Yearly Archives: 2015

A remarkable gesture.

Handelsblatt:

Handelsblatt: Apple just hired some of Tesla’s most important engineers. Do you have to worry about a new competitor?

Musk: Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard.” If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.

Handelsblatt: Do you take Apple’s ambitions seriously?

Musk: Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.

Yet another person who should know better being dismissive of Apple. Remember when cell phone manufacturers said it’s not easy to make a phone and that Apple couldn’t just walk in and take over? How’d that work out for them?

I always love these pictures. So amazing.

[Via Coudal]

Nice tip from Stephen Hackett. I might give this, and the app, a try.

Obviously the iPhone is infinitely worse than any current DSLR for stills but surprisingly it appears to be a far better video camera than my $3000 DSLR when there is enough light present.

Very interesting.

Apple’s statement:

With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple’s highest standards for providing incredible performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s capacity, color, or model.

Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It’s a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.

I didn’t think I’d like this, but it was well done.

Re/code:

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin uses actual events to take the audience on an imagined — as in, fictional — series of fast-paced exchanges in the minutes before the curtain would rise on the introduction of each product.

But the writer and director weren’t looking to create a biopic that rigidly adhered to the details of Jobs’s life — rather, they wanted to create an “impressionistic portrait” that drew from real-life events.

The story is populated by events that never happened — such as a dramatic reimagining of preparations for the Mac’s demo in which it blows up in rehearsal, instead of declaring, “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag” — and long, stinging exchanges that aren’t drawn from any of the six biographies written about Jobs.

I’ll still see the movie but will be disappointed if only because I would have preferred more “reality”. Steve Jobs was such a fascinating person that his life story, in my opinion, doesn’t need the kinds of embellishments described in this review.

The Next Web:

Lightroom for mobile on iOS can now be used locally on your phone or tablet without the desktop Lightroom app, without a Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscription and even without an Adobe ID. The same feature is coming soon to Android.

This move is part of an overall desire to broaden the audience. By letting people use Lightroom for mobile without Creative Cloud, Adobe is making the app competitive with other popular standalone photo editing apps like Snapseed or Pixelmator’s mobile version.

I use and love the desktop version of Lightroom and this will be another tool I can use when I’m out and about using my iPad.

Something has to be done with drones. I’m sure that most people use common sense when operating a drone, but there are those that fly too close to airports, interfere with fire fighting efforts, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

Nearly six years have passed since Microsoft began opening retail outlets patterned after Apple’s blockbuster retail locations. However, the now 116 Microsoft Stores are still a pale imitation to Apple’s own retail network of 460 locations, often featuring more employees than customers as the firm’s products have failed to excite and attract buyers.

This was a sad attempt to copy Apple’s success and it didn’t work. Microsoft under Ballmer tried to copy Apple in a number of ways and they all failed miserably.

Om Malik had a fascinating conversation with Liam Casey, the founder of PCH International. Om says that “Liam’s insights would be useful for a lot of founders,” and I agree.

Jim and Dan talk about the Microsoft event as it relates to Microsoft’s goal of one OS on every device and computer. They also discuss Dan’s new iPad Air 2 and how he’s using it for code, Jim’s copycat rage, and more.

Solid review from Rene.

Wired:

The first Pill has sold more than a million units since its debut in 2012. Though it’s a hit, it’s gotten long in the tooth and the audio quality is really poor. That makes the Pill the perfect thing to tear down and rebuild. (Also, Bluetooth speakers are way easier than headphones.)

The result, the Beats Pill+, sounds much better, looks much better, and is a far more enticing product than its predecessor. It’s more than just a new piece of mobile candy. It’s an opportunity for Apple to show the extent to which it can shape the design of hardware coming out of its subsidiary.

We won’t know for sure until reviewers get units in hand for testing but the early comments from the Beats demo sound promising. I don’t read anything that makes me want to give up my Libratone Zipp speaker though.

ideaMachine Studio:

We stumbled upon the Steve Jobs “Think Different” marketing campaign speech in light of the new movie release this weekend. As animators, we were really struck when he paused for a good while before he said “… marketing… is about values.” We could see in his body that this thought weighed on him. And, in fact, that thought would determine the direction of Apple for the next two decades.

For Jobs, Apple was not about “making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” He and his executive team needed to be about something more. They needed to think beyond the equipment… beyond the dollars, toward something more. They needed to live in service to a higher calling. It’s hard to hear this speech without being moved. Not just because we are hearing a speech from a dead man, but because we know what Steve Jobs is saying is true. Our studio was challenged by this very real moment. Were we just clocking in and clocking out? Were we living from dollar to dollar? Or, were we working for something more?

I’ve seen this video before but the folks at ideaMachine Studio did some great work in cleaning it up. I may be a bit too cynical and jaded to attribute as much to the speech as they do but I certainly believe the sentiment is in Apple’s DNA. They don’t just want to make money. They really do want to change the world.

Quartz:

Twitter’s strength has always been hosting conversations around live events, but it’s not always easy to find them. Doing so often requires some savvy, juggling multiple tabs within Twitter’s app—not to mention knowing the right hashtags and accounts to follow.

Moments is designed to untangle some of these complexities by relying on curation to surface such conversations. Both Twitter’s staff and its partners—including NASA, Major League Baseball, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed—will package tweets into collections, which will show up under a new tab called Moments.

I don’t know if I’d describe “Twitter’s strength” in that way but anything Twitter can do to make the service “less confusing” to new users is good for the company and will help keep the investor wolves from their door. Personally, I don’t find Twitter all that confusing but then again, I’ve been using it from the beginning. Am I wrong? Is Twitter confusing for new users?

Here is what Microsoft announced at its event. I still don’t buy into the one OS for all products.