512 Pixels

With the summer heat beating down upon them, Federico and Myke support me during my time of confession, then we have a memorial service for our very first iPhones, discuss RSS, fashion and more.

Here’s the poster:

And here’s the poster, with proper punctuation:

If this lack of attention to detail is going to be present in the movie, my inner Siracusa is going to need to do more than lie down.

image via The Loop

I finally have hope that Motorola might do something cool again.

Thomas Brand looks back at the wallpapers Apple has bundled with its desktop operating systems over the years.

David Chartier:

For all the incredibleness of the MacBook Air’s new battery, the device is still dependent on WiFi hotspots and, let’s face it, the internet is an essential ingredient these days for getting most things done. Now, keep in mind that adding 4G radios to the MacBook Air likely poses its own share of challenges that Apple has clearly decided to avoid for the Mac, at least so far. In general, it seems like 3G/4G radios have never been very popular in notebooks for some reason. Plus, a 4G radio would add weight to the MacBook Air—renowned for its thin and light design — and, of course, affect that incredible 12-hour battery or, in PCMag’s case, 15-hour battery.

While I like the idea of having in LTE built-in on my laptop, I see some potential issues — besides the ones David expertly outline. Notebooks often are used longer than iOS devices. While cell phone contracts suck, every two years, we get to start over. If my MacBook Air is “stuck on Verizon” for the entire time I own it, that might be weird. In short, I don’t want carrier-specific hardware in my laptop.

While tethering isn’t great, it works well enough for Apple to just side-step this whole problem, for now at least.

Frederic Filloux served on the judging panel at this year’s Data Journalism Awards, given last week at the Global Editors Network News Summit in Paris. The projects covered are all pretty cool, and show what can happen when news organizations take data seriously.

image via Apple PR

I was an Apple Genius-in-training and working part-time on the sales floor at the local Apple store when the first iPhone went on sale six years ago today.

And boy, was it a circus.

The iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. local time. Our store — like all others — closed four hours before the event. In those four hours, everyone in the store was assigned a job, after heavy black-out curtains were hung over the floor-to-ceiling glass at the front of the store.

Geniuses were reading technical documents about the device and AT&T’s activation process, while the rest of us were helping the Visuals team reset the entire store. New graphics panels went up, iPhone cases and accessories replaced rows of Mac software, and all of the front-most tables were re-worked, with new wiring, security cables and — of course — the demo phones.

The demo iPhone I unboxed was the first iPhone I’d ever seen. I just turned it over in my hand, over and over several times before turning it on. When I did, I was blown away.

Of course, this was before the iPhone could run the fancy in-store demos customers are used to seeing today. In fact, these phones had live, active SIMs in, so I called my wife, bent over a table, as the iPhone was tethered to the security system. I loaded a few websites and scrolled through the Settings app before handing it off to someone else.

Around 5, I helped the security guys put up additional stanchions for crowd control. As the Memphis Apple Store is at the center of an outdoor mall, we had to load the stanchions on a cart and push them a ways around the building. By the time we were nearing the end of the building, I could hear the crowd.

There were hundreds of people, lined up in the Friday afternoon heat. News vans were pulled up to the sidewalk, and the guys who had been camping out for 72 hours sure looked happy. We put up the additional barriers, and I got a bunch of high-fives and questions about the iPhone while heading back around the building.

At 6 p.m., we pulled down the black curtains to a roar from the crowd. A moment later, the doors opened.

We sold the iPhones from the Genius Bar at the back of the store. ¹ People streamed in, came to the Bar, and back out the other side of the store. If anyone needed something besides a phone, they had to be accompanied by a sales person.

Customers were required to activate their iPhones in-store, which went fairly smoothly until 8 p.m., when stores in the Pacific Time Zone came online, bringing both iTunes and AT&T servers to their knees. Thankfully, Apple allowed us to send customers home to wait for their activations to complete. ²

While the iPhone would be sold out for months over the summer of 2007, we didn’t sell out, and in fact, things were pretty calm after the first several hours.

While Apple would give employees iPhones, it took several weeks. A few employees purchased on launch day, becoming the envy of the rest of us.

The few weeks after the launch were pretty quiet at the Genius Bar. At the time, we were replacing iPhones for just about anything — including accidental damage — as part of Apple’s capture program, which looks at a wide range of issues and problems after new products are launched. We struggled with local AT&T stores not being equipped to handle things like simple SIM card swaps, but got to know the local customer support team, and ironed out some issues on that front for our customers.

In hindsight, I can’t believe the original launch was only six years ago. The iPhone and the surrounding ecosystem has exploded in popularity in the time since, and today, it is Apple’s main breadwinner. I was glad to have been on the front lines for it.

I always felt that Dave and I’s sites were two peas in a pod in many ways. I’m sad to see it go.

Lindsey Green on Medium, writing about Mad Men’s Don Draper and D.B. Cooper:

Don Draper has been shedding Don Draper ever since the death of Anna Draper in Season Four brought him to tears over the loss of “the only person who really knew me.” From that point on Don Draper had no more reason to exist, so Dick Whitman went back to trying on other skins: dedicated husband, team player, mentor. As nothing fit, he began to go backwards: back to cheating and being absent at home and heartless at work. When he puts a dead soldier’s dog tags around his neck to get out of a life he can no longer stand, he’s gone as close back to the beginning as we’ve ever seen him in the series.

[…]

Whether the series ends with Don Draper at the airport requesting a one-way ticket, answering the question “May I have your name, please?” and pausing, only to respond, “Dan Cooper,” or the series ends in another fashion, one thing seems certain: Don Draper will be gone without a trace.

Holy crap, my brain hurts.

Update: To be clear, I don’t think Matthew Weiner would do this. But it sure is a fun article.

via @bradleychambers

Adam B. Vary takes a look at a building that by its very design inspires creativity.

The whole thing is worth reading, but this part jumped out at me:

Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.

We didn’t get the Lisa back until we got OS X from NeXT. Once we had OS X, that was the Lisa! But we had it so early … If we had just worked on it and developed it until it was at a personal computer price, we would’ve had the most incredible technology ever for GUI computers and we would’ve really owned it and had the rights to it. So Macintosh… the Macintosh failed, really hard, and who built the Macintosh into a success later on? It wasn’t Steve, he was gone. It was other people like John Sculley who worked and worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away.

If this doesn’t get Ungeniused back up and running, I give up.