512 Pixels

Zach Epstein at BGR doesn’t seem to get it.

Brian Klug and Ryan Smith:

For a tablet-focused event I don’t think you will find much disagreement that Microsoft has hit the mark with Metro. Metro feels like it belongs when used with a tablet – it’s smooth, it’s easy to use, it’s gesture-driven, and it’s finger-friendly. Virtually everything Windows Phone 7 did well as a touch screen OS has been ported over to Metro and it shows.

The converse of that is that Metro feels awkward and out of place when used with a mouse and keyboard as a laptop/desktop. It fails to take advantage of the precision of the mouse or the fact that not everything needs to be in size 28 font when sitting down to use a computer. At this moment it feels like trying to use a tablet with a mouse and keyboard, which isn’t far off from what it really is in the first place.

Sounds like a winner.

If anything, this shows how dedicated to the Metro UI Microsoft is. While I like it on WP7 devices, I’m not sure it scales to tablets.

Iain Broome:

When the iPod was released in 2001, the market for mp3 players was relatively new. It was a huge success for lots of reasons, but one of them was its ability to do one thing well. Sure, it could do a handful of tasks, like hold your contacts or run basic games, but it was primarily an MP3 player. A brilliant MP3 player.

I think you can compare those first few iPod models with the first few Kindles. What the iPod did for music, the Kindle has done for books. It took an untapped market by the scruff of the neck and kicked it up the arse. Or ass, if you prefer. Instead of producing a catch-all media player, Amazon focused on books and built an e-reader that was better than anything that had gone before.

To own a Kindle so far has meant to own a one thing well device. That won’t be the case when the tablet arrives.

Three years ago, I launched Forkbombr. Thankfully, I’ve dropped the upper-case B in the name since.

In the time since launch, I’ve published 2,462 posts. As plain text files, that’s right at 3 MB of writing. It’s weird to think about three years of work that way.

Over these last three years, Forkbombr has proven to be more successful than I had ever dreamed it would be. It is still super humbling every time I get a reader email or someone new becomes an RSS subscriber.

Looking forward, I have some pretty big things planned for the site. I can’t wait to share them when the time comes.

From a new service article:

Apple has decommissioned the Apple Online Stores for Indonesia and Vietnam. As a result, Apple will no longer support personalized iPod and iPad replacement products. Customers with personalized iPod or iPad products that require service will receive non-personalized replacements effective immediately.

Thanks, Nameless Source!

Bloomberg:

AOL Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong is talking with advisers to Yahoo! Inc. to gauge its interest in combining the companies after the ouster of CEO Carol Bartz, according to two people familiar with the matter.

I can’t wait to see what quality products will be brought to fruition from this.

Tim Cook, in an email posted by Mac Rumors:

I am very happy to announce that we are kicking off a matching gift program for charitable donations. We are all really inspired by the generosity of our co-workers who give back to the community and this program is going to help that individual giving go even farther.

Starting September 15, when you give money to a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Apple will match your gift dollar-for-dollar, up to $10,000 annually. This program will be for full-time employees in the US at first, and we’ll expand it to other parts of the world over time.

Value and worth are something we nerds spend a lot of time assessing. We make lists, compare specs and plan out entire projects in our heads and in software like OmniFocus before making choices. We make decisions on not only price, but feature sets and the enjoyment or productivity we will derive from it.

In this age of self-publishing, value and worth have taken somewhat of a hit. People don’t want to pay more than a buck — or two, at the most — for an app. We have come to expect free WiFi and ad-free RSS feeds.

The thing is, content and creations take time. And they cost money.

Many of us in the Read & Trust network don’t make our livings from our sites.

If you want to support writers you appreciate and enjoy some good, members-only content, check out the Read & Trust newsletter. Every Tuesday, you’ll get something valuable in your Inbox. It’s five bucks a month.

Your mother would be proud of you.

In recent weeks, there have been numerous conversations about what Apple will be like without Steve Jobs at the helm.

It is a perfectly justifiable question. The first time Steve left, the company went in the crapper.

The key here is simple: when Apple’s board ousted Jobs back in 1987, he wasn’t the leader he is today.

The most obvious example of this to me is the feud the started between the Macintosh team and the rest of Apple.

In 1983, Apple released the Lisa, an all-new type of machine, complete with GUI and a mouse.

The Lisa didn’t do well for many reasons. The price was too high, and it had issues with … well … working correctly. The Lisa’s biggest problem wasn’t technical, however, as I wrote last year:

The biggest problem for the Lisa was Apple itself. In January 1984, the Macintosh was released at a shockingly-low $2,500. The Mac had many more features than the Lisa and a larger software library. The Macintosh outsold the Lisa very quickly, and was soon the system of choice for Apple customers.

The reason the Lisa had so much competition internally was Steve Jobs. In 1982, after being removed from the Lisa team, Jobs gathered Apple’s brightest engineers and designers¹ and holed up in an office off-campus to build the Macintosh.

Brian Lam at Gizmodo, in a lengthy piece on Jobs’ career explains what the relationship² was like:

Steve Capps of the Macintosh team hoists a pirate flag above their building. The Lisa team steals it, but it is retrieved and stands for over a year.

This rift was also present with the Apple II team. The Apple II line of computers was Apple’s cash cow. Its baby. With the Macintosh’s GUI and ease of use, the II quickly felt outdated, and Jobs pulled no punches about the fact he believed the Macintosh was the way forward.

The Steve Jobs of today still has the vision and foresight when it comes to products as he did in the 1980s. But instead of tearing Apple apart, since his return, Jobs has worked to pull Apple together, as a united front of products and ideas, set against the world. John Gruber may have said it best:

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

Since his return, Jobs has been hard at work, building a leadership team that can move forward in a cohesive, positive way. The Jobs of the mid-1980s was just as concerned with seeing his vision fleshed out, but his tactics were far from what’s needed to run a company.

The Macintosh, the iPad and the iPhone are all parts of a bigger machine that marches on. If there are any rifts inside Apple, the public doesn’t see them. In place of a pirate flag, there’s a gleaming, white-walled fortress.

Kelly Hodgkins at TUAW:

In the second quarter of 2011, Apple spent a whopping US$790,000 on lobbying. This is more than double what the company spent in the same quarter of 2010 and up $230,000 from the first quarter of 2011.

While $790,000 is a lot of money, it’s hardly “whopping” compared to the money Google spent in the same time frame —  $2.06 million, a 54 percent increase from the same period in 2010.

This is the promise of Thunderbolt — external PCIe cards. I really hope this sort of thing takes off.