pogueman:

A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice’s speed so high, I couldn’t understand a word it was saying.

And here’s the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone’s battery lasted forever.

Ever since that day, I’ve been like a kid at a magic show. I’ve wanted to know how it’s done. I’ve wanted an inside look at how the blind could navigate a phone that’s basically a slab of featureless glass.

This week, I got my chance. Joseph Danowsky offered to spend a morning with me, showing me the ropes.

Joe majored in economics at the University of Pennsylvania, got a law degree at Harvard, worked in the legal department at Bear Stearns, became head of solutions at Barclays Wealth, and is now a private-client banker at US Trust. He commutes to his office in Manhattan every morning from his home in New Jersey.

Joe was born with cone-rod dystrophy. He can see general shapes and colors, but no detail. (Only about 10 or 15 percent of visually impaired people see no light or color at all.) He can’t read a computer screen or printed materials, recognize faces, read street signs or building numbers, or drive. And he certainly can’t see what’s on his phone.

Yet Joe spends his entire day on his iPhone. In fact, he calls it “probably the number one assistive device for people who can’t see,” right up there with “a cane and a seeing eye dog.”

The key to all of this is an iPhone (AAPL) feature called VoiceOver. At its heart, it’s a screen reader—software that makes the phone speak everything you touch. (Android’s TalkBack feature is similar in concept, but blind users find it far less complete; for example, it doesn’t work in all apps.)

You turn on VoiceOver in Settings -> General -> Accessibility. If you turn on VoiceOver, you hear a female voice begin reading the names of the controls she sees on the screen. You can adjust the Speaking Rate of the synthesized voice.

There’s a lot to learn in VoiceOver mode; people like Joe have its various gestures committed to muscle memory, so that they can operate with incredible speed and confidence.

But the short version is that you touch anything on the screen—icons, words, even status icons at the top; as you go, the voice tells you what you’re tapping. “Messages.” “Calendar.” “Mail—14 new items.” “45 percent battery power.” You can tap the dots on the Home screen, and you’ll hear, “Page 3 of 9.”

You don’t even have to lift your finger; you can just slide it around, getting the lay of the land.

Once you’ve tapped a screen element, you can also flick your finger left or right—anywhere on the screen—to “walk” through everything on the screen, left to right, top to bottom.

Ordinarily, you tap something on the screen to open it. But since single-tapping now means “speak this,” you need a new way to open everything. So: To open something you’ve just heard identified, you double tap. (You don’t have to wait for the voice to finish talking.) In fact, you can double-tap anywhere on the screen; since the phone already knows what’s currently “highlighted,” it’s like pressing the Enter key.

There are all kinds of other special gestures in VoiceOver. You can make the voice stop speaking with a two-finger tap; read everything, in sequence, from the top of the screen with a two-finger upward flick; scroll one page at a time with a three-finger flick up or down; go to the next or previous screen (Home, Stocks, and so on) with a three-finger flick left or right; and more.

If you do a three-finger triple-tap, you turn on Screen Curtain, meaning that the screen goes black. You gain visual privacy as well as a heck of a battery boost. (Repeat to turn the screen back on.)

Joe, however, doesn’t see that battery boost, since he’s on the phone all day long. In fact, he’s equipped his phone with one of those backup-battery cases.

The Rotor

Joe also demonstrated for me the Rotor: a brilliant solution to a thorny problem. There are dozens of settings to control in a screen reader like VoiceOver: voice, gender, language, volume, speaking speed, verbosity, and so on. How do you make all of these options available in a concise form that you can call up from within any app—especially for people who can’t see controls on the screen?

The Rotor is an imaginary dial. It appears when you twist two fingers on the screen as if you were turning an actual dial.

Each “notch” around the dial represents a different setting you might want to change: Characters, Words, Speech Rate, Volume, Punctuation, Zoom, and so on.

“Let’s say we want VoiceOver to read word by word, because there’s something there that we want to hear spelled. We bring up the Rotor,” Joe told me. “It’s a deep menu system. And I can choose what I’m putting there, and the order. There are 20 or 30 items that could go on the Rotor.”

Once you’ve dialed up a setting, you can get VoiceOver to move from one item to another by flicking a finger up or down. For example, if you’ve chosen Volume from the Rotor, then you make the playback volume louder or quieter with each flick up or down. If you’ve chosen Zoom, then each flick adjusts the screen magnification.

The Rotor is especially important if you’re reading on the web. It lets you jump among web page elements like pictures, headings, links, text boxes, and so on. Use the Rotor to choose, for example, images—then you can flick up and down from one picture to the next on that page.

A day in the life

Joe walked me through a typical day, starting with a check of the weather and the train schedule, followed by a scan of his To Do list and email Inbox; on the train, he might read the news or listen to a podcast, audiobook, or music.

Through the workday, he has a few other tricks:

• “There’s another gesture, called scrubbing. You take two fingers, and you kind of Z-line it. It means, ‘Go Back.’
• “Getting a cab is very hard for me to do. I’ll be standing on the street corner, and people look at me and say, ‘What is this guy doing?’ They don’t see that I’m visually impaired, that I can’t see if somebody’s inside the cab! But now, I call a Lyft car or an Uber car, and it’s saying, ‘The car is 2 minutes away’; I just call him. I’m gonna say to the driver, ‘I’m on this corner, I’ve got a blue shirt on, I’ve got a briefcase. I can’t recognize you, so just yell out to me when you get there.’”
• “It’s also kinda cool to be able to project my photos to a huge TV screen. There’s a lot I can see if I get in really close to the screen.”
• If he needs to read a printed document, Joe uses called Kurzweil’s KNFB Reader app. As I watched, he used it to photograph a printed letter; instantly, the app converted the image to text and began reading it aloud, with astonishing accuracy.
• This was very cool: “If I’m in my office and put my headphones on, I’m hearing the phone call and I’m hearing what VoiceOver is saying, all through the headphones. But the person on the other end cannot hear any of the VoiceOver stuff. You don’t know what I’m reading, what I’m doing. I can do all these complicated things without you hearing it. That’s what’s really incredible. If you and I were working together on a three-way call, and you were to text me, ‘Let’s wrap this up’ or ‘Don’t bring that up on this call’—I would know, but the other guy wouldn’t hear it.
• Joe showed me how he takes photos. As he holds up the iPhone, VoiceOver tells him what he’s seeing: “One face. Centered. Focus lock,” and so on. Later, as he’s reviewing his photos in the Camera Roll, VoiceOver once again tells him what he’s looking at: “One face; slightly blurry.”
• “If a cab or an Uber lets me off somewhere, and I’m not sure which way is uptown, I open the Compass app. Since NYC is a nice grid, it lets me know which way I’m walking.”
• “Or I might just say to Siri, ‘Where am I?’ She tells me exactly where I am.”
• Joe uses a lot of text macros. He’s set one up that says, for example, “Where are you?” when he types.
• He knows the positions of all his apps’ icons—but often, he’ll just say to Siri, “Open Calendar” (or whatever).

The big picture

I asked Joe if there’s anything he’d ask Apple to improve in VoiceOver.

“The biggest problem with the iPhone is when you use it a lot, you need a bigger battery. I’m using it all the time. If the phone were just a little thicker, to accommodate a double battery, that’d be a nice thing. I’m also a little disappointed they did away with the standard headphone jack, because when you use it a lot, you need to charge it all the time [and the new earbuds plug into the Lightning charging jack].”

I pointed out that none of his complaints about the iPhone have anything to do with accessibility. They’re the same complaints we all have.

“I know,” he said, laughing. “VoiceOver is very consistent and it’s extremely good. There’s no problem with VoiceOver.”

(The Associated Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired would undoubtedly agree; in January, it gave Apple its Louis Braille Award.)

And how about society? What don’t we understand? What drives him crazy? “Stop grabbing my arm when I’m crossing the street,” or “Stop talking louder to me”?

“I have to tell you, there aren’t that many anymore, surprisingly,” he replied. “As more visually impaired people enter the workforce, there aren’t too many things, honestly.”

There’s an age gap in awareness of these accessibility features, too. “What I find is, people who are older, in their 70s, who have macular degeneration and could benefit from this, don’t,” Joe says. “I don’t know why. To me, it’s so intuitive and fast and easy.”

Well, here’s the bright side: Maybe Joe’s story will help get the word out.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here or you can sign up to get his columns by email. 

pogueman:

We, the people, may complain about how exhausting it is to keep up with the annual flood of new smartphones from Apple (APPL) and Samsung, and so on. But look at the bright side: At least you don’t have to create the annual set of new features. That’s their problem.

Or at least a brutal challenge. Not just because it’s increasingly difficult to think of new features, but also because the phone makers have pretty much run out of room for new components inside.

That, says Apple, is why it removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which go on sale Friday. The headphone jack may not seem very big — but on the inside of the phone, the corresponding receptacle occupies an unnerving amount of nonnegotiable space.

The feature Apple took out

So how are you supposed to listen to music without a headphone jack? Apple offers three ways. First, in the box, Apple includes a two-inch adapter cord that connects any headphones to the phone’s Lightning jack.

Second, the phone also comes with new white earbuds that connect to the Lightning jack. Or you can use any Bluetooth wireless earbuds, including Apple’s own, super-impressive AirPods.

In theory, those three approaches should pretty much cover you whenever you want to listen. In practice, though, you’ll still get zapped by the occasional inconvenience bug. You’ll be on a flight, for example, listening to your laptop with headphones — and when you want to switch to the phone, you’ll realize that your adapter dongle is in the overhead bin. (Actual example.)

But this kind of hassle is the new reality. Motorola and LeEvo (in China) have already ditched the headphone jack, and other phone makers will follow suit.

All right, Apple removed the headphone jack so that it could dedicate interior space to new features. What are they?

Turns out that just about every element of a smartphone that can be improved, Apple has upgraded: the case, the battery, camera, screen, speakers, processor, storage, the Home button, and the software.

The case

The back of the iPhone 7 is aluminum, whose gracefully rounded edges blend smoothly into the glass of the screen. No change there.

But in addition to the standard metal colors (matte black, silver, gold, pink gold), there’s a new finish available called Jet Black. It’s glistening, shiny, deep piano black. It’s gorgeous and sleek and smooth and you want to rub it like it’s a worry stone. It’s also slippery and fingerprinty.

And get this: Apple warns that “its high shine may show fine micro-abrasions with use,” so it suggests that “you use one of the many cases available to protect your iPhone.”

OK what? Why would you choose a phone for its finish and then immediately bury it in a case? What am I missing?

There is, however, one big new case feature: The iPhone is, at long last, water resistant. It can handle up to 30 minutes under a meter of water. Which means that rain and falls into the toilet can’t hurt it. (I gave my test unit four drops into a mixing bowl of water, as you can see in the video above. It never even stopped playing music, and still works perfectly.)

Apple’s late to this ball game, but it’s a really good ball game.

The battery

The iPhone 7 battery is 14% larger than the previous model’s — two hours more life per charge, says Apple — and you notice it. My iPhone 6 is usually gasping along with 9% charge by bedtime; the iPhone 7 usually has around 40% left at day’s end. (The improvement in the larger Plus model is more modest: one extra hour per charge.)

Battery-life improvement may not have the dazzle of, say, a built-in laser or thought-recognition software, but it’s one of the most important enhancements Apple could have made. If you forgot to charge your phone last night, no biggie — you’ll have until midday to find a charge.

Apple is too modest to point out another advantage of the iPhone 7’s battery, too: As far as we know, it doesn’t catch fire, and flight attendants don’t make announcements that ban your phone model in flight (*cough* Samsung Note 7 *cough*).

The camera

Apple makes a big deal of the iPhone 7’s new camera. It’s got more megapixels (12, up from 8), and the front camera has been goosed to 7 megapixels. Megapixel don’t really mean very much, though; they have no effect on picture quality.

Apple also raves about the camera’s f/1.8 aperture (lets in a lot of light). But you know what? When the light is good, the shots look exactly the same as they did on the last couple of iPhone models. (In some photos, you do see slightly richer colors, but only when you view those photos on the iPhone 7’s enhanced screen, as described below.)

The new camera shows its value primarily in low light. The stabilized lens helps a lot — an internal shock absorber that counteracts the typical tiny hand jiggles that often introduce blur into low-light photos. (This feature, which also does a great job of stabilizing videos, used to be only in the Plus-sized phones; the smaller iPhone 7 has room for it, Apple says, only because of the removal of the headphone jack.)

All of this makes a huge difference in low-light videos. The color is clearer, and the graininess much less pronounced. Low-light stills are enhanced to a lesser degree.

The flash on the back is now made up of four LEDs instead of two, resulting in flashes (and flashlights) that are 50% brighter than before. OK, good.

On the iPhone 7 Plus, though, the camera enhancement is much bigger: Apple has installed two lenses. One is wide-angle, one is telephoto. With a tap on the screen, you zoom in 2X. This is true optical zoom, not the cruddy digital zoom on most previous phones (which just blows up the image, degrading the quality).

You can also dial up any amount of zoom between 1X and 2X; the iPhone performs that stunt by seamlessly combining the zoom lens’s image (in the center of the photo) with a margin provided by the wide lens.

2X zoom isn’t a huge amount, but it’s 2X as much as any other thin smartphone can handle. And it’s a triumphant first step toward eliminating a key drawback of phone cameras: They can’t actually zoom. (The LG G5 tried a similar stunt, but the second lens had only half the resolution of the first, and you couldn’t do that intermediate zooming thing.)

You can even zoom right in the middle of shooting a video, which is very cool. Occasionally, the two lenses produce different color tones for the same scene; you can it in the video above, and in the grass in this still photo.

Even on the Plus, by the way, you can continue to use the digital zoom beyond the 2X, all the way up to a somewhat blotchy 10X (or 6X for video).

In a software upgrade this fall, Apple says that the 7 Plus will gain the ability to create the gorgeously soft-focused background that’s common in professional photography. It’s not real shallow depth of field; it’s a special effect, a filter.

When Samsung tried this a couple of years ago, the result was a disaster; the blurriness could spill horribly onto the subject’s face like some kind of reverse acid bath. But on the 7 Plus, the dual cameras are supposed to let the software perfectly pick the subject apart from the background, creating a defocused background that’s indistinguishable from the one you get from “real” cameras.

The screen

Apple makes much of the iPhone 7’s new screen with its “expanded color gamut,” meaning that it can display more colors than previous screens, and its “25% brighter” display.

In truth, the difference is very subtle. You can barely identify the brighter screen only when it’s side-by-side with last year’s model and both are at full brightness.

To test the expanded color palette, I took a series of photos with the iPhone 7 and copied them to an iPhone 6s. In side-by-side taste tests, my test panelists usually identified slightly richer colors when those photos appeared on the iPhone 7’s screen.

The bottom line: Don’t expect some jaw-dropping image improvement in screen quality.

The speakers

The iPhone now has stereo speakers! They’re at the top and bottom of the phone, so you don’t get the stereo effect unless the phone is sitting sideways. Even then, there’s very little left/right channel separation.

But never mind that: The iPhone 7’s audio system overall is definitely better than before. It may not be twice as loud, as Apple claims, but you’d definitely say that the 7 sounds fuller and stronger than previous models.

The processor

This year’s iPhone processor has four cores (brains), two of which are dedicated to lower-importance tasks (and consume less power—one of the reasons the phone gets better battery life).

The storage

The pathetically small 16-gigabyte iPhone has finally gone to the great junk drawer in the sky. Now, the three iPhone storage capacities are 32, 128, and 256 gigabytes (for $650, $750, and $850; installment and rental plans are available). For the larger 7 Plus model, the prices are $770, $870, and $970.

The Home button

The Home button, central to so many iPhone features — waking the phone, switching apps, commanding Siri, and so on — is no longer a moving, mechanical part. Now, when you press it, you feel a click, but it’s actually a sonic fake-out, a sharp internal vibration.

The advantage of this setup: You can adjust how clicky the button is. There’s no gap for water to get in. And this Home button is pressure-sensitive — it knows when you’re pressing harder — which could someday permit some cool new features nobody’s even thought of yet.

The disadvantage of this setup: When your phone is locked up, you can no longer hold down the Sleep + Home buttons to force-restart it. Instead, you’re now supposed to use Sleep + Volume Down, just as on many Android phones.

The software

The iPhone 7 comes with iOS 10, a new version of the iPhone’s operating software — and, as its usual gift to its fans, Apple offers iOS 10 as a free upgrade to anyone with a recent iPhone model. You can download it today.

There are a lot of changes in iOS 10; you can read my review of it tomorrow. Most of them represent delightful advances in efficiency and common sense; for example, you no longer have to swipe horizontally across the screen to unlock it. Instead, you press the Home button, where your thumb is already sitting (because you used the fingerprint reader). Brilliant.

The bottom line

In recent years, Apple isn’t always the technology leader in phones. This year, once again, some of the best new features are just catching up to rival phones: water resistance, image stabilization, stereo speakers. Believe it or not, Apple isn’t even the first company to take out the headphone jack.

But catch-up has value of its own, and every company plays it. (And that camera-zoom thing on the 7 Plus is fantastic.)

Now that Apple’s phone phone is every bit as advanced as any of its rivals, and more advanced in some areas, its engineers can finally get a well-deserved break. But only for a weekend. On Monday, it’ll be time to start dreaming up new features for next year’s iPhone.

David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below.

NYTimes: As Campaigns Seek Delegates, Ordinary Voters Feel Sidelined

pogueman:

Amazon raised a lot of eyebrows last year when it announced that it was planning to start delivering packages by automated drones. How would that work? Would the skies become black with automated flying delivery vehicles? Would they collide with planes? How would they deal with apartment buildings?

Last month, Amazon released a new video showing a prototype of one of its delivery drones, which shares features of both helicopters and airplanes. Clearly, the company is proceeding full speed ahead with this radical idea.

Recently, while researching a story about the legal status of drones for CBS Sunday Morning, I interviewed Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy. Given the speed with which Amazon is apparently advancing with its drone program, I thought it’d be a good time to publish a more complete version of that interview here.

How it will work

David Pogue: First of all, tell the unenlightened about Amazon Prime Air.

Paul Misener: Well, soon after I joined Amazon in early 2000, my young son was sitting on my lap. We ordered something from Amazon, and he hopped off and ran up to the front door, waiting for the brown truck to show up on the spot. That was a high-delivery expectation. (Laughs.) I had to explain that just because we’d bought this thing doesn’t mean it’s at the front door yet.

So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com. The goals we’ve set for ourselves are: The range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds. It turns out that the vast majority of the things we sell at Amazon weigh less than five pounds.

And will it cost more or less than a regular package?

I don’t know that we’ve priced it out yet.

OK, a few questions pop up right away. What if I’m not home?

It gets delivered to your doorstep, or wherever you want in your yard, just as it would be if it were delivered by the UPS truck.

What if there’s some guy with a shotgun who sees that I’m getting a TV and wants to shoot it down?

I suppose they could shoot at trucks, too.

We want to make the deliveries. And we believe that these Prime Air drones will be as normal as seeing a delivery truck driving down the street someday. So the novelty will wear off.

Do you have the drones you’ll be using?

We have different prototypes we’re working on simultaneously — different kinds of drones for different kinds of delivery circumstances. Our customers in the United States live in hot, dry, dusty areas like Phoenix, but they also live in hot, wet, rainy environments like Orlando, or up in the Colorado Rockies.

Likewise, obviously, our customers live in a wide variety of buildings. Some live in rural farmhouses, some live in high-rise city skyscrapers, and then everything in between, in suburban and exurban environments. We want to be able to serve all of those customers. And it may take a different kind of a drone to best work in each one.

You’re designing and building your own drones? So these aren’t off the shelf?

No, actually these are quite different than the drones that you can buy in a store and fly around. These are highly automated drones. They have what is called sense-and-avoid technology. That means, basically, seeing and then avoiding obstacles.

These drones are more like horses than cars — and let me explain why. If you have a small tree in your front yard, and you want to bang your car into it for some reason, you can do that. Your spouse might not be happy with you, but you can do it. But try riding a horse into the tree. It won’t do it. The horse will see the tree and go around it. Same way our drones will not run into trees, because they will know not to run into it.

How do you solve the apartment-building problem?

We’re working on it. And again, it might be changing the design of the drones, so that they better serve that kind of an urban environment.

Or maybe the apartment-building owners could designate, you know, a spot on the roof, or in the courtyard?

That’s entirely possible. We’re thinking through those.

Technology vs. red tape

Would it help Amazon not to have to pay shipping companies? To have it under your own control?

Well, that’s not the purpose of it. It’s really to fulfill a need that we believe our customers have. Usually they need that delivery in a few days, and that’s sufficient. But, for example, let’s say your grandchildren are visiting you at the end of the month. You want to stock up on batteries. So you go to your computer, your laptop, your tablet, or your smartphone, go to the Internet, go to Amazon.com, and stock up on batteries. They’ll be delivered a few days later, and that’s fine.

But what if one of your grandchildren is already visiting you, and she’s playing with an electric truck on the floor, and the battery wears out? On one hand, you could get her all bundled up, put her in the car, and drive to the store to get the battery replacement, and drive all the way back. Wouldn’t it be so much better if you could just go online from Amazon and order it, have it delivered in 30 minutes?

I mean, sure. But you would understand if people said, ‘Are you kidding? That is a huge technological, geological, geographic, regulatory problem to solve!’

Well, it’s actually not as difficult as you might think. The automation technologies already exist. We’re making sure that it works, and we have to get to a point where we can demonstrate that this operates safely.

So which problem is harder to solve? The technological ones or the red tape?

Well, the regulatory issues to which you refer are difficult. And once we demonstrate the safety of the system, we believe that the regulations will quickly follow.

Amazon ships millions and millions of packages a week. Won’t it be loud to have the sky filled with buzzing Amazon drones?

Well, it’s not gonna be some science fiction, Hitchcock scenario; that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But if we design these correctly, they won’t be loud and obnoxious and noisy. It’s a really cool engineering challenge, it turns out. I mean, there are a bunch of challenges. But dampening the noise is one of them.

And how will you keep these drones from interfering with air travel?

Well, we’ve proposed to regulators around the world, including the FAA, a certain kind of an airspace design that would keep the drones separated from the aircraft.

We were thinking: Manned aircraft above 500 feet. Between 400 and 500 feet there’d be a no-fly zone — a safety buffer. Between 200 and 400 feet would be a transit zone, where drones could fly fairly quickly, horizontally. And then below 200 feet, that would be limited to certain operations. For us, it would be takeoff and landing. For others, it might be aerial photography. The realtors, for example, wouldn’t need to fly above 200 feet to get a great shot of a house.

How have the FAA and NASA reacted to this proposal?

I think they welcome the thinking that has gone into it. So I’m hopeful that this will spur discussions about exactly how to get this right.

How does this proposal, the layers idea, differ from what NASA’s working on?

It’s with a similar goal in mind. We presented this proposal at a NASA conference, and we’re of the same mind. We need to figure out this airspace.

My impression is that the FAA and Amazon haven’t exactly seen eye to eye on your plan.

In deference to the FAA, or in sympathy with the FAA, it turns out that they have a limited ability to regulate amateur drones, but they have full powers to regulate commercial drones. To my way of thinking, at least, that imbalance doesn’t make sense.

At the very least, they ought to be treated the same, to give the FAA the same authority to regulate both amateur and commercial drones. Arguably, you would want to regulate the amateurs even more, because they have less training, their drones are less sophisticated, and so forth. So certainly that part of law needs to be clarified, at a minimum.

We believe that they must begin, in earnest, planning for the rules that are more sophisticated, that go to the kinds of operations that Amazon Prime Air will encompass. And other countries already are doing this.

Well, what happens if the technology is ready, everything’s ready, but the FAA still doesn’t have regulations in place for Amazon?

Well, we have customers all around the world, of course. There’s no reason why the United States must be first. We hope it is.

It’s very real

When you tell people what you do at parties, what do they say?

Well, I’m an engineer and a lawyer. They don’t talk to me at parties. (Laughs.) But when they do deign to talk to me and ask me about Prime Air, they always ask me the questions you led with: Is it real? Or is this science fiction? Is this just all some big marketing thing?

I can tell you, it is very real. We’ve beefed up a team at Amazon Prime Air that includes aeronautical engineers, roboticists, a former NASA astronaut. These folks are completely focused on making this a reality — and demonstrating that it is safe before we begin operations.

Challenges are there, for sure, but once we demonstrate that this is safe, we’ll be able to take it to the regulators and hopefully deploy it for our customers quickly. I’ve seen it. It’s gonna happen. It’s coming.

pogueman:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Please find your seats and silence your phones: It’s time for the 11th annual Pogie Awards!

This time of year, the world is teeming with articles that name the best products of 2015 — but the Pogie Awards are different.

These are awards for the best feature ideas in products — even if the products themselves aren’t anything to email home about. The point is to celebrate the inspiration that struck some designer or engineer and to hail that idea’s successful journey out of committee, past the lawyers, and into the hands of the public.

So what were the best ideas in tech of 2015? The envelopes, please!

The Frozone Card Award

If you own a credit card, then you’ve almost certainly experienced an “Oh, dang it!” moment. That’s when you suddenly realize that you don’t know where your card is.

Each time, you’re faced with a stressful dilemma. Do you call the bank and cancel the card, in fear that someone will find it and rack up charges on it — and then deal with the headache of getting a replacement card with a new number? Or should you just sit tight, hoping that it turns up?

The clever folks at Discover now offer a third option: Freeze the card. (You can do that using the Discover Card app or by calling an 800 number.) When you freeze the card, nobody can charge things on it, exactly as though you’d canceled the card. Yet, conveniently enough, recurring charges — such as monthly subscriptions for Spotify, Netflix, or whatever — keep going through automatically.

And if the card does show up, you can just unfreeze it; no harm done, no new card needed.

Freezing is free, it’s instantaneous, and you can do it as often as you like.

The Phone Juice Award

Some batteries are more important than others. You care a lot, for example, about your car’s battery and your phone’s battery.

Well, if your car won’t start, you use jumper cables. So why can’t someone invent something similar for our phones?

Someone has: The Juicer is a tiny, keychainable cable that connects two Android phones or tablets and lets one charge from the other. You can imagine how handy that’d be when you need just enough juice to send a critical text or check for an important email. Such a great idea!

Unfortunately, the general public didn’t agree (or didn’t know about it). The Juicer was the object of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, seeking $65,000 from the public to go into production; the adoring masses ponied up only $8,000, so the campaign failed.

But remember: The Pogies aren’t about products, they’re about ideas, and this one was kind of cool.

The Inkjet Friendliness Award

You know how the inkjet industry works, right? The printer itself is relatively cheap, but then they rip you off with obscenely inflated ink prices.

How expensive? A typical inkjet cartridge containing half an ounce of ink costs $32 — which works out to $4,100 a gallon. Not even champagne costs that much.

In 2015, two big inkjet printer companies finally decided to acknowledge their own greed.

Epson, for example, began offering a line of EcoTank printers that don’t accept cartridges at all; instead, you fill up their tanks from a big bottle of ink. You save at least $500 the first year and $750 every two years thereafter. You never have to throw out a perfectly good ink cartridge because one color has run out, and you don’t fill up the landfill with dozens of little plastic cartridges every year.

But Epson’s rival HP shares the award this year. Its Instant Ink program treats ink like cellphone plans: You agree to pay $3, $5, or $10 a month for 50, 100, or 300 pages’ worth of ink. (Unused pages roll over to the next month, and you can cancel whenever you want.)

You might wonder why anyone would want to start worrying about their monthly allotment of pages, the way they worry now about their monthly allotment of cellphone minutes. But people who actually sign up for Instant Ink rave about three things:

First, they never have to drive out to buy replacement cartridges; HP detects when your cartridges are running low and ships you replacements automatically.

Second, the price per page (5 cents each, regardless of whether they’re black-and-white or color) is much lower than prints from store-bought ink (15 cents per color page).

Third, each new set of cartridges comes with a prepaid mailer for sending back the empty one, which HP recycles for you.

Overall, it’s cheaper, easier, and better than buying cartridges yourself.

(HP’s Instant Ink program actually launched in 2013, but the Pogie Awards Committee somehow missed it. We must have been busy. So we’re awarding the trophy this year to a truly terrific idea.)

The Both Sides Now Award

The world breathlessly awaits the day when the new USB-C jack becomes the one true cable, a universal charging cord for every brand and model of phone, tablet, and laptop. (You can read more about it here.)

Among USB-C’s virtues: There’s no right side up. You never have that moment of inserting it, realizing you’ve got it upside down, and trying again, as you do with today’s USB.

Until that glorious day arrives, you can charge your non-Apple gadget with a MicFlip cable. It’s the world’s first reversible micro USB connector. This idea, too, had an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign — but a successful one: The MicFlip is now a shipping $20 product.

For that, you get a fancy braided-nylon cable with an aluminum shell, gold-plated plugs — and a reversible micro USB end. You can shove it into your phone or tablet either way, without ever getting it wrong.

Tragically, the other end — the one that plugs into your laptop or wall jack — is still a standard USB connector. Contrary to early ads for this thing, it’s not reversible; you can still plug it in the wrong way. But hey: baby steps, right?

The Remote Control Ad Absurdum Award

Last year, in its iOS 8 software for iPhones, Apple introduced a feature called Continuity. It ties your iPhone and Mac together, so that you can make and take calls, or send and receive text messages, on your Mac. In other words, the Mac (or iPad) acts as a sort of big-screened, full-keyboard speakerphone extension for your iPhone.

Originally, to make Continuity work, the phone had to be on the same Wi-Fi network as the Mac or iPad. But this year, in iOS 9, Apple introduced a mind-blowing enhancement to that feature, called Continuity over Cellular.

Now, your phone and Mac don’t have to be on the same Wi-Fi network; you can make or take calls on your Mac or iPad even if your iPhone is somewhere else in the world! Yes, even if you left it at the office or at your buddy’s house. The two are connected via the cellular network.

Making this feature work requires the participation of your iPhone’s cellular provider, and so far, only T-Mobile has it working.

But, still: Adding cellular features to your Mac or iPad even when your phone is across town or across the country? Supercool.

The Everything-Old-Is-New-Again Award

The Chromecast Audio is both a killer idea and a great product.

It’s a little $35 plastic puck that you plug into any old prewireless, pre-Bluetooth audio gadget in your home that has audio inputs (miniplug, optical jack, or RCA jacks) — clock radio, boom box, stereo system, iPhone dock with the now-obsolete 30-pin connector, or whatever. That done, you can send audio to that speaker from your phone.

It’s actually better than a Bluetooth speaker, because you’re sending the audio over Wi-Fi, which has a much better range. And the music sounds better, because it’s not subject to the usual Bluetooth audio compression.

The Chromecast Audio, in other words, serves a real purpose and brings new value to speaker investments you made years ago.

The Pogie Ultimo: The Windows 10 Start Menu

Windows 8 may have been terrible, but the idea behind it wasn’t completely foolish. Microsoft foresaw a world in which computers would have touchscreens, so it created two separate interfaces: one for keyboard/mouse, one for touchscreens.

Unfortunately, in reality that meant twice the learning curve, twice the complexity, and twice the headaches. So the world waited to see how Microsoft could fix Windows’s split personality. Would it abandon the touchscreen-friendly elements? Would it sell two different copies of Windows?

Surprise: Microsoft came up with a solution that pleased almost everyone. It eliminated the touchscreen interface of big, finger-friendly tiles and edge-to-edge, nonoverlapping apps — and it brought back the Start menu.

The left side of that menu works pretty much just as it always has, but the Windows 8 tiles are still here, attached to the right.

As before, these are live tiles: Many of them display useful information — such as the weather, news, stocks, and your next calendar appointment — without your even having to click.

The Windows 10 Start menu no longer takes over your entire screen, interrupting what you were doing. It behaves, in other words, like a menu. And so Microsoft managed to eliminate the split personality of Windows 8, without losing its touch-friendly features.

That single, critical change brought something to Windows that it had been missing since Windows 7: coherence. And since hundreds of millions of people use Windows, it’s not just a great idea that glows in obscurity; it’s a great idea that brings simplicity, efficiency, and peace to all those hundreds of millions.

It is, therefore, a shoo-in for the big prize: the Pogie Ultimo.  

And Good Night!

That concludes tonight’s presentation of the 2015 Pogie Awards. Congratulations to the winners — and to all of us, for being wise enough to embrace genius when we see it.

David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes nontoxic comments in the Comments below.

Looking back at 2015 (and looking forward to 2016):

• The Best and Worst Tech News of 2015
  
• Our Favorite Tech Products of the Year
  
• Yahoo Tech’s Top 10 Predictions for 2016
  

Love the pogies!

parislemon:

Eugene Wei breaks down just how odd the economics of movie-making are:

In fact, it is only by employing so many people that Hollywood productions can keep their production costs to a minimum. It sounds like a paradox, but it makes perfect sense when you realize the distribution of costs on a production. One tiny fraction of people among that long list make up a disproportionately massive slice of the production costs, and those are the movie stars. …

If you’re lucky enough to have Robert Downey Jr. or Jennifer Lawrence or some such movie star in your production, they make many multiples of what your $35/hr union gaffer makes. Also, that movie star is likely committed to their next movie already, so you have them for a finite number of shooting days, too. In almost every way, they are the financial and logistical long pole of your production, so you have to make the most of their time, whatever it takes. You’ve mapped out what pages of the script will be shot on which days in which locations, and the actors are told in advance which days they’ll be needed where.

And:

It’s the tech equivalent of doing a keynote involving someone like a Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Page. Their time is the most precious and expensive resource in the room. Could a handful of people handle all the logistics of reserving and dressing the facility, setting up the A/V, producing all the marketing collateral, sending out invites, etc.? Sure, but it’s not an efficient use of resources for that small team to be the long pole when it’s Tim Cook’s time that is most precious. Anyone who’s ever presented to the CEO intuitively understands whose time is most precious in the room, who to make the most eye contact with.

Thinking of a meeting (or a film shoot) in terms of “the most precious and expensive resource in the room” is an interesting way to frame it, no doubt.

parislemon:

theverge:

The first super creepy trailer for HBO’s sci-fi western starring Anthony Hopkins is here. 

HBO itself describes Westworld as “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” So, okay. 

‘The Matrix’ meets ‘Deadwood’? Sold.

parislemon:

An amazing graph representing the world’s spoken languages.

[via @ProfKumar]

The future is now!