November 22, 2011

Who’s Your Daddy?

It’s no secret that Apple loves aluminum. Look at the MacBook line of notebooks and what do you see? Aluminum cases unlike notebooks of any other computer maker.

Competing PC manufacturers know that the buying public love the aluminum clad Macs, so they want to create ultra books of their own. But Apple controls aluminum supplies and the expensive equipment to make MacBook cases.

From Aaron Lee and Joseph Tai in DigiTimes:

Vendors, facing limited capacity and price restrictions for unibody aluminum chassis, have chosen new materials such as high-density fiberglass, and designs such as aluminum chassis with plastic internal parts, for their ultra book models

In other words, they’re finding it difficult to copy Apple’s unique unibody aluminum construction so they substitute with plastic or other less desirable materials.

Who’s your daddy?

November 21, 2011

Occupy Flash

This is a movement I could get behind. David Goldman in CNN Money on Occupy Flash.

“Occupy” movements have taken over Wall Street, London, Chicago and Oakland. Now an “occupy” group is trying to take control of your Web browser.

Not quite. It’s more of a movement to get rid of Adobe’s Flash plug-in forever.

Among the movement’s complaints are that Flash is “buggy,” “crashes a lot,” “requires constant security updates,” and “doesn’t work on most mobile devices.”

From the Occupy Flash manifesto:

Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies.

Flash makes the web less accessible. At this point, it’s holding back the web.

Flash is dying, but not dead. Using Flash only prolongs the life of an ill-mannered, proprietary technology that can be easily replaced by a new and better standard, HTML5.

What’s next? Occupy Windows?

November 18, 2011

Getting Steve Jobs Wrong (or not)

My impression of Steve Jobs after reading Walter Isaacson’s biography:

Steve Jobs was a highly troubled, obviously brilliant, self-serving, bi-polar egomaniac who was incredibly lucky

In Getting Steve Jobs Wrong, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber argues that the biography was flawed, as are criticisms that Jobs was a tweaker, not an inventor, as postulated by Malcolm Gladwell.

I fall in the middle of the controversy. Nothing I read in the biography contrasted sharply with other books I’ve read on Jobs. Was he a tweaker of technology?

Yes, because that’s what works today. 19th century inventors could invent in ways today’s technologists cannot. Today it’s more of a collaborative affair, more tweaking than inventing something entirely new (like gunpowder).

Even Jean-Louis Gassée, an old Apple guy, called Jobs more of an editor than a writer.

I agree.

Steve Jobs was not an inventor in the traditional sense, but that sense has changed in the past century.

November 17, 2011

Amazon’s Kindle Fire vs. Apple’s iPad 2

PCWorld gets it right in a 2.5 (out of five) star review:

All eyes are on the Amazon Kindle Fire to provide fresh competition for Apple’s iPad 2, today’s dominant tablet. Not so fast: Beneath the Kindle Fire’s slick veneer and unparalleled shopping integration lies a tablet that fails to impress as either a tablet or as an e-reader.

The bottom line?

The Amazon Kindle Fire makes trade-offs to achieve a $200 price. It’s easy to dismiss some of the compromises and weaknesses of the Kindle Fire as the sacrifices necessary to achieve a price point, but the reality is that the Fire may not meet your expectations if you’re looking for an Apple iPad 2-like tablet.

For those people who go in knowing what they’re getting, and who want an inexpensive tablet that capably–though not spectacularly–handles their Amazon books, music, and video, the Kindle Fire’s limitations may be acceptable. However, the Fire falls far short of providing a full and satisfying tablet experience.

You get what you pay for.

November 16, 2011

Google’s Not Even Trying Anymore

Remember the Google Gmail app for the iPhone? It was released via the App Store earlier in November, and then yanked a few hours later (due to a nasty bug). It’s back.

Josh Lowensohn in ZDNet:

The app is noteworthy in that Google has avoided offering a Gmail client for iOS since the introduction of the App Store. Users of the iPhone, iPod and iPad can, of course, use Apple’s own email client to access their email; however, that built-in client is missing many Gmail-specific features.

That’s being kind. The Google Gmail app is also noteworthy in that it’s not a real app, but more of a web browser app, perhaps the crummiest email app ever on the iPhone.

But it’s free.

November 15, 2011

Where Does Apple Go Next With iOS, iCloud, and Siri?

Tim Bajarin in Tech.pinions weighs in on four major industries which could face a disruption from Apple:

Over the last 10 years, Apple Inc has done a rather amazing job of disrupting quite a few industries. By my account, it has dramatically impacted the PC, Tablet, CE, Telecom, Music and TV industries in a big way, and I believe that they are on the cusp of disrupting at least four more major industries in the next 3-5 years.

  • Television
  • Automobiles
  • Watches
  • Appliances

I would add search engines.

November 14, 2011

Speaking of AMD

Steve Jobs in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple’s co-founder:

We tried to help Intel, but they don’t listen much. We’ve been telling them for years that their graphics suck… They wanted this big joint project to do chips for future iPhones. There were two reasons we didn’t go with them. One was that they are just really slow. They’re like a steamship…Second is that we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.

So, what’s going on?

Jason D. O’Grady in ZDNet on Apple flirting with AMD chips, Intel’s reaction to Apple’s hot selling MacBook Air line:

In 2010, it was reported that Apple was testing AMD processors in the MacBook Air. Curiously, just one year later, Intel announced a $300 Million dollar fund to help unleash an army of clones to compete with the MacBook Air.

AMD chips in Macs? It could happen.