Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off today. Apple has chosen to make it an entirely online affair, with the keynote beginning a week of sessions for developers. For the rest of us, the main show will be the expected updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

We’re live-blogging the keynote even though we’re home and watching just like everybody else. But we figured it would be fun to tell you what we think in real time — and we managed to convince Walt Mossberg to join us!

The biggest rumor by far is that Apple may announce support for a new processor architecture for the Mac: ARM instead of Intel. That would be a major transition and not necessarily an easy one. The iPhone is due for iOS 14, and among the things we’re expecting are support for AirTag location trackers, improved widgets, plus a focus on performance and stability.

There’s even the possibility of new hardware. Those AirTags could finally be announced, and the iMac is certainly due for a refresh.

The event kicks off at 10AM PT / 1PM ET, so we’ll see you then!

WWDC 2020 live blog

WWDC 2020 live stream

Despite the never-ending debate on the question of the role of government in America, there’s been a strong tradition of protecting our undisputed, important natural treasures, or taking on great common engineering challenges. Few Americans oppose the policies — many of which originated with Republicans — that bar or limit commercial exploitation of unique places like Yosemite National Park, or the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Even people who opposed Dwight D. Eisenhower liked the interstate highway system, and John F. Kennedy’s most bitter political rival, Richard Nixon, cheered on the astronauts who fulfilled JFK’s challenge of landing humans on the Moon. President Trump campaigned on creating a massive, long-overdue national infrastructure project.

So, in the spirit of this grand American tradition, I’m going to propose a way we can protect the internet, at least in America, from both political whiplash in DC and the constant commercial overreach that threatens it. I say we treat the internet as both a unique resource and a great common engineering project, something that merits government protection.

Stop typing that angry, snarky tweet right now, and let me state a few big caveats.

Some up-front caveats

First, I am in no way suggesting any sort of government ownership, management, or censorship of the internet. I would abhor any of these, even if they were possible. What I am suggesting is that the government rise above all the death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulations and statutes it passes already about the internet and simply adopt the role of its protector. You know, kind of like an offensive line protecting the quarterback.

The thorny details of what that means would remain to be worked out, but the principle is that there’d be a legal wall with a sole purpose of protecting the internet so it can flourish naturally.

Second, I am not suggesting some dreamy decommercialization of the internet. It’s too late for that, and it’s not consistent with American capitalism, anyway. But in protecting the internet we’d have to find a balance. For instance, you’d never be able to pave over Yosemite Valley and build condos, but there are plenty of commercial tour companies that will take you there. You couldn’t build a McDonald’s on the graves of fallen soldiers, but the entire economy of Gettysburg seems pretty much built on the tourism the battlefield attracts. We need a way to protect the resource that enables all the other economic activity.

Third, I have not been living under a rock since November. I’m well aware that the current administration, the current congressional leadership, and the current regulatory agency chiefs would neither want to give up power nor curb business interests. Not to mention that, even in 2017, while many senior federal officials can tweet, way too few really understand the internet.

But administrations and party majorities come and go, though there are plenty of corporate-influenced Democrats, too. Times change. And the situation online keeps getting worse, with privacy, security, net neutrality, and competition all threatened by everyone from the FCC to telecom companies to data-vacuuming advertisers to the dominant Silicon Valley players and, of course, the trolls. So why not float a proposal to fix it?

Finally, I’m well aware that the internet is global, and can’t be wholly affected by any one country. But the United States has outsized influence. The net was invented here, the browser was commercialized here, the most important modern PCs and smartphones were developed here, and many, though hardly all, of the most important websites and services are based here. What we do here matters.

Make a new plan, Stan

So here’s the idea: I suggest that Congress pass a broad law setting out the national interest in protecting the internet and the general principles by which that protection would be defined. This wouldn’t be one of those famous 1,200-page bills nobody can read. It would be meant as a sort of statutory manifesto.

Then, in that same bill, Congress creates a special, permanent, nonpartisan, independent commission — or even a special, narrowly focused court — to adjudicate disputes about internet issues as they arise, by interpreting the law. This would build up a body of precedent. Notice I am not suggesting the writing of any regulations, because this idea aims for the lightest touch possible. This entity would also remove the politically charged, slow-moving, compromised FCC and FTC from internet regulation.

We already have a variety of such narrowly focused, adjudicatory agencies to cover other issues. Just to cite one example, there are special federal courts that only deal in tax matters, trade issues, veterans’ claims, and more. And some economists have already proposed similar administrative forums for internet claims, modeled after how cable companies resolve carriage disputes.

There’s precedent for adjudicatory proceedings on technology issues to have massive consumer and business benefits. One of the most famous was the so-called Carterfone decision in 1968. In that case, the FCC ruled that it was legal for a tiny company, Carter Electronics, to sell a primitive-looking device that patched a two-way radio into the country’s landline phone network. The network at the time was owned by the old AT&T monopoly, which convinced federal authorities to bar any device AT&T didn’t itself make from being connected. The dubious reasoning was that such devices might “harm” the vital network.

The FCC not only ruled for Carter, but threw out the ban itself, opening the door first for much better voice phones than the clumsy models AT&T’s exclusive hardware affiliate made, and later for dial-up modems, without which the internet revolution would have been, at the very least, severely delayed.

Bottom Line

If you don’t like this plan, come up with a better one or a modified one. But we do need a plan. Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies, and for intrusive tracking. It’s too important to leave unprotected.

Last year, I bought a new, high-end LG OLED 4K TV and wrote about the experience. I talked about the brilliant picture, the tiny bezels, the ultra-thin display, and the overly complex UI. But, over the ensuing months, another feature of the TV has become more and more noticeable, and annoying: the audio.

The sound of “what did she say?”

Like most new HDTVs in recent years, my LG is too thin (even with its bulge in the lower back) to support more than small speakers. They generate volume, but little nuance.

On top of that, modern TV shows and films are increasingly mixed in a way that demotes the clarity of dialogue in favor of cinematic sound effects and wild swings in volume between scenes.

This wasn’t much of a problem with my old TV, a decade-old Pioneer Elite Plasma with huge, front-facing speakers running top to bottom on each side of the tall screen. But, with the new LG, we soon began resorting to closed captions on many shows, especially British ones, because the dialogue sounded muddy.

It turns out this combination of small speakers and dialogue-unfriendly mixing is a well-known problem, much written about. And its effects aren’t just limited to people who are hearing-impaired or whose hearing has degraded due to age. It’s a broader issue. You can tell it affects you if you’re constantly reaching for the remote to raise or lower the volume within the same show or movie (not counting the always-blaring commercials).

In fact, before I ever left Best Buy with the TV, the salesmen, who had been very high on the LG, told me all the new TV speakers were too small and tried to get me to buy an external soundbar. I ignored them, because a) I am not, and have never been, an audiophile, b) I suspected they just wanted me to spend more money, and c) a soundbar would be yet another gadget on our crowded TV console.

Sonos as TV savior

And then came the new Sonos Playbase to open my eyes and ears. I’ve been testing this combination TV speaker and Sonos music player for roughly six weeks, and here’s my take on it as a non-audiophile who has never before used an external TV speaker.

The Playbase is expensive at $700. In my tests, it exhibited two minor drawbacks, which I’ll describe below. But, otherwise, I found it to be a glorious improvement in both my TV audio experience and the general music-listening experience in my large family room, where the previous best speaker was a $199 Sonos Play:1 model.

My test Playbases (first a beta preproduction unit, then a production version) were black, and, as fully described by my colleague Chris Welch here, are thin, wide boxes designed have a TV placed directly on top. In our case, with our particular TV (which has a wide, flat base), the Playbase pretty much disappeared into the media area, and didn’t stand out as yet another box. That was a big plus.

But the bigger plus was the sound. When used as a TV speaker (a mode it automatically adopts whenever the TV is on) it produced crisp, clear, rich sound that rendered the dialogue beautifully and yielded soundtrack music and sound effects far superior to those from the TV’s own speakers. That’s partly because it has a center channel dedicated to dialogue, as well as left and right stereo channels that carry most other audio.

I found the sound immersive through the whole large room, at every seat from which I’d watch TV. Sonos also has an iPhone and iPad-based feature called Trueplay, which tunes the speaker to the room in a couple of minutes, adding a little more immersion.

And, suddenly, there was no more need for subtitles in our house. If you do encounter a show with dialogue you’re still having trouble hearing, there’s a “Speech Enhancement” feature that boosts dialogue further. In my tests, tapping on this enhancement icon in the Sonos app definitely made a difference, without diminishing any of the other sounds.

Setup was dead simple, with just two cords — an optical audio connector to the TV and a power cord. There’s also an Ethernet jack, but I found the 802.11n Wi-Fi to be just fine, even though it’s not the latest Wi-Fi version. (Sonos says it stuck with “n” because it finds it works better to connect the Playbase with other Sonos speakers you may have. It says it uses both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands.)

The app, which runs on all major platforms, also walks you through a simple configuration of your cable or TV remote so it can control the Playbase’s volume. In my case, the Apple TV remote could control the Sonos as well.

But wait! It’s also a standalone speaker!

When you’re not watching TV, the Playbase functions as an excellent standalone Sonos speaker, connected via the Sonos app to dozens of music services. Later this year, along with other Sonos models, it will acquire the ability to be controlled by Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant via an Echo device. Sonos says it’s working to make this control seamless and not clumsy, so it won’t require a secondary wake word, like other Alexa “skills.” The idea is that, for music, you could designate your Sonos system, including your Playbase, as the default speaker. For other kinds of audio responses, the Echo’s internal speaker would take over.

In my tests, as a standalone speaker, the Playbase behaved just like any other Sonos model, offering great sound for music. Its audio quality outclassed the Play:1 models I own. (I didn’t compare it to other, costlier Sonos models.) And, because that thin slab hiding under your TV can now be your main music speaker, you can remove any other speaker you may have in the room with your big TV, saving space and reducing clutter. (You could also wirelessly link a couple of Play:1 models and a Sonos Sub with the Playbase to create a home theater, but, remember, I’m not an audiophile, so I won’t be doing this.)

As with other Sonos speakers, you can group the Playbase with additional Sonos units. You can play separate music, or the same music, in various rooms. You can even play TV sound via speakers far from the TV.

So what’s not to like?

Well, for a non-audiophile, there’s the price; I wish it were less. Unless you’re already sold on Sonos, you could fix at least the dialogue problem with cheaper TV speakers, like the Zvox, at $250.

Then there’s the latency. I found that in certain scenarios, like first turning the TV on, or switching inputs or moving among different over-the-top services, the sound didn’t start until 2–3 seconds after the picture did. Sonos said this was because the Playbase had to emerge from sleep and do a quick sound analysis before starting, and do the same analysis when adjusting to a new source.

Also, the Playbase takes away the visual audio indicator on the TV screen, at least on my TV and others. I got used to these things.

I also wish the unit had microphones, so that, when Alexa compatibility arrives, you could just issue it commands directly, without an Echo device. Sonos says it plans microphones for future products, but wouldn’t exactly tell me why they’re absent on the Playbase.

For audiophiles, there are other issues, laid out here by my colleague Nilay Patel.

Bottom Line

As somebody who needed great TV sound to go with a great TV picture, who loves the Sonos audio system, and is perfectly happy with a single immersive speaker in the family room, the Playbase meets my needs. I’m planning to buy one.

But, if you can’t, or would rather not, spend $700, there are cheaper alternatives. And if you’re a real audiophile, there may be more desirable ways to go.

Still, this is a fine product. I recommend it to people who want better TV sound, love Sonos quality, and can afford it. Everyone else with a new, thin TV should definitely look into adding a soundbar of some kind. Even if you’re not an audiophile, good TV sound matters.

In 1998 it was possible to make a big-screen romantic comedy about email. Yep, email — the same medium we often think of now as boring and even annoying. Back then, it was perfectly plausible that two attractive characters played by two attractive movie stars (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) could fall in love over AOL email and each be thrilled to hear the service’s iconic, cheerful audio alert: “You’ve Got Mail.” That was also the name of the film, which garnered a respectable 73 percent from top critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The trailer feels like a time machine now.

Of course, today, such digital romance would take place using some combination of Tinder, texting, and maybe Snapchat (though the two leads seem too old to fit the Snapchat target demo, so maybe iMessage and FaceTime). Email would never be considered a common path to love, even one believable enough for a movie.

Email is a senior citizen. It’s been around since at least the 1960s in one form or another. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a hot competition among consumer email services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail.

Now, young people shun email as much as possible. Even for adults, answering an email rarely seems urgent, and that red counter of unread emails often climbs into the thousands.

A conversation in the talk bubbles of a messaging service, or on Slack, Twitter, or Facebook, demands — and receives — faster action.

I was an early user of AOL, so early I didn’t even have a number after my user name. For me, email was once vital, both for personal and business uses. But, like a lot of you reading this, if my phone or laptop today happily called out “You’ve Got Mail,” I’d be tempted to smash it. Today’s email competition is all about mobile apps that help you manage the email mess with minimum hassle.

The undead walk among us

Still, despite all signs to the contrary, and many predictions, email is not dead. In fact, some analyses suggest that it’s growing. Few people can afford to be without it. It hasn’t expired; it’s morphed.

There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will. The old ones just adapt and change.

Back in the day, television was supposed to kill off radio, but radio gradually saved itself by dropping the programming TV did better (like dramas and variety shows) and started to focus on playing hit songs and hosting political and sports talk shows.

I think something similar is going on with email. Once the king of digital discourse, email has surely been dethroned by an army of alternatives: vast and numerous messaging services; photo- and video-oriented sharing on social networks or the photo apps of Apple and Google; business tools like Slack.

I get the latest pictures of my granddaughter through iCloud photo sharing. I get the latest discussions of how we plan to cover stories on The Verge or Recode through Slack. My editor and I collaboratively edit my stories inside Google Docs. Ten years ago, all those things would have been done via email. Back then, when a reader wanted to tell me I was an idiot (or worse) for something I wrote, I got an email. Now, they tell me on Twitter.

Despite all that, however, chances are your communications from businesses — like banks, insurers, lawyers, accountants, and utility companies — are still sent via email. Even if they use Slack or some similar internal chat-like tool, many employers also still send important personnel announcements and policy statements via email, presumably for legal reasons or to ensure everyone gets them.

And, of course, then there’s marketing of all kinds, including spam. For this kind of stuff, email has long been the digital channel of choice, and, as other kinds of messages migrate away, marketing looms even larger in your inbox. It’s this stuff that has helped simultaneously prop up email and turn people off from it. You’re unlikely to see an unwanted ad for airline mile deals in your iMessage or Facebook Messenger threads, but you’re virtually certain to see one in your email inbox.

Whole companies are built around this marketing business. They sell their services to other businesses or political groups and devise ways to get around filters.

It’s bad in so many ways

Like radio, email isn’t dying, it’s just changing. Over the past decade or so it’s become much more like postal mail. It’s not the place you expect to find a greeting from a friend, or even a timely update from a professional colleague. Instead, it’s a mix of junk mail you hate and discard, plus bills and missives from businesses you also hate but can’t discard. And the junk mail is the bulk of it.

It’s also outright dangerous. Email remains a key vector for network attacks by criminals, hostile states, and surveillance agencies. It’s a major way bad actors get unsuspecting people to click on links or images or attachments that hide malware that can penetrate networks and steal identities.

Like paper mail, email also induces guilt, piling up and up until you can find the time and will to pick through to see what you might need or want.

Still, it’s hard to just stop using it altogether.

Of course, there are always exceptions that prove the rule. For instance, newsletters and news or sports alerts you subscribed to, actually want, and find interesting. I check email for several of those and skim or read them.

Bottom line

By and large, email is now a generally unpleasant, often untrustworthy, and sometimes literally perilous experience that deserves less and less of our time and attention. But it’s not dead, and I don’t expect it to disappear anytime soon. Just be wary of it.

Remember You’ve Got Mail? The whole time the Tom Hanks character was email-wooing the Meg Ryan character, he was, in real life, building a giant chain bookstore that put her cozy neighborhood book shop out of business.

Consider yourself warned.

It’s often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs. These were the first computing devices meant for individuals that weren’t kits, had screens and keyboards, and could actually do something useful, like word processing, game play, or, eventually, spreadsheets.

The best known of these, the Apple II, which remained on the market in various forms until 1993, will have its 40th anniversary in June. That makes mass-market personal computing younger than the Super Bowl, Starbucks, and Disneyland.

You can trace a pretty straight line from these first machines to the laptop, tablet or smartphone you’re using right now. They are all personal computers, with the smartphone being the most used today. Those 1977 models (which included entries from Commodore and Tandy) are also the forebears of the web, Facebook, Google, and pretty much whatever else you’re using on whatever digital device is at hand.

The information “appliance”

But almost right from the start, and right through the 1990s and even the early 2000s, the quest was on, at least among some, for computing devices to become “appliances” or “information appliances” — that is, dead-simple to use, without training or the need for a manual. I know: the push for greater ease of use was a defining principle of my own tech column in The Wall Street Journal, which launched in 1991 and continued for 22 years.

Of course, the standard for this “appliance”-level of ease of use changed over time. The bar was pretty low in 1977, when, according to Wikipedia, the then-influential Byte magazine said the Apple II “may be the first product to fully qualify as the ‘appliance computer’ … a completed system which is purchased off the retail shelf, taken home, plugged in and used.” This, despite the fact that it used a command-line interface, needed an audio cassette recorder to store its apps and data, and took plenty of effort to master.

For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft’s dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out. Of course, a significant minority of people enjoyed solving these problems and loved to hack and modify PCs. But not mainstream users.

Even Apple’s Macs, which were generally much simpler and more secure, got more buggy and fell behind as the company faltered in the 1990s, and didn’t hit their current stride for years thereafter.

During that era, I tested many digital devices that claimed to be appliances, a few of which were even mildly successful. I reviewed one of them as late as 2005, a device called the Pepper Pad, which was kind of what an iPad might have been with worse designers and an even higher base price. I wasn’t crazy about it.

Only the Palm Pilot, and its descendant, the Treo, came close to the dream, but they were limited and lacked large platform ecosystems. (Despite its popularity, the BlackBerry for too long was largely an enterprise-focused email terminal with few apps.)

The iPhone changed everything

In 2007, everything changed with the iPhone. As crippled as that first model now seems, with its lack of apps and glacial cellular connectivity, the iPhone was a practical, useful, self-contained computer a child could understand. It was an information appliance. And it became even more so with the advent of the App Store the next year. Today, it seems boring to many tech fans, but the iPhone broke through the last barrier that allowed everybody to do a wide range of tasks on a speedy computer.

And that was followed up in 2008 by Android. It took years to sand off the rough edges and get the hardware right, but Android devices added qualities the iPhone lacked: they sold for less and allowed for lots of customization.

Then came the iPad in 2010, to add a large screen and more PC-like apps to the iPhone template.

By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.

So, are we done with the quest for the perfect information appliance? Nope.

The next stage

We’ve already begun the next stage. You might call it the quest for the Starship Enterprise computer — the one that you can just talk to when you need information, or to get a task done, to be entertained or to record a moment. It will require perfect conversational ability, sensors of every kind and limitless storage, prodigious, always-learning artificial intelligence, access to almost infinite personal data, and knowledge about nearly everything. These are all huge steps to take, and they will all require massive investment and more than a few failed first attempts.

But every major computer company is pursuing this goal, in one form or another, as are researchers and smaller companies unknown to us yet. So far, we see only the glimmers of this future in things like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the Google Assistant.

These voice-activated “assistants” often live on existing laptops, smartphones, and tablets. They also now come in their own hardware, notably the Amazon Echo and the Google Home device.

But, even from today’s vantage point, we all know they are very crude. When I asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last year if we were in the first inning of the quest for these artificially intelligent, conversational devices, he said it was even earlier than that: “It might even be the first guy’s up at bat.”

I suspect that today’s mass-market AI software and hardware will, in only 10 years or so, look as primitive and quaint as the Apple II does now.

And when they get all of that figured out? Well, some other perfect information appliance will still be waiting, just out of reach.