Here’s the thing. Apple’s homegrown mapping data has to be great.
Mapping is an essential phone feature. It’s one of those few features that almost everyone with an iPhone uses, and often relies upon. That’s why Apple has to do their own — they need to control essential technology.
On the challenges facing future versions of iOS.
Anderson is hinting that Mozilla may pursue anti-trust action against Microsoft in the U.S. and Europe because of the Windows RT restrictions. He writes on the Mozilla blog that Microsoft's action:
"... runs afoul of the EC browser choice commitments and seems to represent the very behavior the [Department of Justice]-Microsoft settlement sought to prohibit."
Given that Microsoft has only the tiniest slice of the tablet market, and Apple dominates, there's no anti-trust implications here. If there were, they should apply to Apple, by banning competing browsers from the dominant tablet operating system, iOS.
Or why we are not going to see Firefox Mobile on iOS.
It’s un-Apple-like”. That, for me, is the entire iTunes experience in a nutshell.
So much for iTunes on Windows being “like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell”.
That’s quite unusual, most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.
So was the “Think Different” campaign an elaborate plot to get Samsungs of the world to chase exactly the wrong goals?
I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success.”
It doesn't sound like blackmail AT ALL.
Handshakes, a few pleasantries, good hot coffee, and then, well, then I got an Apple press event for one. Keynote slides that would have looked perfect had they been projected on stage at Moscone West or the Yerba Buena Center, but instead were shown on a big iMac on a coffee table in front of us.
Apple enters a “new territory” and it starts with an unusual way of announcing their brand new operating system.
Initially I'd been asking myself if it's not degrading for Apple to approach “a blogger”. But then I read what John Gruber wrote and realized that his account of the story may be more important than a generic article from the “real journalists”. And it's almost surely more insightful.
That phone also runs the Mango operating system and it’s a gorgeous device, with an elegant shell beautifully crafted from a single piece of polycarbonate plastic. The operating software is smooth and fast. In many ways the Lumia 800 was the nicest phone I’ve ever used. It makes the iPhone seem old and outdated, and makes Android phones seem big and clunky.
I'm happy to learn that soon after I left Nokia it began to slowly recover from the crisis that started roughly at the time when I joined the company.
The Amazon Kindle is full of all sorts of amazing, delightful touches — the sort of thing you’d expect from an Apple product. For example, when you first take your Kindle out of its (gorgeous!) box, it boots right up knowing your name and logged into your account. This is actually out-Apple-ing Apple: it’s possible because Amazon not only controls the hardware and the software, but the entire distribution channel; they know exactly who is going to get each Kindle.
Amazon is getting close to Apple's level of user experience, sometimes even exceeding them. But it's not quite there yet in some areas.
- A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
- A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Jeff Atwood on the dictatorship of Apple and developers's acceptance of the situation.
I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.
A different kind of obituary of Steve Jobs.
