Yearly Archives: 2015

Mashable:

Inside the Apple bubble, a giant campus with more than 10,000 employees, it’s easy to lose introspection. Yet, when I ask Schiller if Apple does everything well, his answer surprises me.

“No, of course not, of course not,” he said. “And we don’t want to sound like we’re perfect. We never are, we always have to get better and always have to listen to where we’re not doing well.”

Well written and visually interestingly laid out piece by Ulanoff. I’ve met Schiller several times and I’ve always found him interesting and engaging. Then again, we both love hockey so that means I’m biased.

ZDNet:

During its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Apple CFO Luca Maestri was keen to point out how beneficial swapping out PCs for Macs can be.

“There are currently over 30,000 Macs deployed within the company with 1,900 more being added each week. IBM tells us that each Mac is saving $270 compared to a traditional PC, thanks to the much reduced support cost and better residual value.”

Those of you who work in IT have known this for years. When I worked in a corporate environment, it was obvious there was more tech support needed for the PCs than the Macs. One company I worked for had 40 PC support techs who were busy all day, every day. They had two Mac guys for the same number of machines. They spent most of their day doing “fun IT” stuff and not troubleshooting and putting out fires. When you’re talking about thousands and thousands of Macs, that $270 per machine adds up to real cost savings for corporations.

Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results and the company reported quarterly revenue of $51.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.1 billion.

The growth was fueled by record fourth quarter sales of iPhone, the expanded availability of Apple Watch, and all-time records for Mac sales and revenue from services.

John Coates:

Aerial is a Mac screen saver based on the new Apple TV screen saver that displays the aerial movies Apple shot over New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, China, etc.

Aerial is completely open source, so feel free to contribute to its development!

These Apple TV screen savers are beautiful and they look just as good on your Mac’s desktop.

Fusion:

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was announced earlier this month: three scientists shared the almost $1 million award for their work on how cells repair DNA.

Once again it did not go to John Goodenough, the 93-year-old physicist regarded as the father of the lithium ion battery. You probably haven’t heard of him, but for years, pundits have predicted that Goodenough would win science’s highest honor. And for good reason. His work transformed society. His is possibly the most revolutionary invention yet not to win the prize. What’s it to you? Well, your life wouldn’t be the same without his work.

It’s hard to disagree with this characterization of the importance of the lithium ion battery. And that importance will only grow as we move forward with more and more kinds of electronics — in particular, electric cars.

CocoaConf Yosemite is set for next spring and I’ll be there again next year. I had a lot of fun here at the last conference.

Alphr:

Time to flex your Apple knowledge, with a quiz that delves into the company’s history and pulls out past classics (along with some lesser known products). Are you an Apple nerd extraordinaire or do you find it hard to tell your iPods from your iPhone? Take the quiz and see how you fare.

As I suspected, I’m not nearly as familiar with this stuff as many of you are. To be fair, I wasn’t around during the time of the really early Apples and Macs so I don’t recognize many of them. Still, I made it to the “Apple Nerd” category of the quiz.

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