This is sad.

This is the complete text of Businessweek’s interview with Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi, parts of which appeared last week. Every bit as revealing as the Cook interview. I get a real sense of the excitement these two have working with each other. Clearly, they love what they are doing. This from Ive:

I have always found—and I know the ID team has always found—that the discoveries you make when you are lucky enough to sit next to somebody who represents a completely different expertise, those discoveries can be really profound, and they’re really exciting.

Federighi on process:

We would prototype. We would review how it felt. Did it really work in the way we hoped it did once it was in our hands? We would get versions of it that we would live on, and then we would get together and we’d say, “I’m using it and I like this, but this bit is not coming together quite the way we wished,” and we’d iterate. So a lot of those conversations are just driven by perfecting the product together.

Ive on the emergence of parallax:

One of the things that we were interested in doing is, despite people talked about this being “flat,” is that it’s very, very deep. It’s constructed and architected visually and from an informational point of view as a very deep UI, but we didn’t want to rely on shadows or how big your highlights could get. Where do you go? I mean, there is only so long you can make your shadows.

It wasn’t an aesthetic idea to try to create layers. It was a way of trying to sort of deal with different levels of information that existed and to try to give you a sense of where you were.

There’s so much great stuff here. Interesting to hear their back and forth on complexity and collaboration, on working for Tim Cook, and the changes Tim Cook brought to Apple’s supply chain. Brilliant read.

This is an important step. To give you some perspective on the size of a nanotube:

100 microns – width of human hair 10 microns – water droplet 8 microns – transistors in Cedric 625 nanometres (nm) – wavelength of red light 20-450 nm – single viruses 22 nm latest silicon chips 9 nm – smallest carbon nanotube chip 6 nm – cell membrane 1 nm – single carbon nanotube

Fascinating.

Nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General, and will pay $350,000 in penalties.

Wow.

Seriously Samsung?

Some of these are fantastic. My favorite? The hackey-sack guy in the Apple Store. Wow.

No. Your iPhone is not waterproof.

“Update to iOS 7 and become waterproof” claims the ad (see below) explaining that “In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone’s power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone’s delicate circuitry.”

C’mon, people. Use your noggin.

Nice walkthrough of the changes that came to the Photos and Camera apps with the move from iOS 6 to iOS 7.

Tim Cook’s promise to “double-down on secrecy” seems to be working, at least as far as analysts are concerned.

Fast forward to this year’s iPhone lauch: Munster, after observing iPhone 5c & 5s launch day lines and taking notes, reiterated his firm’s prediction of weekend sales of 5 to 6 million, detailed as “2.5 million iPhone 5s” and “3 million units” of iPhone 5c.

In parallel, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted sales of 6 to 8 million.

When Apple announced sales of 9 million iPhones over the weekend, Munster told Bloomberg, “When I saw that 9-million number, I basically fell out of my chair.”

This from a guy who is traditionally on the high side when it comes to predicting Apple unit shipments.

I really like the Line 6 gear.

Scouting NY:

the properties in Monopoly were in fact named after the streets of Atlantic City. Monopoly itself has a long and complicated history, but the addition of Atlantic City-based street names can be traced to one Ruth Hoskins. Hoskins had learned a version of the game in Indianapolis, and upon moving to Atlantic City in 1929, made her own copy from scratch naming properties after streets where her friends lived.

This past weekend, I was driving through south Jersey, and decided to make a quick detour through Atlantic City to see what the Monopoly board looks like in real life.

I had forgotten that the Monopoly properties were real. Sadly, none of them match up to what I imagined them to look like.

Chuck Wendig:

You don’t want books to be pirated; you implement DRM. DRM mostly just pisses off regular users who suddenly have reduced access to the thing they thought they owned. They decide to become pirates, instead, because it’s easier and it gives them the access to the content in the way that they want it.

DRM creates — and then challenges — pirates.

It punishes regular readers.

Funny, interesting piece from the writer about publishers and publishing.

Kyle Vanhemert wrote a great article about Apple’s design choices in iOS 7.

I’m not even going to link to ABC or WSJ. Instead you can read Daniel Eran Dilger’s fine story. Spoiler: ABC and WSJ think Apple’s record iPhone sales are bad news.

Jay Freeman, better known as Saurik, has taken a closer look at what’s happening under the hood with iMessage Chat and he raises the concern that your information might not be secure as it passes through the app maker’s servers in China before it’s sent on to Apple. Fellow developer Adam Bell claims the app is circumventing Apple’s restrictions by spoofing chat requests as a Mac mini.

Scary.

Glad to see this. Apple is definitely doing the right thing here.

This is dark, sad, and powerful. About a year ago, David Hilfiker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This past January, he decided to blog about his journey. Here’s his self-written bio:

I am a 68-year-old retired physician and live with my wife in the nation’s capital. I practiced for seven years in an isolated rural area and then for ten years in an inner-city neighborhood. In 1990 we founded Joseph’s House, a home for homeless people with AIDS and cancer. I have continued to write, teach and lecture about poverty, politics and other issues. I am writing this blog to dispel some of the fear and embarrassment that surrounds Alzheimer’s.

And here’s a bit from his first post:

Garrison Keillor said recently, “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all material.” So, at least for a time, this Alzheimer’s disease will become material for my website and for this blog. I want to write about what Alzheimer’s is like from the inside. What is the experience of losing one’s mind? Do I still experience myself as the same “self”? Obviously, I don’t know how long I can do this, although my good friend Carol Marsh has volunteered to keep it going with interviews when I can no longer write. We’ll have to see.

If you want to follow from the beginning, here’s a link to the start of the blog. Brave man.

This review of the iPhone 5s is about what you’d expect. The author loves his new phone, points out things other reviewers have also raved about. But this bit focused on the difference with apps specifically compiled for the iPhone 5s’ 64-bit processor, vs their 32-bit iPhone 5 counterparts:

For instance, Night Sky 2 — it’s among those apps compiled in 64-bit — clearly gains speed during startup. It launches in 2.7 seconds on the iPhone 5S, compared to 4.6 seconds on an iPhone 5. Although 1.9 seconds may not sound like much, it’s still an indicator of the kinds of speed gains we’re likely to see as more apps are updated.

A better test of the new architecture is the new game Infinity Blade 3. For this quick test, I rebooted both devices and launched the game before running any other apps. From the moment I launched the game until the introduction animation ran, I found the iPhone 5S to be surprisingly faster than its predecessor. On first launch, the iPhone 5S needed 47 seconds to clear the loading screen and begin the animation, 14 seconds faster than the iPhone 5. For the second launch, I rebooted the phones again before launching the game. The iPhone 5S reloaded the game in 17.8 seconds compared to 48 seconds for iPhone 5. On the third attempt, the iPhone 5S needed 19.8 seconds, the iPhone 5, 37.9 seconds.

Those are some pretty significant differences.

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Smile Software makes some great products.

Very thorough review if cameras are your thing.

WANT!

One thing I’ve learned—everyone has different thoughts on what makes a great calendar. Here’s another alternative that looks pretty good.

Interesting, but required a bit of Mission Impossible trickery to make it work.

The CCC started by photographing a fingerprint with 2400 dpi. Next the image was inverted and laser printed at 1200 dpi. To create the fingerprint mask Starbug finally used, latex milk was poured into the pattern, eventually lifted, breathed on (for moisture), and pushed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. In this sense, it’s hard to definitively state the hackers “broke” the TouchID precautions, because they did not circumvent the security measure without access to the fingerprint.

This does raise a fair question, though. How usable are the fingerprints we regularly leave on our phones? How susceptible is the iPhone 5s to this technique?

This should be interesting.