There’s something in me that can’t resist poking fun at Monster Cable every time the opportunity presents itself. I’ll grant you that “Monster” is a great name if you’re starting a cable business but I don’t feel like it’s enough to justify their cost or filing lawsuits. 

Monster had a piece of Beats before Apple bought them. They sold their interest and now probably regret it. So they brought a lawsuit that Billboard reports was dismissed on summary judgment.

Apparently, Monster litigates a lot. According to Wikipedia, by 2009, Monster made 190 US Patent and Trademark Office filings and filed 30 lawsuits. Examples include disputes with Discovery Channel for making a show called Monster Garage and a claim against Disney for making a movie called Monsters, Inc.

By far, however, my favorite was the Monster dispute with Blue Jeans Cable. Blue Jeans Cable is an outstanding small supplier of cables. (I’ve purchased several of their HDMI cables over the years.) In 2008, Monster sent a patent infringement letter to Blue Jeans and the CEO (a former litigation attorney) wrote back with the best response to a cease and desist letter I’ve seen in my 23 years of practicing law. I know I’ve linked this before but given today’s news, how could I resist?

You should really read the whole thing but here’s just a taste:

Last week Stephen Levy published an extended article on Backchannel about what’s going on at Apple with machine learning. A lot of us, myself included, have been wondering openly how Apple can compete with companies like Google at making our devices smarter when Apple’s privacy stand prevents them from reading user data. I wrote about this just a few weeks ago and I questioned whether Apple’s respect for user privacy and making the best possible consumer products can coexist.

The Levy article strikes me as Apple’s response to these questions. Apple’s position is that it can deliver excellent services and privacy by processing data on our devices rather than in the cloud. If that’s true, it would be spectacular. It would be like having a private assistant with no memory of actually working for you.

The trouble is that a lot of the artificial intelligence smarts you see from services like Google comes from having the ability to compare all of the users data. I’ve been testing the artificial intelligence and iOS 10’s Photos app and it’s pretty impressive. You can search for faces and objects in photos and the app does the hard work of finding them for you. However, it only learns to the extent Apple allows it to. Apple has pre-populated the application with a series of search terms including things like “mountains”, “dog”, and “baseball”. This has been working since the early betas and I’ll write more about this when iOS 10 releases.

The trouble is it will only search terms that Apple has deemed worthy of a search term. As an example while I can find mountains by searching my Photos library, I cannot find “stormtroopers” or “Yoda”.

Google Images, on the other hand can search both terms. My guess is that Google was keeping track of the searches done on its cloud-based photo storage site and doing some back-end magic to add popular terms and find the appropriate photos. (As an aside, Google thinks the search term “Yoda” should turn up pictures of the Star Wars character and Buddha statues. Maybe they know something.)

In theory, Apple could update its own list of search terms as it perfects the use of Differential Privacy that would anonymize the data as it goes into the Apple servers but I can’t help but feel Apple will never update as aggressively as Google’s server farms will.

I’m not sure exactly how this all plays out. Part of me feels like Apple is getting ready to enter the ring with one hand tied behind its back. Nevertheless, I would prefer slightly less robust machine learning if it allowed me to continue to protect my privacy rights. The real question becomes what consumers do if there’s a significant difference between server-based services with little privacy and device-based services with better privacy. 

Either way, the Stephen Levy article demonstrates that Apple is fully engaged with this question and taking what they believe to be the best course of action. I recommend reading the whole thing if this topic is at all interesting to you. Apple is clearly (and publicly) taking a different path with respect to machine learning and privacy. I’m fascinated to see how this all plays out.

I recently guested on the Command-Control-Power podcast, which is a show focussed on supporting members of the Apple Consultant Network. I was brought in to talk about legal issues facing IT professionals. It’s not the usual stuff I talk about around here but if that’s your thing …

Yesterday the Free Agents released its first guest interview show. Our guest was Relay.fm co-founder Myke Hurley. During the show we discussed Myke’s journey and his big surprises after going independent.

A few years ago John Gruber, Brent Simmons, and Dave Wiskus joined forces to create a notes app called Vesper. If I was setting up a developer shop, these three guys would be on my dream team. They made a great app with a lot of taste and it never really took off. John wrote a post explaining why Vesper is shutting down.

If the dream team couldn’t make it work, who can? John goes on to speculate about other ways they could have rolled the app out in order to make it more profitable including developing for the Mac first, where productivity apps still sell for more than the price of a cup of coffee. In the case of Vesper, the lack of a Mac app certainly kept me from fully adopting it. The resurrection of Apple Notes didn’t help either.

I think John’s post should be required reading for anyone thinking about getting into the productivity app business. For years now I’ve been talking to app developer friends and they are nearly universally wondering how long they will be able to survive in a business where consumers expect to pay less than $5 for an app and expect that app to be maintained for years at a time with no further revenue to the developer.

This problem is holding back productivity software on the iPhone and–even more dramatically–on iPad. The iPad Pro hardware is, performance-wise, competitive with a laptop. The difference, however, is that people are simply not willing to pay the same for iPad productivity software as they are willing to pay for Mac productivity software. Developers understand this and, as a result, are not putting the time and effort in on iPad and iPhone. I realize I’m stating the obvious but if developers could earn more from quality iOS development, we’d have a lot more quality iOS productivity software. 

Towards the end of his post John gets to the subject of subscription pricing.

Subscription pricing feels like a third rail to me. Every time I write anything remotely positive about it, I get tweets and emails telling me how terrible an idea it is. Nonetheless, I’m not sure how we continue to get quality productivity software without it.