The WWDC Keynote has come and gone, and I’m super excited about one feature in iOS 9 in particular: Proactive. It’s really just a bunch of extensions to Siri and Spotlight, but what extensions they are! The most exciting are the ability to launch apps from the lock screen, chosen by the phone based on what you do, where, and when. So, when I get to the office, I can sit down at my desk and flip open OmniFocusWunderlist, and get an overview of my day. Or, more likely, just dive right into Overcast. When I come home in the evening, and decide to go for my daily run before dinner, it can let me go right into my running app of choice, and queue up my running playlist. Bedtime? It can offer me Sleep Cycle.

There’s also a bunch of improvements to the Spotlight screen, including contact and app suggestions based on where you are and what you have on the calendar. There’s integration between calendar and maps, so if I have an event coming up, it can give me traffic and travel time ahead of time—and hopefully public transit, since that’s been added to Apple Maps in the new OS. It’s all looking incredible, and now I know that the old, beloved Cue app team has actually been working on stuff in Cupertino. This is the sort of stuff i’ve been dreaming about for over a year… only to end up disappointed by third-party offerings. Maybe iOS 9 is the start.

Of course, Google Now has offered something similar for years now. It never worked for me, but I did give it an honest chance. Twice, actually. The second time was my great Pebble experiment, as Google Now is exactly the sort of thing a smartwatch was made for. But, after one too many “Hey, you should leave for work now” alerts while I was already on the subway heading into the city, I deleted it with prejudice. I’d rather go without than have one that doesn’t work.

And I’d rather go without than load Google up with more of my data than seems necessary. Which leads to the other awesome thing about the Proactive features in iOS 9—they’re locked to the hardware. Craig Federghi made a point during the presentation that all the Proactive smarts are “done on-device and it stays on-device under your control.” I can see this not just as a boon for my personal privacy, but also as a boost to reliability for someone who spends two hours every working day underground with limited and spotty connectivity. We’ll see which is going to work better, but I’m glad the gauntlet has been thrown.

I’m not opposed to sharing my data for useful services. I’m opposed to sharing that data and having it sold to advertisers, at least not without knowing precisely what I’m giving up. That’s something for a very different essay. Still, with Apple planting their flag firmly in the ground of user privacy and security, I’m more willing to give their service a shot. Proactive looks almost exactly like what I’ve dreamed of… and it’s only the start of what could become a life-changing set of technologies. I want in.

So, with the coming new Apple Streaming service, Nilay Patel at The Verge has realized that streaming music means a return to the Dark Days of DRM:

[N]ext week Apple is probably going to launch another streaming service, and if history is any guide, it’s only going to work with Apple products. That means I’ll have yet a fourth music service in my life (Spotify, Google Play Music, Prime, and Apple Music) and a fourth set of content exclusives and pricing windows to think about instead of just listening to music.

— Apple Music and the terrible return of DRM | The Verge

It’s hard for me to feel any sympathy for this argument, especially since I dropped about $100 on new vinyl in the last few months. There are very few advantages to vinyl in a digital age, but one of them is that I don’t have to worry about whether the music is exclusive to any particular streaming provider. And, hey, most new vinyl these days includes a card to download the music in DRM-unencumbered MP3 format.

The problem of streaming lock-in isn’t even new. Just look at the frustration every time something falls off of Netflix, or when Taylor Swift pulled her music off Spotify. Why is Apple (re-)entering the streaming fray any different? Is it because the fiery Anti-DRM sentiment of Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” is now off the Apple website? Oh noes! An eight year old missive about the state of buying music is no longer being hosted by Apple! Clearly this means we’re entering a New Dark Age of DRM-based streaming horrors.

I’m going to make a wild prediction: the iTunes Music Store, with its gobs and gobs of DRM-free M4A files isn’t going to go away on Monday, or any time for the foreseeable future. [1] Neither is the Amazon MP3 store, or Google Play’s Music store. If you’re so worried about not being able to have access to the music you want without having to switch between four various streaming services, and paying $40 a month for the privilege, you can take that $40 and buy four albums worth of music from the online music storefront of your choice. Or, you can take that $40 to a local, independent music store and buy it that way. The iTunes Music Store will still be open after Monday. Your local record store might not.

Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” essay accomplished what it intended to do. There are no digital music stores on the Internet that sell music with DRM. Not even Pono. There’s plenty of options for those of us who want to have control over the music we’re paying for. Streaming isn’t going to take that away. Nilay moans: “Am I really despairing for the days when I maintained a huge collection of legal and not-so-legal MP3 files that could play on any device I owned without any hassle?” Maybe you are, Nilay. There’s no despair from this streaming holdout.

This problem of meaning is brought to a head in Silicon Valley. In trying to answer the question, “what does all this new technology mean for us?” Silicon Valley executives, investors and journalists often default to a story about human progress. Moreover, many in Silicon Valley are so privileged and talented that they can ask themselves what they would like their work to mean beyond simply making them richer. Venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs regularly invoke phrases like “make a difference,” “have an impact,” or “change the world,” which suggest that they at least partially view their work in moral terms; in terms of beneficence. Of the thousands of investments VCs might screen per year, they end up funding less than one percent. Yet, it is troublingly hard to glean consistent moral criteria from their investment choices. For people with so much discretion, one would think a robust concern with “changing the world” in any meaningful, moral sense, would at least preclude them from investing in companies such as Zynga; or, for that matter, cause them to fire the management team of Uber.

— Morality and the Idea of Progress in Silicon Valley | Berkeley Journal of Sociology

There’s a very specific definition of progress in Valley culture, and it’s intrinsically tied in with the idea of “productivity” and “efficiency.” Optimizing for it often has a very human cause, one that gets brushed under the rug as simply the price of progress. It’s time to start questioning that narrative.

Well, Asus has released a new Android Wear watch that bears some similarity to Apple Watch. Cue the whining from the usual Apple pundits. I’ve only been in the Apple community for a little over a decade, but if there’s one thing that’s always rubbed me the wrong way about my fellow Apple users, it’s how spiteful they get over other companies releasing products whose designs or marketing are similar to Apple’s. Spare me.

It’s the degree of offense I get from the articles, podcasts, and other Apple chat that bugs me. I don’t know if they don’t think that consumers will be able to know the difference, or if they’re just offended by the idea. While it’s not a new phenomenon, Apple helped stoke the flames with it’s billion-dollar trade dress lawsuit against Samsung. Going back further, there was Apple v. Microsoft over the Windows 3.0 interface. Plus ça change… Frankly, it just comes off like endless partisan nonsense to me, something which tech journalism is already too rife with.

A credit to Tim Cook is that, since his tenure as CEO began, Apple’s become less litigious about trade dress crap, and opted to just focus on making products that don’t suck. A point could be made about competitors in Apple’s spaces using Apple-inspired design as a way to make their products appear better without putting Apple’s degree of care and skill into it, but even the best design can’t hide crap. If the Asus Zenwatch 2 succeeds, it won’t be because it has a digital crown and comes in rose gold. If Tim Cook’s Apple sees this as a threat, I’m sure they’d bear down on Asus with the full force they’re capable of. I don’t think they do.

You don’t like the Zenwatch 2? Don’t buy it. Tell your friends and family, if they ask for advice, not to buy it. Otherwise, relax. Your own Apple Watch isn’t going to become useless and worthless because some other company has a product that looks and is marketed similarly. It doesn’t work that way.

“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices,” Cook went on, getting even more explicit when talking about user privacy.

“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.”

— Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech On Encryption, Privacy | TechCrunch

Speaking of trust, I certainly don’t hear Larry Page talking about user privacy the way Tim Cook does. You should also read what Tim has to say on encryption. It’s not just a matter of