Macbook Vinyl Decals
All designs available at etsy. I recently discovered the underground subculture of vinyl macbook decals on etsy, there are literally one million different designs (no really, I counted!) you can buy and adhere to your glow-y Apple logo, but really, can you beat Hipster Snow White? She was into apples way before you ever purchased your Macbook.
We don’t do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It’s unfair to ask people who don’t have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
Jonathan Ive was interviewed by the Evening Standard.
On competitors’ failures:
Most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.
And on innovation and spending time on details:
It’s incredibly time consuming, you can spent months and months and months on a tiny detail - but unless you solve that tiny problem, you can’t solve this other, fundamental product.
You often feel there is no sense these can be solved, but you have faith. This is why these innovations are so hard - there are no points of reference.
Every additional interview with Ive further convinces me him and his team share the motivations of Benedictine Monks, who stole away from society to obsess over meticulously hand-written Bibles.
(via dbreunig)
Today I spent a chunk of my morning writing time explaining how an episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic relates to Apple’s legal fight with Samsung and the general state of the smartphone and tablet market.
I. Love. My. Job.
Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House. “If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.
In this NYT piece about Apple and why, as much as we love tech companies, they are not the economic drivers in the United States that their industrial brethren are/were. A telling paragraph from the same article:
(via joshsternberg)Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost every electronics designer relies upon to build their wares.
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
[…]
One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
How the US lost out on iPhone work
This incredible investigative report by the New York Times takes a look behind the scenes on why Apple outsources its manufacturing work to Chinese companies and workers.
The company held out for as long as it could to maintain manufacturing within US borders but eventually caved in and in 2004 shut down its last US plant in Elk Grove, California, which was making Macs. The former plant now serves as a call center for Apple.
As to whether the US can reclaim manufacturing jobs from China, this part is damning:
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
The Atlantic last year calculated how much an iPad would cost if it was manufactured in the US, it was $1,140. That point was rebutted but then the rebuttal itself was claimed to have been taken through a misunderstanding. If this is all too confusing to follow, let’s take this discussion back to the point in the NY Times article.
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”China’s Foxconn can and has done this.
I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It’s a political problem.
Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.
Ars Technica on Apple’s textbook event this week.
My hopes for this announcement, if it is a “GarageBand for eBooks”:
- It’s free
- It’s not just for text books
- It is able to tie into a boilerplate Newsstand app, allowing publishers to more easily layout periodical content in a standard way (the divergence between Newsstand apps is unnecessary and frustrating)
- Textbooks are published into a textbook ecosystem, with unified notes, book collections for courses managed by instructors, and interactive quizzes built into books allowing students to take short exams and instructors to grade easily from an iPad.
I think 2 will eventually pan out, but 3 is wishful thinking. 4 would be a game changer, but would require massive commitments from major universities to catch on. Teachers I know would like such an ecosystem (I would have liked it as a student), but it may be a hinderance to adoption and is probably best saved for later.
(via dbreunig)(via dbreunig)
Air Pocket Mirror Book
Available for purchase at w3shstore for €19.95
(via: Laughing Squid)
Actually Looked at the Apple Patent? They Could Stop ANYONE from Building a Tablet
Back in 2010 Apple filed for a design patent for a screen with a bezel and a back…a tablet. They called it the handheld computer. … Take a look at the above design and tell me that doesn’t look like EVERY TABLET on the market. Apple has just chosen the most competitive Android tablet on the market and taken it down. This Community Design patent by Apple has only been around since 2010 so clearly Apple didn’t invent the tablet, Bert Keely, in 2000 at Comdex in Las Vegas the showed off Microsoft’s vision for the Tablet PC. Look familiar? Kind of looks like the images above, how can Apple patent an entire product category?
An open letter to my boss, Steve Jobs
Dear Steve,
I’m writing to let you know that I’m leaving Apple. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it appears that readers have found out that you’re paying me to write positive articles about your company. I can’t hide it anymore. It’s not good for my credibility.
I mean, how could people not realize that I’m in your pocket when I write articles about how you set records in share price, iPhone sales, iPad sales, revenue and profit? You couldn’t possibly set all those records at once! I can’t believe you even suggested that. That idea was dumber than the Newton.
When I first brought up the possibility that people were on to us, you suggested I throw in a few unfavorable articles, just for show. Well, even though I wrote stories with the titles, “Mobile Web apps escape Apple’s iron grip,” “Taking down the Apple and Google smartphone duopoly” and “What’s the bug up Apple’s @$$?,” none of those articles threw them off.
Not even my story criticizing Apple’s decision to pull the Xserve without warning, or the fact that I said the move was indicative of your losing strategy in the enterprise space, could do anything to assuage their fears that I was cashing Apple checks.
You thought by saying Apple’s surpassing of Microsoft in tech market share was overstated might disguise the fact that you hired me. Nope. Saying Apple is a new hacker bulls-eye? Uh-uh. Calling you out for a bogus answer to iPhone 4 antenna problems? No way. Calling iPhone problems “an annual tradition?” No sir. Expressing concern about Apple’s supply constraints? No.
So I think it’s best to part ways. I’ll miss those big fat checks rolling in.
But it’s cool. Google has made me an offer I can’t refuse.
Best,
One of the highlights of my time at Laptop Mag was when I wrote a post that caused scores of people to accuse me of having an Apple bias. My co-workers all laughed, stating these folks clearly did not know me. But beyond that, I find it curious that this accusation gets thrown around a WHOLE LOT. If I write a favorable review of a Dell notebook or a Samsung tablet, I don’t get people saying I must be on their payroll. Interesting the attitudes around Apple in this regard.
Anyway, good thing David is resigning. That means more money for me when I write my biased reviews. whoopie!
Woah. Sorry son, I don’t hire designers with Macs. They’re usually asses with wayfarers.
Every day, I feel a little worse that I didn’t stand in line for two days to pick up a phone that I paid hundreds of dollars for just so I could be called a moron by the CEO of the company and then given a $30 rubber band free of charge.
Apple. Think Different.
How the iPhone 4 story has gone so far...
- Gizmodo: check out this prototype iphone we "found".
- Steve Jobs: that's not an iPhone *dials police*.
- Sometime later....
- Steve Jobs: masses, listen to me, this is the best phone ever, again.
- Consumers: gimme gimme.
- Steve Jobs: wooo done it again.
- Consumers: wait..... If I hold my phone like this *claws at phone* it drops all the signal.
- Steve Jobs: there is nothing wrong with it.
- Consumers: seriously, this is broken.
- Steve Jobs: no it's a software problem, thats why when you touch the "hardware", it stops working.
- Consumers: bollocks, fix it!
- Steve Jobs: hold it differently!
- Consumers: no!
- Steve Jobs: okay, fine, free cases and refunds for everyone...but it still isn't broken.
