Remember CompuServe? Excite? Prodigy? Kind of an ugly nostalgia. Take a look back.

Maybe my favorite thing of all from Monday’s event was the ingenious battery tech Apple used in the new MacBook.

Timothy B. Lee, writing for Vox about this image:

When you crack open the laptop’s case, most of the space is taken up by its battery. Or, more accurately, batteries — plural. The irregular brown rectangles in the laptop’s four corners, as well as the big one in the middle, are all batteries. The device’s logic board — the brains of the laptop — is at the top. At the bottom of the image you can see the underside of the trackpad.

That logic board is tiny, Moore’s law at work. But batteries follow no such law. So Apple figured out how to break them into pieces to better fit into every nook and cranny of the MacBook case, all while leaving them connected as a single functional unit. Incredible.

Jay Yarow at Business Insider pulled together a variety of reactions to some hands-on time with the Apple Watch. These are snap reactions, given without the opportunity to live with the technology, without the benefit of true immersion.

In a nutshell, the sense I get is one of confusion with the interface. Stephen Pulvirenti at Bloomberg:

Since the first Apple Watch announcement in September 2014, Apple has been touting the digital crown as a groundbreaking interface that will set the Apple Watch apart from its competition. So how is it in practice? On first use, the device felt a little confusing and clumsy. Sometimes it seemed to do one thing; at other times, just the opposite.

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

First things first: it is really confusing to have both the Digital Crown and the communications button next to each other on the side. As I tried to navigate the Watch interface, I found myself pressing one or both several times, without knowing which one would take me to the home screen, back out of an app, or launch a feature. Coming from the traditional iOS paradigm of a single home button that always takes you home, it’s a notable difference.

There are certainly some positive comments, but the tone is more hopeful for future improvements, rather than kudos for the existing Apple Watch.

John Gruber called the reactions worrisome. In reference to confusion stemming from restricted access to glances:

Worrisome. Compare this description of the “slide up from bottom of display” Glances to Control Center on iOS. Control Center is available and works the same way (again: slide up from bottom of display) everywhere: the lock screen, the home screen, and within any app.

To me, this gets right to the heart of the matter. To be successful, an interface must have rules that are intuitive and consistent. Sounds like there’s some work still left to do here. That said, this is, fortunately, a software problem. Software is fixable. Software can evolve over time.

Re/code:

OK, Comcast: Your move.

That’s the message HBO CEO Richard Plepler was sending yesterday to the cable giant and the other big pay-TV distributors, when he announced he was going to start selling subscriptions with Apple.

HBO’s plan to sell a standalone version of the service — HBO Now, for $15 a month — using Apple as its exclusive digital launch partner is big news. Remember, though, that it’s only half of the story: Plepler wants to use his new digital service to create a new revenue stream, and perhaps a life raft. But he also wants to use it as a lever to get more money out of his existing business with the pay-TV companies, which generated $5.4 billion last year.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. HBO exclusivity with Apple is for a rumored three month time frame.

The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc.’s huge gravitational pull on mall traffic is distorting the market for mall rents, winning the iPhone maker sweetheart deals and putting upward pressure on other tenants’ leases.

Apple draws so many shoppers that its stores single-handedly lift sales by 10% at the malls in which they operate, according to Green Street Advisors, a real-estate research firm. That gives Apple the clout to negotiate extremely low rents for itself relative to its sales, while creating upward pressure on prices paid by mall neighbors who might not benefit from the traffic.

No surprise and a big change from the early days of Apple Retail when Apple was “forced” to sign long term leases because mall operators were worried about the company’s long term viability.

Ars Technica:

Apple has published their second major security roll-up package of the year, Security Update 2015-002, which contains fixes for multiple version of OS X stretching from Mountain Lion 10.8.5 to Yosemite 10.10.2. These updates mitigate threats from several different vulnerabilities, but the most notable is a fix that will inoculate Safari users against the so-called “FREAK” SSL/TLS exploit.

Good to see Apple extending this patch back to Mountain Lion.

Every Apple Watch you see in an ad shows a time of 10:09. According to the linked article:

Watchmakers have traditionally chosen 10:10 as their display time because it ensures that the watchmaker’s logo, which is usually engraved beneath the 12, isn’t obscured by the watch hands. On top of that, having the hands at 10:10 is symmetrical.

Apple, however, chooses to display a slightly different time on all of its Apple Watch promotions, setting the time one minute ahead to 10:09 rather than 10:10.

It’s no mistake, either. Apple has a history of choosing a display time that has some significance, famously setting the time on all of its iPhone promotional materials and images to 9:41, the approximate time of day when Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone to the world back in 2007.

So why 10:09 for the Apple Watch? Apple appears to be making a statement about being slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to smartwatches, and the facts back this theory up.

My 2 cents. I think this is more about symmetry, about attention to detail, than about being ahead of the curve. At 10:10, the hour hand will be 1/6 of the way between the 10 and the 11 on the watch face. If the minute hand is precisely on the 2 (as it would be at 10:10), the minute and hour hands would not be symmetrical. At 10:09, the hands would be much closer to symmetrical perfection.

That sounds more like Apple logic to me.

Fortune:

In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Apple’s human resources chief Denise Young Smith said the company is partnering with several non-profit organizations on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort to increase the pipeline of women, minorities, and veterans in the technology industry—and, of course, at Apple.

Good to see Apple doing more on this issue. There’s lots more to be done though and Apple can’t do it all alone. This has to become an industry-wide effort.

Kirk McElhearn, who assures me that my Apple Watch bet spoils are speeding my way from the UK, has put together a PDF mockup of both Apple Watch case sizes so you can try them on your wrists while you wait for the real deal.

As we learned from the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus mockups we did, the trick is to get your printer to print a document at actual size.

Be forewarned, this is a flash video. If not, I would have embedded it. But that aside, this is a nice cut-up of the two hour event video, focusing strictly on the highlights.

Anyone spot a non-flash version of this video, or a non-flash alternative? Tweet it to me, I’d be more than happy to pop in a replacement.

Update: Here’s a non-flash video put together by the fine folks at Apple Insider. This one uses a voiceover, rather than a cut together of the original speakers, so I’ve left the link to the original as well, in case that’s more your speed.

“iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations. “ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”

I didn’t see this one coming, but I’m really glad Tim and company decided to do it.

“Apple has reinvented the notebook with the new MacBook, and at just two pounds and 13.1 mm, it’s the thinnest and lightest Mac ever,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Every component of the MacBook reveals a new innovation. From its fanless design, ultra-thin Retina display and full-size keyboard that’s 34 percent thinner, to its all-new Force Touch trackpad, versatile USB-C port and breakthrough terraced battery design, the new MacBook is the future of the notebook.”

So Apple has the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro lines again. I spent some time with the new MacBook today and it is stunning. I want that gold one.

“Apple Watch begins a new chapter in the way we relate to technology and we think our customers are going to love it,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We can’t wait for people to start wearing Apple Watch to easily access information that matters, to interact with the world, and to live a better day by being more aware of their daily activity than ever before.”

It was a great keynote and a very interesting product.

Finally, learning and practicing a new language is easier and more intuitive than ever before. Introducing HelloTalk, the language app where your teachers are native language speakers from around the world. You just pick the language you want to learn—there are over 100 from which to select—and almost instantaneously you’ll be in touch with native speakers of that language … and you’ll start learning and practicing immediately.

HelloTalk isn’t a course you strictly follow; rather, you learn and practice at your pace and in the manner that best meets the way you learn. Practice foreign languages with people around the world. Simultaneously speak and type the language you’re learning. Record your voice before speaking to your HelloTalk friends and compare your recording to standard pronunciations. Change your friends’ audio messages to text for better understanding, and receive help to improve your grammar. Easily translate whenever you don’t understand, and so much more.

With HelloTalk, you’ll discover learning a new language is fun … and fast. Download your copy for iPhone or Android today.

From Gigaom:

On Monday, Apple will officially launch the Apple Watch, its first completely new product since the iPad was introduced in 2010 as well as its first major launch under CEO Tim Cook. Gigaom will be covering what Apple has in store live from the Yerba Buena Center on Monday.

But Apple actually introduced us to the Apple Watch back in September, and since then, Cook has spoken about the smartwatch several times in public. When he gets on stage in San Francisco on Monday to introduce Apple’s “most personal device ever,” some of what he’s going to cover will be new, and some of it he will have said prior, during the past six months as he’s been honing his Apple Watch pitch.

Here’s what to expect from Apple Watch, from Tim Cook, the boss of Apple himself (read it in a smooth-as-molasses southern drawl.)

This is a fascinating collection of quotes, more so if you can get Tim Cook’s voice in your head as you read them.

First things first, here’s a link to the live stream of the event, which will start later today at 10 a.m. PDT.

According to the site:

Live streaming video requires Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X v10.6.8 or later; Safari on iOS 6.0 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later.

As Tim Cook told a London Apple Store sales staff: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”

Well, sort of, but point taken. This is a new path for Apple, stretching the bounds of their take on technology, reaching into the world of fashion.

Pebble kickstarts aside, smart watches have not sold well. But perhaps that’s because they’ve not been done well. We’ll soon find out if there’s a market out there. My money’s on Apple making this market, as they’ve done with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Oh, and, let’s not forget the bet.

Can’t wait!

I, Programmer:

Susan Kare is the artist responsible for many of the classic Mac icons that are universally recognized. Now her impact as a pioneering and influential computer iconographer has been recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Susan Kare designed all of her early icons on graph paper, with one square representing each pixel. Now this archive of sketches has been acquired by MoMA, jointly with San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and has gone on show as part of a new exhibition, This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good.

We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kare for her lovely and elegant icon designs.

Dr. Drang:

Apple’s patent application is for a method that allows them to make 18k gold that has, on a volume basis, less gold than regular 18k gold.

How can this be? It’s because Apple’s gold is a metal matrix composite, not a standard alloy. Instead of mixing the gold with silver, copper, or other metals to make it harder, Apple is mixing it with low-density ceramic particles. The ceramic makes Apple’s gold harder and more scratch-resistant—which Tim Cook touted during the September announcement—and it also makes it less dense overall.

The media is going to have a field day with this. They’ll get it wrong but they’ll still lose their collective minds over it.

M.G. Siegler, as part of his 500 Words series for Medium:

Assuming Learmonth’s sources are correct, HBO is just tying up loose ends (read: Apple) at this point to launch the new service alongside the premiere of season five of Game of Thrones in April.

Yes, there has to be some concern for HBO launching such a service during what will undoubtedly be peak demand — after all, they shit the bed last year during the exact same time with HBO Go — but with MLB by their side to help them this time, we should be good to go.

Will HBO Now catch on, develop the traction it needs to achieve critical mass, to legitimize the à la carte content model?

Based on how this new service fares for HBO, we should see many others fall in line to do the same thing. And given that I fully suspect this will be a massive success for the company, we could see a domino effect quicker than many imagined was possible.

When ESPN tips and goes straight to their users: watch out.

It’s not so much the cord-cutters that Big Cable has to worry about, it’s the upcoming millions of cord-nevers — kids who head off to college or their first jobs and don’t feel like cable television is worth the cost. I would bet on a huge percentage of those kids signing up for HBO Now to go with their Netflix accounts.

On Apple TV:

The current Apple TV has a nice chunk of content, but Apple needs to make it a no-brainer for consumers to go with their offering. That means getting all (or at least most) of the content currently offered on television. Up until now, that has seemingly meant working with the cable providers. But if the aforementioned domino effect happens, Apple could have a much easier time getting what they want (whether that’s dealing with networks directly or using them as leverage to bend the cable operators to their will — we’ll see).

Couldn’t agree more. This is a shrewd partnership for Apple and could be the discriminator that breathes life into Apple TV sales.

Eric Migicovsky is a smart watch pioneer. His new Pebble Time kickstarter has raised over $16 million and Pebble has sold more than a million watches. He has a rare voice of experience and insight into what Android Wear has done and what Apple brings to the market.

Barron’s interview with Migicovsky is an interesting read. A few excerpts:

Notifications are fun and useful and wonderful, but it’s not the only part of the future. The real thing is, the number one reason, is to tell the time. When you look down at your wrist, you have to be able to see what time it is. But more important, what’s the context around time? Am I late? Am I early? What’s the traffic like?

On Pebble’s pins in a timeline interface:

What is important is not the app but the content of the app. If you overlay it on top of time, everything clicks. You see these pins on your timeline, and you could have 20 different ones, but it won’t be complicated.

ESPN is taking the idea of the current engine, where you follow teams that you like. They are putting that into the past, present and future organization. So, you have a single pin from a provider like ESPN that in future, exists as a heads-up of when a game starts. In the present, that pin traverses time and becomes a real-time score keeper. In the past, that exists as a record keeper. It’s time-based context.

On Android Wear and the slow moving smart watch market:

We have a million users, the biggest smartwatch population. Android Wear, I don’t think anyone ever respected them. They didn’t have any new ideas. I like their voice responses, though. We looked at that. The benefit we have are passionate users that care. Looking at the competition, it’s crazy that we launched three years ago and it’s taken people this long to launch their first.

On sales:

The only one that has a chance of selling a lot is Apple Watch. If you look at the numbers from [research firm] NPD for the holiday quarter, Pebble outsold everyone else including Samsung. We were twice the volume of Motorola [360] in terms of units. All the other ones are smaller footnotes at the bottom. It’s cheap to make a watch but they don’t actually get sold.

And on taking on Apple:

I think Apple is a massive competitor. They are Apple, and there’s no reason to underestimate the power they have. We are specifically doing things Apple can’t do, like having a battery life of 10 days, like having this new interface, being waterproof, working with both [Google’s] Android and with iOS.

Good stuff. I think Migicovsky has Pebble right where it needs to be, a real sweet spot in the market.

A few days ago, a 72-year old man who went by the names Indiana Jones and, more recently, Han Solo, crashed his vintage World War II-era Ryan PT-22 Recruit open cockpit plane, making a hard landing on a Los Angeles golf course (likely in an attempt to travel back in time).

Thankfully, Harrison Ford is on the mend (as a friend said, not sure I could stand losing Spock and Jones/Solo in the same week), but here’s a picture of the plane, sitting on its belly after the crash.

ZDNet:

For years, Oracle has tormented Windows users by bundling adware with its Java installer for Windows PCs. Now Oracle has begun including the same adware as part of a default installation of Java for the Mac, using the same deceptive techniques.

More sleazy business practices for you and yours to be made aware of. Thanks to Rob Griffiths for the heads up.

The Mac Observer:

For the purposes of Gatekeeper, Apple verifies the identity of the developer, but not their intent. It’s up to you to ensure that the applications you install and run on your Mac come from the people you think they came from, and we’ll show you how to do that.

The key words are, “it’s up to you” to not let your guard down and to always be aware of what you are downloading and installing. Apple is doing their part and it’s up to the user to do theirs.