Tag Archives: apple

Adventures in iCloud Mail Hosting

How does switching email hosts disable your Bluetooth headphones? Read on to find out.

As many people did recently, I got The Email from Google telling me that my Apps for Domains (Legacy) account is going away and that I should either pay up or move away.

I’m not averse to paying. I use email a lot and I have my own domain, so I appreciate that I’m not a typical consumer. But I do object to paying Google because it feels like they’re double-dipping: both data mining my information and billing me for the service1.

In short, I’m not going to stay with Google.

Since I already pay for iCloud — as part of the Apple One bundle — moving my email there would be the obvious choice. Being able to use your own domain is a recent feature, part of iCloud to use their current branding.

Unfortunately the documentation isn’t great. And there are technical gotchas. Let’s walk through my experience.

Step 1, enter your domain name. Okay, check.

Step 2, enter any existing email addresses. I entered my main address and it told me that it wasn’t allowed. As others have noted, the system does return useful error messages, however those are not displayed on the screen! I was left guessing, which is incredibly frustrating.

I figured – partly luck, partly a process of elimination – that the email address was associated with another Apple ID. I logged into my other Apple IDs and removed references to my address, but to no avail. It continued to reject me.

The difficulty is that I’ve been using Apple’s web services for a long time. I have accounts that date back twenty years, before iCloud, before MobileMe, before your Apple ID even needed to be an email address. My main email address predates even that.

Luckily Apple has a “find your Apple ID” tool that tells you the Apple accounts that an email address is associated with. It turned up two accounts that I have no recollection of ever creating. One was a pre-email address account with a very bizarre name. It was an odd reference, but one I recognised so it was certainly me!

I requested that those two accounts get deleted. At that point, the “add domain” screen allowed me to continue.

My hope for step 3 What was to add some email aliases. The way I had my mail set up at Google was with a single mailbox but with multiple aliases. In practice, most of the aliases were just “wildcard” addresses, that is, if it found an address it didn’t know it would send it to the main mailbox. I knew that (bizarrely) Apple’s iCloud didn’t do that. I’m not totally happy with that but, for the way I use email, it’s not an absolute dealbreaker.

Except. You can’t have aliases. I can create an alias to my iCloud address, somethingelse@icloud.com, but not somethingelse@mydomain.com.

This is a problem. Over the years, I’ve removed almost all of the aliases, but one I use almost every day is the one attached to my Apple ID!

I go through my last few months of email – that was a fun afternoon – updated my address at a handful of companies so that the only remaining required alias was the one for my Apple ID.

I have payments and purchases and subscriptions for the entire family associated with this account. I know that in theory I can change the ID but in practice it fills me with dread.

If I’m to move my email, however, this is a necessary step. That it’s the one remaining required alias and that it might make things easier moving to any other email provider pushes me to attempt it.

It wasn’t as difficult or as problematic as I feared. All the work I did previously, removing all traces of the “old” Apple IDs, meant that the change largely Just Worked.

For the next day I found myself signing into all my devices again. The most surprising was when I started listening to a podcast and two minutes later my AirPods suddenly stopped working. I tried turning them off and on again – all the usual diagnostic tools – but couldn’t get them going. I was stood in the middle of the street so I didn’t want to get too in depth.

When I got home I realised they stopped working because they were connected to my Apple ID. I re-paired them with my phone and the audio immediately started to play. Of all the things I expected to stop working when I changed the account, my earbuds were not on the list!

As I write this, it has been about three weeks since I “flipped the switch” and moved over to iCloud email. My Google account is still live – I can switch back if something is utterly broken – but I have not done so. I guess it’s possible that I’ve missed some emails, but I would have no idea if I did, of course!

Despite the initial teething problems I’ve written about above, it’s been working well since then. It even supports push email rather than polling periodically. Not critical, but a nice feature.

Would I recommend it? With reservations. It’s not going to work as a replacement for Google for some people. And both the software and the documentation needs work. The feature set is limited, the backend supports more detailed diagnostics than the front-end and the documentation assumes that you don’t have a mess of Apple IDs like I do.

Let’s hope that Apple work on this. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight thing. There are a bunch of issues here, many of which appear to be a consequence of decisions made years ago.


  1. The argument may well go that they do not data mine paid accounts but I have no ability to verify that. Google have done enough dodgy things with data that I don’t trust them. Pick one. ↩︎

App Store pricing

Like Spotify’s complaint before it, yesterday’s “App Store Principles and Practices” document from Apple got me thinking.

Apple talks a lot about free apps not paying anything (which isn’t entirely true of course), and it’s always pitched as a feature.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a bug.

This effectively means that all paid apps have to subsidise all free apps. Is this what’s preventing Apple from reducing the 30% fee?

Why should free apps get a free ride? How much value is Facebook getting from Apple? My apps don’t take your personal data and use it for advertising purposes — something that Apple seems to be in favour of — yet I have to pay 30% and Facebook pay nothing.

Of course, we have to consider unintended consequences. It would be fair for Google and Facebook to pay, but what about a game I wrote in my spare time? Or that useful utility I wrote for myself that I’m altruistically sharing?

I don’t know is the short version. Should they charge for each download? Or each App Review? They’d probably need exceptions for certain categories, but also to be very careful that the system doesn’t get gamed.

The other thing Apple doesn’t directly address is Spotify’s most compelling argument: the fact that Apple charges 30% commission for apps that provide digital services, such as streaming music or books, means that no one other than Apple can actually allow in-app purchases in those categories. Apple only allow in-app purchases with the fee yet many of these services just don’t have 30% “spare” that they can give Apple. Apple Music and Apple Books don’t have to play by the App Store rules and they don’t have to pay the 30% fee.

If anything, this is harder than than the free freeloaders problem. It doesn’t seem right that Apple couldn’t compete in these categories, yet the platform owner clearly has a huge advantage here.

Anyway, at least two issues here and no firm conclusions. They always say “bring me solutions, not problems.” Sorry, I failed.

Send in the clones!

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

  1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
  2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
  3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

And that’s where the problems start.

If I forget to turn off WiFi — which I almost always do — then when the clone starts up, it immediately connects to WiFi and starts to back up to Time Machine. I panic and stop it as soon as I realise.

But then I boot back to my main disk and… Time Machine decides it needs to do a full backup. Which. Takes. Forever. (Backblaze is also doing a huge backup, presumably for the same reason.)

What’s the answer to this? Is there a way to switch off WiFi on the clone automatically? Only start when the boot disk has a specific name? I don’t know! It’s hard to search for because I can’t think what the answer might be.

iOS 11

As I’ve done for the last few years, here are a few quick thoughts about today’s new iOS release, version 11.

I’ve been using the iPad version since the beginning of August and the iPhone version for only a couple of week but I think I have reasonable picture of what you’re going to see. 

Good

  • Multi-app support on the iPad. Wow! It’s quite different. You might need to give it a while before you get used to it. I also found that I needed to rearrange my dock so that apps I use to multitask are quickly available
  • “Swipe up on the iPad keyboard to get symbol characters.” Such a time saver
  • The voice synthesis of Siri is way better. But I agree with Gruber, if I could have dedicated engineering resources to Siri that wouldn’t have been where I would put them
  • iCloud sync for Photos. No more training each device to receognise each person!
  • Lots of nice, minor changes. The “Now playing” lock screen widget, the “play” button at the top of playlists/albums in the music app
  • Control Center is improved (but see first item in the “ugly” section below)

Bad

  • I’m guessing this has something to do with the iPhone X, but the one 3D Touch gesture I used all the time was the hard-press on the left side of the screen to trigger the app switcher. That’s gone in iOS 11. This is going to take a lot of getting used to
  • It won’t work on older devices. I get the “why” but it always sucks when they get left behind

Ugly

  • Why did the WiFi button is Control Center change to be “disconnect” rather than “switch off”?!
  • Not sure about some of the animations, especially on iPhone. 

iPhone 6s

I wasn’t sure that I wanted a “big” iPhone as I was perfectly happy with the 4” form-factor. But if I was going to get a new phone and the new ones are bigger, I reasoned, I may as well go really big and go for a 6s Plus. On paper it made perfect sense.

Then I played with one in an Apple Store and I laughed. In practice it was comically big. I really didn’t want a phone I could only realistically use with two hands.

In many ways, my main complaint with the iPhone 6S is the same. It’s a lot bigger and I can only just use it one handed. Even a couple of months in, I think I still want a 4” phone.

Which is not to say that it’s not good. The camera is excellent. It’s much faster than my old 5. It’s my first device with Touch ID, and it’s great. Going back to punching in my PIN code every time would get annoying very quickly.

At launch I thought that 3D Touch would be a game changer and that Live Photos were a gimmick. I may have had that the wrong way around. The problem with 3D touch is that it’s not available everywhere, so you quickly forget to use it. This is not entirely Apples fault. Even my own apps don’t fully support 3D Touch yet. Live Photos, on the other hand, “just work” and they do capture a moment in a way that a simple photo doesn’t. They’re good for those serendipitous moments that you wouldn’t try to record a video of.

Overall I like it, but with more reservations than I’ve had with any of my previous iPhones after a couple of months with it.

Taking Stock

Share price movements are kind-of-sort-of-rational but not always intuitive. For example, when Apple has a big keynote and announces some significant product, everyone expresses surprise that the share price goes down straight afterwards. Even many smart people get this wrong (“It isn’t based on logic and reason” – The Talk Show episode 53). I hope to explain why the price dropping actually does make sense in this post.

In doing so I’ll likely make some errors. Some of those will be deliberate simplifications. In other cases I’ll probably just be wrong. But either way, I think the gist, if not the details, should give you a good idea of what’s going on.

I’m going to keep things simple by only talking about the share price. There are other factors (such as dividends) that might reasonably be considered but I think we can get a decent enough explanation without complicating things.

If we only worry about the share price, the obvious way that you make money is by selling the share at a higher price than you bought it for. So, even when you first buy a share you’re making a punt on the future of the company.

For a keynote, where no actual financial information is shared, it’s a pretty simple case of “buy on the rumour, sell on the fact.” Traders heard some of the same rumours about the shiny new iUnicorn that you did. They speculated that people would like and buy this new product and bought some shares. By the time the product is announced, the theory is that the share price already factors in all the up side (profit) of it, so they sell.

It doesn’t matter whether the product is good or bad, better or worse than was predicted, the share price will likely still go down. The next bit of good news that will likely pump up the stock will be an earnings announcement, good launch weekend sales figures, etc., but no more good can come out of this announcement. So sell.

The process for an earnings call are similar though possibly are a little more technical. In addition to any sales figures, traders are also looking at things like the “earnings per share” (EPS). However, in common with a product announcement, at the point of the call, traders would generally consider all the good news to already be factored into the price. Even if the company beats expectations, there’s no more good news to be had so they may as well sell.

For the sake of completeness, let’s also consider a couple of other circumstances that can trigger significant variation in the price. These are typically financial in nature and if they happen at the same time as an earnings call or keynote can exacerbate any already significance price changes.

The most common are options, a derivative financial product that gives the owner the option to purchase a share at a price set in advance, pushing the real share price towards the option price. (A large number of people are going to have to buy the same stock at a set price, so that becomes the price.)

Something else that happens fairly frequently is a share price dropping by a certain amount causing algo trading systems to kick in a sell too. Combine this with the sell off after an earnings call or product announcement and the effects can be way out of proportion with what was announced.

The last one I’m going to mention is when a company is added to a well traded index, such as the S&P 500. This happens because many investors looking for relatively low risk (such as pensions) buy index funds, so as soon as you’re added to the index your shares suddenly become a lot more popular. (Sadly I worked for a company and had shares in it when the opposite happened.)

The short story here is that, unless you’re a professional investor, you probably shouldn’t buy shares to make a quick buck. Buy Apple stock because you like the company and expect to hold onto it for at least a few months. Don’t let the day-to-day peaks and troughs worry you.