Great piece from Rene Ritchie of iMore:
There hasn’t been a single Apple keynote yet this year. Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Craig Federghi, Eddy Cue and Jony Ive haven’t taken a single step onto a single stage, or shown off one atom of new hardware or one bit of new software or services. Yet Apple has taken a huge hit on the market and in mind share, areas that, until very recently, they dominated.
If you wanted to plan an assault on Apple, you couldn’t do a much better job.
Internet Explorer and Firefox are the two remaining non-WebKit holdouts now.
My Trip Chowdhry Google alert struck paydirt today, courtesy of Garett Sloane of the New York Post, a newspaper for people who have read everything else in the doctor’s office:
Apple is investing heavily in a technology known as indium gallium zinc oxide, or IGZO screens, according to Chowdhry.
IGZO! But why, Trip?
IGZO glass could be used in flexible phones that represent the next leap in hand-held technology, he said.
Trip thinks a bendy iPhone is coming within the next three quarters. Really.
The researcher also said the glass Apple has been ordering can be cut in large sheets, meaning the company could be prepping for its long-anticipated high-definition flat-screen TV.
I’m pretty sure glass availability hasn’t been the reason we haven’t yet seen an Apple television set.
Maybe Trip Chowdhry has an inside scoop on this, or better information than I do. I certainly don’t have his rumour accuracy record — mine’s better.
Great short film about the employees at Stumptown behind their legendary coffee. This same attention to detail is probably present at your favourite local small-batch roaster, too, but the amazing thing about Stumptown is that they do this consistently for cities on both coasts in the US.
Kas Thomas:
I’ve been involved in publishing all my life, and like many others I’ve always accepted as axiomatic the notion that typefaces with serifs (such as Times-Roman) are, in general, are more readable than non-serif typefaces (e.g., Helvetica). It never occurred to me that there was any doubt about the matter. Were the monks who invented serifs and other text ornamentations merely engaging in idle doodling? Weren’t they consciously intending to increase the legibility of the important documents they were transcribing?
It turns out that, as with so many of the things we “know” are right, the idea that serif typefaces are more readable than non-serif typefaces simply isn’t supported by the evidence.
Fascinating. I, too, have subscribed to the notion that serif faces are easier to read in print than sans-serif ones. Every class I’ve ever had on the subject has taught me this, and it seemed to make sense. But Thomas cites a number of articles that make a compelling argument against this agreed truth.
One of the things often singled out as enhancing readability is variance in stroke width. Since serif faces often employ this feature (see Bodoni for a particularly egregious example), it’s often taken for granted that it must be that kind of typeface that makes it more readable. Sans-serif faces don’t usually use variable stroke thickness because it often looks bizarre without the serifs to terminate the strokes. But the two do not go hand-in-hand, as Thomas notes.
Harry Marks:
Putting out inexpensive phones would lessen Apple’s brand and bring it down to the level of an LG or Samsung, something it has worked hard (and litigiously) to avoid. Apple doesn’t have to hit every price point to be successful. The iPhone (and the iPad mini even moreso) proves it.
Well said.
Dustin Curtis on American Airlines’ rebranding:
The design problems at American Airlines have never stemmed from its visual identity, but rather from its execution of that identity and from its culture around customer experience. But the bankrupt company, in a misguided attempt to change its external perception, set out to remake itself visually.
Not only did they toss away one of the best identities in their industry for something that’s mediocre, they’re repainting one of the oldest fleets in the world. Terrible.
Red Bull isn’t my Formula 1 team, but their accomplishments — including three consecutive constructors’ and drivers’ championships — are massive.
Hopefully the last article I’ll post about CES until next January comes from John Siracusa. Remember how Mat Honan described the show as “the world’s greatest hardware show stuck in a software era”?
Sure, hardware is very important. Faster processors. More and better sensors. Radios with better transmission capabilities, running on more frequencies. Pixel density. Delightful chamfers. These things matter. A lot. But the bottom line is software — or it should be. While atoms may indeed be the new bits in terms of production, bits remain king when it comes to consumption.
Turns out that software is also the key to a bunch of real shit, according to Siracusa:
Who really likes the “software” in their car, microwave, or blu-ray player?
All of this software is terrible in the same handful of ways. It’s buggy, unresponsive, and difficult to use. I actually think the second sin is the worst one, especially when it comes to appliances and consumer electronics. Dials and knobs respond to your touch right now. Anything that wants to replace them had better also do so.
Mark Collins of AT&T PR:
When FaceTime over Cellular launched in September 2012, we explained that we wanted to roll it out gradually to ensure the service had minimal impact on the mobile experience for all of our customers.
As a result of ongoing testing, we’re announcing AT&T will enable FaceTime over Cellular at no extra charge for customers with any tiered data plan using a compatible iOS device.
Finally.
Hey, you haven’t read enough about how the iPhone 5 is suddenly going down the tubes, and how this means Apple is going out of business, and how that means Mitt Romney is President and Tim Cook is a pirate taking over the Jobs’ family yacht, right?
Right?
The Macalope wrote a funny thing about it today, too.
Hey, remember how Apple is the big bad patent bully? And how they are granted patents on simply ridiculous things that are so plainly obvious that the guys in the comments over at TechCrunch had already thought of that invention? And remember how they’re clearly miles ahead of everyone else in these frivolous filings?
Well, the 2012 patent tally has just been released from IFI Claims. IBM was (once again) in first place. Apple was 22nd. Google? 21st. And what about Samsung? Well, they ranked second.
Someone should really do a tally of all the lawsuits that are going on, because I bet Apple isn’t the most litigious, either.
Facebook previewed a new natural-language search tool today that they’re calling “Graph Search”. Steven Levy of Wired has a great article about how it was built:
The company already had truckloads of information, but it was hard for users to access. Who are my friends in New York City? What books are my friends reading? Is there anyone nearby who loves Wilco? What’s an Italian restaurant that people really like? The new search product would answer such queries. But [former Google employee Lars] Rasmussen’s team faced a tough quandary: whether to focus on the most popular kinds of questions — or take on the tougher challenge of building a smarter search engine that would let users ask Facebook pretty much anything.
Some pundits are indifferent. But Facebook is a huge company with a massive user base — by default, any product decision they make is news. And, like Federico Viticci and Rene Ritchie are speculating, imagine how this could integrate with Siri.
Sunday night, a rumour popped up from the Wall Street Journal that Apple was halving their iPhone 5 display orders for the January through March quarter owing to “weak demand”. This has caused something of a massive sell of their shares despite this whole thing smelling wrong:
Before the number was removed, I wrote that “32.5 million displays for their January through March quarter is nothing to sneeze at.” Given the suspect original number, I was wrong — this situation doesn’t seem entirely likely for that quarter. This sentiment was echoed by Tero Kuittinen at BGR:
Perhaps the weirdness of the math is why the current version of the WSJ article no longer cites the 65 million unit figure. Sometime between Sunday at 8:00 p.m. EST and Monday at 7:00 a.m., the Journal decided to drop the number from its article. But if the 65 million number is not right, is the estimate for halving March orders correct?
No, probably not.
So what’s the deal here? Brian X. Chen of the New York Times managed to address the above issues with a named source:
Paul Semenza, an analyst at NPD DisplaySearch, a research firm that follows the display market, said that for January, Apple had expected to order 19 million displays for the iPhone 5 but cut the order to 11 million to 14 million. Mr. Semenza said these numbers came from sources in the supply chain, the companies that make components for Apple products.
A name! Citations! Numbers! Realistic numbers! Not 50%! Amazing!
Looks like there’s a massive windfall in for investors come January 24, the day after Apple’s earnings release. I doubt this will be anything but a record-breaking quarter. In fact, while I don’t think it’ll have the same holy shit factor of Q1 2012, I think it’ll be of a similar kind of reaction.
Nick Bilton for the Times’ Bits blog:
What struck me about our brief conversation wasn’t that Mr. Cook was talking about two teensy buttons — this is Apple, after all — but that he never once mentioned the technology in the iPad Mini. Instead, he talked about one thing: design.
To this day, I’m not actually sure how many megahertz my iPad operates on. And frankly, I don’t care about the technology inside the technology anymore. It just works — for the most part — and therefore consumers no longer need to think about it.
There’s also Nathan Bashaw’s article, “Designer Eats Engineer”:
The first generation of web designers mostly came from print, and had a tendency to treat web pages as clickable sheets of paper. It made sense that their tool of choice was Photoshop. Now that web design is maturing, it’s practitioners are increasingly discovering the benefits of learning to think in code. The new front-end engineer is really just a designer who prefers HTML, CSS and Javascript to Photoshop.
Two great articles on why design isn’t just veneer: it’s the way things work. The holdouts are finally beginning to understand that. Consider Steven Sinofsky’s “snark-free” observations from CES:
The design language in use for both hardware and software is trending towards a clarity and minimalism — turning over the screen to the app and the customer. There’s a lot less glowing and translucency. Navigation is clearer. Touch gestures are assumed on any device and often are not readily apparent (that is designers are assuming you will figure out how to touch and tap to make stuff happen). And the use of the full screen for the task at hand is clearly dominant. Rather than gain “speed” or “power” via multitasking by arranging, widgets, picture in picture, and so on, the focus is on moving quickly between task-oriented screens.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it’s what designers who know their shit have been preaching for ages. (By the way, I’m ignoring the contradiction between the “clearer navigation” and hidden gestures sentences, for the sake of brevity.)
Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica:
Over the last year, four important Apple executives left the company. One of those execs was hired and fired within that year. Another chose to retire, only to take a few steps back several months later. We thought we’d take a look at these four and what roles they played within the Apple ecosystem to see what all the fuss was about — for better or for worse.
2012 was a big year internally at Apple, but these changes are setting them up for a very solid 2013.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has significantly cut their orders for iPhone 5 displays (9to5Mac link due to the WSJ‘s paywall):
Apple’s orders for screens for the January-March quarter, for example, have dropped to roughly half of what it had previously planned to order, two of the people said. The U.S. company has also cut orders for components other than screens, according to one of the people.
This is an interesting development which is sure to trigger sells of Apple shares come Monday morning. But this news may not be what you think it is.
First of all, this isn’t the first time news has leaked that Apple has cut orders for parts of a hot device. In September 2011, they apparently trimmed 25% off their iPad parts order according to Bloomberg:
Reduced orders from Apple to iPad suppliers could reflect both weakening demand in Europe due to economic conditions there as well as a strategy by Apple, the world’s biggest company by market value, to operate with reduced inventory, Wanli Wang, a Taipei-based industry analyst at RBS Asia Ltd., said today.
Despite the apparent cuts, Apple sold over 11 million iPads during that quarter, a 166% increase compared to Q4 2010.
In November 2011, they also reportedly cut back their orders for iPhone 4S parts. Recall, however, that the quarter in question was that insane record-breaking quarter, with 37 million iPhones sold.
I wouldn’t usually link to Business Insider except to mock them, but Jay Yarow has a good point:
First, Apple’s manufacturing of the iPhone could have been better than expected.
Second, and much more importantly, Apple is apparently going to release a new iPhone in the May-June time frame, according to Topeka Capital analyst Brian White. His report is seconded by Peter Misek at Jefferies. (Misek has a June-July timeframe, White has May-June.)
Early refresh rumours notwithstanding, it’s likely that Apple could have simply made enough iPhones to sustain them through a massive first calendar quarter. This is corroborated by a Nikkei report (via The Verge):
According to the report, Apple had planned to source a total of 65 million displays from the two companies during that period, but that number has been reduced “in response to lower than planned global sales of Apple’s iPhone 5.”
We’ll find out for certain a week on Wednesday, but 32.5 million displays for their January through March quarter is nothing to sneeze at.
Mark Bao reflects on the death of Aaron Swartz:
And despite not knowing him at all, his death left me feeling a void in the world. Because the world lost a brilliant person, but also because the world lost someone whose ideas I believed so much in, whose ability to put those thoughts into action was admirable, whose willingness to show vulnerability and humanness was something I feel like the world desperately needs more of.
In a profile in the December 17th issue of The New Yorker, Trent Reznor revealed his involvement with the Beats brand as a brand new music streaming service codenamed “Daisy”:
Reznor sees Daisy as a second generation of Spotify and Pandora, which rely on mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener. Daisy, however, would present choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs, making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately.
It’s vague, but it’s there: it’s hard to guess at what a listener might like and the results often suck, but suggestions from people who love the same music makes for more accurate suggestions, and a happier listener. Everybody wins.
While announcing that he has accepted the CEO position of Daisy, current Ian Rogers — CEO of Topspin — offered this explanation of what makes it different, and what makes it better:
While I use and love many music services today (mostly MOG, Songza, and Pandora in my personal life), the music experience and interface hasn’t evolved all that much. In many ways it seems like we’ve spent the last fifteen years answering the basic question of “how do we make the music available” (the question Napster answered in 1999) and not “how do we find the music we love? the music we want to listen to right now?”
A great observation, and a service like this sounds absolutely necessary. Rolling Stone magazine also reports that Reznor has accepted a chief creative officer position at the company, which is great news: Reznor is not only an exceptionally talented musician, he also understands the evolving relationship of media and technology.
Via Dave Pell’s Next Draft comes this interesting taste-test of Nespresso versus a house prepared espresso, and another espresso of the author’s — Julian Baggini’s — choosing:
Coffee-making lends itself to automation, since all the key variables are strictly controllable. […]
In theory, that is bound to result in a better brew than the traditional process, which, for all its romance, is full of opportunities for degradation and mishap. A bag of beans, once opened, will start to lose its flavour very rapidly once it is ground. Calibrating temperature and pressure is also difficult and subject to human error.
This is true enough, but I maintain that a good barista will prepare a better cappuccino than any machine can, time and time again. Nespresso is inoffensive to the point of being bland. The beans I prefer1 all produce shots higher in acidity and have a much lighter roast profile than a typical espresso (where by “typical” I mean your average Starbucks, Second Cup, or Seattle’s Best shot). This is polarizing — I know a lot of people who love their French roast — but I prefer it every time. And, of course, a barista is necessary to produce decent, consistent microfoam, something a machine simply can’t do right now.
Phil & Sebastian make a few great espresso blends, though their Ethiopian is the best. 49th Parallel’s Epic Espresso is a favourite, as well as Fratello’s Competition Roast. ↥︎