My mother (age 94) has severe hearing loss, and depends on hearing aids. She’s been through several pairs of them over the years. The ones she uses now work well for improving her hearing. Their Bluetooth connection to her phone also really helps her with phone calls.

Unfortunately, these expensive hearing aids don’t seat well in her ears, the right one frequently falling out. They also routinely need to be sent off for service, forcing her to use her older (non-Bluetooth) hearing aids for a week or more. It’s very difficult for her to make phone calls using the older hearing aids.

When I saw Apple pitching the Air Pods Pro 2 as having a hearing aid feature, I was intrigued. I knew they wouldn’t be a substitute for her primary hearing aids, but I figured they might work well enough as inexpensive spares that would easily integrate with her phone. I got her a pair as a Christmas gift.

Fiasco

Apple’s big pitch for products like the Air Pods Pro is it “just works”. As listening devices, yes; as hearing aids, no. When we set up the Air Pods Pro with her phone, there was no indication of any hearing aid functionality. It took a while to even verify we’d purchased the correct version of Air Pods Pro. Why Apple doesn’t clearly mark products with model numbers baffles me.

Apple’s support pages showed Settings app entries that simply didn’t appear. We updated her iPhone (from iOS 18.1 to 18.2), still no settings entries. Diving deeper into YouTube and Reddit revealed the firmware in the Air Pods themselves needed updating. But there’s no direct mechanism for this. More Google/Reddit/YouTube searches revealed a convoluted sequence of carefully timed charging case opening, closing, unplugging, plugging, and “waiting ten minutes” to force the Air Pods to update their firmware.

With the update hurdle cleared, we finally saw the hearing aid settings. Apple insists you take a hearing test before enabling the hearing aid function. This is not unreasonable, but we couldn’t even get this to start with my mom wearing the Air Pods, because it insisted they weren’t fit properly. Multiple tries with different ear fittings still wouldn’t start the test. We finally resorted to my son (her grandson) taking the test for her, enduring the maximum volume to get a test that would work properly for her.

Even after all that, it still wasn’t clear how to switch the Air Pods to “hearing aid” mode and adjust them. Several more trips to Google to verify we had that set up correctly.

Conclusion

In the end, we did get it worked out. They work sort of as well as her old spare hearing aids, with the benefit of having a Bluetooth phone connection. To be fair to Apple, their Air Pods are recommended as hearing aids only for people with “moderate” hearing loss, not the severe loss my mother has.

But the protracted fiasco required to set up and deploy the hearing aid feature is inexcusable. My son and I are both Apple savvy tech professionals. Yet it took us over an hour of scouring the internet to piece together enough information to get the hearing aid functionality to work. Much of the useful information we found was from sources outside of Apple. Some of the posts indicated even Apple Store “geniuses” were flummoxed by the difficult setup process.

Clearly if a major new feature requires an update to the Air Pod’s firmware, that update should happen immediately when the device first connects, not at some unknown time later. The hearing aid functionality should be controlled by a dedicated app, not buried deep in the settings menus. The multi-step setup process badly needs streamlining, and the fittings need to work with a wider range of ears, or allow skipping the “fit” test altogether.

Apple, having damaged many people’s hearing in the first place, is uniquely positioned to make hearing aids affordable and easily accessible. They’ve got the first part down. The Air Pods Pro price is cheap compared to the thousands for professionally fitted hearing aids cost. But the difficult setup is going to cause most people who want them for hearing assistance to just give up and return them.

I recently got a new Mac at work, and to my horror, upon first start up it started “enrolling” itself in the company’s Device Management remote administrative system. Now, for a random office worker this is fine; it allows the company to keep their system up to date and secure. But for software developers this is really a mess. Things like anti-virus tools wreck havoc with locally compiling and debugging code. I have enough problems to solve with my own code without the computer randomly changing out from under me.

How did my Mac get “enrolled”? When the company purchases a new system, they (or their vendor) hands off the computer’s serial number to Apple and tells them that the computer belongs to them. When the Mac boots for the first time, it phones home to the Apple mother ship, learns about this, and starts installing the company’s management tools.

To avoid this, reboot the machine with ⌘-R held down. This boots it into recovery mode. Use the disk tools to erase the “Macintosh HD” hard drive, and then use the option to re-install MacOS. This time, during the installation, do not connect to the Internet. Unplug the Ethernet cable, do not sign into any WiFi. The installer will whine about this several times, just ignore it (click “this computer is not connected to the Internet”). Mac OS will install without device management (you can easily set up the network connection later).

After this setup, the computer eventually phones home, and starts posting notifications nagging you to enroll the device. To make these go away, follow these instructions, which I’m quoting (with some clarification) below:

NOTE: With MacOS 12 Monterey, the procedure below no longer works. Instead, the new solution is to modify the host table to disable access to the relevant Apple servers. This page describes the new procedure.

“Using this SO answer, I found it’s no longer sufficient under Mojave. I found that additional *.plist files were added under the same namespace.

My solution was to:

• Restart, and boot in recovery mode (by holding down ⌘-R)
• In the recovery menu, go to Utilities > Terminal, and type:
  csrutil disable
  reboot
  This disables the Mac’s “System Integrity Protection” that normally prevents you from modifying system files.
• Boot in recovery mode again (⌘-R held down) so the SIP is off. Go to Utilities > Terminal again.
• The recovery mode mounts the main drive volume as a read-only file system. You’ll need to re-mount it read-write:

# Show list of mounted filesystems. You want to find the drive ID
# e.g. "/dev/diskXXX" for your hard drive
mount

diskutil unmount /dev/diskXXX    # Unmount the drive
diskutil mount /dev/diskXXX      # Re-mount as read-write

• Move the following files to disabled directories with these commands:

cd /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/System/Library
mkdir LaunchAgentsDisabled
mv LaunchAgents/com.apple.ManagedClient* LaunchAgentsDisabled/
mkdir LaunchDaemonsDisabled
mv LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ManagedClient* LaunchDaemonsDisabled/

If you’d like to restore the system integrity protection (a good idea), then type csrutil enable after the commands above, and then reboot.

Note: I tried moving /System/Library/CoreServices/ManagedClient.app to a different path, but that broke bootup.”

After the last reboot, the notifications nagging you to enroll the system should go away (there may be a leftover one in the queue, but that’s it).

Magic Leap is a company developing custom hardware and software for Augmented Reality (AR) experiences. You wear a special Magic Leap headset, and the world you see through the lenses is augmented with computer generated images and animations.

The company has been in business for eight years, and (according to Wikipedia) has consumed $1.4 billion in investment capitol (other reports put the total investment at $2.3B). It is just now “shipping” a “product”: a developer preview device costing over $2,000.

This company is going to fail. Here’s why:

Too much money invested

Any time a startup consumes more than eight figures of investment dollars without selling products or services to actual customers, it’s a huge red flag. When the investment goes to three commas without a sale, the red flag is burned to a crisp. The money comes in due to an elite form of FOMO among investors, not because the value is actually there. Think Theranos and Bernie Madoff. The startup CastAR was able to demonstrate a viable AR product on vastly less investment. And I’m confident Microsoft didn’t spend hundreds of millions creating the Holo Lens.

Magic Leap’s investors will never be repaid. As we’ll see below, there just isn’t enough of a market for expensive AR headsets to justify that much investment. People might point out Amazon.com, which went over a decade without making a profit. Yes, but they were successfully selling books to paying customers within a year of their founding. Not eight years and $1.4 billion later. As David Packard (the “P” in HP) famously said: “More organizations die of indigestion than starvation.”

The product is too expensive

The initial Magic Leap One developer preview system sells for $2,300. I’m guessing these are hand-made in small batches at their Florida headquarters. Assuming volume production in China, the price could come down to the $500 range. I doubt it goes much lower though; custom optics, speakers, batteries, displays and powerful computing hardware are not the cheapest commodity items. Mid to high end smartphones and cameras use similar components. They are some of the most mass-produced tech items in existence, and yet they rarely retail for less than $500.

This is a huge barrier to the market. Outside of a few niche markets, nobody needs an AR headset like they need a phone or a laptop. Your phone does AR pretty well right now. Fun AR apps like 2016’s smash hit Pokemon Go run on your phone, no headset necessary. Many AR experiences (like Pokemon Go) are experienced just fine by holding up a phone or tablet, and peering through it as a magic window. Given you already own the phone, spending another $500 is a non-starter.

And if you really want a headset? For less than $50, you can put your phone in a plastic (or cardboard!) headset and have a similar experience. No, it won’t be as good as Magic Leap’s, but it’ll be good enough. Most immersive AR apps are fun novelties you experience intermittently, not something you spend hours doing every day.

No developers

Suppose you’re an AR developer. You need to choose a platform. Here are your current choices:

• Apple’s ARKit. Millions of phones and tablets to run on, thriving app store to market your work.
• Android’s ARCore. Millions of phones and tablets to run on, thriving app store to market your work.
• Microsoft HoloLens. Small installed base, but backed by a huge, successful software company.
• Magic Leap. Over $1B in the red.

Most AR developers expecting to make a living are choosing the first two. This is particularly true for the sort of games and novelties we’ve seen in AR to date.

If Magic Leap’s business plan is to dominate the software platform or AR content, they’re hopelessly late to the party. Timing is important here. Microsoft invested huge sums to make the Windows Phone a viable alternative to Android and iPhones. But it was several years behind the two dominate platforms, and never caught up. Microsoft had to abandon the effort after three years.

There are some niche applications demanding the better fidelity a custom headset like the Magic Leap One or the HoloLens provide. Examples include specialized training, medical uses, and exotic technical work, like engine repair on a fighter jet. But these are niche markets. You’re selling hundreds, maybe a few thousand if you’re lucky. These customers can justify $500 headsets, but these markets only supports a handful of developers. This ecosystem simply isn’t large enough to support a company needing a return on a $1B+ investment.

The Flop

I predict Magic Leap makes it another two or three years before (non-augmented) reality finally catches up. In the end, the headsets will be a collectible curio (like Google Glass) and some giant company buys the patent portfolio for pennies on the (over $1B) dollars invested.

Update Sep-2018: Magic Leap is now fishing for business from the US Military. Even a windfall contract like that won’t repay the investment, though.

Update Dec-2018: So much for that military contract…

Update Mar-2020: Called it! Looks like they’re starting to circle the drain.

Update Apr-2020: Definitely circling the drain. The virus pandemic almost seems like an excuse, but it could also be the straw collapsing the camel.

Update Sep-2020: Savage Bloomberg story. “[Former Magic Leap CEO] Abovitz’s Twitter bio [now references] something called Project Phoenix. Abovitz, one could assume, is the mythical bird. That makes Magic Leap the ashes.”

Update May-2022: The first headsets are liquidated at a deep discount.

Update May-2023: Apple has entered the fray.

After an update a few weeks ago, I started seeing this alert frequently pop up:

It even complained about my employer’s WiFi, which I’ve been using for years. Everywhere I went, it asked: “Do you want to disconnect?”

Then it occurred to me: Using WiFi means you’re not using Verizon’s expensive cellular data. I have no proof, but it’s pretty easy to imagine Verizon rigged this app to scream Stranger Danger! every time your phone connects to WiFi, in the hope you’ll take the default response (“Yes, disconnect”) and keep burning down your data plan, perhaps racking up another $15–30 if you exceed it.

Hey, if you’re going online to transfer your payoff from the Russian KGB to your numbered bank account in Switzerland, you might not want do it on the WiFi at Starbucks. Otherwise (thanks to Edward Snowden) most apps and web sites have wised up and are using at least some form encryption between your phone and their servers. Unless you have reason to think you’re specifically targeted, public WiFi isn’t much of a risk.

To disable the alerts, launch Security & Privacy, then tap Menu > Settings > Web Security > WiFi Security OFF. Or consider nuking it altogether. If it came installed on your phone, you won’t be able to un-install it. To shut it up completely, go to your phone’s settings, then Apps > Application Manager > Security & Privacy. Click “Force Stop”, then “Disable”. And stop letting Verizon scare you away from using cellular data only when you really need it.

I like Mac hardware, but typically run Windows on it. Apple provides a (terrible) utility called Bootcamp to configure the Mac to run Windows.

Unfortunately, unlike most Windows hardware vendors, Apple rarely updates their support software for Windows. No wonder, it’s not really their main gig. So imagine my surprise when this popped up:

I clicked on the update button, and after a pause, the machine rebooted. Without even asking permission, huh? A few progress messages flashed on the screen, and then bonnnng it rebooted again. Windows logo, spinning dots. Then black screen, spinning dots. And the dots kept spinning for another half hour.

It can’t take a fast machine (this was a Mac Pro “trashcan”) more than 30 minutes to process 522MB of software, so something was clearly broken. Multiple reboot attempts all failed the same way: Windows logo, then black screen with spinning dots.

At this point, the options looked grim. I didn’t have a recent backup of the whole boot volume. Since Apple’s Bootcamp insists on destroying the entire volume to update Windows, restoring from scratch meant nearly an entire day of reinstalling all the apps and restoring all the data.

Fortunately, I found a way out: Fotis Gimian posted a wonderful tutorial on how to Install Windows 10 on a Mac without using Bootcamp. I simply followed the instructions on how to create a bootable Window 10 installation USB drive. With this drive, here’s the recipe for recovering the Windows boot:

• Unplug all USB devices except for the Windows install drive and the keyboard/mouse.
• Restart the Mac with the option (alt) key held down, and select the Windows install USB drive to boot from.
• When the Windows install screen comes up, select the language/keyboard options, and click “Next”.
• The next screen has a big “Install Now” button. Do NOT click that. Instead, click on “Repair your computer” (bottom left).
• Choose “Advanced Options”. On that page, select “System Restore”.
• Choose a restore point with a date before the problem occurred, then click “Restore”. Let it do its thing.
• Shut down, disconnect the USB Windows 10 install drive, then reboot.

It’s criminal of Apple to not provide a straightforward way of creating a Windows install drive without wiping out your existing windows partition. But thanks to Fotsie’s work, there’s a work-around.

I’m not a Trump supporter. But I am curious.

I work in downtown San Jose. My wife (not a Trump supporter either) had emailed to warn me about a potential traffic mess due to his rally there. When I replied that it wouldn’t be a problem for my commute, she suggested I go to it, just to see what’s up. Why not? The SJ Convention Center where it was held is only a few blocks from my office, and the 7pm start time was conveniently after work.

Protesters were everywhere. As I walked up to the front of the convention center, the guards (safely behind locked glass doors) pointed to the side. We had to walk around the block to the south “hall” (really, a giant tent).

As soon as I turned the corner, the crowd got even more raucous. I have never seen so many police in one place at one time. Blinking red & blue lights everywhere. I spotted shoulder patches from all over the South Bay: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, SJ, Sheriff’s officers, etc. Many were decked out in riot gear. Figure at least half of them were pulling in overtime, and you have quite a hit on local community budgets.

A phalanx of officers separated the path of those headed to the event from protesters shouting in both English and Spanish. About half a block from the venue you had to pass through a knot of cops checking for tickets. I stepped aside, googled “Trump San Jose Tickets” on my phone, filled out the form, and a couple minutes later had a screen to let me in.

After passing the ticket check, the street was completely blocked off, so the protest shouts faded behind us. Once inside the tent you had to pass through metal detectors and a bag check to get in. Trump had already started at 7pm sharp, I was bit late after getting the ticket.

The South Hall tent was less than half full when I arrived, maybe just over half full by the end. I’d guess a few thousand people. From where I was standing near the back of the crowd, Trump wasn’t much more than a bright orange blob in the distance. But his voice was amped up to earsplitting levels.

Trump is not wasting money on speechwriters. His 50 minute rant was coherent but disjointed. Much of his talk is about how press reports about him are untrue. He spent quite a bit of time “debunking” news stories that appeared weeks ago, but didn’t address the current crop covering the Trump University scam.

He’s already responding to Hillary’s “thin skinned” attacks. “She’s worried about me having my finger on the nuclear button? Hey, she’s the one who voted to go into Iraq…I wouldn’t have done that.” By contrast, Trump mentioned spending more on the military several times in his talk.

Other topics, in random succession: trade deficits, guns (proud of his recent NRA endorsement), repealing Obama care, cutting regulations on business. He loved bragging about winning the Republican nomination, and vowed to campaign hard in California and New York in the general election (most Republicans abandon those states to the Democrats).

His funniest bit (I’m messing this up but it was along the lines of): “Lying Hillary’s out there saying ‘Trump started out with a $100M inheritance’. My sister hears this and calls me up, ‘Really? You got $100M?’”

“Here’s the story” is his verbal tic. “Here’s the story folks…Folks, so hear’s the story…”. Maybe it buys him time to veer off in another direction.

When Trump left the stage, the entire crowd had to exit through a single doorway. This was done to facilitate the police directing the Trump crowd an entire block out of the way from the protesters. Apparently things got ugly; I avoided it by staying a block away from the convention center on my way back to the office.

From what I could see, it’s unfair to blame all the chaos on Trump and his supporters. Most of the shouting seemed to be coming from the protesters, and it appeared to be more racially motivated than political.

I like scanners. See, at one time I was really into books. But after a decade or two, you come to the conclusion books take physical space. Lots of it. So when my tax guy showed me his Fujitsu ScanSnap I was hooked. Mine ingested most loose papers, statements and documents. This cleared a shelf or two. I also scanned many books by sawing their spines off, and feeding them to the ScanSnap fifty pages or so at a time. It works great, and this cleared several more feet of shelf space.

However, there are some books I just can’t bear to saw up to feed to a sheet-feed scanner, and this is the niche the Czurtek ET16 falls into. I also had fantasies of using it to replace my slow, clumsy flatbed scanner. So, I signed up to the Indiegogo campaign, for $234.

First, let give big kudos to Czurtek for delivering within a month of the their promised date. This is incredibly good for such a complicated crowdfunding project!

The Hardware

The ET16 scanner comes nicely packaged, but it needs some minor assembly — you attach the scan head to its base. They pack a very nice screwdriver for this task, and some rubber stickers to hide the screws (hint: you’re not meant to take it apart).

Then the first realization hits: This product takes a lot of space. You should plan on a square meter or so on your desk to set this up and comfortably use it. And when you’re done, you have a fairly large device that does not neatly fold up, so you’ll need half a cubic meter to store it.

The scanner itself feels solid and well made. It’s packed with both desk and foot switches to operate it as you scan through your books. It has a nice LCD on top to monitor your scan and progress. A black rubber mat for placing your artwork is provided. Finally, it uses three lasers to determine the curvature of the book pages, so it can flatten them out in software.

The Software

Um, the software. Yeah. So this part is awkward. Fortunately, it might get better over time, but it took me a good hour or so to figure out how to use it, and I’m a professional software engineer who’s used to arcane technology. [Note: I’ve only tried the USB/Windows software, I have not tried the WiFi/Web usage.]

The software does little to guide you through the workflow of using the scanner. It was developed using some sort of alien UI toolkit that looks nothing like the native Windows it runs on. It also doesn’t look like a web page, or a Mac, or a phone, or anything else you’ve ever used. It insists on running as an admin process, which is creepy. Normally providing step-by-step instructions is beyond the scope of a review, but I found using this software so convoluted I’ll do it as a service to others struggling to figure it out.

Scanning documents

Getting the scanner to work at all is the first challenge. There’s no USB driver for the device, so Windows complains when your first plug it in. After much trial and error, I discovered that you must:

• Plug in the scanner into your PC’s USB port
• Turn on the scanner
• Launch the app
• Turn the scanner off then back on

After these steps, the software finally recognizes the scanner. Getting the “Visual Projector” to work is a good test that it’s finally operating.

Figuring out the app’s controls is the next challenge. On the far left edge of the application window, the two cryptic icons switch between “Scanner” (top) and “Visual Projector” modes. Now I’ll walk you through how I actually managed to get some documents scanned. First, select the “scan” button (the rectangle with the horizontal line through it on the far left side).

See that black line underneath the “Scan” page icon at the top left? Click on it. Surprise! It’s a pop-up menu for selecting gray/B&W/color/seal (seal??). Select the type of scan you want. Click on the Scan page icon at the top left, and choose if you’re scanning flat artwork or a book that’ll need to be “flattened” in software. Now you’re ready to start scanning. Position artwork, press button (or foot pedal) wait for the red LED on the top of the scanner to turn on and back off, repeat.

You’re able to scan a new page every few seconds, but the PC software (even on my beefy 4GHz multi-core PC) does not keep up. After you’re done scanning, watch the “X/Y” counter on the top right of the scanner’s LCD screen. You need to wait for the first number (the “X”) to go to zero and then wait for the last page (page “zero”) to be transmitted before you’re actually done scanning. There’s no other progress indicator telling you how far behind the app is, or when it’s completely finished.

When you’re sure all the scanned pages have made it to the PC, hit the Escape key to exit scanning mode (I didn’t see any other way to do this? More hidden UI). At this point, the app created a bunch of JPEG files listed on the right side of the app. These are buried in the Application install folder (hint: this is probably why it insists on running as admin. Earth to Czurtek: Next time aim for the user’s Documents folder, OK?)

On the right side of the app, you’ll see a list of image files. At the bottom right, those cryptic letters (“SEL All REV Undo”) are actually (surprise!) buttons. Click on “All” so all the images are selected with checkboxes.

Now you can click the “To PDF” button at the top left, then the “PDF” to the right of that, and it’ll pop open a save dialog and allow you to create a PDF file. Note the JPEG files are kept around; you’ll need to go into the application folder (as administrator!) to delete them. Finally, to start another document I found it easiest to simply quit the app and re-launch it. Otherwise, the image files are still there from the last document scanned.

Results

Well, I’m keeping the flatbed scanner. The lights on the Czurtek aren’t bright enough to light documents completely evenly. And they’re too close to the camera. For matte documents this doesn’t matter much. But when I tried scanning some of my daughter’s pencil artwork, the lights reflected off the graphite back into the camera lens, producing terrible results. For artwork or photography, the results from the Czurtek are not better than a careful snapshot with a good cellphone camera.

For B&W documents on matte paper, the Czurtek does a better job. I tried some book pages, and it does a capable job of flattening the pages, although some picked up a bit of edge blur along the way. If you’re trying convert a book with text and diagrams (and you don’t want to saw the spine off) the Czurtek can do the job.

One case where the Czurtek did a wonderful job was some old large tractor-feed printouts (those were a thing 30 years ago). The Czurtek had no problem with the large page size, and did a great job turning them into PDFs once I figured out the arcane workflow.

I have only used the device with their application on a PC. I have not tried their hosted application over WiFi.

To sum up:

• It takes up a lot of space, both to use and to store when not in use.
• OK scans, good for text and line art diagrams.
• Not so good for photos, artwork, or glossy printed material
• Reasonable job of scanning books and other bound material
• Great for larger documents too big to fit in a sheet-feed or flatbed scanner.
• The application software, um, well… let’s just say it can only get better.