Year: 2012

The Story Behind Toy Story 2’s Deletion

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Matthew Panzarino:

After the deletion and restoration of Toy Story 2, the team was likely hoping for an uneventful path to release, but it was not to be.

In the Christmas of ’98, after the release of A Bug’s Life and the promotional tour was done, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and legendary story man Joe Ranft all came to the production team to take a look at Toy Story 2.

It was not a good film.

Inside the iPhone Charger

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Ken Shirriff has torn down an iPhone USB charger, and the results are impressive:

Apple’s power adapter is clearly a high-quality power supply designed to produce carefully filtered power. Apple has obviously gone to extra effort to reduce EMI interference, probably to keep the charger from interfering with the touchscreen. When I opened the charger up, I expected to find a standard design, but I’ve compared the charger to the Samsung charger and several other high-quality industry designs, and Apple goes beyond these designs in several ways.

‘The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over’

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Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and Silicon Valley entrepreneur:

Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon. If you were a good VC you could make $100 million. Now there’s a new pattern created by two big ideas. First, for the first time ever, you have computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people. Second is that we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face, and we’re doing them on a computer.

And this trend has just begun. If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire population.