Jim Dalrymple on Samsung’s ‘cash-for-clunkers’ program:

Samsung wants consumers to buy its Galaxy S III so badly that it’s willing to pay them for their old smartphones.

Priceless.

Literally.

The Curiosity rover touched down on Mars this morning. Today NASA released this image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the spacecraft in descent over the surface of the red planet. That’s damned impressive. The Missile Test wing of Daily Exhaust laments the idea that robots will more than likely be humanity’s emissaries to the stars, but it’s hard to argue with results. Now let’s get some boots and flags up there.

Ars Technica: Is Surface Microsoft’s confession that Windows 8 isn’t really cut out for tablets?

But Windows 8 exposes the great danger of Microsoft’s vision: a software environment that forces you to go “PC” when all you want is the “Plus” bit. If the iPad has taught us anything at all, it’s that there’s a lot of people out there who are happy with pure tablets, and actively desire pure tablets. Windows 8 gets a lot right, but its PC side is still there, and it’s inescapable.

The beauty of the iPad is in all the way it isn’t a PC. No keyboard. No wires. No pesky file directory explorer. When Henry Ford build the Model T, he didn’t market is on how well it aligned with the horse and buggy. He marketed it on how different and better it was than its predecessor.
The more time goes on and the more I really look hard at Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, the more I see a company not ready to cannibalize one area of their business in order for another part to thrive.
And for innovation to happen, you need that cannibalization.

Elevator pitch: What’s the idea for your new series?
Comedians. In cars. Getting coffee.
Simple idea and three things I love. Count me in. (…although this show isn’t as simple as The Nothing Pitch)
Check out this one of Jerry Seinfeld riding with Ricky Gervais. I love when Jerry picks up Ricky in his 1967 Austin Healey 3000 and Gervais has no clue what type of car it is, let alone an English one.
via Laughing Squid

There’s a gold mine of Mad Men-era clip art in the Bart & Co. Flickr account.


via Khoi Vihn

Over at The Verge there’s a post on the nearly 40 iPhone and iPad prototypes revealed in Samsung trial.
MG Siegler responds:

Let me reiterate my stance that I think it’s fascinating that Apple wants to win this lawsuit badly enough that they’re letting all this previously confidential information get out.

I think Apple is super pissed off they have to reveal all these prototypes, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. And it gives their competition no advantage moving forward. This is because all of these prototypes are artifacts of the creative process, not the creative process itself.
It’s same thing as getting access to the sketchbooks of Da Vinci. Yes, you’re looking at the work of genius, but this in no way helps you create a masterpiece. I would even go as far as saying it’s like getting the source code to a program or website—unless you’re smart enough to know how to work with the code, it’s useless. Marco Arment argued this point in Episode 85 of his Build & Analyze podcast (around the 68-minute mark).
So Samsung and everyone else in the world now has access to old Apple hardware prototypes (rejected ones, I might add), but they’re not getting access to Apple’s creative process for innovation.

Batman 2012

Batman 1960s

Electronista: AT&T adopting ‘anything but iPhone’ strategy, sources say

AT&T is deliberately trying to steer retail shoppers away from the iPhone, according to three sources for the Boy Genius Report. Regional sales managers have allegedly been handing instructions to store managers, telling them that people looking for smartphones should be directed towards Android or Windows Phone devices instead. Even if a person comes into a store looking for an iPhone, workers have reportedly been told to show shoppers other options so they can “make an informed decision.”

Funny to hear about a phone carrier trying to divert peoples’ attention from a great product.
If true, it’s clear AT&T is doing this because they don’t want to become too reliant on Apple for success. This will be tough though, as the article says the iPhone represents 72% of all activations on their network.

Ben Brooks decided a car (van) metaphor was most appropriate to explain the limitations he felt with the Google Nexus 7 tablet, so of course this gets a linkup on Daily Exhaust:

Let me use a car metaphor for you (because you love it when I do that). Imagine you own three vans: a “normal” 7-8 seat minivan, a 10 passenger van, and a 15 passenger van. Odds are that the two most used vans are the smallest and the largest. The 10 passenger isn’t that much larger than the minivan and isn’t that much smaller than the 15 passenger van. And so the 10 passenger van only has a 1,000 miles on it after 10 years.

I prefer to keep with Jobs’ metaphor of (desktop) PCs becoming the ‘trucks’ of computing as society becomes more mobile and urban and now needs tablet ‘cars’ to get around. Not only because I hate the idea of comparing tablets to vans, but because I have no point of reference for van usefulness.
[Digression: You know how bad a decade the 80’s was for cars? It was so bad, I thought the A-Team’s black van—with it’s diagonal stripe up the side ending in a spoiler on the roof (???)—was badass. I (and many other of my generation) thought a van was a cool ride. Let that marinate in your head for a minute.]
Back to the Nexus 7. It sounds like the Nexus 7 is more like a Smart Car in my world where the iPhone is a Ducati motorcycle and my iPad is a Volkswagen GTI. Sure the Smart Car is smaller than my GTI, but my GTI still gets good mileage and I have no problem parking it on the street in the city. Plus, I don’t have nearly as much fun with the Smart Car as I do with with my manual shift, turbo-charged GTI.
[Sidenote: my father bought himself a 2008 GTI a few years ago. Something fun to drive on the weekends. One weekend the two of us took a ride together and he let me drive. We reached a stop sign before one of the main roads in my home town and before we I pulled out my father said, “Drop it into 2nd gear and floor it” I did what he said and the car yanked me back on my seat. My dad laughed. What a fun ride.)]

Another bit worth mentioning from Siricusa’s Mountain Lion Review regarding how Apple handles (or doesn’t handle) messaging in the new Messages applicaiton (it replaced iChat):

The new interface combined with the new protocol leads to an experience that I found confusing. Send a message using the Messages application and a window may appear on one or more Mac screens, a notification dialog (and sound) may appear on iPads or iPod touches, and someone’s phone may vibrate in their pocket. Oops, did you just mean to send a message to your colleague down the hall as he sat at his Mac? Or did you mean to send a text to someone’s phone and not cause an alert to appear on his iPad which is currently being used by his child to play a game?

This is going to be a tough nut for Apple (and everyone else making mobile devices) to crack. Many of us are living in a multi iOS device world and can benefit greatly when all our devices are data- media- and message-synced. But only once we have said synchronization do we realize all the rules needed to make such a feature useful.
The same thing happened with the photostream in iCloud. When I first set it up, I thought, “Great! Now I have all my photos on all my devices.” I was only after living with photo synchronization did I realize I didn’t want every photo synced on every iOS device I own. Eventually, Apple added the ability to remove photos from Photostream on a per-device basis.
I see the same thing happening here, it’s all about Apple’s baby steps. Get to core functionality down, then slowing layer in added controls and customizations. In this case, mirror messaging across all devices on a particular iTunes account and once messaging is working give people the ability to control what devices get what messages and when.
Remember, when Apple introduces a feature, they want to get it right the first time, like copy-and-paste. I’m willing to bet they’ve already been working on mutli-device message synchronization. It’s just not ready for prime time yet.