512 Pixels

On this fortnight’s Liftoff:

NASA’s “Journey to Mars” plan is wide-reaching but a little light on details in places. We dive into it and consider what it would mean if Elon Musk beats NASA to the Red Planet.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• MartianCraft: Training crafted just for you.

Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs:

We’re committed to growing and expanding Quip’s productivity platform as part of Salesforce. If you’re a Quip customer, please know that we’ll continue to provide you with the exceptional service and extraordinary products you’ve come to expect from us, and once the transaction closes, we’ll do so as part of the world’s #1 CRM company. If you’re not yet a customer, sign your team up today!

As their blog post also says that Quip is hiring, my gut says that it will survive in some form or another, but as part of Salesforce’s enterprise tools. I’m happy for these guys, but I’ll be pretty disappointed if I — as a regular human user — get shut out of this app.

This is some good stuff:

More than one hundred new and redesigned emoji characters will be available to iPhone and iPad users this Fall with iOS 10. This exciting update brings more gender options to existing characters, including new female athletes and professionals, adds beautiful redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag and more family options.

Some of these rolled out in iOS 10 Developer Beta 4 earlier today.

Kagi, long-time payment processor used by many Mac developers has closed:

For the past ten years Kagi has been struggling to recover from financial losses due to a supplier fraud situation. We have reduced the debt but the recovery has failed and forced us to close.

We are sorry we failed you.

Damn.

I’ve always had a strong sense that places are important. I’m not a particular sentimental person about some things, but my strongest memories are very often associated with specific locations.

I wrote about this five years ago on this very blog, when I trespassed in a hospital due for demolition visited an important part of my family’s history.

(Just a little warning: that post is intense. I couldn’t re-read all of it.)

I’ve thought about this part of me many times over the years.

Several years ago, my brother and I were north of the city, not far from the small, country elementary school we attended. I badgered him into letting me stop and take some pictures. He didn’t understand why I wanted to do it, but I was driving, so we did it.

When I left my job with The Salvation Army in 2013, I walked through the community center I helped design and built, taking tons of photos, trying to soak it all in while I still had an employee keycard. It took a couple of years before I could go to an event or work out up there without weird emotional tugs.

I’ve thought a lot about it over the last month or so.

Recently, my alma mater started tearing down the dorm I lived in for two years with one of my closest friends. It wasn’t a nice building, and I really only slept there, but I’ve been cutting through campus while out running errands to keep tabs on the demolition. I’ve stopped to take some pictures, and was disappointed to realize I took very few of our room while we lived there.¹

Last week, my wife and I purchased her grandmother’s house, after selling our previous one. We moved our family of five into a home where my mother-in-law and her siblings grew up.

There’s a lot of history in this house, but it’s not my history. I’ve watched Merri experience some of the things that I thought were unique to me in our relationship. Several times, I’ve caught her just looking into a room or out into the yard, and I know she’s thinking about the time she spent here as a kid, or when she lived here in college.

I’m sure that with some time, I’ll feel the same way about this house as I did our previous one.

I don’t know what my point is in all of this. It’s just been on my mind, so I thought I’d share it, and encourage you to take some photos of your surroundings. One day, you may want them.

Alina Selyukh at NPR:

What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here’s a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)

Good times.

Lindsay Zoladz at The Ringer, writing about the post-production life of Apple’s last music player with a spinning disk:

Who would fork over up to $1,000 (or more; a factory-sealed seventh gen is listed for $1699 on eBay right now) for an old, obsolete MP3 player except a stick-in-the-mud Luddite, resistant to our inevitable progress toward a cloud-based future? I’m not sure. But I think these people were onto something.

I’m posting this link from my iPhone, sitting in a parking lot in the pouring rain. I’d say this device has changed the world.

This month on iMore, I wrote about the Titanium PowerBook:

Since their inception, Apple’s PowerBooks had been encased in various shades of gray and black plastics. Some were smaller than others, and they looked good for the time, but by the time 2001 rolled around, it was time for a change.

The iMac and iBook G3s were colorful machines, and even the PowerMac was clad in plastic. The PowerBook G4, however, would be a totally different beast.

Apple has posted its Q3 results:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $42.4 billion and quarterly net income of $7.8 billion, or $1.42 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $49.6 billion and net income of $10.7 billion, or $1.85 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 38 percent compared to 39.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 63 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Looking at these breakdowns, I can’t help but wonder if the iPad has finally found its natural leveling point at around 10 million units a quarter. iPad revenue was actually up a touch, probably thanks to the iPad Pro.

For a lot more detail and coverage of the call itself, check out Jason and Dan’s coverage at Six Colors.

Here are some charts:

Revenue

iPhone Sales

iPad Sales

Mac Sales

We’re happy to announce a new podcast on Relay FM:

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they’d had enough. Now they are independent workers, learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are… free agents.

Come for the sick intro, stay for the awesome show.

In a stunning break with tradition, Connected tackles the multi-iPad lifestyle and photo management in this week’s episode.

My thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this week’s episode.