Why would one of the most innovative technology companies in the world be glacial in redesigning one of its most iconic products? Why would it want the MacBook Air to look…dated?The answer seems pretty simple. The design hasn’t changed because, frankly, it hasn’t needed to.
What changes, if any, would you make to the Air?
I started my career in 1981 working for 3 years at a defense contractor. By 1985 I started my first company to develop and then sell a spreadsheet like application for the Mac called Trapeze.So what was it like back then in the dark ages? Quite different than today in many ways; not so different in others. There was no internet, no Google, no StackOverflow. It was just you and your friends and your brain.
Warning, antique history!
Ah, the good old days.
Vanity Fair:
For three years, Apple and Samsung have clashed on a scale almost unprecedented in business history, their legal war costing more than a billion dollars and spanning four continents.Beginning with the super-secret project that created the iPhone and the late Steve Jobs’s fury when Samsung—an Apple supplier!—brought out a shockingly similar device, Kurt Eichenwald explores the Korean company’s record of patent infringement, among other ruthless business tactics, and explains why Apple might win the battles but still lose the war.
Great read.
The second blockbuster Apple v. Samsung patent trial has ended, and it looks like a Pyrrhic victory for Apple.The Cupertino company can notch a second win, but with far less damages than it requested. Apple wanted $2.2 billion, and the jury awarded it $119.6 million, or just over 5 percent of what Apple had requested.
I don’t think this ends here though.
Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.“Later this month, Apple will update its policies so that in most cases when law enforcement requests personal information about a customer, the customer will receive a notification from Apple,” company spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said.
This is good news for the customer and brave of the companies involved to stand up to the government on this issue.
Bob Paulsen, co-founder of PlayerLync, told SI.com that teams have video and documents sent to their iPads—even when the device is asleep—within minutes after a game ends, allowing them to watch and review without an Internet connection (quite a popular feature for road teams that are sitting on a bus or taking off from a tarmac). Comments and information can easily be added and shared. “Coaches and players insert their own audio, visual, text and clips,” Paulsen says, “and securely send them to one another.”
We see some of this in Apple’s “Your Verse” TV ad.
In honour of The Publisher’s adventures in Ireland this coming week, I present this list. But I’m not sure where they got their data from. For example, there’s no way Poutine is the “drunk food of choice” in Canada.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (is) the cult-stoking comedy series that provided awful films with hilarious, sharp, high-speed detractors’ commentary. MST3K is the story of a sarcastic Earth dweller—played initially by series creator Joel Hodgson and, in later years, by head writer Mike Nelson—who’s exiled to a ramshackle spaceship called the Satellite of Love, where he’s forced to watch an endless supply of crapola movies. Our hero’s response to such torture, naturally, is to unleash a torrent of withering one-liners, or “riffs,” that he delivers with the help of a couple of robot pals.
I never actually saw the show but have heard many geeks and nerds refer to it lovingly.
On July 20th, the five remaining members of famed comedy group Monty Python will reunite for one last show, and you won’t have to fly to the United Kingdom to watch. Due to popular demand, The Last Night of Monty Python will be streamed live to 1,500 theaters around the world.The performance is expected to include some of the group’s famous sketches, although we’re not yet sure which ones. “I think you can expect a little comedy, a lot of pathos, some music and a tiny bit of ancient sex,” Eric Idle told the UK Press Association.
OMG I am so going to be in a theatre watching this on July 20th.
Virtually everyone who had offered an opinion about Apple’s iPhone mix got everything wrong.In stark contrast, no drastic measures were recommended for fixing Moto X. Even the Wall Street Journal couldn’t bring itself to describe Google’s price slashing of the Moto X (from $550 to $399) as a desperate measure to move inventory.
Despite all the media pampering for Google, the reality in this case was that Motorola lost over $700 million for Google in just the last six months of Moto X sales.
As a follow along to the previous “iPad is doomed!” story comes this. I truly do not understand how the tech and mainstream media can see the same data points and come up with the exact opposite conclusions. That is, the iPhone 5c is a flop and the Moto X isn’t. Even if you are being intentionally biased for Google, the data doesn’t support you.
iPad sales did disappoint one group of folks immensely: Wall Street.As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad would be in the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. Think about that for a second. The iPad alone is bigger than almost all Fortune 500 companies.
If the iPad is a fad, it’s the greatest fad in the history of American business.
It’s easy to point to “fewer iPads sold” and Chicken Little the story to death – as respected columnist Gassee and Mossberg have done. But it would still be wrong.
The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.
Anyone “giving up” on the iPad really has no clue as to what Apple’s long term strategy is and has always been.
Like Steve Jobs, I grew up in California, and though I knew he attended (and dropped out of) Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I was surprised to read that Steve took frequent trips to an apple farm-slash-hippie commune near McMinnville, Oregon established by his friend (and Reed College student president) Robert Friedland.The part that surprised me was I was sitting in my house in McMinnville, Oregon when I read that. McMinnville is a fairly small town about 35 miles southwest of Portland, Oregon, but thanks to farm roads and small two lane highways, it takes over an hour to get to Portland. Often people I meet in other parts of Oregon have never heard of it. It’s rare to meet anyone in California or beyond in any other US state that has heard of the city. When I read that Steve Jobs spent time near the place I’ve called home since 2003, I did some more research.
Interesting story about an area where Jobs spent a lot of time.
I’ve always wanted to have a ride in an F/A-18 Hornet but not this close to other F/A-18 Hornets.
Slate:
When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world. You can pick it out of the New York City skyline by its 45 degree-angled top.But it’s the base of the building that really makes the tower so unique. The bottom nine of its 59 stories are stilts.
This thing does not look sturdy. But it has to be sturdy. Otherwise they wouldn’t have built it this way.
Right?
I’ve been reading about this story for years and it’s a fascinating one of design, ethics and responsibility.
The Wall Street Journal obtained the marketing materials for Gillette’s new razor, the ProGlide FlexBall. The ProGlide FlexBall can cut each whisker 23 microns shorter — about a quarter of the width of a strand of human hair.I won’t mince words: ProGlide FlexBall is a bad idea. A really bad idea. In fact, the razor represents everything terrible about America’s innovation economy.
It’s amazing how many gimmicks razor manufacturers have come up with to try and get us to by sharp bits of metal to scrape along our faces.
You know that pen spinning thing you do? You can stop now. These kids do it better than you could ever imagine doing it.
The Verge:
Anki Drive, the real-world racing game that uses your iPhone as the controller, is expanding its lineup today to include new cars, tracks, and Anki Drive is finally getting an old-school racing mode to go along with its existing battle mode.In an unusual twist, players who buy Corax will not be able to play as him until they defeat the car in battle with the artificial intelligence set to “medium.” “You have to earn that right by first beating him in battle mode,” says Mark Palatucci, Anki’s co-founder and chief product officer.
I bought (and returned) the original Anki Drive precisely because it didn’t have a Race Mode. These will be welcome updates to many.
Wired:
Thursday is the Mustang’s 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Ford plopped a 2015 Mustang GT convertible onto the observation deck of the Empire State Building.Ford pulled the same stunt with the original Mustang, but five decades of technological advancements haven’t made it any easier to pull off. The deck is 1,000 feet up, so using a crane is out of the question. And the building’s tall spire rules out lowering the car from a helicopter.
That leaves the freight elevator.
The Observation Deck of the Empire State Building is one of those places you have to go to when you visit New York City. While this is a marketing stunt, it sure as heck isn’t a cheap one.
Slate:
Do you live in North America, South America, Australia, or eastern Asia? Then you get to see a lunar eclipse on the night of April 14–15! And while North America is the best place to watch—we’ll get to see the whole event—the real action doesn’t begin until 05:58 UTC on the April 15, which is just before 02:00 EDT, so it’s a bit late. You might just want to stay up for it, though.
I’ll be having a nap later this afternoon so I can get up and take photos of the eclipse. In related news, apparently I’m so old now I need a nap in order to be up at midnight.
I use a lot of cloud services for file storage, primarily Dropbox, but also Box and (begrudgingly, for certain shared projects) Google Drive.I also use iCloud, but not in any way that would be considered a true cloud file storage service. I use it strictly as a sync service for contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, Safari; I also use Back to My Mac.But that’s it; I don’t use iCloud for cloud-based file management at all. Why not? Because iCloud in its current implementation is chock full of the stupid, at least for those of us who still use and rely on OS X.
When people say, “Apple doesn’t get Web Services”, this is a prime example of it.
Steve Matteson has designed some of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world, and engineered the original core fonts for Microsoft, adapting Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier, which you’ve probably used for term papers or resumes or anything else you wrote in Word. He has also created some less-classic designs that he’s not too proud of, such as “Curlz,” which falls in the Comic Sans camp of typefaces reserved for high school yearbooks, princess-themed birthday party invitations, and mockery.But that is the plight of a professional font designer: One day you get to make lasting letter sets, the next you have to pay the bills. “Sometimes you have to do work that you’re not really proud of,” Matteson told Fast Company. “That’s why we call it work instead of play.”
I know literally nothing about fonts – I couldn’t point out Geneva if you put a gun to my head – but the process is endlessly fascinating to me.
Nautilus:
The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.
I got 13 out of 16 right but I definitely guessed on at least three of them.
For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks.In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business.
Sad, fascinating story. Watch the two men in happier times in the short film, “Font Men”.
Did you watch the show? What did you think of it?
Cinema exists to project our dreams. Science-fiction cinema exists to project our most creative dreams—time-travel, alternate worlds, expanded consciousness, and more. That’s why we’re science-fiction maniacs and why we gathered up our top 100 movies.
Interesting list and a great primer for those unfamiliar with the genre.
Calgary Sun: Mounties were called about a John Deere 6400 tractor with a front-end bucket being stolen from a property a few kilometres from the break-and-enter complaint. Mounties began following the movements of the tractor as it drove through fields, … Continued
Daily Mail:
Take a look at a map today, and you’re likely to see that North America is larger than Africa, Alaska is larger than Mexico and China is smaller than Greenland. But in reality China is four times bigger than Greenland, Africa is three times bigger than North America and Mexico is larger than Alaska.The distortion is the result of the Mercator projection, the map most commonly seen hanging in classrooms and in text books, which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world.
Maps have always fascinated me and this is “old news” but if you have kids, go ahead and blow their mind showing them the Mercator map they are likely familiar with compared to other maps like the Gall-Peters projection.
Quartz:
“What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time,” a Google insider told me in passing last month.This change affects only Apple users who have upgraded to iOS 7, the latest version—but that’s 85% of iOS devices. They no longer have the ability to remain anonymous as they watch videos on YouTube or navigate their cities using Google Maps.
“Don’t be evil” indeed.
Susan Kare “was the type of kid who always loved art.” As a child, she lost herself in drawings, paintings, and crafts; as a young woman, she dove into art history and had grandeur dreams of being a world-renowned fine artist.But when a chance encounter in 1982 reconnected her with an old friend and Apple employee, Kare found herself working in a different medium, with a much smaller canvas — about 1,024 pixels. Equipped with few computer skills and lacking any prior experience with digital design, Kare proceeded to revolutionize pixel art.
Kare is a legend and I never tire of reading or hearing about her story.