Year: 2012

The Push of the SSD

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Lee Hutchinson at Ars:

It’s certainly safe at this point to say that flash has won the war in the mobile space—I don’t think we’ll ever see another tablet or phone based on anything other than solid state storage. The war for the proverbial desktop (which includes most laptops) is far from over, with hard disk drives still outnumbering SSDs in most traditional computers. Still, SSDs are in enough places doing enough things that modern operating systems have changed to accommodate them.

I hadn’t really thought about SSDs taking over this way, but it makes perfect sense.

On Pocket Cameras

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Marco:

Because as fun as it is to share iPhone photos conveniently on Instagram, that can’t be my only photography: I also need some photos that won’t look like shit when I look back on them in the future.

I’ve come to the same resolution (ha!) of late. A lot of photos of my kids were taken with my iPhone, and while most of them are decent, none are as high-resolution as I wish they were. Thanks to Marco, I’ve put my Canon G9 back in my daily bag.

Impressively Polished

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Jason Snell, five years ago:

The iPhone certainly has room to grow, and there’s no doubt that future versions will build on the impressive list of features in this initial product. But let there be no doubt: this first iPhone is an impressively polished product, with none of the haphazardness that we’ve come to associate with anything 1.0.

In Our Pockets

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Jason Snell:

But though it’s come a long way, the iPhone of five years ago is still indisputably the iPhone. It’s the product that changed how we thought about that little device we keep in our pockets all the time. I remember clearly how I much I hated bringing my Palm Treo along with me when I went somewhere. Sitting in that tent five years ago was the first time that I actually looked forward to bringing my phone with me wherever I went—at least, once I got out of the mountains and got to somewhere with actual phone reception. Five years later, I won’t go anywhere without that device close at hand.

Bob Mansfield Retiring From Apple

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The Apple PR Machine:

Apple today announced that Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will retire and the role will be transitioned to Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering, over several months. The entire hardware engineering team will continue to report to Mansfield until his departure.

“Bob has been an instrumental part of our executive team, leading the hardware engineering organization and overseeing the team that has delivered dozens of breakthrough products over the years,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are very sad to have him leave and hope he enjoys every day of his retirement.”

On Obamacare’s Popularity

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Igor Volsky:

While Americans may not like “Obamacare” — and the political process of passing it — they do support its major provisions and are likely to resist any effort by Republicans to take away their benefits. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that while 56 percent of Americans oppose the law as a whole, 61 percent of respondents favored allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26, 72 percent wish to maintain the requirement that companies with more than 50 workers provide health insurance for their employees, and 82 percent of respondents favored banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. As more benefits roll out in 2014, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to argue for their repeal.