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Cartoon
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Welcome to the new decade: Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Truly, we have changed the world
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Will we someday have entire orchestras playing iPads?
id Unleashes Impressive Rage On The iPhone
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Carmack’s demonstration, using the id Tech 5 engine, could possibly be the most impressive tech we’ve seen on the iPhone. Running on the iPhone 4 but easily run on the 3GS, the visuals indeed rivaled anything from the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox, and might even be able to give a few current-gen titles a run for their money.
Don’t Be Ugly By Accident!
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Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple
Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are “fair use”
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Every three years, the Library of Congress has the thankless task of listening to people complain about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA forbade most attempts to bypass the digital locks on things like DVDs, music, and computer software, but it also gave the Library the ability to wave its magical copyright wand and make certain DRM cracks legal for three years at a time.This time, the Library went comparatively nuts, allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be "fair use," and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers.
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Terminal Tips and Tricks For Mac OS X
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Most iPhone users love AT&T
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77% of iPhone owners say they’ll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they’ll buy another Android phone.
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Nokia Profit Falls Amid Tough Smartphone Competition
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Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, said Thursday that its profit fell 64 percent in the second quarter as it struggled to compete with the innovative software makers Apple and Google in the critical smartphone segment.
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“Nokia’s problems are big and serious,” he said. “The emergence of the iPhone and the Android operating system have made that all too clear. Nokia was not prepared for either one. They are clearly not the same industry leader they have been for the last 30 years.”
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Oh the irony
I remember the good old days when Android fans made fun of the iPhone because some people did a jailbreak to install software, now those same people have to jailbreak their phones to be able to uninstall some software.
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Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren’t joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"
The response was, "Oh, it’s easy. You just have to root it."
"So you’re saying I have to hack it. Same way I can do whatever I want with my iPhone, but I have to hack it first."
"No, no. It’s totally different. Android is open."
"But you have to hack it in order to be able to do what you want?"
"Yes."
*sigh* "Ok, so how do I root an Incredible?"
"Oh, you can’t. Someone will probably figure it out sooner or later, but for now you’re just stuck with what you have."
"But I could jailbreak an iPhone now and do whatever I want with it. People already figured it out."
"Yeah, I guess."
"How is this more open again?"
"Because with Android, you can do whatever you want! It’s Linux, after all."
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Apple Press Conference
The ever-arrogant Apple
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How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away with a free case that makes the problem go away
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Look what they’ve done to poor Adobe, yanking away their right to spend more than three years figuring out how to run Flash on mobile devices. Look what they’ve done to the world’s developers, telling them to write specifically for iPhone rather than just port over apps designed for less capable phones. Compounding their sin, they have the unrelenting gall to insist that apps meet some basic standards for quality and reliability. With their “our way or the highway” attitude, Apple takes choice away from customers, forcing them to settle for a library of only 225,000 apps.
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Apple revenue by product line
Wow. The iPad is already bigger than the entire iPod segment!
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Apple ‘stunned’ by iProduct demand
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Apple doesn’t have enough iPads and iPhone 4s to meet consumer demand, doesn’t know when it will, and doesn’t know how many more it needs.
And, no, it didn’t create an artificial shortage of either device to hype up a buzz storm.
"We do not purposely create a shortage for buzz," Apple COO Tim Cook to analysts and reporters after announcing Cupertino’s $15.7bn third fiscal quarter on Monday. "I’m not sure where that comes from, but that is not our objective. We would like to fill every customer’s orders as quickly as we can."
But they can’t.
After telling a questioner that Mac and iPod supplies weren’t constrained, Cook said: "The iPad and the iPhone are significantly different. Both of these products — the iPad and specifically the iPhone 4 — we had backlog [of orders] at the end of last quarter that we were not able to fill, and currently we are still selling both of those products as fast as we can make them."
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High Ground Maneuver
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I’m a student of how language influences people. Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words: "We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."
Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.
Did it work? Check out the media response. There’s lots of talk about whether other smartphones are perfect or not. There’s lots of talk about whether Jobs’ response was the right one. But the central question that was in everyone’s head before the press conference – "Is the iPhone 4 a dud" – has, well, evaporated. Part of the change in attitude is because the fixes Apple offered are adequate. But those fixes easily could have become part of the joke if handled in an apologetic "please kick me" way.
If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 in particular to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to "all smartphones have problems," the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.
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Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
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Almost as soon as the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, the carrier realized it might run short of bandwidth. Within just a few months, the first wave of iPhone customers was already sucking down about 15 times more data than the average smartphone customer and 50 percent more than AT&T had itself projected. In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute. Rinne, who had already met with Apple’s iPhone team at least half a dozen times, fully expected the company to play along. After all, manufacturers agreed to such restrictions all the time. It didn’t make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn’t support.
But in meetings with Apple engineers and marketers over the subsequent year, Rinne and other AT&T executives discovered that Apple wasn’t playing by traditional wireless rules. It wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”
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They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”
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第四代iPhone出包賈伯斯忙滅火
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Best thing to come out of Antennagate? Apple’s “antenna testing chamber” porn.
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Reporters who attended the “Antennagate” presser today in Cupertino were invited to tour the company’s “$100 million antenna designing and test facilities.” They’re blinding us with science! Bonus: When I right-clicked to save this jpeg from the Apple website, I noticed that the original file name included the words “Stargate Chamber.” The hell with your free bumpers, Mr. Jobs, I want one of these suckers!
The Apple page with the “porn” is here.
(oh, and Apple posted video of the press conference, omitting the Q&A section)
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Apple Claims New iPhone Only Visible To Most Loyal Of Customers
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In a move expected to revolutionize the mobile device industry, Apple launched its fastest and most powerful iPhone to date Tuesday, an innovative new model that can only be seen by the company’s hippest and most dedicated customers.
"I am proud today to introduce to those who really, truly deserve it, our most incredible iPhone yet," announced Apple CEO Steve Jobs, extending his seemingly empty left palm toward the eagerly awaiting crowd. "Not only is this our lightest and slimmest model ever, but as any truly savvy Apple customer can clearly see, it’s also the most handsome product we’ve ever designed."
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Apple press conference announcement leaked!
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Apple’s holding a press conference tomorrow regarding the iPhone 4. Everyone expects it to be about the antenna flaws recently detailed by Consumer Reports. Though some expect freebie cases or even a recall, Gruber submits that Apple’s never held a press conference except to announce new products. This can only mean one thing.
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Yes, the iPhone 4 is broken / No, the iPhone 4 is not broken
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What’s more, at this point Apple’s sold well over two million iPhone 4s, and we simply haven’t heard the sort of outcry from users that we’d normally hear if a product this high-profile and this popular had a showstopping defect. Honestly, it’s puzzling — we know that the phone has an antenna-related problem, but we’re simply not able to say what that issue actually means for everyday users.
So we’re doing what we can do: we’ve collected reports from every member of the Engadget staff who’s using the phone, as well as reached out to a variety of tech industry colleagues for their experiences. As you’ll see, most of our peers seem to be doing perfectly fine with their iPhone 4s, but the people who are having problems are having maddening issues in an inconsistent way. We’d say it all comes down to the network — particularly in New York City, where AT&T just completed a major upgrade — but even that isn’t a consistent factor in predicting experience. Ultimately, we just won’t know what’s really going on until Apple comes clean and addresses this issue (and the growing PR nightmare it’s become), but for now we can say with some certainty that not everyone is affected, and those that are seem to be in the minority.
Well, we’ll know more on friday
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Microsoft to launch ‘iPad killers’
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Microsoft is set to release a series of Windows-based, tablet-style computers this year as it seeks to see off the challenge posed by Apple’s iPad.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, told delegates at the company’s annual worldwide partner conference that they would find the range of devices “quite impressive”.
Zune Maxi, anyone?
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How to hold the iPhone — Fixed.
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Material Matters
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"The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material–the material informs the form," says Ive. "It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way."
For the sake of Core77′s design student readership, I divert briefly into the realm of design education and ask Ive if he has any advice for students. "While [design schools today may have] sophisticated virtual design tools, the danger in relying on them too much is that we can end up isolated from the physical world," he says. "In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves–’I press too hard here, and it breaks here’ and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it’s important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials."
In Suit Over Faulty Computers, Window to Dell’s Fall
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Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses.
“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.”
Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.
Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Ten years ago Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, Sun and Apple faced the same challenge. The technology had become a commodity and low cost competitors were killing their margins. Dell choose to use his companies market share and scale to be the lowest cost provider, effectively killing competitors. IBM chose to exit the business and sold their PC division to Lenovo and focus on services and servers with a strong emphasis on open source. Sun never could figure it out . HP and Compac merged to try to mirror Dell’s strategy. Apple released OSX and iTunes to reshape the digital experience. The focus on design and user interface was the winner. Instead of building the cheapest clone, Apple stayed out of that market and became the premium experience. The escaped the commodity trap. The result is that today while Apple has 12.5% market share in PCs, they take in half of the total profit.
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Windows 8 leaks show Microsoft’s eyes on Apple
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Although still early in the process, newly leaked documents about Windows 8 offer some keen insight into where Microsoft wants to head with the next version of the operating system.
One thing that is made abundantly clear is that Microsoft has been paying attention to Apple. In the documents, which appear to come from an April meeting with computer makers, Microsoft discusses its Cupertino, Calif.-based rival and outlines plans to offer a Windows Store similar to the way Apple distributes software on its iPhone. The documents, which Microsoft has declined to comment on or authenticate, also talk about plans to give Windows a more iPad-like response time through new power management settings.
In particular, one slide titled “How Apple Does It: A Virtuous Cycle,” talks about the need for simplicity in design. “Apple brand is known for high quality, uncomplicated, ‘it just works,’” the slide says, adding that “This is something people will pay for!”
Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time for all the program managers at Microsoft to give their input into Windows 8, so it’ll probably be just as screwed up as all previous windows versions.
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Android Also Gives Google Remote App Installation Power
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The remote-wipe capability that Google recently invoked to remove a harmless application from some Android phones isn’t the only remote control feature that the company built into its mobile OS. It turns out that Android also includes a feature that enables Google to remotely install apps on users’ phones as well.
So if you’ve bought an Android because Apple has too much control over the iPhone, you’ve been had.
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Apple iPhone 4 Antennas…
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Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom. This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head. Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won’t be the last. The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna. This can’t be a good design decision, can it? How can we be stuck with this conundrum? It’s the FCC’s fault.
You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But, the hand is not!! And the FCC’s tests are not the only tests that must be passed by a candidate product. AT&T has their own requirements for devices put on their network, and antenna efficiency is one of them. I know because I have designed quad-band GSM antennas for the AT&T network. The AT&T test similarly does not require the hand to be on the phone.
So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements – and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!
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FaceTime and the iPod Touch
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That FaceTime is currently only available when connected to Wi-Fi is, obviously, a limitation. But that it uses Wi-Fi — data, rather than voice networking — is an indication of just how big a deal it is. It’s the beginning of Apple’s end-run around the phone carriers.
You can switch to FaceTime from a call that started as a voice call, but as Dan Frommer reported at Business Insider this week, once you switch to FaceTime, you’re no longer using voice minutes. The voice call ends once the FaceTime connection is made.
More importantly, you don’t need to initiate a FaceTime call using a voice call. You can start the call using FaceTime directly, in which case the entire process takes place over IP networking. The advantage to starting with a voice call is that you’ll get a voice connection even if the recipient isn’t on Wi-Fi at the moment.
But consider the implications of the fact that you don’t need to start with a voice call. That means you don’t, in theory, need to start with a phone. A hypothetical camera-equipped iPod Touch could make FaceTime calls. So could a hypothetical camera-equipped iPad. Or even an Apple TV. This notion occurred to me during the WWDC keynote, when Steve Jobs said that Apple expected to ship “tens of millions of FaceTime devices” (emphasis added) this year alone. (Skip to around the 1:33:30 mark in the keynote.)
Prediction: both the next iPad and the next iPod will have front-facing camera’s.
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Forrester: iPad sales will plummet
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In other words, in Forrester’s opinion, the 2 million iPads Apple sold in April and May were a fluke. It will be lucky sell 1.5 million in the U.S. between June and December — or fewer than 215,000 per month.
"Consumers didn’t ask for tablets," she points out in her summary. "In fact, Forrester’s data shows that the top features consumers say they want in a PC are a complete mismatch with the features of the iPad."
*cough*
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