A chunk of the internet growled at Apple yesterday over its Siri feature being ‘anti-abortion’, and I suggested it was probably not intentional. Sure enough, Apple has now responded, and it’s confirmed that this issue is a “glitch”:

Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this, but I will happily admit I’m glad.

Articles on MobileBeat and Amadi Talks have sparked an online row that Siri—and by extension Apple—is anti-abortion. This is on the basis that Siri does not respond successfully to questions about abortion clinics or abortion itself. If this really is the case, then Apple’s position here is at odds with its relatively liberal stance. Apple employees took part in pro-LGBT It Gets Better, for example, and it’s to participate in World Aids Day (The Loop); a blanket ban on pornography through the App Store is the only outright ‘moral’ clampdown I can think of.

There are also some things to bear in mind before attempting to rip Apple’s board a new arsehole over this issue (or, if you’re anti-abortion yourself, congratulating the company):

1. Siri is still in beta. The software is full of holes. If you’re outside of the USA, you cannot even search for any businesses. Even in the USA, it’s full of bugs and often misinterprets input.
2. Siri isn’t intelligent. Arguments about Siri being anti-abortion and misogynistic appear to have some credence when you’re mindful that it can reportedly infer someone’s demands to go to a strip club, and yet it ignores abortion terms. But Siri’s about one step up from a 1985 Infocom text adventure. The lack of understanding about abortion could easily be a hole in the feature’s ‘understanding’, or something that hasn’t been added, or something that a male-oriented team didn’t realise was important enough to correctly or fully define.
3. Siri often uses generic answers. One comment I’ve seen is that Siri answers “I just am” if you ask: Why are you anti-abortion? This isn’t confirmation about anything, given that Siri offers the same answer if you say: Why are you a penguin?
4. You can send Apple feedback. If you believe Apple’s in the wrong and doubt any of the possible reasoning I’ve offered (or simply want to ensure Siri is updated accordingly), visit the Apple website and offer some constructive feedback.

If Siri comes out of beta and it’s clear Siri’s still treating the term ‘abortion’ as a business (as it currently does when you ask “What is abortion?”, although “Define abortion” brings up a short description via Wolfram Alpha) and essentially blocking results to centres and institutions that Google and Bing offer, fair enough: there’s clearly something very wrong at Cupertino. For now, though, I’d argue Amadi Talks offers a perfectly sensible perspective on the issue:

Is this the most terrible programming failure ever? No. Is this worth a boycott of Apple? I don’t think so. What it is, however, is a demonstration of a problem. Especially when certain topics seem to be behind a black wall where information that’s readily available online is not being “found” or presented. This is something that Apple and/or Wolfram Alpha need to address and rectify.

In other words, don’t go crazy just yet, but this is something Apple needs to address.

Devin Wilson asks on Slide to Play: what’s a game really worth? He initially, rightly, argues that people will bitch about spending a few bucks on an iOS game, yet will happily pay the same for a sandwich. And he complains about developers “bellyaching” about the race to the bottom, fighting for 99-cent scraps along with myriad other developers, before idly wondering if microtransactions/freemium or “any other pricing model” might be better.

The article dramatically smacks into a wall when Wilson mentions an essay by Jason Rohrer about the

absurdity of selling digital copies, which is—of course—exactly what game publishers have done for as long as most of us can remember

Well, not quite as long as most of us can remember, whipper-snapper. I remember when videogames came on cassette tapes, but anyway:

Rohrer’s writing thankfully isn’t a call for piracy, but it’s definitely enough to make you question the nature of the games business. What is it that we’re really paying for?

There’s a clear problem for some people in understanding that things that don’t have a tactile product that you can hold and, when necessary, hurl at next door’s cat when it’s taking a shit in your garden, have value. The value—what you’re paying for—is in the consumption and the experience. A game is still a game, regardless of whether it comes inside a piece of plastic or as a collection of ones and zeroes fired at your electronic device over the magic of the internet.

There’s already been some debate about this in light of the used game market, but we can almost certainly agree that a digital copy (which itself can be copied at no detriment to the original and practically zero cost) has—if nothing else—a slippery value.

From my statement above, you’ll note that I disagree with this. If anything, I’d argue a digital copy’s value is—when DRM is non-existent or applied in a non-hateful manner—far from slippery. That I can play my copy of Exciting iOS Game on my iPad, iPod and iPhone without paying any extra money to do so is fantastic. With iCloud, progress can seamlessly shift between devices, too. This is beneficial; this is added value. It’s not ‘slippery’ value. Still, it’s clear that quite a few people these days really don’t see any value in non-tangible products, and that’s a pity. The assumption that everything online is—or at least should be—’free’ is a big problem.

If I buy an app for $2.99 on my MacBook Pro, then put it on both my iPod Touch and iPad, these individual instances of the app don’t seem like they’re now worth just one dollar each just because it’s 3 dollars spread across 3 devices. At the same time, I don’t now have $9 worth of content, because then I’d just be printing money in a sense.

The value is in the ability to freely duplicate. Likewise, when I buy a downloadable album, the fact I can play that on any musical device I own increases its value. It’s impossible to put a set figure on this value (and to do so misses the point), but it’s an odd argument to suggest digital copies somehow make anyone question value, or that you need to somehow divide up the cost of a fixed-value purchase between the items you install it on.

It seems, then, that the entire business of games is quite possibly a sham! Even Apple’s overhead doesn’t make sense in terms of valuation: they can afford to distribute free apps for no cost to the developer.

If games have no inherent monetary value, then it must be the case that it is only by the generosity of those who don’t want to circumvent the normal channels of distribution that any developers make any money at all!

There are some serious leaps of logic here. “If games have no inherent monetary value”? From whose claims? Wilson’s, by making the argument without anything much to back it up? And to suggest that it’s “generosity” to not bootleg content is reprehensible. It might be easy to break the law these days when it comes to copying games, music and movies, but you’re not being “generous” in paying for these things—you’re simply acting within the law and, to some extent, supporting the people who made them. Kill the revenue stream and you wave goodbye to all these things.

Recently, Adam Saltsman wrote a blog in which he described microtransactions as “contrived” and “unethical”. This coming from the man who refuses to drop the $2.99 price of Canabalt for iOS, a repetitive, two-year-old game that’s absolutely free to play as long as you’re on a device that runs Flash.

Wow, what an absolute git Saltsman is. Imagine: he made a game and set a price for it, and he’s refused to drop that price! Man, I want to kick his face off, because— No, actually, it’s his game, right? It’s his decision what to price it at? And is the insinuation in the quote that Saltsman is being a hypocrite for calling microtransactions “unethical”, because he refuses to drop the price of his “repetitive, two-year-old game”? Because it sure sounds like it.

The source code is free to download as well! I don’t think Canabalt is bad (quite the opposite), nor do I mean to merely attack Saltsman (whom I respect), but his pricing model is no more logical than the practices he describes as “extortion”.

The problem is that a whole ton of freemium games are dodgy as hell when it comes to pricing. That’s not to say standard pricing doesn’t lead to questionable value propositions at times, but freemium is very often bait-and-switch. For every game that’s a demo (a few levels for free, and then a price to unlock the rest of the game), there are dozens of games that effectively force you to buy in-game currency to get anywhere in the lifetime of this universe. Sure, you can technically churn your way through without dipping into your bank balance, but only if you’re some kind of masochist.

It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of game Saltsman was rallying against in his post. He said:

Games that […] abuse [achievement] checklists and include In-App Purchases, are deliberately contriving their designs in the worst way in order to extort money from players, which is unethical and unacceptable design practice.

Wilson sums up his article as follows:

I like good games, and I think game developers would probably tend to make better games if they didn’t have to worry about their empty stomachs and overdue rent. Game makers undoubtedly need to get paid, but putting an absolute monetary value on a digital game doesn’t seem possible.

I really don’t see why not. Why is gaming so fundamentally different from everything else you buy? It’s extraordinarily rare beyond a PR stunt to have record artists let people pay whatever they want for an album. And I don’t pay my supermarket what I want to for my shopping. The enjoyment of a game might well often be subjective, but a single up-front price (or a free game with a single IAP) at least provides no scope for confusion nor is there any contrivance to get you to buy your way through the game instead of grinding. You’re paying a fixed fee for a certain amount of entertainment—and that’s it.

I’m late to the party, but I just watched the HP Envy design video. Oh my. It’s a really stunning piece of work that makes me wonder if HP’s designers are suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or whether they’re just delusional.

If you’ve not seen the HP Envy, it’s like a MacBook Pro knock-off made by some dodgy Chinese company, with a horrible volume knob glued to the side and that your kid’s drawn on (carefully, mind) in felt-tip pen. (HP calls these elements ‘colour accents’, rather than ‘a really shit idea that looks horribly out of place and distracts from the otherwise somewhat clean design’ or ‘a desperate attempt to try and make people think we haven’t actually ripped off Apple’).

Some choice quotes from the video:

The first goal was to create a super-clean high-end design, and we did that in the geometry we chose

Presumably by popping to the nearest Apple Store and going “we’ll rip off… that one” and pointing to a MacBook Pro.

The second one was a level of honesty. That was really a key goal.

Honesty that doesn’t extend quite so far as to admit that the design is a total rip-off of something that already exists, natch.

The materials that we used were really true to this core attribute of honesty.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean the materials include “we ripped off Apple and we’re really sorry” being burned into the base of every model.

The last one was really key as we brought Beats Audio into the Envy landscape.

It’s always a good idea when you bring another company into the mix, because that never compromises your design aesthetic.

We wanted to […] visualise the audio and go beyond the sense or the audible sound of the Beats with Envy

“We were told that we had to somehow integrate the Beats Audio branding.”

You’ll notice with the product that we integrated a volume wheel that has what I call interaction gravity

And what I call a large volume knob oddly and intrusively shoved on to the side of a notebook. Still, I guess HP’s research must have shown that volume control was something people needed to mess with all of the time, and that existing media keys for doing so were just too hard for people to understand. Either that or it’s a stupid gimmick, in part demanded as part of the co-branding with Beats…

That is what pulls people into the product to interact with it

Unlike, say, the keyboard and the screen. Or perhaps they have ‘interaction gravity’ too. Man, my pen, which I just used to scribble a note, also has interaction gravity! As does the notepad! And my desk! And my chair! INTERACTION GRAVITY IS EVERYWHERE!

It allows the user a finite control of audio

As opposed to an infinite control of audio, which would be bad.

It feels a lot like a high-end stereo knob […] and it’s something we prototyped time and time again […] so we got this sense of quality

This bit’s at 1:45 and there’s a palpable sense of depression coming from the designer as he says “time and time again”. It’s like he’s trying to scream: “They forced us to improve the knob. Time and time again! THEY WOULDN’T LET US LEAVE UNTIL THE KNOB WAS PERFECT!”

Envy is about the beauty of the details

Details mostly designed several years ago by Apple. Well, bar the numeric keyboard that forces the trackpad to be oddly left-of-centre. That’s detail.

Has that next layer of design when you start to engage it

I have engaged you, notebook! Show me your next level of design!

When you open it up, it’s a little like Christmas

What, in that you thought you were getting something great, but when you open the box you see your aunt’s bought you a fucking Gobot instead of a Transformer?

In that there’s quite a few things inside the product that really draw your attention

Oh, OK. That’s just what I think of when someone mentions Christmas: things inside a product that really draw your attention. Man, Christmas round designer bloke’s house must be a laugh riot.

Colour accents that tie us into Beats Audio

Ah, the next layer of design: a horrible red stripe inside the keyboard. Mmm.

It’s a product that creates envy

Mostly on the part of the design team, who wish they were working for Apple.

Regular readers know what I think of the Apple rumour mill. I’m sick of sites that latch on to any Apple rumour, spewing out far-fetched guesswork from analysts and inevitably unnamed sources, in the mad desperation for hits. The iPhone 5’s going to be slightly longer, you say, despite having no proof? QUICK! THE WORLD MUST HEAR OF THIS!

But I am also occasionally sucked into the guesswork game for publications I contribute to. For .net magazine, I used to write an end-of-year ‘trends’ piece, trying to figure out what would happen in the industry over the coming year. Unlike most Mac/iOS rumour articles, the hit-rate was high, because I spoke to professionals who were grounded and reasonable. It’s the ‘grounded and reasonable’ approach that I took into last year’s ‘Apple in 2011’ piece for TechRadar, and I thought now would be a good time to see how I fared.

1. Mac App Store The Mac App Store is likely to be the first of Apple’s major products to appear in 2011. Announced during Apple’s unveiling of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), but also compatible with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), it will bring a streamlined app-purchase, download and update model to the Mac, much like the one for iOS devices.

A no-brainer, but a hit nonetheless. And I ‘m also a huge fan of the MAS now, because it makes installation and app management way easier. That said, I do hope Apple relaxes a bit regarding its upcoming sandboxing requirements, or the MAS could rapidly become a place solely for dumbed-down apps.

There will be restrictions, too, but standard Mac installation will still be permitted; therefore, we expect the Mac App Store to be a great system for kick-starting a thriving ecosystem of smaller apps and games on the Mac, with industry giants – initially, at least – sticking with traditional distribution methods.

I pretty much hit the nail on the head with this. Although some big names are making the odd MAS foray (notably Adobe, with Photoshop Elements), many of the biggest apps are absent, including the CS suite and Office.

2. iPad 2 Apple’s tight-lipped about what iPad 2 will or won’t include, but it’s a safe bet it’ll incorporate FaceTime, and Jobs’s dismissal of the 7-inch form factor of rival tablets suggests iPad 2 will differ from the original little in that regard. Elsewhere, more RAM and storage are likely, and a USB port and a Retina display have been mooted as other new features. Whatever we end up with, expect iPad 2 to land a year after the original’s debut, in April 2011.

Bar some streamlining, the form-factor was essentially the same (i.e. a ten-inch screen). The ‘other new features’ thing was a requirement to link to an existing article, and I didn’t believe either would happen. Again, though, this wasn’t rocket science. The iPad 2 arriving in 2011 was obvious, but note I didn’t argue the iPad 3 would also appear, unlike plenty of other writers. I was, though, wrong about a storage bump (more’s the pity).

3. iOS magazine rack Rumoured to be imminent for months, along with the Rupert Murdoch-backed iPad-only newspaper The Daily, iOS 4.3 is said to include functionality that will enable Apple to provide a digital magazine rack, including subscriptions. This is surely a cert for 2011, complementing iBooks nicely, and enabling publishers to free themselves from relying on apps with in-app purchases or services like Zinio for digital magazine distribution for iOS.

Newsstand showed up in iOS 5 and has been a pretty successful platform for many publishers. I’m hoping 2012 will see more apps along the lines of those by Tap! and The Guardian, directly designing for the tablet rather than aping existing print pages.

4. iPhone 5 Apple’s iPhone release schedule is reassuringly regular, and you can expect the iPhone 5 to appear by early July. Unless Apple’s been at the crazy juice, you can guarantee that the antennae will work flawlessly, regardless of how you jam the device into your hands, and you can also expect bumps to speed, storage and performance.

In terms of functionality, a few rumours have surfaced, and Apple’s reportedly been experimenting with Near Field Communication, potentially enabling a device to be used for making payments. Elsewhere, it’s possible US customers will finally be able to escape AT&T, with the iPhone 5 becoming available on Verizon.

A swing and a miss. Some of the details are correct, but the device name wasn’t, and, if I’m being honest, I did expect NFC to show up, because, clearly, I went slightly mad the moment I wrote that bit.

5. Mac OS X 10.7 In October, Apple gave everyone a sneak peak of Mac OS X 10.7, also known as Lion. The eighth major version of Mac OS X was part of a ‘back to the Mac’ event, showcasing how iOS devices are now influencing Apple’s desktop and laptop products. Lion includes the iOS homescreen-style Launchpad, full-screen apps, auto-save and auto-resume, auto-hiding scrollbars, and more fully utilises multitouch gestures.

Given that this had already been demoed, this wasn’t exactly a tough guess.

During his presentation, Steve Jobs noted that these features were just a taste of what the finished software (due ‘summer’ 2011) will contain; other rumoured features include a resolution-independent and/or unified interface and an upgraded QuickTime X.

Again, these were required round-ups of what people had suggested would be included. I should probably have added that anyone truly believing Apple would ever unify the OS X interface hasn’t been paying attention since OS X first arrived. iCal, presumably, was to punch that approach into people’s faces until they give up with the unified idea.

6. Increased focus on iOS With Lion’s release, expect Apple to again switch its attention to iOS, perhaps starting to preview aspects of the next major revision to the mobile operating system. It’s also fairly likely that a shift will take place in 2011, with Apple very obviously considering iOS the ‘default’ operating system for Apple products, with Mac OS X repositioned as something more for professionals and anyone else with demanding requirements. Don’t be shocked if you hear nothing at all about Mac OS X 10.8 in 2011, but plenty about iOS 4.x and perhaps even iOS 5.

Mac users might argue otherwise, but I think all of this came to pass in 2011. The Mac remains important to Apple, but not nearly as important as iOS. And with ‘back to the Mac’, Apple is prepping its Mac users for making the shift to a more iOS-like environment.

7. Opening up AirPlay AirPlay is a potentially revolutionary technology for the media obsessed, but it’s currently hugely constrained. At present, you can live-stream video and audio from an iOS device to an Apple TV, but only from a very limited number of Apple’s own apps. Developers have shown this limitation has been imposed by Apple itself, for reasons unknown; happily, when responding to a MacRumors reader’s query regarding AirPlay video working in Safari and third-party apps, Steve Jobs reportedly said: “Yep, hope to add these features to Airplay in 2011”.

AirPlay’s now available for all apps, although some idiots continue to block it (hello, iPlayer in the UK, where we pay the licence fee—thanks, BBC!)

8. Improvements to MobileMe MobileMe hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. Many users cite that it’s unstable and unreliable, often bettered by free solutions available from Apple’s competitors. In iOS 4.2, Apple surprisingly freed Find My iPhone from the paid MobileMe (at least for owners of 2010 iOS devices- cynically, anyone with an older device was blocked from creating the required free account), and in response to another MacRumors reader’s email about MobileMe products, Steve Jobs reportedly replied: “Yes, it will get a lot better in 2011”.

Given that Apple’s building a massive data centre, there’s hope MobileMe might become an integrated part of its operating systems, becoming the backbone for enabling you access to your content from any Apple device or computer.

It’s called iCloud rather than MobileMe, but this all happened. Support issues mean iCloud’s not quite as open and flexible as I’d hoped (i.e. it’s not an Apple version of Dropbox), but that’ll come.

9. iTunes streaming It’s the rumour that never dies, but perhaps 2011 will finally be the year Apple augments its existing iTunes Store music purchase options with some kind of streaming service. This could come in the form of Spotify-like streaming, but that would potentially eat into Apple’s iTunes Store sales; therefore, we could see an alternative service, such as enabling you to stream your own collection to a device, using the Lala technology Apple acquired, in combination with the in-progress giant data centre.

I nearly screwed this one up while writing, before realising Apple would not follow Spotify, and so I entirely rewrote the section, imagining what Apple would most likely do. The above pretty much describes iTunes Match, so I’m happy with this.

10. Doomsayers rebuffed Despite all of these things and, perhaps, the odd surprise or two, doomsayers will continue to predict Apple’s imminent death, ignoring the massive profits the company’s generating, the boost in headcount and store outlets, and the innovative products it’s producing.

Well, obviously.

Unless Steve Jobs goes crazy and turns Macs into Windows boxes or has the iPhone 5 made out of puppies, this cycle will continue into 2011 and beyond, with Apple offering modest expectations, analysts providing bizarre predictions that bear little relation to what Apple stated, Apple revealing new and huge piles of cash every quarter, Wall Street going berserk at Apple having not revealed a pile of cash 50 times bigger than the moon, hacks saying Apple is doomed for some spurious reason, and Apple stockholders and board members happily watching Apple shares continue their upward trajectory.

I have a feeling I might as well copy and paste this last point into any similar article this year.

So, I’m quite happy with my list. There are a few wobbles lurking, but only one out-and-out blunder. And the way I got such a high hit-rate was simple: researching what had already officially been announced and not relying on stupid rumours. Many would argue that meant playing it safe, but this also resulted in a pretty accurate run-down of Apple in 2011, only missing a couple of points that almost no-one was talking about in 2010 (such as Siri). Such measured writing doesn’t necessarily get people giddy with anticipation, but I’d rather provide this kind of insight than become an analyst spraying bullshit all over the internet.