Starting Anew ⇢

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Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s new SVP of Retail, in a blog post on LinkedIn:

My father used to always say, “Ask questions, don’t make assumptions.” Questions invite conversations, stimulate thinking, break down barriers, create positive energy and show your willingness to understand and learn. Questions show humility, acknowledgement and respect for the past, and give you greater insights into both the business and individuals. And don’t be afraid to ask personal questions or share a few of your personal details. Talking about weekend interests, family and friends can give you a more complete view of your peers and partners, their passion and compassion. Building a relationship is also the first step in building trust, which quickly leads towards alignment and unity.

It’s a great read, and a sure sign that Apple’s corporate life is changing. Can you imagine a post like this going up five years ago? Five weeks ago?

On the Oxford Comma ⇢

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Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight:

FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey Audience ran a poll from June 3 to 5 asking 1,129 Americans which camp they fell into, and wouldn’t you believe it? We’re split on that comma.

We asked respondents which sentence was, in their opinion, more grammatically correct: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind and loyal.” Or: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind, and loyal.” The latter has an Oxford comma, the former none.

The result was pretty much down the middle, with pro-Oxford partisans commanding 57 percent of the vote and opponents to the tyranny of the extra comma grabbing 43 percent. Although those numbers might be enough to defeat Eric Cantor, it’s hardly a clear victory for the Oxfordians.

As a general rule, AP drops punctuation and spaces to preserve space. While newspapers are dying (and the guys who used to set type by hand are gone), I prefer the style. I learned AP style in high school and college and my brain barely registers that the punctuation exists, much to the chagrin of my wife and her fancy English degree.

via The Loop

Dan Frommer, on Tim Cook ⇢

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Over at Quartz:

As Apple’s product line matures and growth slows, it is easy—perhaps too easy—to criticize Apple CEO Tim Cook for not being enough like Steve Jobs, his legendary predecessor. But that misses the real story: Since taking over as CEO, Cook has made several key moves—including some Jobs might never have considered—to set Apple up for its next big thing.

The QuickTake 100 turns 20 ⇢

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Stewart Wolpin at Mashable:

First unveiled at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo on February 17, 1994, the QuickTake 100 went on sale 20 years ago from yesterday — June 20, 1994. It was priced at $749 and initiated the age of consumer digital photography.

One reason why the QuickTake 100 is not often mentioned as an Apple breakthrough — other than the fact that Jobs’ himself had nothing to do with it — was that it’s one of the few non-computer products Apple produced and one Apple itself didn’t design.

The entire QuickTake 100 line was built by Kodak, but the 200 was by Fujifilm. No matter the source, these products are still an interesting look at weird, 90s Apple.

More interesting? By some measures, the iPhone is the most popular camera in the world. I bet that twenty years ago, no one thought that a camera with an Apple logo on it would take over the world.

Computerworld going digital-only ⇢

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Scot Finnie:

On June 23, we will publish the last print issue of Computerworld.

It was 47 years ago, almost to the day, that Computerworld’s very first issue rolled off the presses: June 21, 1967. The newspaper’s first publisher was the late Patrick J. McGovern, who was the founder and chairman of International Data Group (IDG), Computerworld’s parent company.

It’s sad to lose anything that has endured so long. But we are merely taking part in the natural evolution of the media industry, like so many great publications before us. Trains, after all, were once powered by coal and steam; Computerworld is moving from paper to electrons.

Buy N Large Prime

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Yesterday, Amazon announced its Fire Phone, a 4.7-inch smartphone running the company’s forked version of Android that can be found on its tablet offerings.

The phone is interesting in and of itself. While the industrial design is a little boring, the inclusion of four cameras to power the device’s unique “Dynamic Perspective” technology that takes a 3-D interface and makes it (probably) useful.

The software is just as interesting. The phone comes with an online cloud service. By owning of the whole stack — cloud services, front-end web services and devices — Amazon is sitting at the big-boy table with Apple and Google. I only expect the company to grow these offerings over the coming years.

There is one thing about the Fire Phone that bothers me, though. It can be used as a portal to Amazon’s online store via Firefly, a service on the phone that lets users take a photo of just about anything.

While Firefly does more than link to Amazon for purchasing, it’s clearly the focus of the service.

Here’s Ben Thompson on the subject:

Amazon has always had a unique relationship to the physical world: from a consumer perspective they’re totally virtual, yet their primary business is things you can actually touch. In that sense something like the Fire phone is perfect for Amazon: it tightly binds the virtual to not only what is on your computer screen, but to what is on your hand, and with Firefly, most of the objects you interact with everyday.

The question, though, is if the Fire phone is perfect for Amazon’s customers. Just because someone loves Amazon doesn’t mean their entire life is about buying things. And while it’s true that Amazon has gone to great lengths to make the Fire Phone compelling as a phone, it’s still an inferior offering as compared to a high-end Android phone or especially an iPhone when it comes to things like apps.

Since the Fire Phone isn’t going to burn down (sorry) any existing market leaders, it’s only fair to assume that Amazon’s main push here is to make it easier to buy things.

As I said on The Prompt this week, I’ve purchased daily-use household goods on Amazon.

I feel weird about it. While buying toothpaste online does nothing to help my local economy, the truth is that I’m not buying it from a mom-and-pop store. My six bucks is going to end up at Amazon or Walgreens, and both are multi-billion dollar companies.

There’s no doubt in my mind that technology like Amazon’s can make life easier. We’re all busy, and if I can save that 45 minute trip to the grocery store, my week could be better for it. We outsource and offload all sorts of responsibilities onto services and other people. Why should shopping be any different?

My sticking point comes from my favorite Pixar film.

While Amazon isn’t killing the planet — and probably won’t send us all to space when Earth is so polluted the human race faces extinction — it’s not hard to imagine a world in which the company’s sheer size and ubiquity make it impossible to avoid. Amazon is already my default when it comes to purchasing all sorts of items. As the company grows, I’m only more likely to use my Prime account more and more often.

All that said, I like Amazon for the most part. I don’t think the company is evil, but I don’t want to be in a chair having everything I need to me delivered to my fingertips automatically.

Buy N Large went from being a mere retailer to being everyone’s “very best friend.” It was a a living, breathing, all-knowing conglomerate designed to help and aid humanity, but ended up entrapping them.

Maybe Amazon making purchasing so easy isn’t what we need.

Hell, we’re halfway to this scenario with our always-on screens.

How to turn a G4 into a next-gen Amiga ⇢

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Benj Edwards:

Long ago, Mac fans and Commodore Amiga fans fought like mortal blood enemies. But we now live in a far more civilized age—one where Macs and Amigas can walk together, hand-in-hand, along the sandy shores of computerburg.

For that we can thank MorphOS 3.5, a free-to-try Amigalike operating system developed by Amiga and PowerPC aficionados. With a simple download and a CD-burn, you can turn an aging G4-era Macintosh into a modern day Amiga-compatible machine.

It’s inevitable that I sacrifice a computer to this cause.

Jason Snell, on Yosemite ⇢

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Jason Snell, in his hands-on of OS X Yosemite:

The design changes in Yosemite are noticeable, but the system is still very recognizably OS X. Longtime Mac users’ fears that the Mac was about to collide with iOS in some kind of crazy peanut butter-chocolate disaster have not been borne out. It’s a forward-thinking design that looks better on Retina displays, pointing the way toward a high-resolution future for Mac users.

I installed the OS on a second partition on my MacBook Air at WWDC, and my thoughts closely track with Snell’s. Yosemite is still OS X. While I don’t care for all the design changes thus far (and am wishing I had a Retina Mac more than ever) it works more or less just like its predecessors. Call me an old man, but that’s what is important to me with these releases.