Bloomberg‘s headline:
LG Display Profit Misses Estimates on Stalling Apple Sales
The headline from the Wall Street Journal:
LG Display Gets Boost from Apple
Keep in mind that these headlines represent stories which are using the exact same first quarter data from LG.
Marco Arment:
Every app with a nontrivial number of downloads is likely to have comments, too, in the form of App Store reviews. This goes far beyond the app market these days, with stores like Amazon allowing anyone to review products and media, and sites such as Yelp that will publish anyone’s review of any restaurant, doctor, or church.
Consider, too, that people who have had a negative interaction are more likely to comment than people who have had an acceptable or positive interaction, making the product or service look worse than it potentially is.
Smartphones are getting stupid big. So what’s a company to do? If you’re taking a page from Apple’s playbook, you keep your phones at a reasonable size.
If you’re HTC, on the other hand, you introduce a normal-sized phone which pairs with your, uh, phone. It’s also a remote control for your phone.
This is the dumbest new product I’ve seen all week.
Brad Spurgeon previews the technical complexities of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix for the New York Times:
“It is not easy to find a good setup as you do experience the track surface changing over the weekend and sometimes the wind can affect the balance of the car too,” said the former world champion Kimi Raikkonen, a driver at the Lotus team.
“It’s one of the more tricky places to get the car exactly right, but at least you don’t often have to worry about rain,” Raikkonen added.
It’s not just the technical challenges, however; the Bahrain race has political challenges surrounding it, too. Spurgeon again:
To worldwide condemnation, and ignoring pleas by British politicians and international organizations like Amnesty International, Formula One decided to honor its contract with Bahrain. The race was staged on the premise that sports should not be politicized and that despite the portrayal by the media of a country in chaos, Bahrain was a safe place for the teams, spectators and media to visit.
Formula One organizers and teams are saying the same thing about the race this year.
Formula One has unique requirements, owing to its worldwide racing calendar and large audience. This year is no different, at least in Bahrain. The track is one of the least interesting on the calendar, but the closeness of the points after the first three races of the year will make it a good one to watch.
The BBC reports:
Fair-trade officials in Taiwan are looking into reports that Samsung paid people to criticise rival HTC online.
Samsung is alleged to have hired students to post negative comments about phones made by Taiwan’s HTC.
Samsung, based in South Korea, said the “unfortunate incident” had gone against the company’s “fundamental principles”.
A few things:
John Gruber:
How low has Apple’s valuation dropped? As of today it’s lower than Dell. Wall Street thinks Dell has a brighter future than Apple.
Remember when this stuff made sense? Neither do I.
Siu Han and Alex Wolfgram, of — ugh — Digitimes:
Upstream sources in the iPad mini supply chain expect a 20-30% decline in shipments for the device during the second quarter of 2013 [compared to Q1] due to lacking demand in the market.
Or, perhaps, a lack of a giant holiday shopping rush. True, there’s a lower demand for the iPad Mini compared to the previous quarter. But there’s also reduced demand for wrapping paper, which means Apple is clearly doomed.
Am I getting the narrative right?
Benedict Evans:
Android isn’t really growing at all in the USA, at least at the big two operators. (‘Other smart’ is almost all Android now). All the growth is coming from iPhone.
What a shocker.
Many of the best album covers of all time came from the mind of Storm Thorgerson. This is a tragic week, indeed.
Today, we’re releasing Twitter #music, a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter. It uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists.
And therein lies the first problem with this app. Popular music is, by definition, music that you’ve likely heard — or at least heard of — already.
There’s also a suggested music page, but Twitter doesn’t have musical data aside from the users you’re already following. Some of the suggestions are so banal and predictable that it’s hard to see how this is a useful tool. Does it really think I wouldn’t have heard of The Pixies or Portishead?
Recommendation engines only work well with a massive amount of initial data, like an entire music library or a user’s purchase history. If Twitter were able to access my music library, it would know that I already have most of what it is suggesting.
The ever-astute MG Siegler, on the vast number of tech blogs “covering” the tragedy in Boston:
At some point, you’d hope that bloggers, as human beings, would be shocked and appalled enough by what’s unfolding before their eyes that they would lay down their keyboards and stop playing the pageview game, if only for a few hours. Instead, I’m afraid the opposite instincts kicked in.
A third-party supplier of several companies of which Apple happens to be one posted revenues $30 million under analyst’s expectations, so obviously it’s Apple’s fault and they should be punished $30 billion. Naturally.
It’s only Wednesday, yet this week has been dominated by two stories of madness and incredulity. I’ve found Monday’s bombings in Boston difficult to comprehend. As far as I’m aware, nobody I know has been injured. But, for what reason I’m not certain, the cowardice of such an event has had a significant impact on me.
I didn’t want to write anything about this on Monday, for reasons that CNN aptly demonstrated today. But after a personal pandemonium yesterday, I’ve found time to reflect.
Paul Kafasis wrote a particularly moving article:
Just as they must have been more than two centuries past, people today are frightened and concerned. But now, just as it was 238 years ago, Boston is defiant.
Dave Caolo has assembled some of the more uplifting stories that arose from such a horrific event.
The second story is, of course, the lack of willingness by the US Senate to allow a bill requiring background checks for firearm purchases to move any further in the legislative process — a bill which 91% of Americans supported. Even the normally stoic President found it difficult to contain his anger and disbelief.
It’s hard to believe that it’s only Wednesday.
Mike Beasley, 9to5Mac:
Watching this movie felt a lot like using a PC. I spent half the time staring at the screen in utter bewilderment, and the other half desperately trying to figure out how something so void of any semblance of taste was actually OK’d by anyone at any level of the production.
Brevity is the soul of wit. This single-joke movie is only brief on a geological time scale.
Update: Mat Honan watched it, too:
iSteve, the Steve Jobs parody biopic from Funny or Die, starring Justin Long, Jorge Garcia, James Urbaniak and Michaela Watkins, is profoundly unfunny. It runs nearly 80 minutes. If “Funny or Die” is a promise, the crew should probably start coffin shopping.
A giant bag of hurt.
Julie Zhuo, product design director at Facebook:
How can we talk about physics-based UIs and panels and bubbles that can be flung across the screen if we’re sitting around looking at static mocks? (Hint: we can’t.) It’s no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer [sic], a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. We’ve given a few talks on QC in the past, and its presence at Facebook (introduced by Mike Matas a few years back) has changed the way we design.
Due to the initial impression of its complexity, I’ve never bothered to learn Quartz Composer, preferring to mock up interactivity in Keynote or with HTML/CSS. The latter is particularly nice for the web, because the code can simply be copied into the final product.
After reading this article, however, I think it would be imperative to learn how to use Quartz Composer. Unfortunately, it isn’t bundled with Xcode any more. If you are a registered Apple developer, you can grab it from the developer downloads area, in “Graphics Tools for Xcode”.
Shawn Blanc:
I’ve always viewed trailers as film art in and of themselves. And while I certainly enjoy watching today’s epic trailers, I have more appreciation for the ones which maintain some self control, aiming to tell me just enough and no more.
Absolutely. I have noticed an increasing trend towards spoiling the plot. It’s frustrating as an audience member and, I imagine, even more frustrating for those who worked so hard to tell the story at a specific pace (trailers are often created by people unaffiliated with the production of the film).
While the contents of the agreement are confidential, the parties indicate that Microsoft will receive royalties from Hon Hai under the agreement. Hon Hai joins a growing list of contract manufacturing and original design manufacturing companies with Android and Chrome patent licenses.
Think about it: the two companies which make the most money — and therefore exhibit the most market control — with Android are Samsung and Microsoft.
Must be embarrassing.
You know — to write for The Register.
Riccardo Mori (via MacStories):
Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.
If you have information on your computer that is worth more than a hard drive (in both monetary and time-to-recreate terms), and you’re not backing up, you’re nuts. Time Machine is the most straightforward (and cheapest) approach, but it isn’t bootable. If you’re cool with that, it will probably work fine.
If you have some sort of crazy multi-drive setup, or you need your backup drive to be bootable, SuperDuper! is a delightful choice.
If you’re looking for a backup hard drive, I recommend something very quiet and unobtrusive, so you can leave it on all the time. I have a Buffalo MiniStation — it’s bus-powered so it’s convenient, and it uses Thunderbolt, so everything is instantaneous. If you’re feeling totally baller, pick up a solid state external drive.
But I already have a web browser.
