Magic! at the Mall.

Introduction

I got my first phone sometime around 2018¹. I got my second last month.

My first phone was a silver iPhone 7. I remember my friends with iPhones had iPhone SEs or 6s back then, and having a 7 was a subtle step up. I was the one who’d take photos because I had the “best” camera. I rarely used it when I got it — our school had a phone-free policy, so I’d have to dump my phone into this wicker basket of phones at the start of the day. I’d rescue it at the end of the day, then not really do anything with it after I got home. I didn’t even get a phone plan until I started high school, and til then I didn’t use my phone for much besides Google Hangouts and the occasional FaceTime.

There was one classmate who had an iPhone 8, and I recall thinking the X was so excessive. What were the new features, besides a slightly bigger screen and no home button? Big deal. Fast forward a few years, and I’d think people who got the then brand-new iPhone 13 were on the bleeding edge, perhaps a little extravagantly so.

But it’s 2024, and the dynamic island and USB-C charger and three cameras of the iPhone 15 are all the rage. I’d still stubbornly stuck to my iPhone 7. All of a sudden, I was the only friend with a home button. I’d stopped getting updates a few years ago, but I didn’t really miss any of the new features. My 7 served me well — besides, well, Uber Eats not working with anything under iOS 16 and FaceTime and Discord calls starting to stutter out. I still didn’t really feel a need to upgrade, and having an old phone felt almost like a point of pride for me at this point: I’d taken such good care of my phone that here it was, six years later, with no scratches, a two day battery life, and working like a charm.

Unfortunately, the day came last month: I’m headed to Cambridge (UK) for the fall, and I’ll need both my Canadian SIM, to receive SMS verification codes and such, and a local SIM for calling. My iPhone 7 doesn’t support an eSIM, so I won’t be able to dual-SIM. With a heavy heart, I made my way to my local Apple Store.

There, I got an iPhone 14 (doubling my model number!). While I was there, a lot of casual magic happened. I’d never bought a phone in person before, or really spent significant time in an Apple Store, so I was pleasantly surprised by some of the little touches I noticed. This was also my first time switching phones, so I got to experience the sheer wizardry that is Quick Start. And while I was booking my pickup slot, I also noticed Apple Vision Pro demos available, and I impulsively booked a demo. The AVP isn’t something that I’ve really thought about, besides seeing a few tweets and video thumbnails, or considered for actual use, but I found the demo fairly enchanting.

I think there are a few aspects that make magic.

• Magic inverts expectations while building on them. It makes the hard things unexpectedly easy and the impossible things possible, but it has to do so in an incredibly intuitive way. There shouldn’t be a ‘why does this work?’ — there can only be an ‘of course’.
• Magic is embedded and composable, not standalone and sandboxed. It’s adaptable to whatever you need in the moment, and comprehensive in covering everything you might think about.
• Magic is predictive but forgiving. It figures out the word on the tip of your tongue and the recurring patterns that make up your day. When you get something wrong, it gently nudges you to ask if that’s what you really want.
• Magic can disappear. With more magic comes more responsibility. The more magical an experience, the more tiny flaws can quickly break the suspension of disbelief.

The Quick Start and AVP demo experiences both captured these traits — I think that afternoon in the Apple store was the highest density of casual magic I’ve experienced this summer. This is a post about those moments of magic at the mall and what makes a computing experience compelling. I’ve always been jokingly disdainful about Apple fans, but in those few hours in the store, I started to see what they’re so enthusiastic about.

Don’t (Quick) Start Now

Picking up my phone was a very straightforward 5-minute errand. Unfortunately, when I got home and was admiring my edge-to-edge screen, I noticed the phone had a scratch. I wasn’t about to spend that much money and take a defective phone, so I had to go back and exchange it². I didn’t want to risk taking another trip again if there was another visual defect or some software problem, so I decided to do my setup in-store (and also because the only AVP demos were at the end of the day, so I had some time.)

I don’t think I had to worry much about the migration though, since Quick Start was seamless. Quick Start is a way to wirelessly transfer all your apps, app data, messages, and preferences over to a new device. You can do Quick Start via an iCloud backup, or you can run one directly from the device. One really nice touch was that I didn’t even have to log into or search for the Apple store WiFi, and even over the public WiFi, which I didn’t expect to be very fast, the setup was done in less than five minutes. I don’t have a lot of photos or data backed up on my phone, but nonetheless I was impressed. This speed underscores something about magic: it works fast. Magic doesn’t need endless loading bars and doesn’t get stuck downloading something.

There are plenty of small touches that transferred over: my texts and contacts were just as I’d left them, I was already logged into most apps, my wallpaper and lock screen was identical, the years of settings I’d carefully curated were in place, my pirated textbook PDFs were set up perfectly with Apple Books. My muscle memory for everything still worked, without any of the tedious setup and comparing things between either phone. It was like having an exact, scaled-up replica of my old phone.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so pleasantly surprised with a migration process. When I bought my phone, I was dreading the hours I’d expected of downloading everything and setting up logins and preferences again. Taking all that away with such attention to detail was a very good investment on Apple’s part. I used to be distrustful of cloud syncs and signing into browser/device services³, but they’re so helpful for applications where they’re (somewhat) strictly necessary. I think background processes like syncs and preprocessing do a lot of the heavy lifting for magic. I have no insight into how Apple’s photos systems works, for example, but I’d bet they’re creating their recap albums with an off-device queueing service and they’re running their people detection online when a new photo’s uploaded to iCloud Photos. This ties into my previous point about magic working to match your speed — because the processing happens before you’re looking to access something, it seems more magical when you go to look something up and it’s already there.

This background processing is also a lot easier when your endpoints are all centralized, because this provides consistency in how data is stored/read. This is how you can make your service feel omniscient and predictive, since you have all the data to figure out all the patterns. You can certainly engineer a way to connect more disparate data sources: I keep coming back to reference Cambria lenses, and I was introduced to the Resource Description Framework model in one of the first few chapters of Designing Data-Intensive Applications. I just finished the book, and one of the primary focuses of the last chapter is on data integration via derived state, batch processing, and federated/unbundled databases, which I expect would be the key components for bringing something like this to generic devices. To this end, Samsung’s Smart Switch seems to be able to bring iOS data to Android devices as well as from other Android devices to a Samsung, and I’d be interested in learning more about how it all works.

I think Quick Start’s adaptability and coverage were key to making it feel like magic. I wouldn’t have expected Apple Books, for example, to get ported over so seamlessly, though now that I think about it, it probably does back up to iCloud. Even apps outside of the Apple ecosystem, like Discord and FitBit had me already authenticated and all my app-specific settings were translated over. Magic works over everything – it’s not meant to let on that it’s forgotten something and can’t be even slightly inconsistent with the ecosystem’s ‘magic system’, and Quick Start does so expertly. Maybe this is all because I haven’t done iOS development before and this is all thanks to some slick data access API requirements, but I’m so awed by how flexible the setup feels.

I think two things that could be improved, perhaps, are the Apple Wallet transfers for credit cards (although I guess there’s good regulatory and privacy reasons for this) as well as SIM-card / phone-number based apps like Whatsapp or Signal. But even off the top of my head, I can think of some technical limitations with each, so there’s probably a reason they’ve not been implemented.

Interlude: I Miss My Home Button

With my new phone itself, there are a few key things I’ve noticed. The first is fairly obvious: the camera quality is certainly a step up (and in tandem, the quality of the screen to view the photos I take has definitely improved). I was recently at a work dinner with my fellow interns, and I took out my phone to take a quick photo for my parents. The second I opened the camera app, I blurted out that the camera quality was so much better than my old phone. Doubling my model number also seemed to double the warmth, depth of colour, and sharpness of even casual pics. When I was on a trip to the UK earlier this month, I took a few nighttime photos of the very classic architecture – lots of fine details and masonry. Despite the dim lighting, the photos were still able to capture things quite well with minimal grain. I’m very impressed with this camera, and I can’t imagine the further upgrades that the newest models are supposed to deliver.

Another thing I’ve appreciated is finally having good NFC support! I wrote another blog post about building a webring that interacts with a physical NFC ring, something that wasn’t possible to test with my old phone. I’ve been a little obsessed with NFC tags and having little physical checkpoints that interact with my digital world (for example, this do-not-disturb phone pillow, or its more consumer counterpart Brick). I’ve played around a little with NFC and the Shortcuts app, and I’m also happy with how much Shortcuts has levelled up since iOS 15.

Finally, I’ve realized how nice it is that apps and features are able to pick up on patterns of usage. One example is the wallet app – I was travelling abroad and was using a credit card that I don’t normally use. Within a few days, Apple Wallet knew to bring that card up as my default when I double-pressed the power button. This is a nice tidbit of magic — Apple Wallet was smart enough to pick up on my intents without explicit configuration, but it’s easy to override and pick a different card if I needed to.

There’s much more, like being able to customise my home screen more with different icons and widgets and fonts, but I’d like to move on to another major magic experience.

1.4 Pounds

I impulsively booked an AVP demo since I’d be there at the store anyways, having not really seriously thought about the device or read up about its features beyond the ‘first look’ demo that was all over my feed. When I got there, the first thing the Specialist said was that the AVP was not a VR headset: it was a spatial computer. I still don’t really buy the rebranding — it feels a tad pedantic — but I will say it’s unlike anything I’d ever tried before.

My headset experience is limited to a ten-minute stint playing Fruit Ninja on an Oculus Quest during a summer camp, so maybe that’s why I was so intrigued. First off, I was not expecting to have my face scanned and a custom-fit headset delivered to the demo station. I think I have a fairly normal set of face shape/head size/vision requirements, so maybe it was all a bit of theatre to make the demo feel more personalised.

Tailoring the demo is the major thing I felt like was lacking. The experience starts with learning how to browse photos, view live photos immersively, and navigate around apps, culminating in a very well-shot immersive video. This really highlighted the gestures and new interactions that were possible with the AVP and certainly provided the most wow-factor. I wish I’d have gotten more walkthroughs through more productivity and everyday work demos, though. The AVP was constantly touted as a portable way to make the world your workspace for anything, but we never got to actually see what doing work was like. Going through a spreadsheets program, editing a video, or doing some debugging might have made the demo more compelling for people looking for a more serious, professional use-case for the AVP. It would have been annoying to set up and pair a MacBook for every demo, but surely there’s a way to streamline this (make more magic, y’all!) It would have been extra amazing if the demo could pull from iCloud data – there must be something they can copy-paste from Quick Start. I would have loved to learn how to read my EPUBs from Apple Books or how to use Shortcuts with the AVP, especially any cross-device capabilities. If anything, the current demo sells the AVP as a (heavier), more immersive version of the VR headsets already available, focusing on entertainment and casual usage: exactly what Apple was trying to avoid.

Controlling the AVP was a bit like how I imagine Harry Potter et al. felt at Hogwarts — harnessing magic is tricky. The calibration helped serve as a tutorial to pick up the mouse mechanics, and I liked the slight gamification. Once you got used to having to look exactly where you wanted the cursor and do the pinch-clicking, the tutorial went by fast. Pointing with my eyes didn’t feel very accurate at first, though, unless I really focused on a point, or if I shifted my focus, then looked back. Doing gestures without a button also felt a little unusual due to the lack of tactile feedback, but by the end of the demo I was well-adjusted. I was still relying on instructions for when to use the crown and for what, but I’m sure with more time it’d have gotten ingrained into muscle memory.

One of my favourite parts of the demo was that cinematic video I mentioned before — it tied together the best of the audio/video capabilities. There are a bunch of safari and immersive walk-with-the-animals-type clips, and I’d swear that the elephants were right by me. There was a scene with a tightrope walker, and I felt my heart drop when they also fell off. There was also an NBA scene where the player throws the ball right at your face — I visibly flinched, and the Specialist said she uses it as a marker of how far people are into the video when they recoil.

I loved the depth of field of the AVP, and I think it really helped with the suspension of disbelief and the resulting magic. Had the videos felt flatter or the layers more compressed, it wouldn’t have gotten the feeling just right. Because most of the demo was so flawlessly executed, I think it made it obvious when and highlighted when things didn’t go quite so well (e.g. the visual pointing). That’s another aspect of magic: if you’re going to build an immersive and comprehensive experience, it’s crucial you take care of the smallest details too.

Conclusion

A few days ago, before I started writing this post, I was trying to check my phone when it froze. I’d opened the Clock app to set an alarm, but all I saw were a row of icons at the bottom with a grey screen. I locked my phone and swiped up to open it — it faded out the clock font but wouldn’t open the app. It was much too late to go out to the Apple Store, and I was dreading making the trek the next day. The illusion of magic? Gone⁴.

But I’ll forgive Apple on this one, since the whole experience of getting the phone itself was enough magic for a good bit. Between Quick Start, old new features, and the Apple Vision Pro, I’ve both been able to be enchanted and think a little more about what made each so charming. All of the encounters captured some of the core aspects of magic: Quick Start flipped the script on tedious phone migrations and did so in an incredibly intuitive, embedded, and comprehensive way. My new phone made me appreciate the power of good predictions, and how those little touches can seem so obvious in hindsight. On the other hand, the Apple Vision Pro underscored the responsibility that comes with this power — its immersion felt magical, which especially underscored the handful of papercuts along the way.

Overall, I think what really makes or breaks magic is how well it fits into an existing worldview and how intuitive it is. I was comparing magic in software to classic fantasy book series like Harry Potter, which have very composable, expansive, and consistent magic systems. Tech is how we’ll make hard things easy and make the impossible possible, but we’ll have to do so carefully to really capture the magic. Radically different offerings, like the AVP, bring a lot of opportunities for moments for casual magic, but I can appreciate the challenges that must have come up in order to make it feel so spellbinding.

I thought I’d have hated getting a new phone, but I both appreciate the phone itself and the fascinating few hours I had at the Apple store because of it. I plan on holding on to this phone for a long time again. I went from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 14, so the logical next step is to wait for the next multiple of seven. When I drop by to pick up my iPhone 21, I’ll see what demos, features, and crazy, magical moments are possible then.

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P.S. If you’re looking for posters or art, you should check out the Toronto Island Patent Press on Etsy! A friend and I made a set of posters based on retro schematics and patents for classic computing companies, like IBM, Nortel, and DeskMaster. They’re available as digital downloads in a wide variety of very aesthetic colourways — perfect for the sort of people who geek out over the first monitors and blueprint drawings.