A lot has been written about Jony Ive, much of it biographical and centered on his design milestones. This piece is different. It paints a picture of Ive, does a better job capturing his spirit.

Here’s an example:

> Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own hands that keeps Ive grounded. “He’s not distracted by any veneer of glamour,” says Tang, who remarks on his friend’s thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two finely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved, Ive-designed ashtrays—Tang loves cigars similar to the ones on Smoking-hub.com—constructed from the next-generation iPhone material. “It was like getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Tang says. Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously inventive ways to use the technology at his fingertips. When a presenter from Blue Peter—Britain’s longest-running children’s TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft utilitarian designs from household objects—came to present him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peter badge depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In repayment, he fired up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer-controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum like an origami flower, and in a mere ten hours created a Blue Peter badge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant cousin of the MacBook Air.

I enjoyed the whole thing, but this sentence really brought it all home for me:

> Design critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design, when manufacturers began to understand that consumers would pay more for craftsmanship.

Right at the heart of it. Truth.

This Vanity Fair interview with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella for their upcoming November issue does a good job capturing both men’s personalities and, even more importantly, offers a sense of the nature of the challenge facing Microsoft 2.0.

“The way I think about success is our relevance,” says Nadella.

Relevance, however, is exactly what Microsoft doesn’t have, according to its critics. “The Irrelevance of Microsoft” is actually the title of a blog post by an analyst named Benedict Evans, who works at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. On his blog, Evans pointed out that Microsoft’s share of all computing devices that we use to connect to the Internet, including P.C.’s, phones, and tablets, has plunged from 90 percent in 2009 to just around 20 percent today. This staggering drop occurred not because Microsoft lost ground in personal computers, on which its software still dominates, but rather because it has failed to adapt its products to smartphones, where all the growth is, and tablets. Even Microsoft’s new chairman of the board, a former IBM executive named John Thompson, told Fortune last winter that “there are some attributes to Microsoft today that do look vaguely like IBM circa 1990.” That is a particularly wounding comparison, because, as any tech person knows, IBM is the company that two decades ago an aggressive young Microsoft helped topple from the pinnacle of great technology companies.

The drop from 90% of all screens to 20% is both telling and subtle. That stat doesn’t take into account percentage of all data stored in Microsoft cloud solutions. Cloud is a perfect example of a business Microsoft originally missed, then pivoted to catch.

The Loop has been sold out of weekly sponsorships for the better part of two years, but we have some openings coming up in the next couple of months. There is only one sponsor a week, so you will have the exclusive spot to get your product or service in front of the fine, good looking readers of The Loop. If you would like to talk about a sponsorship or schedule a week, please Email Jim Dalrymple.

Jim and Shawn talk about Samsung, the Apple Watch and teens, Stevie Ray Vaughan and “Does the iPhone 6 get lost in The Beard?” Special guest appearance on this Amplified by a crow!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Visit lynda.com/thebeard to get access to all their courses FREE for 7 days).

I did an iTunes Festival wrap-up piece on Fortune today, which includes an exclusive interview with Oliver Schusser, Apple’s head of iTunes Europe.

Racked:

Neiman, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys New York, and Saks Fifth Avenue all have their own outlets; customers flock to these stores for the brand-name cachet and believe they’re shopping last season’s carefully curated inventory. However, this isn’t exactly the case.

Nordstrom Rack, for example, confirms to Racked that only 20% of what it sells is clearance merchandise coming from their stores and website, while the rest is bought expressly for the outlet.

I’ve gone to dozens of outlet stores and malls, sometimes involuntarily, and I’ve always thought they were a little bit fishy. Turns out, many are.

The Verge:

The first thing you notice about the IBM Model M keyboard, when you finally get your hands on it, is its size. After years of tapping chiclet keys and glass screens on two- and three-pound devices, hefting five pounds of plastic and metal (including a thick steel plate) is slightly intimidating. The second thing is the sound – the solid click that’s turned a standard-issue beige peripheral into one of the computer world’s most prized and useful antiques.

I used this keyboard so much in college, I can still hear that sound and feel that key pressure. Great keyboard.

Medium:

The physically and mentally exhausting nature of the Oktoberfest fortnight requires trust that’s cultivated in familiarity. Each server needs to know she can lean on her fellow team members when she’s endured so many boob ogles, grabby hands, and sawdust-covered blobs on the floor. Worming your way through 10,000 sweaty, beer-swilling revelers 12 hours a day for 16 days straight tests the limits of even the most crowd-loving extrovert.

Attending Oktoberfest in Germany has always been on my bucket list.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster dissected Piper Jaffray’s fall survey of 7,200 teens.

Response to the Apple Watch remains, in the words of Piper Jaffray technology analyst Gene Munster, “tepid.” Only seven percent of teens said they already own a smartwatch — and just 16 percent would be interested in shelling out $350 to buy the Apple Watch.

“The concept of wearing a watch for teenagers is foreign — and I think that’s part of what is reflected in that response,” said Munster. “The second piece is, it’s still something that people need to hear more about, beyond what Apple has to say about it, before people get interested in it.”

Seems to me, anticipating response to a product that has not yet hit people’s wrists is a fool’s errand. The market for the Apple Watch is divided financially, functionally, and stylistically. Add to that divisions for age and gender and you’ve got one complex beast of a market.

A survey given now may be good for product design and marketing folks but is useless as a predictor of specific market segment response to a product. It is too early to tell how people will respond once they see an Apple Watch in the wild, have the chance to try one on for themselves, experience the pros and cons in real life.

More importantly, the Apple Watch is currently a static, unchanging product. When it is officially released and people respond to it, Apple will have the opportunity to fine tune their product line. Part of the beauty of the Apple Watch is its modular design, offering different case styles and sizes, along with a plethora of watch bands and corresponding pricing models. Apple has a lot of tuning points to address both weak and strong points in the market.

The Apple Watch market is dynamic and unpredictable. Any survey this early needs to either be ignored or taken with a grain of salt.

If you are editing some text in iOS and spot a word you meant to capitalize (e.g., May instead of may), the old approach was to press and hold, then slide the cursor to just after the letter to be capitalized, then hit delete and retype the letter.

In iOS 8, there’s a better way. Double-tap the word you want to capitalize and hit the shift key. Predictive text will show the initial cap version of the word. Tap it and you’re done. And if you double tap the shift key (shift-lock), predictive text will show the ALL CAPS version of the word.

Thanks to TUAW for that fantastic little tip.

Thoughtful editorial from Wired. The upshot:

However it got there, Apple has come to the right place. It’s a basic axiom of information security that “data at rest” should be encrypted. Apple should be lauded for reaching that state with the iPhone. Google should be praised for announcing it will follow suit in a future Android release.

Also worth reading, this essay from Salon, entitled America’s huge iPhone lie: Why Apple is being accused of coddling child molesters.

Wired:

Early tomorrow morning, the moon will pass behind the center of Earth’s shadow and turn a rusty red color. Most people probably won’t be able to see this total lunar eclipse, because it will occur mainly over the Pacific Ocean. But don’t worry. You can watch a live broadcast by the Slooh Community Observatory from multiple locations in Australia and North America or NASA’s broadcast of the event.

Always fun to watch these celestial events.

The Province:

Whitey was pictured in the photograph escaping the clutches of his mother Bernice and racing to his father Jack, a rifleman who was leaving for war with the B.C. Regiment (Duke of Connaughts Own Rifles).

The image was captured by Province photographer Claude Dettloff, sent around the world and on Saturday, brought to life again.

A $2 Canadian coin has been minted, postage stamp produced and bronze statue unveiled at Hyack Square, near the original scene.

Not just an iconic Canadian picture but a world famous image made all the more sad when you hear the story of what happened afterwards. Make sure you have a tissue ready if you watch the video.

EVH is one of the all-time greats. It’s nice to just watching him having fun.

Floodwatch:

Floodwatch is a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual.

I’m going to install and use this for a month. I bet the data it collects will appall me.

If you are, or ever were, a fan of Aaron Sorkin and The West Wing, this oral history is a must read. Delicious.

Elton was on a chat show and was challenged to create a song, on the spot, from a set of oven instructions. Genius.

AP Wire:

The steep decline in income, likely the widest fall in Samsung’s earnings history, shows how the company’s quick rise to the world’s top smartphone maker with the Galaxy phones faces what might be its biggest challenge. Its struggle is apparent in both the high-end phone segment where it competes with Apple Inc. and the low-end segment where it faces rising competition from the likes of China’s Xiaomi and Lenovo.

This has been coming for a while now, but there’s no proof like watching earnings projections fall by half in a very short time.

On September 23rd, Apple reported an adoption rate of 46% for iOS 8.

As of October 5th (this past Sunday), Apple’s official numbers show that, in the ensuing weeks, the adoption rate crept up to only 47%. Interestingly, the iOS 7 rate went down from 49% to 47% (as you might expect), but the pre-iOS 7 adoption number actually increased from 5% to 6%.

The stagnation might be due to the public issues surrounding the iOS 8 release, including bugs that kept the Health App from running, as well as concern that adoption of iOS 8 might cause problems with iCloud Drive data.

Apple’s self-reported numbers are reflected by the most recent data from MixPanel (via MacRumors).

csstyle is a modern approach for crafting beautifully maintainable stylesheets. The csstyle method is implemented using a set of SASS mixins that make your CSS readable and semantic, generate your selectors for you, and automatically handle things like specificity and nesting. csstyle makes your project’s styling refreshingly consistent.

Geohopper Beacons unite Apple’s iBeacon technology and proximity-based notifications in a single easy-to-use bundle. Using Geohopper 2.0 for iOS, a single tap configures the beacon which then sends notifications to your selected contacts when you enter or exit the beacon location. No additional setup or maintenance is required.

Very cool.

Magic Script Creator lets you experiment with creating custom AppleScripts by just answering a few questions. No prior knowledge of AppleScript is needed in order to use this application. Included in Magic Script Creator are 24 different examples that you can configure hundreds of different ways. Most examples contain UNIX command line tools, combining their power with AppleScript’s strengths.

Version 4.0 contains two new major features. First, you can choose to compile your scripts with line by line remarks. This will help you understand what each line of code is executing. Second, for those examples containing UNIX command tools, you can export the MAN (or manual) page in an easy to read PDF. No more trying to read these manuals in a tiny terminal window! To learn more about Magic Script Creator, watch an instructional video, purchase the application, or try a demo version, please visit our homepage.

The Verge:

What happens when you give an Android Wear smartwatch to a 16-year-old with a bit too much time on his hands? You get Windows 95 on your wrist. Now, we frankly have no idea why you’d load a desktop operating system from twenty years ago onto a Samsung Gear Live smartwatch with a 1.63-inch display, but, hey, why not? Thanks to emulator software available for Android, this technology mishmash is a reality.

I am mesmerized! Watch the video.

Bill Gates, in last week’s Bloomberg interview:

“Apple Pay is a great example of how a cell phone that identifies its user in a pretty strong way lets you make a transaction that should be very, very inexpensive,” he said.

He explained: “So the fact that in any application I can buy something, that’s fantastic. The fact I don’t need a physical card anymore, I just do that transaction and you’re going to be quite sure about who it is on the other end, that is a real contribution.”

Some wonder just how inconvenient credit cards are. Is it really such an imposition to take a card from a pocket or a wallet to pay? Is Apple Pay solving a problem that isn’t too much of a problem?

Gates, though, said that Apple’s true role was in creating the market: “All the platforms, whether it’s Apple’s or Google’s or Microsoft, you’ll see this payment capability get built in. That’s built on industry standard protocols, NFC. And these companies have all participated in getting those going. Apple will help make sure it gets to critical mass for all the devices.”

The value of Apple Pay is much more than saving you a reach for your credit card. Far more important is Apple Pay’s role in battling fraud, keeping your credit card number out of the top level of the transaction.

Cincinnati Enquirer:

Macy’s is expanding Cincinnati-tested technology that enables in-store shoppers to browse items not on shelves and even skip the checkout this holiday. It’s part of a broader push to woo Millennial customers and boost overall convenience and efficiency.

Customers looking for the hottest new Michael Kors purse that’s not stocked in their favorite color have been able hunt for their hue at point-of-purchase terminals at the Kenwood Towne Centre store as part of the Cincinnati-region testing.

The touchscreen point of purchase or “POP” machines confirm if an item is in the store – or at any store nearby or across the country. Also being expanded are local “look book” terminals – touchscreen catalogs that replace some mannequins and show the shopper how some clothes look paired with other garments or accessories.

So far, so good. Macy’s is exposing their inventory system to customers. Makes for more efficiency all the way around. But then the article digs in to the various tech in play. When it comes to explaining Apple Pay:

How it works: Customers with the new iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch will be able to pay at registers with a wave of their devices. Customers buy virtual encrypted “tokens” from Apple to be stored on their phones – so in the event they’re lost or stolen, no credit card info is on the device. More details will be released this month by Apple.

I still struggle to get my head around exactly how Apple Pay works, but I do know that customers won’t be buying “virtual encrypted tokens” from Apple. Hard to blame the Enquirer, though. This is a complex process. But taking a complex process and wrapping it in a dead simple service is Apple’s specialty.

And that’s the key. If Apple Pay works seamlessly and adds a layer of security/indirection to the credit card universe, it’s not so critical that the end user truly understands the inner mechanics.

NY Times:

The company, considered a foundational institution of Silicon Valley, said in a news release that it intended to divide itself into a company aimed at business technology, including computer servers and data storage equipment, software and services, and a company that sells personal computers and printers.

Both companies will be publicly traded. The business-oriented company will be called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, while the PC company will be called HP Inc. and will retain the company’s current logo.

It’s tough when you build a business based on products, no matter how innovative, that get commoditized. Innovate or die.

This original iPhone 2G prototype was used for external (outside the company) testing and was not loaded with the official iOS interface. Instead, it ran the “skankphone” testing interface (see “skank is the new black” in small print on the picture in the auction listing).

If you look at the 6th picture, you’ll see the icon view, which features a Cheerios box as an icon for the serial number. Cereal for serial, get it? Heh.

I love looking at these old phones. Amazing how far the world has come since the original iPhone was introduced.