About once a year, Apple comes out with ONE new phone, an iPhone. If the phone is bad, Apple goes out of business. Apple bets the company every year on that new iPhone, and to make that a reasonable bet, they spend tons and tons of marketing on design, engineering, quality, and customer support. Apples knows a bad iPhone makes WSJ / New York Times front pages. Apple knows that to make a bad iPhone loses them iPad, iPod, Macbook,… customers. And so … by and large, Apple does not make bad iPhones. In contrast Four times a year, each, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Huawei, Sony, and others, come out with a new Android phone. This phone is one of many many products made by each of these companies. The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs. Losing a customer here is bad, but does not carry the long term cost as losing a customer at Apple does.

About once a year, Apple comes out with ONE new phone, an iPhone. If the phone is bad, Apple goes out of business. Apple bets the company every year on that new iPhone, and to make that a reasonable bet, they spend tons and tons of marketing on design, engineering, quality, and customer support. Apples knows a bad iPhone makes WSJ / New York Times front pages. Apple knows that to make a bad iPhone loses them iPad, iPod, Macbook,… customers.

And so … by and large, Apple does not make bad iPhones.

In contrast

Four times a year, each, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Huawei, Sony, and others, come out with a new Android phone. This phone is one of many many products made by each of these companies. The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs. Losing a customer here is bad, but does not carry the long term cost as losing a customer at Apple does.

—jerrya on hackernews

Daniel Jalkut: 'Invest In Yourself'

Daniel Jalkut: ‘Invest In Yourself’

So well said.

Reason, or gloating

Gruber:

Lees might as well have said, “We think Apple is fundamentally wrong on the iPad.” But so how does Microsoft rationalize the iPad’s success and popularity?

Now let’s travel back in time to oh, say, 1985, where we find this contrivance of my imagination:

Steve Jobs might as well have said, “We think Microsoft is fundamentally wrong with Windows.” But so how does Apple rationalize Microsoft’s success and popularity?

How quickly we forget that greatness, popularity and success are not inexorably linked.

THE HOBBIT, Production Video #2

THE HOBBIT, Production Video #2

Download (h.264 720p)

THE HOBBIT Start of Production

THE HOBBIT Start of Production

Download (h.264 720p)

Super Meat Boy developer releases satirical, intentionally bad iPhone port of their PC game

Super Meat Boy developer releases satirical, intentionally bad iPhone port of their PC game

I like their creativity. They went to quite a bit of trouble to make a point.

Legit - a better command line interface for Git

Legit - a better command line interface for Git

Inspired by GitHub for Mac, this new project aims to provide the same more intuitive interface ideas, except on the command line instead of a GUI. Looks promising.

Nitpick: I can’t stand it when technology is described as ‘sexy’. It’s an absurd non-sequitur that makes me question the writer’s motivations. More pragmatically, it provides no useful information as to why I should be interested in it. Even a mundane adjective like ‘better’ says more, in that it’s not actively anti-communicative.

Designing GitHub for Mac

Designing GitHub for Mac

Very interesting background story on developing GitHub for Mac, which, as I previously mentioned, simplifies and improves upon several areas of Git’s workflow, for the better.

It contains an interesting point, which I had been thinking about, but forgot to mention:

I wanted to build an awesome version control client. As it happens, Git is the perfect backend to do that …

Git itself was originally conceived as ‘Git Core’, not a complete version control system in its own right, but rather a framework which others could build version control systems on top of.

But nobody ever built a version control system on top of Git Core, and people wanted to use a version control system, not a framework. So the Git Core team gradually added more and more ‘porcelain’ (as opposed to ‘plumbing’) commands that would be easier for people to use directly in a version-control-like way. And eventually, they dropped the ‘Core’ from the name when they decided the interface was good enough.

The interface was not good enough.

Git is amongst my favourite software; it changed the way I work, and there’s nothing that matches how powerful it is. But the brilliance of its internals just makes the glaring flaws in the interface more apparent; the ideas that GitHub for Mac introduces have been badly needed for a long time.

Why Apple took away your livelihood

There’s been a lot of angst regarding the introduction of Final Cut Pro X, and the simultaneous disappearance of Final Cut Pro 7, with the replacement lacking functionality considered critical to a non-trivial number of professionals. This is certainly a valid concern.

The question of why Apple introduced FCPX in its current state should be obvious, and is better addressed elsewhere¹. The question on my mind is: why did Apple take away FCP7 at the same time, instead of continuing to provide it for a while as in past transitions?

I can think of these reasons (which are somewhat intertwined):

• Apple wants to stop selling all boxed software, no exceptions. Even Lion is going to be App Store-only. They’re taking such a hard line on this that I wouldn’t be surprised if it came all the way from The Top. You know who I mean.
• Final Cut Pro 7 is, if I’m not mistaken, an ageing Carbon app. It might be non-trivial to do whatever porting is necessary to make it work on the App Store, including (but perhaps not limited to) license checks.
• Apple doesn’t want novices hearing about the great new Final Cut Pro and how easy it is to use, searching for it on the App Store, and finding two different versions, becoming confused as to which one they should buy.

I’m not going to pass judgement on whether these reasons are ‘good enough’ or whether Apple did the right thing - again, you can find plenty of that elsewhere. But given that this was their decision, it may be useful to understand why.

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1. Okay, okay, I can’t resist a footnote: ‘Real artists ship.’ ↩︎

This may be the first time in history that a copyright owner claims that an alleged infringer has irreparably harmed it by not engaging in enough acts of supposed infringement.

This may be the first time in history that a copyright owner claims that an alleged infringer has irreparably harmed it by not engaging in enough acts of supposed infringement.

—Zediva, in their lawsuit by the film industry