Part 1
Part 2
This is hilarious.
I am, however, waiting anxiously for the “shit apple-haters says”. Those are the most curious folks: “Everything with an apple is the work of the Devil!!”.
Pinch-to-Zoom and Rounded Rectangles: What the Jury Didn’t Say
How did so many get this so wrong? I fear it betrays something ugly about the way tech reporting works–and doesn’t work–these days. Depth, expertise, and reflection are all lacking. So is serious research. If you are going to write about a patent case, it’s a good idea to read the patents in dispute. Reading patents is not a particularly pleasant business. The language is tedious, legalistic, and often deliberately obfuscatory; you want to give the Patent Office the required information while giving away as little as possible to your competitors. But reading the claims, the critical section of the patent, isn’t all that difficult. There are a total of 101 claims for the three patents and they fill about five printed pages. Yet I suspect very few of the people who wrote about the trial actually made the effort. If they had, they would have known that the range of gestures covered was much narrower than has generally been reported.
I’m not sure where the idea that pinch and stretch was at stake originated. It seems to have crept into the trial coverage at some point and become part of the folklore of the case. And when the jury announced that it had found infringement by Samsung on all three utility patents, a large number of writers seemingly assumed that one of those covered the gesture. In the case of rounded rectangles, Samsung’s obfuscation certainly contributed. So did a general hostility toward the entire patent system in the tech community, including tech writers, which created a readiness to believe in the most absurd interpretation of the outcome.
Apple Never Invented Anything
Drugged or sober, the proud iPaq owner falls into the following point: The basic ingredients are the same. Software is all zeroes and ones, after all. The quantity and order may vary, but that’s about it. Hardware is just protons, neutrons, electrons and photons buzzing around, nothing original. Apple didn’t “invent” anything, the iPad is simply their variation, their interpretation of the well-known tablet recipe.
By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity, Henri Poincaré had similar ideas before him, as did Hendrik Lorentz earlier still. And, come to think of it, Maxwell’s equations contain all of the basic ingredients of relativity; Einstein “merely” found a way to combine them with another set of parts, Newtonian mechanics.
[…]
So, yes, if we stick to the basic ingredients list, Apple didn’t invent anything…not the Apple ][, nor the Macintosh, not the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad…to say nothing of Apple Stores and App Stores. We’d seen them all before, in one fashion or another.
The sincerest form of jerkery
But it’s not just Samsung that’s sussed out the natural evolution of things. No, no, no, no, no. A world of five nos. Take Ultrabooks for example. Lenovo’s COO Rory Read told us a year ago that the fact that Ultrabooks all look exactly like the MacBook Air was …
“…just a natural evolution of the space.”
Natural. Evolution. See? It’s simple. And natural. And evolutional.
Forms evolve over time and they just naturally evolve into designs Apple happens to not necessarily invent but certainly popularize. See? What could be more natural? Or evolutional?
The Macalope Weekly – Macworld
No weekend is complete without my dosage of laughter from The Macalope weekly column.
One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever, Made Worse
“The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked.
The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It’s so weak, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It’s a huge, huge pain.”
NeXTStep Origins
As Apple releases a new iteration of Mac OS X, it’s interesting to see the origins of such powerful system, and realize that what we’re currently using (we as in we Mac users) is in fact NeXTStep OS. Also, we could probably use a NeXT computer as easy as if we were using a Mac if we somehow stumbled upon a working NeXT machine today.
In 1994 i was having a MS-DOS introductory course in the old Portuguese Youth Institute. God, what would I have done if I could instead play with a machine like this.. Looking back it seems as if I was in the Medieval times while Steve came from the shinny 21st Century.
10.8 Mountain Lion
And in case you didn’t knew, Apple has released a new iteration of its flagship Operating System, Mac OS X 10.8, aka Mountain Lion. Go read The Review to understand what it is all about.
Also, avoid updating until 10.8.3, somewhere around Christmas time. Let some one else do the beta-testing and bug fixing for you. (( Unless you really want to play as i do. But remember then that you will find some bumps on the road and your work can suffer from those. ))
The Marco.org Review of John Siracusa’s Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
“The 10.8 review maintains Siracusa’s standard at approximately 26,000 words, an impressive feat given that the interval between 10.7 and 10.8 was much shorter than most previous OS X update intervals.
This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.”
This review of a review, done slightly in humoristic terms is lovely. But you would miss the larger joke, bold in the quoted paragraphs, if you didn’t knew that Marco Arment is creator and main developer of Instapaper, the original “source” for Apple’s reading list feature.
The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable
“Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last. But is it an informed decision? When you buy something, how often do you really step back and ask how long it should last? If we want long-lasting products that retain their value, we have to support products that do so.
Today, we choose. If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still. When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves.”
Better wages
“Apple is pushing for Chinese worker reform now because with its huge margins, better worker wages & fewer hours hurts Apple competitors.”
I’m not sure if the Apple Board / Tim Cook would actually go for this maquiavelic strategy, it really doesn’t seem their thing. Apple has, since 1997, pretty much did their thing and let the rest of the world follow their own path. In fact, it seems something more out of Bill Gates book of strategy.
But if true, it will work. Boy, how it will work… And pretty much nobody will withstand it. It will drive the prices of competing laptops right into the Mac(s) price range. And if that happens around the time of Windows 8 spectacular launch and an even spectacular crash, Apple’s share of the PC market will sky rocket, and a giant turmoil will follow in the “PC world”.
As a secondary outcome, it’s a step further for the factories coming back to the western world. Or moving to other less developed countries, spreading richness and well-fare around, improving life conditions and reducing the wind behind China’s sails.
Now that i think of it i can only see positive outcomes on this…