Docker’s birthday made me think about containers, and then there are some more thoughts about online payments and the iPhone SE.

Docker birthday events

Last week Docker celebrated its 3rd birthday, and it did so in style. Around the world there were about 120 events, usually organized by Docker meetups. And yes, I did go to the one in Melbourne. It was a lot of fun, and I learned some things although I spent more time talking (and working on my own Docker related projects) than actually working on the challenge. I think it was a great idea, and has no doubt brought in many new developers to a budding ecosystem.

It seems to be a good time to have a quick reflection on Docker as well, as it’s been taking the (development) world by storm. Where AWS (which celebrated its 10th around the same time) leveled the playing field in terms of infrastructure, Docker seems to be doing the same at an OS level. What I mean by that is that when you use a Docker container you don’t have to worry about the underlying OS. You just have a container, which runs something, and that’s all you really need to know.

Docker also introduced a new version of their software for OS X and Windows that doesn’t need Virtualbox anymore. This makes it faster and easier to run. For years I’ve been predicting¹ that some day operating systems will become less important, and I believe that Docker is a good step in this direction. Because to a Docker container it doesn’t matter whether you run Windows, OS X, or Linux. Everything it needs is included inside it.

Now, I don’t see my full hope coming to pass anytime soon. As in, I would really like it if applications with a user interface could be used this way. A best case scenario example here would be a game. The developers create a container containing all the libraries and such that the game needs. The container can then be run on any operating system, and won’t care if you decide to start using something else.

Of course, I realize that in many ways this is just a dream. I don’t have enough knowledge about game development to see the impracticalities of such a system. In my head I don’t see why it wouldn’t work for games, and potentially it could even help with making it easier to port games to consoles. If those consoles can handle the same containers (and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t), that would truly give you a single version to be run on all systems². Size might be a constraint here, but that’s a solvable problem (even if it’s just by including bigger drives, and yes I’m looking at you Apple).

There are other problems with this idea as well, such as applications needing to deal with the different ways interfaces work (Mac users, such as myself, won’t be happy if everything suddenly looks ugly, aka different). At some future time, I will likely turn these thoughts into a bigger blogpost, but for now just think about it. Wouldn’t this be nice?

Online payment innovations

It looks like there are going to be some changes in the world of online payments. First it seems that Apple is finally going to extend Apple Pay to the web. The focus for Apple Pay has always been on the physical part of it, where it replaces your credit/debit card in stores. Especially in the USA where apparently credit cards have for a long time been insecure³ this was an important feature. Support for it in the USA is lacking though, and in countries like Australia where every store seems to support it it’s just not available.

There was also support for it with in-app purchases, but rolling it out to websites is a big thing and will really make it take off⁴. It’s not that the other use cases don’t have their place, but how often do we buy something online? And how often do we wish that would be easier? I for one try to never store my credit card details at an online store (obvious exceptions are the big players like Amazon and Apple) because I’m not sure I can trust their infrastructure to be secure.

Yes, PayPal does something similar to this, but it’s good to see more movement in this market and because it’s built-in on iOS devices Apple will have a big advantage there.

Another player has entered the payment market, but with a completely different way of doing things. Instead of generating tokens and requiring sellers to support a new payment method, Privacy works by generating a credit card number at the time you need it.

It’s currently USA only, so I can’t test it right now, but it seems that they’ve developed a nice system. The way I imagine it works is that they’ll have their big list of numbers (about a billion or so), and when you request one using their browser plugin it will make that number valid for a short period of time, let’s say 15 minutes. During that time, or until a payment is made, it is then coupled to your account with Privacy. This seems to be the way to work around the limitations you would otherwise have due to the way credit card numbers work.

They also seem to have something set up for recurring payments, so you can use it for things like your Netflix subscription. So obviously the cards can also work for longer periods than a single payment, which is something that I don’t think is supported by Apple Pay.

There are of course limitations to this. Right now Privacy only works with Google a Chrome on the desktop, which means they’re completely missing the mobile market. As more and more purchases are actually made using mobile devices⁵, that is an important and big limitation. They’re probably working on a solution for that, maybe a separate app with an extension like 1Password, but until they have that they’re missing out on a big part of the market.

An issue with all of these services is the physical world. Often enough when you make a booking for something they will ask you to bring the credit card you used to make the booking. I don’t think this is a good way of verifying someone, but it still happens. So if you end up using any of these solutions, please make sure you don’t use them when you have to show your card. It wouldn’t be fun if you missed a flight because you were secure…

Of course, one way to deal with that is not to use that company, but you might not always have a choice in the matter. Other than that though, I’m happy to see different solutions coming in this space and am hoping to see them flourish.

iPhone SE

I already mentioned Apple’s new phone briefly last week, but I feel like I didn’t do it enough justice. Ben Thompson’s article about it reminded me that this is basically the cheap iPhone people have been asking for. I’m sure there are people who disagree with that, or say that it’s not cheap enough. But it is a top of the line phone, available for less than the two-year old model used to be.

And make no mistake, it basically is the current model iPhone, with a smaller screen and a lot cheaper at $400 USD⁶. Which in many ways makes it a far better deal than the $550 USD iPhone 6 is. For a smaller screen and price you get far better hardware. Of course, as Apple still has the ridiculous 16GB base storage you’re likely to pay more than that $400. Most likely because of the 6s line they couldn’t change that now, as it wouldn’t make sense that the cheap phone has higher base storage than the premium phone. Hopefully they’ll (finally) fix that in September, at least they seem to be doing so with the iPad.

What I’m mostly interested in with the SE though is what will happen one year from now. Will there be an SE 2, or are they going to keep this same model around for another year? And if they keep it around, will the price drop or stay the same? I wouldn’t be surprised if one year from now they’re offering this same phone with the same price, but a higher amount of storage in the base model (and maybe a new color). It would still be an excellent phone at that time, and they might see the storage as a good enough improvement. Oh well, I guess we’ll find out in a about a year.