Smart Quotes and Apostrophes

I'm going to level with you now; this is going to be a geeky post but you might learn something pretty surprising about typing. I know I did.

One of my favourite typefaces is Adobe Song (Adobe Minion but a little lighter and looser, designed for simplified Chinese).  There'll be those that say I probably shouldn't use it for latin text but I just like how it looks. I often set Apple Pages to this typeface when I want to just type. I set song lyrics and poems in this typeface regularly. A problem I've had with using Adobe Song has long been an inexplicable space after apostrophes.

Adobe Song and the apostrophe mystery

Needless to say this drove me crazy. I tried the obvious: highlighting the space to see if it could be manually deleted, playing with tracking and kerning, you name it. Nothing seemed to sort this out. 

I ran a web search for this problem and the plot thickened. I discovered plenty of people complaining about something similar, but they were using Microsoft Word, not Apple's Pages. I opened Photoshop and tried to type with Adobe Song there and discovered that there too I got this irritating space. Three different applications across different operating systems and the same problem. That told me this probably wasn't a bug but something I didn't know about typefaces that was tripping me up.

Quotation Mark Ignorance

To cut a long story short, I discovered that almost all of us type the wrong (for want of a better word, as I'll explain) character when we are typing apostrophes and quotation marks. As so many of us are typography laymen, Microsoft and Apple have a setting in their word processors for enabling ‘smart quotes’ that automatically corrects for our ignorance. This setting is enabled by default and most of us will never even notice.

Pages' smart quotes

What does this setting do?  It automatically substitutes the ' character for a nice curly ’. You see, they are not the same character.

An imaginary headline set in Times New Roman. Note that using the correct keyboard key for an apostrophe here is rendered as a symmetrical typewriter apostrophe when smart quotes is disabled.

Back when typewriters were the word processor of choice, it simply wasn't practical to have a key for all these different yet similar punctuation marks. It became acceptable to use ‘dumb quotes’ when using a typewriter. The apostrophe, single quotation mark and prime symbol were all entered using the same key and a symmetrical ' was invented for simplicity's sake. You'll still often see this character online, where text has been entered using programs without a ‘smart quotes’ feature (including for apostrophes in the body of this article, typed online. Safari has a ‘smart quotes’ feature but it doesn't seem to affect this web app).

When computers took the place of typewriters people's habits were set hard and so for the sake of typography the ‘smart quotes’ feature was widely adopted by software companies. Usually, this feature works fine and substitutes in curly quotation marks when we use the key left over from typewriter days and we hardly notice – so much so that when it goes wrong as it did for me using my Adobe Song, I was at a loss to know what had happened!

What was happening was that I was entering apostrophes and Apple Pages was substituting the apostrophes with a quotation mark, as is its wont. When the quotation mark went in, so did the added space that should follow a quotation mark. Of course, I wanted an apostrophe, which does not mandate a space.

Apostrophes, Quotation Marks and Primes

So what should we be typing in for quotation marks if we don't want to rely on smart quotes?  Well, there are three main characters that you're likely to be typing in using the same character on your keyboard: apostrophes, quotation marks and primes.

For an apostrophe, you're almost certainly already using the correct character. On my Mac's keyboard it's the key to the right of the colon/semi-colon key. The issue with apostrophes is that using the correct character on your keyboard for an apostrophe will likely give you a typewriter apostrophe rather than a nice curly one, as I said earlier. This is why smart quotes generally substitutes this apostrophe with a closing curly single quote.

For a quotation mark, you should be typing option-] to for open marks and option-shift-] for closing ones.

The symbols keyboard in iOS 7 is labelled with a closing double quotation mark/speech mark but the default symbol you actually get is a double prime.

A prime is the mark used to signify feet and minutes, amongst other things. To enter this character, you will probably have to use your Mac's Special Characters window accessed from the edit menu in most apps. ‘Smart quotes’ won't do this for you so it's good to know you shouldn't use the apostrophe key for this at all ideally.

If you are using an iOS device then you can get these symbols by pressing and holding the characters on the virtual keyboard. Bizarrely, the typewriter double quotation mark key is labelled with curly double quotation marks/speech marks. iOS supports primes but I cannot see any way to enter them using the keyboard.

What About Speech Marks/Double Quotes?

Typewriter quotes and opening and closing speech marks/double quotes in Times New Roman

The same story, I'm afraid, but with some confusing US nomenclature thrown in for good measure. You see, I've said ‘quotation mark’ throughout this article referring to the single quotation mark. I'm British, and in Britain this is what a quotation mark is. The double quotation mark is a ‘speech mark.’ I'm sure not all Brits will agree, but those same Brits probably say ‘alternate’ instead of ‘alternative’!

Regardless, the symbol you get if you press shift-' is an old typewriter double quotation mark. Again, it'll often get automatically converted to a nice pretty curly double quotation mark if you have smart quotes on, but if you want to know the shortcut for entering this manually it's option-[ for opening marks and option-shift-[ for closing.

Does It Matter?

If you have smart quotes on – and you likely do – then it probably doesn't matter as your word processor will handle this for you most of the time. Unfortunately, the smart quotes feature isn't perfect and if you love your type as much as I do then you want to know your beautiful curly quotes from your typewriter throwbacks. Great type is about the details. It's also just nice to know what you're doing and not have to rely on your computer to correct you. Of course, the likelihood is that nobody will notice if you just use dumb quotes, but I'd like to think my audience would be made up of the type of people that would care!

…but I digress. 

2013 iPhone Lineup

What Apple Stands For

Let's make this clear: Apple is not Samsung. The story that many have focussed on in the mobile space over the last year has been the rise of Samsung. What so few media outlets can be bothered to say, however, is that Samsung's growth has not come at the expense of the iPhone. On the contrary, the iPhone 5's sales have been excellent. What Samsung has done is eat up the market share of everyone else. It has dominated the market below a certain price point. Above that price point, it is still very much behind the iPhone.

People who take a cursory look at the mobile market – and sadly, this includes many mainstream media outlets – see Samsung's market share percentage and think that makes them the industry leader. That could not be more inaccurate. The share of the market Apple owns may be smaller in unit sales than Samsung, but the units they sell are of far greater value. It's akin to comparing Kia's marketshare to that of Jaguar Land Rover. They might sell more, but they have to sell 3-4 units to make the same profit.

This is what Apple has always done. Look at PC sales. Apple lags way behind the market in terms of units sold, but it dominates above a certain price point – the price point for which Apple chooses to make computers and the point at which all the profit exists.  Steve Jobs famously said that Apple 'can't ship junk.' They'd rather make beautiful hardware and sell only to the top end of the market than lower standards and try to mop up the far less profitable lower end of the market. Wouldn't you?

Apple doesn't sell a computer for less than £499. Their cheapest laptop is £849. They could sell a laptop for £299 and try to compete for the single-digit profit margin such a price point offers, but they don't want to. Why? Because doing so would mean making a piece of 'junk.' To illustrate how hard it is to make a profitable computer in that space look no further than the speculation that Samsung is pulling out of the laptop market.

What Apple Was Never Going To Do

Given this fact about Apple, why would anyone expect them to make a 'cheap' iPhone? The iPhone has succeeded in being something very difficult to achieve; it's an affordable yet aspirational product. A cheap iPhone would make it more affordable but less aspirational. It would also mean making an inferior piece of hardware (in fairness, some might argue they did that with the iPhone 5C but it's still a very high-quality piece of hardware).

As much as some people would love to see a £249 iPhone, that was an expectation borne out of a lack of understanding of what Apple does. Criticism of Apple for not releasing a £249 iPhone is as absurd as criticising Jaguar Land Rover for not releasing a £20,000 Range Rover.  The only difference is that instead of a Range Rover probably being out of most people's price range forever, the iPhone is affordable enough that anyone that really wants one can get one.

Problems Facing Apple

Apple is going through a purple patch that has lasted several years now. There's good reason for them to feel very happy about their current position. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't threats facing the company. I see two main threats that Apple faces. 

• The emergence of the Asian market. Nearly two thirds of the world's population lives in Asia. The Chinese and Indian economies have been booming for years and they are at the point now where iPhone-class products are in demand. To ignore this emerging market would leave the door open for huge profits to be made by competitors and in the long term, huge leverage over the global market to be earned. Thusfar, the iPhone has not bowled over the Chinese market the way it did the North American and European ones, for whatever reason.
• Cheap phones got good. For a long time, the iPhone stood head and shoulders above the competition. Everyone with any sense wanted one, even if they couldn't afford one. Now, even cheaper phones made by the likes of Samsung are good enough. 'Good enough' is a dangerous thing in technology. Our human race has a depressing knack of being satisfied with 'good enough', eschewing 'great' for the most meagre of savings.

The iPhone 5C is Apple's response to these threats, not to Samsung's perceived encroachment in existing markets. When you set up a company you are often advised to carry out a SWOT analysis. This means writing down your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

• Apple's strengths are industrial design, software engineering, vertical integration and logistics.
• Their opportunities are obvious: to be in Asia what they are in the Western world to an enormous market with tremendous potential for growth.
• Their weaknesses are that they must compete above a certain level in the market and that their products as of last week only came in two colours.
• Their threats are as above and in many ways the same as their opportunities.

Apple is bringing its strengths to bear on the Asian market and trying to mitigate its weaknesses and threats.

The iPhone 5C makes the second tier iPhone more appealing. Now it's a brand new product you are getting if you buy it, not last year's model. It's vibrant and fun. That should appeal in Asia and to the youth markets in the US and Europe. It's easier to produce which allows Apple to meet demand in a much larger market.

It's cheap enough to appeal the way the previous year's model used to to some, but it's expensive enough to remain an aspirational yet affordable product in the Asian market. 

The iPhone 5C is a serious injection of colour into the range

What Have They Done Before?

The iPod Nano was cheaper, but never cheap.

We've seen this before. The original iPod was white or black. It was hugely expensive. As time went on Apple brought the price down as manufacturing made that possible but it stopped at a certain point – a sweet spot where it was cheap enough that anyone could get one if they really wanted one, but it was expensive enough to retain perceived value to customers.  They then released  cheaper, less capable ranges of iPods in the iPod Mini, then iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. These came in a variety of colours and were hugely successful. With the iPod range seemingly reaching the end of its life, or at least its life as a major product, it has never been a 'cheap' product in any sense of the word.

What Apple Should Get Credit For

The iPhone 5S' fingerprint sensor will grab the headlines and understandably so. If Apple has executed on this well then it could remove one of the few frustrations of using a smartphone. How many hours do you spend over the lifetime of a phone typing in its passcode?  It's that little bit of annoyance removed every single time you pick up the device. I think that's bigger than some realise at this point.

The fingerprint sensor also has other tremendous security implications. A huge number of people – Apple say as much as 50% – don't have any passcode on their phone. With the power of a modern smartphone, that's crazy. Also, how many people have short, easily-broken iTunes passwords because they don't want to remember a huge long secure code each time they make a purchase in the App Store or iTunes Store? With the fingerprint sensor allowing verification there too, people can set huge long passwords for these things without any added inconvenience.

Another thing Apple should get credit for is going 64-bit. Nobody was pushing them to do this. It opens up the road ahead of iOS devices and it shows Apple's engineering ambition. I think that deserves credit. 

iOS7

iOS7 is part of this release

We should be careful not to overlook that iOS7 is also part of this release. This is a significant, root and branch re-write of iOS. In many ways it is the biggest change people buying one of these new devices will see. When you combine the iPhone 5C with iOS7, you see this is no small release for Apple.

Time will tell if this set of products works or not, but at this point I think Apple and fans of their work should be pretty excited going forward. Criticism follows Apple's every move because they're uncompromising and different. I see no substance to the criticism this announcement is getting.  People say I always say that, but I'll keep saying it until Apple stops selling hundreds of millions of devices.

…but I digress.