This month on MacStories, I spent some time with the first iPad to really stick around more than a year, the iPad 2:
While that doesn’t seem remarkable today, it was an eternity when it came to iOS devices at the time. The iPad 2 was one of the first devices Apple kept around to fill a lower price point on its product matrix.
Veteran reporter Steven Levy has a great feature on Apple’s new campus. It’s full of details about the building and its environment. This part really jumped out at me:
“This might be a stupid question,” I say. “But why do you need a four-story glass door?”
Ive raises an eyebrow. “Well,” he says. “It depends how you define need, doesn’t it?”
This morning, we’re announcing two new shows on Relay FM: Originality is hosted by Aleen Simms and K Tempest Bradford. The show is all about exploring the wheres, hows, and whys of creative genius. The hosts are joined each episode by a diverse assortment of guests from a variety of fields.
Roboism is a podcast mostly about robots. Alex Cox and Savannah Million care about how robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are affecting our culture.
MP3, the digital audio coding format, changed the way we listen to music and drove the adoption of countless new devices over the last couple of decades. And now, it’s dead. The developer of the format announced this week that it has officially terminated its licensing program.
The gist of the story is pretty simple. The Fraunhofer Institute has licensed certain MP3 patents, and recently announced that program has come to an end:
It’s another week, and Amazon has another Echo for preorder. Microsoft’s Build keynote brings changes to Windows 10 and how it interacts with the wider world, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is considering a ban on electronics larger than phones on flights across the Atlantic.
My thanks to our sponsor:
Joseph Hill is undertaking one hell of a project: porting Swift to Haiku. For the uninitiated, Haiku is an open-source operating system based on BeOS:
Haiku has ports for several modern programming languages available to developers, but some of them are in the form of version specific patches, which haven’t been upstreamed yet. As new releases of programming languages come by, maintenance of platform support through patches becomes increasingly difficult and Haiku misses out on official support for those languages. By working directly with the Swift community, this task aims to add Haiku support specifically for Swift and its sub-projects in the effort to not only improve Haiku’s programming language diversity for future developers, but to make Swift a possible alternative programming language to develop Haiku apps in.
For 29 years, New York City’s Tekserve was the hub for Mac nerds in the Big Apple. Here is Rick Rojas in The New York Times:
Tekserve found its niche in an era when Apple had a much smaller slice of the computer market. Among many of Tekserve’s customers then, Apple computers had a devoted following. “It was the cult of Mac,” said Mr. Gepner, who, before running Tekserve, was a regular customer.
I recently spoke with Jon Butt on his podcast about my background, Relay FM and the podcasting industry. I enjoyed our chat, despite a huge thunderstorm going on in the background here in Memphis.
Last week, I linked to an old Power Computing article in Apple’s kbase.
Then Ark el sub Ĉielarko pointed me to this gem:
Apple Computer did not purchase Power Computing Corporation.
Apple purchased core assets from Power Computing Corporation. Power Computing Corporation continues to service and support their computer hardware. If you feel you have a warranty issue, contact Power Computing Technical Support at 1-800-708-6227.
Wondering what Power Computing was? The book I published last year has a whole section about them.
On this episode of Ungeniused, my podcast about weird stuff on Wikipedia:
When Myke was young, he wanted to be an Egyptologist. Unaware of his co-host’s childhood dreams, Stephen booked a world-wide tour of modern pyramids.
I learn a lot about my cohost and business partner on this episode.
This fortnight on Liftoff, Jason and I cover a possible future Pluto mission, SLS delays and the X-37B spaceplane.
My thanks to our sponsor:
The band is back together just in time to talk about Federico’s new iPhone case, the Echo Show, Phil Schiller’s comments on App Store upgrade pricing and more.
Don’t miss tickets to our live show in Chicago coming up in October!
My thanks to our sponsors: