Apple rumors

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John Moltz:

At the risk of sounding like your prototypical hipster, today’s rumors just aren’t as good as they used to be. The devices that we hear whispers about now — a smartwatch, a television, a cheaper iPhone—seem lackluster compared to the rumored products of days past—products that, when they actually appeared, changed entire industries.

Memories for iPhone

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Keep track of the most important moments in your life. Memories tells you exactly how much time has passed since those very special days.

A very simple and easy to use app.

Stupid ideas

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“What a stupid idea,” I thought to myself.

As we finished our coffees, I think he sensed my apathy, and we parted ways. But just before I walked away, he asked a question:

“What do you think about the name we’ve been using? It’s called Pinterest.”

A couple of great stories from Dustin Curtis.

Apple’s $17 billion bond deal

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Apple Inc wowed the debt markets on Tuesday with the largest non-bank bond deal in history, offering a whopping $17 billion for sale as the U.S. computer giant switches strategy to placate restless shareholders.

Sources said investors could barely submit orders fast enough to get in on the deal from Apple, the only major tech company without a single penny of debt on its books.

No debt and they still had to placate shareholders.

I can’t believe this shit

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The headline at the Motley Fool:

Samsung’s Mediocre S4 Reviews Are Bad News for Apple

This must be a joke, right? Not even Motley Fool are stupid enough to let that go on their site.

Right?

What. The. Fuck.

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BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins:

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

The PlayBook may not be a good model, but the iPad is doing just fine.

Hulu continues to grow

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Andy Forssell, Hulu’s acting CEO, shared details on how the company is doing, including growth metrics, new product innovation and upcoming content.

Tech Talk Alert

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A service to be alerted when Apple’s Tech Talks are announced.

iPad tops JD Power study on owner satisfaction

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For the second consecutive study, Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of tablets in overall owner satisfaction. Apple achieves a score of 836 and performs well in four factors: performance; ease of operation; styling and design; and features.

Apple’s rating was a 5, which is the highest JD Power gives. Amazon, Samsung and Asus all received a 3, which JD Power classifies as “About average.” Acer got a 2 — that’s classified as “The rest.”

Consumer Reports: Apple is tops in tech support

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Consumer Reports talking about Apple:

The company scored far higher than the other big companies for the elements that make for successful online and phone support: ease of contacting staff, clarity of advice, technical knowledge, patience, and time for follow-up.

And here is what they said about Windows-based companies:

Clearly, there’s room for improvement in tech support: 24 to 40 percent of respondents who sought phone or online help from makers of Windows-based computers said the staff’s patience, knowledge, or clarity was fair at best.

Design and business

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Doug van Spronsen writing about Ron Johnson and JCPenney:

I am not suggesting that great design isn’t effective, quite the contrary. But if the root cause of the issue is deeper, it might be better to start the strategy process a few layers back.

Great article and I agree. Selling iPhones, iPods and iPads is fairly easy because they are great products — the business side of things was working. Couple that with well-designed retail stores and you’ve got a winner.

NAMM acquires the TEC Foundation

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The TEC Foundation for Excellence in Audio has formally entered into an agreement to become part of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), strengthening the important work of both non-profits and the NAMM Show. All TEC activities, including the Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards, will join other marquee activities, events and efforts within the NAMM Foundation portfolio including the Museum of Making Music, research projects, the SupportMusic Coalition and global public service campaigns.

This is great news for NAMM, but more importantly the pro audio community.

Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with half of its storage used

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Russell Holly for Geek.com:

If you head to the Storage section of the Settings on a new Galaxy S4, you’ll find that only 8.82GB is available to the user. That’s the total space available to you, so applications that were pre-loaded by your carrier and anything you sync over during account creation will pull from that amount. The rest of that 16GB you can’t even see as the user — Android tells you that the phone only has 8.82GB total, entirely cutting out the space used by the system itself.

Terrible.

Apple can’t win

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I agree with Gruber on this. No matter what Apple does, someone will find a problem with it.

CleanMyMac 2 [Sponsor]

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CleanMyMac 2 is an ingeniously simple and powerful system maintenance solution to get extra space and keep your Mac clean and well-organized.

Besides cleaning your hard drive of outdated cache files, system logs, language files and other unneeded data, CleanMyMac 2 also reduces the size of iPhoto libraries, helps find and delete large files and folders which haven’t been used for an extended period of time, correctly uninstalls applications, and so much more — reclaiming your Mac’s valuable hard drive space and keeping it running at peak efficiency.

CleanMyMac 2 is the simplest, safest, and most effective way to clean your Mac. Try it today for free.

Mistakes

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The goal isn’t to avoid mistakes, though, but to learn how to recover from them.

There’s some truth right there.

Some important lessons for guitar players

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Instead of notes, scales and chords, we’re talking about fretting hand position, picking hand positions, strap-height, stance and how you hold your head, neck and shoulders. All of these things affect what you can do on the guitar.

Great video by Alex Vollmer about how we interact with our guitar. There is a preview video available — you can buy the full video for $5.