by eating into its price advantage.

Why the Small iPad Doesn’t Make Sense

That’s why a small iPad could make sense for Apple. Here’s why it wouldn’t make sense: the iPad is not the iPod.

Expanding the iPod line-up was an easy choice, because (1) different iPod models for different purposes didn’t cannibalize the other models, and (2) they were easily replaceable by a different iPod model. A customer who owns an iPod shuffle now can replace it with an iPod classic in minutes, because all they do is play back media.

Let me explain what I mean, starting with two. Apple’s purpose with selling the iPod was simply to sell more iPods.¹ All they did was play back the user’s media, so Apple could create as many new iPod variations as they’d like to, since their purpose were all precisely the same. The cheapest model did the same thing the most expensive model did: it played music. Any music you purchased for your iPod shuffle would work just fine for the iPod classic.

This wouldn’t be true for a small and large iPad, however. The iPad’s equivalent to the iPod’s music is applications. That’s what we use them for, that’s what we spend our money on. But here’s the problem: applications designed for the large iPad are not necessarily going to work so well on the small iPad. Let’s say the small iPad’s screen resolution is 1024×768, so it could run current iPad apps at a reduced physical size: many applications are going to be way too small. Applications designed for the large iPad’s 10″ screen can take advantage of that size to include more controls and content on screen at once that, if shrunken down to fit on the small iPad’s 8″ screen, would be too small to use.

In other words, to take full advantage of each device, developers would need to build applications specifically for each screen size, like they do for the iPhone and iPad already.² As a result, this isn’t so much the introduction of a smaller iPad that users can replace with a large iPad as easy as they do the iPod—it’s actually the introduction of an entirely new device between the iPhone and iPad with its own advantages and disadvantages that must be designed for.

So a small iPad would probably force developers to build applications specifically for each iPad, and thus wouldn’t necessarily lead to the “start on the cheap iPad, then move up to the better, larger iPad” effect people assume. But this also points out something really, really important: a small iPad and the large iPad have very different reasons for existing.

So back to reason number one. With the current iPad, Apple’s intent seems to be to replace the PC as we know it for many purposes. Not for all, and certainly not for all users—but for regular people who use PCs for web browsing, sending email, taking notes and managing their music and photo libraries; and increasingly, for new uses altogether and some creative work, like Square’s point of sale application and painting. What’s more, as the iPad becomes more capable, more involved tasks—like word processing and creating presentations—are also easy to do on the iPad, and that will only be more true as time goes on.

That isn’t true for these small tablet devices, and it wouldn’t be true for a small iPad, either. A relatively large screen is necessary to do these kinds of tasks, and no matter how advanced the software gets, it’s going to be difficult to create a presentation or take notes or make a painting on a 7-8″ screen. These devices are ideal for reading, watching video, playing games and, to a slightly lesser extent, browsing the web. In other words, they’re entertainment devices. And that’s fine—this isn’t a moral judgment—but their size makes their purpose very different from the large iPad’s purpose.

This distinction is important because if Apple is attempting to make tablets the next central computing platform, creating a small iPad could undermine it. Many people do buy the current iPad for the same reasons they might buy these smaller tablets, but once they’re using it, they could begin using it for more uses than they envisioned—like editing video or their photos. But if they buy a small iPad, that isn’t possible. It’s an entertainment device. Someone who purchases a small iPad rather than a large one is someone who may never use an iPad for any more than reading a book, browsing the web and watching a movie. And that’s a lost opportunity for Apple.

Perhaps Apple believes a smaller iPad could be capable enough to achieve their goal. And it’s certainly true that a small iPad could be more useful in certain circumstances than a large one, and thus could expand this new era of computing even farther. But what’s also true is that this nascent tablet space is very much in its infancy and there’s still no telling where it could go. It could end up being that tablets are the new personal computer as we know it, as Apple seems to believe; or it could be that the tablet is more an entertainment device, not a replacement to the PC in any sense of the word. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is unambiguously in the latter camp, and introducing an “iPad” which has a similar purpose to the Fire could swing momentum toward that line of thinking for what the tablet’s purpose is.

While even in that case it wouldn’t be a bad business for Apple—Apple could certainly sell a ton of entertainment-focused tablets—it would also short-change Apple’s capabilities and advantage Amazon. Apple is positioned to deliver this post-PC tablet device in a way that no one else is, but if they’re simply entertainment devices, Amazon can and will challenge them for dominance. Apple’s vertical integration of software and hardware, and their unique position as both a computer and consumer electronics company, is much more of an advantage if tablets are the new PC than if they are just a newer, better iPod.

So What Should Apple Do?

I don’t know what Apple will do. They could introduce a new iPad within a year. I really have no idea.

But I don’t believe they should. In fact, I think at some point, they will introduce a smaller iPad. But I think it needs to be at least several years from now, probably more like five years, because they must establish the iPad—and thus the tablet—as a personal computer, both because I believe it’s what tablets should be and because it’s a better market for Apple to be in.

Price competition from smaller tablets like the Kindle Fire certainly is a concern, but I don’t think Apple should compete with it by introducing a similar device. That only entrenches the market position Amazon carved out. Instead, Apple should compete with it by making the iPad—a much more capable device—increasingly more affordable. Move into lower price-points, which they did by keeping the iPad 2 around at $399. If at all possible, I think they should try to get a model at $349 or even $299, to reduce the Fire’s price advantage even more.

By making the iPad—still just as capable—cheaper, they not only reduce less capable tablets’ price advantage, but they also make the iPad easier to justify for schools. I think targeting education is an especially powerful strategy, because it puts into brilliant relief how different the iPad and smaller tablets are (on the iPad, you can read textbooks, take notes and study in a way that isn’t really possible on a small screen), and it gets them in children’s hands. And when a kid uses an iPad as a computer from the beginning, it’s a lot more likely they’re going to use it as a computer when they grow up, too. For them, the PC will look like an archaic contraption meant to torture users. Sit at a desk and move a little pointer around the screen? Yuck!

So no, I don’t think we’re going to see an iPad mini any time soon.

1. Turning them into Mac users was a nice side effect, but that’s a separate issue entirely. [↩]
2. Of course, relatively simple applications like games could adapt with few changes, but that isn’t the case for all applications. Think about trying to adapt Apple’s iWork suite—it’s not that it can’t be done, but that controls that are large enough on the large iPad’s screen would be much too small if shrunken down to fit on an 8″ screen. [↩]

Yesterday, Apple announced the next version of the iPad. Appropriately, it’s just called “iPad.” No version number, no modifier, nothing. Just iPad. The iPad has become as iconic as the Macintosh and the iPod, and the name stands on its own.

We knew nearly everything about it because of rumors. We knew it’d have a retina display, we knew it’d likely have a new camera, and we thought it’d support LTE, too. I think, though, that by focusing on the technical details, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees.

What’s especially telling each iPad event is what Apple shows after they’ve announced the iPad—the new applications they’ve built to run on it. These software demonstrations show both what Apple’s thinking and it sets the tone for application developers. When they introduced the iPad in 2010, they showed Keynote, Pages and Numbers. They wanted to show that this wasn’t just a device for browsing the web or watching video. They showed that it could be used for getting “real” work done, too. When they introduced the iPad 2 last year, they showed iMovie and Garageband. What that event said is that it can allow people to make things, too, and it is superior in some ways to doing it on a computer.

Yesterday, they completed the iLife suite by releasing iPhoto for iOS. With that release, the iPad now has the same applications that people buy and love the Mac for. It’s empowering to know that you’re buying a computer that’s really, really good at managing photos, making small films and even songs right out of the box. Think about how exciting that is for a kid, especially—if they have a Mac, they can create movies and music and photos with a surprisingly high level of quality.¹ Now, not only is that possible on the Mac, but it’s possible on an iPad. You can shoot film with an iPod touch, send it to your iPad, edit it down into a movie, and publish it online all without ever touching a computer. Or do the same with photos. In many ways, it’s a much better experience than doing the same thing on a computer. There’s not as many capabilities, some areas are still clunky, but… You’re editing a photo with your fingers. Come on. That’s awesome.

That’s what Apple is saying with that demonstration: the iPad is quickly becoming the only “computer” many people need, and it’s going to be a much better experience than it ever was on a computer. It’s this 1.5 pound notebook-sized thing that you can pull out anywhere, anytime, and write, create art, take and edit photos and video, or make music. You don’t have to worry about drivers or viruses or defragmenting the hard drive or any of that other computer crap you had to think about before. All you have to do is create. Or just watch a movie.

It’s this device that isn’t a computer in the traditional sense of the word, because it’s approachable and easy to use and just doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels closer to something tangible and real. That’s the vision, and while we’re not there yet, we’re surprisingly far along. Consider that five years ago, none of us had even used an iPhone in person, and today, we’re using a touch-screen notebook-sized computer that can do all of this. That’s where Apple is heading, that’s where we’re heading. I couldn’t be more excited.

1. When I was a kid—which wasn’t that long ago!—we ran around with an old camcorder from our parents and shot little movies. We had no way to edit them, and yet it was still some of the most fun and expanding experiences I had. The process of thinking through a story, where we were going to shoot it and how, and actually doing it—it’s a wonderful thing for kids to be able to envision a goal and accomplish it. Any Mac available today comes with capabilities I only dreamed of then, and that’s so exciting for kids. Kids can literally shoot a movie or make a song, publish it for the world to see—and the world will see it. I believe very strongly that encouraging children to be creative not only can help their self-esteem, because they learn that they can create something and are capable of great things, but also turns them into different people. By getting that idea very early, the idea that you are capable of building new and wonderful things, you start to think about work and the world differently. [↩]

We have computers which fit in our pockets and are the size of a notebook, and they are dramatically different than the personal computers that preceded them. They have cameras, microphones, accelerometers, gyros and GPS. People can use them almost anywhere and unlike PCs, people enjoy using them, too.

There’s a huge potential audience because so many people use smartphones and tablets, and yet a lot of the new applications we end up talking about are meaningless to them. We talk about new social networking and productivity apps, and we get really excited about them for a couple of days, and then we forget about most of them. There’s a glut of them and a glut of discussion about them, but they’re doing very little for regular users.

Why is so much of our discussion centered around new services and apps that aren’t going to be around in a year and aren’t going to do much to improve regular people’s lives? Why are we building so many new services and apps that try to solve problems that don’t really exist when there are so many other niches we could make dramatically better for people with these devices?

Look at what Square is doing for small businesses and shops. They just introduced Square Register, which turns an iPad into a cash register-replacement. Customers can pay with cash, credit card, or just by the customer’s name. It’s not only convenient for customers, because they can buy, say, a coffee at coffee shops they visit often without ever pulling out their wallet, but also empowering for the business. Because all sales go through a single well-designed computer system, they can track what’s selling better, what sells better at certain times of the day, how sales respond to different incentive programs they’re implementing, et cetera. Square provides very detailed information to businesses that had no data at all beforehand.

That’s what Square is using the iPhone and iPad to do: they’re giving more power to small businesses and making the experience better for customers. That’s really exciting and it genuinely makes people’s lives better, by making it easier to operate a business or a little bit more enjoyable to be a customer. They’re taking an industry—payment processing—that hasn’t changed much in years and is really boring for most of us to talk about, and they’re radically changing it. That’s awesome.

There’s all kinds of similar opportunities available in ostensibly boring areas. Rather than build more social networks, let’s try to find something in our lives that could be dramatically better, and let’s make it dramatically better. Let’s re-make the world using these incredible devices we have.

The health industry, restaurants and cooking, architecture, archeology, education, realty—there’s all kinds of fields which could be improved by using smartphones and tablets. They’re not what get people on Hacker News or Reddit excited, but new services and apps which make things better in these fields will get a lot of regular people really excited, because they can empower them and make their work easier and more enjoyable.

It’s up to us, though, to make those changes. We have to try to understand the issues people in these fields face, and then think about how they could be improved. And then we have to build it. We have to get excited about solving issues non-geeks care about. We have every reason to, too; by trying to solve problems in fields that have been left behind a bit by technology, there’s huge potential for radical change.

And there’s also huge potential for success. When you solve real problems for people, your plan for how to make money is a lot easier: you sell it. You don’t need to worry about getting really, really big and implementing advertising in such a way that it makes enough money to grow the company without annoying users, because when you solve real problems for people, they’re generally willing to pay for it.

That’s what I want to see more of in the next few years: less talk about new social networks and productivity apps, and more work on solving real problems for regular people. I want to see more people looking around them, recognizing ways they can make people’s lives better in tangible ways, and building it. Because that’s what excites me about smartphones and tablets: they have the potential to dramatically re-shape everything we do and empower people in the process.

And it’s up to us to make that happen.

This will sound like a bad joke or a “Modest Proposal”-like satire, but it’s not. In the Journal of Medical Ethics, two Melbourne academics argue that infants are equivalent to fetuses and, when the burden they put on their parent(s) or the government is too high, can be aborted:

Nonetheless, to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care. On these grounds, the fact that a fetus has the potential to become a person who will have an (at least) acceptable life is no reason for prohibiting abortion. Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk. Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia.

(Via Sven Wilson.)

Let me walk through what Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva are arguing and their logic. They begin with the contention that newborn infants are morally equivalent to fetuses—that is, they have no right to life—and thus people should be able to kill them (they prefer the term “abortion”) if they place too great a burden on the parent(s) or government which pays for medical care.¹ They further make clear that this logic not only applies to infants suffering from debilitating, chronic conditions, but also to healthy infants that should expect a healthy life.

Just let that sink in for a second. They are arguing that parents should be able to murder—sorry, abort—children who they believe impose a burden on them. They suggest that other individuals should decide whether a human being will live or not, based on how convenient their life is to them. They are arguing this because they believe that being human does not also mean having a right to life, and thus the parent(s)—who we know are alive—are prioritized.

But how do they decide when a human has the right to life? They argue that a human becomes a person with a right to life when they have the capability to make “aims” (by which they mean intending on accomplishing something for themselves) because killing them would harm them by depriving them of accomplishing these aims:

Now, hardly can a newborn be said to have aims, as the future we imagine for it is merely a projection of our minds on its potential lives. It might start having expectations and develop a minimum level of self-awareness at a very early stage, but not in the first days or few weeks after birth. On the other hand, not only aims but also well-developed plans are concepts that certainly apply to those people (parents, siblings, society) who could be negatively or positively affected by the birth of that child. Therefore, the rights and interests of the actual people involved should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion (2).

Let’s unpack their logic a bit, because they did not further explain it (which is disappointing, since this is the crux of their argument). What they seem to be getting at with “aims” is that the person is self-aware and actively directing itself. This “test,” though, is an absurd way of deciding such a basic question of whether a person has a right to life or not. Let’s say there is an adult who lives at home with his parents and never leaves the couch. He has no “aims” besides eating the food his parents provide him and sleeping. While he may be capable of greater aims, functionally, his aims are no different than an infant child’s: to eat and sleep. Remember, Giubilini and Minerva are arguing that killing someone who is capable of making aims is wrong because it would prevent them from accomplishing their aims. Substantively, this adult man and an infant child have the same aims, and thus according to this logic, the parents have the right to kill him, because he poses an undue burden on them.²

Perhaps Giubilini and Minerva would respond that the primary consideration is whether the person is capable of making aims, but there is no doubt that infants—as soon as they are born—are capable of making aims. Their aim is to survive and to eat, and they accomplish those goals by crying until their parent provides them what they want, whether that is food or simply being held. That is, they want to eat, and they pursue a strategy to achieve their aim. Maybe the authors would further respond that aim doesn’t count, because the desire to eat and the strategy they use are instinctual, but that’s a rather poor argument to make: how then do we decide when an individual is in fact making an aim that is purely of their own volition? What is the bright-line which decides that this infant is alive, but that one is not? There is no clear line which divides it. We simply cannot know it with any certainty. And if we cannot know with certainty that an infant is alive, shouldn’t we presume that it is?

There’s nothing inherently different between what Giubilini and Minerva argue and a similar argument used to justify abortion—they simply have extended it to its logical conclusion, which is that, if fetuses are not alive, then there’s no reason that just-born infants are alive, either. I have no doubt, however, that many people who support the right to abortion reacted with horror and disgust while reading this paper, and for good reason: because while life may well start when a person becomes self-aware, we also inherently know that each individual, by their nature as a human being, has a right to life. Their right to life is not a societal construct, something created by everyone else and subject to change. It is a result of their nature as a human being, being capable of self-awareness, and when we deny that, we also deny something fundamental about being human.

What this paper illustrates is that when the point where a human being becomes alive is up for debate, and can be legally defined by law, we enter a time where we can allow the legally-sanctioned murder of many, many people, because we have dehumanized human beings, because we have decided they are not alive, like we are. We can do so while assuring ourselves that we are doing the right thing, the moral thing, while all along we are allowing people to be murdered for the parent’s or society’s convenience.

1. This logic, by the way, is a primary reason I oppose government involvement in health care. Once government pays for health care, they have a perfectly logical reason for deciding whether a person should live or not. In this case, the writers imply that government should be able to decide whether a baby lives or not because it may place a burden on the government to pay for its care. That’s perfectly logical if we believe infants have no right to life. Other cases include the elderly who suffer from mental debilitation with no chance of recovering, or for drugs which extend the life of people suffering from terminal illnesses or increase their quality of life before death but are also very expensive. [↩]
2. In fact, it’s easy to argue he poses a greater burden than an infant child, because if an adult man still lives at home and has no intention of supporting himself, the expectation is that burden will continue indefinitely, whereas there is a reasonable expectation for infants that they will become capable adults and support themselves after a certain period of time. [↩]

A Chinese immigrant whose aunt worked for Foxconn wrote David Pogue about Foxconn’s factory conditions:

If Americans truly care about Asian welfare, they would know that shutting down “sweat shops” would force many of us to return to rural regions and return to truly despicable “jobs.” And I fear that forcing factories to pay higher wages would mean they hire FEWER workers, not more.

Anyway, now my aunt has been living in New York for one year after saving up money for a plane ticket and visa, and she is wonderfully happy to have escaped Asia and reunited with our family. None of this would be possible if it wasn’t for that “sweat shop.”

The “jobs” he refers to? Prostitution, which is what his aunt did before working for Foxconn.

Working in Foxconn’s factories certainly isn’t “good” work, or enriching work, or enjoyable work. But it’s work, the conditions are much better for most workers than working in rural China, it pays relatively well, and it provides opportunities for people whose families have been locked in poverty in the countryside for generations.

There’s nothing unethical about Apple’s practices. They use Foxconn to manufacture their products and push them rather aggressively to improve working conditions. What we’re seeing in China is what occurred in the Western world during the nineteenth century—a poor country is being transformed into a wealthier, developed country, and that’s what this process looks like. When nations are poor, they compete on the cost of labor, because their workforce is uneducated and unskilled, and that’s what they have.

Conditions are poor during this stage, because reducing cost is the main focus, and because workers have no ability to demand better conditions, because productivity is low and each worker is replaceable. As the economy develops further, worker productivity rises, and wages rise along with it.¹ As productivity increases and wages along with it, two things happen: first, workers become relatively more affluent and expect a better standard of living, and second, workers have more leverage over their employer to demand better working conditions.

That’s how economies develop and working conditions increase. Labor laws help, but a labor law that isn’t economically feasible for the country will either do nothing, or do more harm than good. There is no magic way for China’s working conditions to instantly match the Western world’s. It is a process which takes time, but it is a process which makes people’s lives much better. It’s very hard to understand just how poor China is, but developing brings opportunities to people whose families haven’t had much of any for centuries. And that’s no exaggeration.

Others have argued that Apple is acting unethically because they use a company with relatively poor working conditions rather than manufacture their devices in countries with better conditions. The implication people make is that Apple only does this because China provides low-cost manufacturing, and since they don’t manufacture their products in countries with better conditions, they’re only concerned with reducing cost and maximizing profit.

Perhaps Apple’s management is only concerned with maximizing profit. That’s certainly possible, but it is also irrelevant, because the core of this argument is absurd. By using Foxconn, Apple is providing employment for hundreds of thousands of people who need opportunities to get out of the countryside and provide for their families. Moving their manufacturing to, say, the U.S. would certainly be good for the U.S. economy, but possibly disastrous for those workers. Other manufactures may hire some of these suddenly unemployed, unskilled workers, but it’s difficult to see all of them being hired. And even if they were, they would be working in precisely the same conditions they were before, or worse, so the net result is this: hundreds of thousands of unskilled Chinese workers lose their job, are forced to seek employment at other factories with similar or worse conditions, and may not find a job which pays a comparable amount at all.²

That’s Apple acting unethically? People making this all-too-common argument are making judgments before thinking through their reasoning for it, or the implications of their preferred outcome. That’s irresponsible, and that’s a charitable characterization.

The net result here is that Apple is contributing to a process which will improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they are aggressively pushing Foxconn to improve working conditions. No, there’s nothing unethical about what Apple’s doing. Maybe they could be even more aggressive. But it is absurd to say they’re acting unethically.

1. Think about what happens as a worker becomes more productive—that is, they can do more work, or more effective work, within the same amount of time. If a worker’s productivity increases, the company benefits because they can produce the same output for less cost. If a worker who is paid $2/hour and produces 1 unit/hour of output now produces 2 units/hour, the company’s cost per unit has declined from $2/unit to $1/unit. That productivity supports higher wages (say, $2.50/hour), and if the worker’s current employer won’t increase her wage, another company certainly will. Wages tend to increase as a result. [↩]
2. Imagine if all large Western companies followed this principle and chose not to use Chinese manufacturing. China’s economic growth would come to a screeching, painful halt, and hundreds of millions of people would be denied the chance of a higher standard of living. How the hell is that ethical? [↩]

With Mountain Lion, Apple announced they are moving OS X for Mac to an every-year release schedule, like iOS. That’s significantly more aggressive than Apple’s been since 10.3 was released in October 2003. Since then, each successive release has taken at least 1.5 years. 10.5, Leopard, took 2.5 years to ship, partly because Apple had to peel engineers off of the Mac OS X team to finish the iPhone in time for release.

That shows how much Apple has changed in five years. At the beginning of 2007, Apple’s only computing products were Macs, and it took them at least 1.5 years to release a new update to Mac OS X. Shipping the iPhone required re-tasking engineers from the Mac OS X team, and delaying the 10.5 release. At the beginning of 2012, though, Apple sells three kinds computing products: the Mac, iPhone and iPad, releases new versions of iOS each year, and plans on doing the same for OS X for Mac.

In 2007, Apple eked every last ounce of work out of their resources. They were maxed out, with larger releases for the Mac, and a new operating system to develop, too. In 2012, they’re stepping on the accelerator.

They’re accelerating at an interesting time. The Mac is outgrowing the PC industry, the iPhone was the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2011 (top three, actually—iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS), and the iPad dominates the nascent tablet market. Apple is, by all measures, at the top—and yet they’re increasing their pace.

It’s a lot like a marathon runner or cyclist that, while punishing the rest of the pack with their pace midway through the race, decides they can ratchet the pace up even more. Their earlier pace was merely a leisurely stroll. They don’t just want to win the race. They want to break everyone behind them.

I think that’s what Apple is doing. They are a bigger company now, with more resources and capabilities, and they are using their size to accelerate development. As I wrote last April, Apple’s success depends on constantly defining this new market. When Apple defines what these new kind of computing devices are and what they can do, and everyone else has to play on Apple’s terms, it is very hard for anyone else to beat them head-on. Now that Apple is in control, their plan is to move at such a quick pace that no one has time to jump ahead, because they’re constantly trying to catch up to where Apple was.

This doesn’t mean constantly improving their current devices and software, iterating and iterating closer to perfection. That kind of development leaves you open to disruptive change, just like Apple did to Research in Motion with the iPhone. It means making big leaps into new areas, and it means cannibalizing their current businesses. it means disrupting your own business. I have no doubt mobile devices as we know them now—handheld device with a large screen—will morph into other forms as time passes, and I think Apple’s intention is to make those kinds of dramatic changes.

That might mean a move toward wearable computers, playing a larger role in the family room, or making the iPad an even more capable computer. Or it might mean something entirely different, I don’t know. I think that’s what, in part, Mountain Lion indicates: in the next five years, Apple isn’t going to make consistently small improvements to their current products, they’re going to make dramatic changes. Apple is attacking.

This morning, Apple introduced the next version of OS X for the Mac—10.8 Mountain Lion. There’s a number of things worth writing about, and I will, but what’s most fascinating is how Apple introduced 10.8.

There was no special event at the Moscone Center, or even Apple’s campus theatre. The only major publication which got early access was the Wall Street Journal, and it was an interview with Tim Cook.

Instead, Apple provided one-on-one demonstrations of Mountain Lion to John Gruber, Macworld, the Loop, and the Verge. One-on-one demonstrations to the people who cover Apple news every day for a living, but are decidedly new-media.

Here’s how John Gruber described it:

We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product briefing”. I had no idea heading into the meeting what it was about. I had no idea how it would be conducted. This was new territory for me, and I think, for Apple.

… The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announcement event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR.

You could read it as Apple disowning old media and embracing these independent, niche publications. While I don’t think that’s what it is (I have no doubt that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal will be among the first to have the iPad 3), I think it reflects the changing landscape for media. Today, those major publications—while still important—are merely among the important publications, whereas they used to be the only ones of consequence. It’s telling that Apple chose to deliver such important news through niche—geek—publications and their website.

It’s also a change in how Apple operates. Phil Schiller told Gruber that they’re “starting to do some things differently.” That’s for sure. I don’t want to say that this is something Jobs’s Apple wouldn’t have done, because I don’t think that’s accurate—actually, I could see Apple doing this while Jobs was CEO. It is a change in tactics, but not in strategy. Even though Schiller acknowledges they’re doing some things differently now, I don’t think he would say that this is out of line with the philosophy Apple’s followed since Jobs’s return. But it is, nonetheless, a significant change. Apple used to like revealing something new to the world all at once, and this is a slight step away from it.

It’s a change necessitated by Apple’s new stature. Apple could do that in 2005 because they had fewer products to introduce. They had the Mac and the iPod, so holding events for each one every year wasn’t much of an issue. That’s changed. Apple has the Mac, iPad, iPhone and iPod. Holding events each time they have something relatively significant to announce for each product line would result in a dilution of the special event’s power to draw attention from the public and media.

This new tactic nicely sidesteps that issue. It allows them to to still tell their story (in a way that a website just can’t), speak directly to the Apple community, and retain the special event’s appeal. That’s smart.

Mountain Lion’s introduction comes along with a slightly more transparent Apple, too. For the past few weeks, Apple has received significant criticism for their contract manufacturer, Foxconn’s, working conditions. Jobs’s Apple tended to remain quiet on these sorts of things, until they were ready to make a statement—which sometimes came in the form of a special event, as with the iPhone 4′s antenna controversy.

It appears Cook has been slightly more open. When the New York Times published a scathing and somewhat inflammatory piece on Foxconn’s working conditions and Apple’s refusal to improve them, Cook sent an email to Apple employees addressing the report. And just this week, Cook spoke at Goldman Sachs’s Technology Conference, and answered a fairly wide range of questions about Apple’s business and products.

However slight, Apple is adjusting to its new size and changing how it operates. What this signals is that Cook isn’t afraid to make changes where he thinks they need made. He isn’t going to keep all thing the same for fear of screwing up what made them successful. And that’s certainly positive. Who knows if this is the extent of a more transparent Apple, or a prelude to more changes to come. But I’m glad to see that Apple isn’t afraid of tweaking their playbook—or even throwing it out completely—when they think it’s necessary. Sticking to orthodoxy was never, and should never, be a part of Apple.

In desktop applications, the user interface dominated the screen. The buttons to click, the bars to drag, the windows. The actual stuff we were working on—text, images, video, whatever—was largely secondary, and that made sense, because the only way to do anything was through the interface. It worked, but it was always clear that it was artificial, something entirely created that didn’t work how our brains do. We had to force our brains to work how the computer worked, contorting ourselves around it.

In a sense, desktop applications could be designed without context in mind, because there really was only one context: the user is sitting at a desk working on the computer. In this context, and because the PC only worked using abstractions upon abstractions, it was okay for the user interface to dominate what we were doing. Everything was artifice anyway, so it only made sense for artifice to dominate.

That isn’t the case with mobile devices. What’s powerful about mobile devices is that they exist to complement what we are already doing, rather than be our primary focus. Whereas users mold themselves around how PCs work—users only work on PCs while their focus is entirely on them—mobile devices are used while doing other things. They’re used while waiting in line at the grocery store, when out to dinner, watching television, driving somewhere (by passengers!), or walking somewhere. Mobile devices are used almost entirely while doing something else, for relatively short periods of time, and usually, to accomplish a very specific task. What groceries do I need to buy? What time does the movie start? How do I get to that restaurant? What’s the weather going to be like? etc.

What this means is that designing applications for mobile means that context—for what purpose it will be used, how, and where—should be the first and primary consideration. It must define everything about how the application is designed, from the application’s concept to the physical design itself. It also means, though, that mobile applications are tools, a means of accomplishing a task and getting on with what the user is doing. Mobile applications should be cogs which seamlessly fit into an existing process—say, finding a restaurant to eat at—and make it better.

That’s precisely what a tool is: something which requires very little explanation for how to use it, because it is designed so precisely for its purpose, that how to use it is obvious. If you’re trying to dig a hole with your hands, you don’t need much explanation for how to use a shovel. “This is the handle” is about the extent of it.

There is no interface, in other words. There are no complicated concepts to learn first, no keyboard commands—just something which makes immediate sense, because it was designed precisely for what the user is trying to do. The application’s underlying concept should match the user’s.

Of course, there are cases where this really isn’t possible. Some purposes are so complex that even the best solutions are too sophisticated to be immediately understood, and even in simpler cases, it’s difficult to achieve. But that should be the goal.

What we should be trying to create are applications that are designed so specifically to the user’s context that the application ceases to feel like software—a finicky piece of artifice that we have to strain to understand and play with to get it to do what we want—and begins to feel like a physical object, something that just is and just works a certain way and we know will work that way.

Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to investors in Facebook’s IPO filing solidified how they think about the world:

People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

Facebook’s goal is to increase how much people “share” their information, to create a more “open” world where people are more connected. It’d be easy to quip that of course they want this, because it’s good business for them, but I don’t think that’s the way causation flows here. I’ve no doubt they believe that. And that’s the problem with it.

To do this, Facebook sees themselves as a sort of utility which connects the world and that everything is built on top of. Everything else—applications, games, services—should be built upon Facebook, because they are the one place you can go to get access not only to nearly every individual, but also to their personal information (metadata, if you’d like), and their relationship with every other individual. Facebook is a utility which allows you to tap into what they like to call the social graph, or the network map of societies.

My issue is with the idea of an “open” society, where people make most of their information public. Zuckerberg believes this society is superior, because the world will also be more honest and transparent, and we will be able to learn from differing perspectives. Perhaps. But as I argued in September 2010, an open society begins to breakdown the barrier between the private and public. In an open society, sharing becomes a part of the doing itself. If you’re seeing a movie, you post about it, along with who’s there with you; if you’re listening to a band, you let Spotify post it for you; if you’re eating dinner at a new, really cool restaurant, you haven’t really been there until you check-in.

Once the sharing is a part of the doing, you no longer consider whether to do something in the isolation of whether you want to do it. When sharing is a part of the package, you also consider how whatever it is you’re doing will reflect on you. You’ll consider what the general public’s, or your network’s, standards are for it. In that piece, I wrote:

To exist as individuals, we depend on private space to think and experiment without judgment by the public, and to judge the public by our standards. It is only within this space that we can define who we are as separate individuals from the greater society we exist in.

As that space decreases—as we begin sharing more and more of our interests, desires, hopes, fears, goals and what we are doing at any given moment—these factors, uniquely ours, will increasingly become the public’s. They will become the public’s to judge, compare, laude or criticize, and decreasingly our own characteristics, thoughts and beliefs. Rather than judge the outside world based on their own standards, individuals would judge themselves by the public’s standards. Individuals would be outsiders to themselves, looking in and measuring by everyone else’s standards.

That sounds hyperbolic, I admit. But I don’t think it is. As the amount we share increases, we begin to internalize the “public’s” standards next to our own, and at some point, it’s difficult to separate the two. Rather than creating a world filled with more diversity and variety and different perspectives, we create a networked groupthink, where heretics—diversity—is immediately found, criticized, and repressed.

You could argue that people should be stronger-willed and thicker-skinned. Maybe that’s so, and maybe that’s possible, when your identity is already formed. But imagine growing up in this open world, trying to figure out exactly who you are. Social pressure to conform on adolescents growing up in a pre-Internet world was already terribly high, so imagine trying to find new music, books, ideas and hobbies where you not only can share everything you do, but you’re expected to. Forming your identity requires experimentation with a variety of different things, seeing what you like and what you don’t, and that’s something which is inherently private, because you really aren’t sure yet what it is you like. But when that’s public, the overwhelming pressure will be to go along with whatever happens to be the social trend at that moment, to protect yourself from public ridicule. And not sharing isn’t much of an option, either, when the social norm is to share.

Tom Vanderbilt on the autonomous car:

Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

We are undoubtedly moving toward cars that drive themselves without any human input. Autonomous cars sort of symbolize new technology that, on the one hand, excites me because of the possibilities, the efficiency gains, the open parking spaces, the safety, the sheer excitement of creating a car which can drive itself—but it also worries me, because I wonder how that changes society and who we are.

A society where most everyone uses autonomous cars is also a society where being able to drive a car is a lot like being able to ride a horse—a quaint, cute skill to have. It’s a society where we may no longer enjoy driving down highway one through Big Sur, or along an empty desert highway at night, because most people may not even own a car, and if they do, they certainly aren’t driving it themselves. They’re passengers, distracted by other things like iPhones or iPads or Kindles or whatever else they’re playing with, because taking a car is now just free time.

I suppose it’s a bit odd to find pleasure in driving a few thousand pound piece of gasoline-burning metal, itself operated by computers, along a mountain or desert road and deriving some kind of relaxation or even meditation in it. Of course, the car itself was a huge technological change which completely upset the norms which came before it and, I’m sure, led to similar fears about what that change meant. And of course, as things change, we’ll adapt, and find new ways to enjoy ourselves.

Yet there’s also something utterly serene about driving down an empty desert road at night, perfectly awake and aware. It’s one of the few things left in our lives where we aren’t constantly bombarded by text messages, alerts, status updates, the urge to see what’s going on in the world, and where, because we aren’t bombarded by it and we must be focused on operating the car, we are actually left alone to think. That is freeing, and that is worth protecting. And so while change might be a natural part of life, it’s also true that we should try to protect that. Not protect driving in particular, but make time for those kinds of moments, and create ways for them to exist, even when we could be checking Twitter while our cars drive themselves.

Apple announced three things today: textbooks for iPad, a new iTunes U app for teachers to manage classes and for taking them, and a free iBooks authoring application for the Mac.

I’m going to talk about the iTunes U app and textbooks, but I do want to say that this is incredibly exciting. Apple is trying to re-make education, and it’s very clear that this is something that means a lot to them. This isn’t just another business opportunity—it’s a chance to do something great and improve people’s lives. Apple is the only company with the platform, resources and passion to completely change how we learn in school, and they recognize it. What they announced today is the best example of why Apple is different than every other consumer electronics company. Their goal is not to make and sell devices. Their goal is to make the world better, and however cliché that sounds, that really is their goal.

iTunes U

Before, iTunes U was a section on the iTunes store with lectures from various schools and organizations across the world. Now, iTunes U is also an iOS application with direct access to those materials—and also a place for managing courses. Teachers can upload their class’s syllabus, books, handouts (documents, presentations, PDFs, web links), quizzes, assignments and media, and it’s all organized into a single place for students. Students can also take notes for each class within it, but the feature-set is so basic I don’t see this being very important.

But being able to manage classes within a single application is a big deal, both for K-12 and college students. When I was a kid, what I struggled with most was keeping track of all of the assignments and handouts from each class. Papers would get buried at the bottom of my backpack or I would lose them altogether. That’s not only bad for the student, but it’s also bad for the teacher, because they have to keep copies of every handout around for students who lose it and deal with students who aren’t prepared for class because they didn’t complete their assignment or didn’t bring it. If they’re using the iTunes U application, teachers and students won’t have to worry about it, because everything will always be on their iPad.

That’s less of an issue for college students, of course, but having each class’s presentations and materials with you at all times, able to look something up or study, is incredibly convenient.

The bigger picture for iTunes U is Apple’s created a very convincing way for people to take classes online. We can take classes online now, but it’s a terrible experience at many schools. Students still need to buy textbooks, and the class is managed through something like Blackboard or Moodle, which are rather bad. Because the experience is so bad, online classes tend to be something people suffer through for the credit, rather than something engaging that they learn from.

iTunes U could change that, because it’s actually nice to use. Everything is in one place and well-organized. It’s hard to overstate how important that is for a student: because everything is in one place and they know how to use it, there’s much less mental overhead for figuring out what they’re supposed to do. They just do it. That’s especially important when you’re taking a course online, because whether the student does their studying and assignments depends on their motivation to do so.

Textbooks

The new iBooks application includes digital textbooks, with books from McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These aren’t static books, either—they’re what you’d get if you combined an Inkling textbook’s capabilities with Push Pop Press’s UI concepts. Textbooks can include video, Keynote presentations, 3D images, interactive images (for example, you can inspect different parts of a cell membrane) and chapter reviews.

Those interactive elements are important, because textbooks can more effectively convey certain types of information that’s difficult to do on a static page, but what’s most important is how good the reading experience is, and how easy it is to take notes. We’ve had digital textbooks for a while on the desktop, but they were never very good for those two reasons: they were difficult to read and take notes with. After using one of Apple’s new textbooks, though, they nailed it. Text is clear and, well, easy to read. Taking notes and highlighting text is easier in iBooks than it is in a real book; to highlight something, you just slide your finger from where you want the highlight to start to where you want it to end, and to making a note is just as easy.

iBooks also has a study cards feature, which takes the textbook’s glossary and highlighted items and turns them into flash cards, and it works really well. It’s a perfect example of what makes digital textbooks so convincing.

And textbooks are $14.99 each, or less. $14.99. Fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. Less than a night at the movie theatre. I’ve paid $250 for a single textbook before. $14.99 is what’s known as a big deal.

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so. For the first time ever, elementary and high school students will be able to replace twenty pounds of books with a one-and-a-half pound device. They won’t need to decide between bringing a textbook home for homework and a backpack that strains their back. They won’t have to worry about forgetting a book. It’ll all be in a paper-sized computer that they can carry with them everywhere they go.

Thank you, he said. Maybe you don’t need me to say it, because I think you know, I think we’ve always understood each other, in that quiet and unacknowledged way, where you don’t say much but I know exactly what you’re saying, what you really mean—but I want to say thank you, he said, looking out into the distance for a second, beyond her, eyes unfocused, then back. Isn’t it funny that when you have something, you don’t realize what it is? That it’s something that won’t ever exist again, and you should thank God or nature or providence, or whatever it is—every second you have it, and every second afterward, too, because you had it, you were lucky enough to have that moment in time?

You infuriated me. You talked too much for too long. You made me listen, when I am the one who likes to talk. We infuriated each other. We argued about gun regulations, we argued about music, we argued about whether a restaurant was any good. You had to be right, and so did I, so everything was a potential debate just waiting for a spark. When you thought I was wrong, you said so. If you thought what I said was bullshit, he said, you said so. And when you thought what I was doing was right, you said so, too, because all you said is what you thought. Thank you.

You and I, he continued, were friends for eight years, through high school and college, and—the edges of his lips arced up slightly—wasn’t there a sort of strange symmetry there? You had such a difficult time in high school, you know, that stuff a lot of people go through then, not sure where your place was, who you were sort of, and we talked and talked, and I tried to listen and understand, but I probably wasn’t very good. And in the last year, I went through something where what I thought was my purpose dissolved and I wasn’t sure anymore—and you told me I needed to get stronger, what I was doing was right, and everything that happened would be for the better, that I’m capable of great things and I should achieve them—and I deserve someone great, too. You made me believe it. And you made me laugh—really laugh—when I hadn’t for weeks. Thank you, he said.

Between the tournaments, the classes and the lunch breaks, the movies, the breakfasts, the bon fires, the long conversations, the drives, the concerts, God—we had more good moments than any two friends could ask for. We did. A lot happened in that time, didn’t it? You and I graduated from high school, stopped speaking for a few years because of a disagreement (and doesn’t it seem so silly now?), you graduated from UCLA in three years, I started graduate school, we both had long relationships, we started speaking again the year before—calmer people, more willing to listen, less arguments, but that same understanding, that never goes away, I think—and you talked me through those few months where I didn’t know what was up and what was down, like we had never stopped talking.

Thank you, he said. A calmness rolled over him, like a slow tide inching along, because he had finally told her what he never had—the calmness that comes when a task of great importance is finished. But under this was a splinter, a small bit of pain almost unnoticed but unmistakably there, because he knew he would wake up soon. Thank you, he said one last time. Thank you for that time you were here, for that time we were friends, and I hope you knew what it meant to me.