Some analysts were cautious in their assessment of Apple’s wisdom in choosing Next. “I am a little bit surprised by this move, and I still have to digest this,” said Daniel Kunstler, who follows the computer systems industry for the investment banking firm J.P. Morgan. “There are no real details as to how they are going to use the Next technology and platform to jump-start their own operating system or how long it’s going to take.”
Category: Apple
Fifteen Years Ago, Today
This was the best $429 million Apple has ever spent.
Apple to Offer Dividend?
Apple Buys Anobit
The purchase of the flash storage company is the reported to have cost $500 million. It’s the biggest purchase Apple has made since it bought NeXT in 1997.
An LTE iPhone
Steven Sande at TUAW references this article at the Houston Chronicle concerning the iPhone and LTE. In it, Dwight Silverman says:
Presumably, if the next iPhone comes with LTE, it will use newer-generation chipsets and Apple will have tuned iOS for battery longevity. But I’m not optimistic. I’m also hoping that any LTE phone Apple offers will come with a setting that turns it off and allows users to drop back to 3G when battery life is more important than raw speed.
On the Difference Between Apple and Google
Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.
I think Gruber nailed this one right on the head.
There’s an element of irony here, though. In 1984, Apple painted IBM as Big Brother, the all-knowing, all-powerful overlord that turned citizen into mindless drones.
Today, IBM is a shadow of the empire it once was. Instead, Google now holds that position of power, with all of our data being used to serve ads. A quick scan of my Address Book shows that over 75% of my contacts have a Gmail account listed.1 To say that Google is an Internet powerhouse is a massive understatement.
Long Live Birdfeed
I’m totally behind this. As much as I like Tweetbot, Birdfeed was probably the best Twitter app I ever used on an iPhone.
Dr. Drang, on Type2Phone
Dr. Drang, on the little app that allows users to type on their iOS devices via the Mac:
What isn’t wonderful, at least not initially, is what goes on in the Type2Phone window as you type. Every keystroke shows up in a little white chiclet which scrolls from right to left as you type. It’s really distracting.
[…]
So what you see on your Mac is not what appears on your iPhone; it’s more like the output of a keylogger program. Weird.
The Macalope, on CNet
Clearly, CNet has no bias. Well, other than the bias for conventional wisdom.
Crothers, it should be noted, famously declared that the iPad had “met its match in the [HP] TouchPad”. If this is the analysis that a supposed lack of bias brings, give the Macalope bias every time.
18 Ways to ~/Library
While I understand Apple’s motives here—I’ve had to troubleshoot more than a few Macs on which an inexperienced user had munged the contents of ~/Library—there are plenty of valid reasons a user might need to access their personal Library folder.
Thankfully, there are tons of ways to get it back.
Scrivener for iOS
On Pushing Apple Rumors
Google has published a listing of their top keyword searches from 2011. Out of the 10 fastest-rising global search trends, Apple holds three spots. At number six was the iPhone 5, number nine Steve Jobs, and number 10 is the iPad 2. Other lists also have Apple products, including the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 on the Fastest Rising Consumer Electronics list.
There are a number of things we can take away from the findings. The first thing is that the general population is genuinely curious about what’s going on at Apple these days. That’s a great thing for Apple, and us, obviously. The second, and probably more important thing to point out here is that people eat up Apple rumors with an appetite that’s much bigger than the competitors’ audiences. Devices like the iPad 3 and iPhone 5, not even released yet, are on these lists.