Portrait of a Letterpress Printer from • of two lands • on Vimeo.

Last week BGR posted this infographic of where all of Apple’s revenue comes from:

It’s important to emphasize the story that isn’t being told in the above image:

All the revenue from the Mac, iPad and iPhone are inextricably linked to the “minuscule” revenue from Services. The ‘Services’ category includes the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and the OS X App Store.

If you remove Apples services, everything else evaporates.

Canalys on Android Wear devices:

Over 720,000 Android Wear devices shipped in 2014 out of a total of 4.6 million smart wearable bands. Though the Moto 360 remained supply constrained through Q4, Motorola was the clear leader among Android Wear vendors. LG’s round G Watch R performed significantly better than its original G Watch, while Asus and Sony entered the market with their own Android Wear devices. Pebble meanwhile shipped a total of 1 million units from its 2013 launch through to the end of 2014. Continual software updates, more apps in its app store and price cuts in the fall helped maintain strong sales in the second half of the year. ‘Samsung has launched six devices in just 14 months, on different platforms and still leads the smart band market. But it has struggled to keep consumers engaged and must work hard to attract developers while it focuses on Tizen for its wearables.’ said Canalys VP and Principal Analyst Chris Jones.

Language is important.

Shipped does not mean sold.

I’d love it if some of these Android Wear vendors strapped on some balls and bragged about how many devices they sold.

—R. Buckminster Fuller via Form & Construct

See last post.

As I get older I catch myself having more and more jaded and cynical reactions to things around me. It’s just what happens to certain people when they get older. This doesn’t make being jaded and cynical a good thing. Case-in-point: Co.Design’s headline and review for Cooklyn’s identity system:

Is This The Most Brooklyn Branding Ever? Aruliden’s Visual Identity For The New Restaurant Cooklyn Is Almost So Trendy It Hurts.

Perhaps nothing captures brand Brooklyn more completely than aruliden’s communication design for Cooklyn (that name!), with thick stationary watermarked by an old-timey map, copper accents, and a logo reminiscent of a cattle brand. The business cards are embossed with an elegant art deco copper overlay on one side and historical cartography on the other side. The minimalist logo features the sans serif letters CKLN clustered together as if they’re attached to the business end of a branding iron. Even the clipboards on display have precious copper accents. Aruliden arranges every component of the visual identity together with wooden blocks and cylindrical copper paperweights that look like they fell out of a general store from 1889. It’s the kind of pure, artisanal wood-and-metal-and-marble aesthetic that pairs well with a thick slab of bacon and tufts of ironic facial hair.

Lazy and corny name aside (Cooklyn, really?)—what beautiful gold foil, watermarks and typography. Those trendy assholes at aruliden created a top notch identity system, how lame! Shame on you!

If beautiful design systems like this are what we think warrant negative reviews, we have problems. There’s more businesses than not that would be lucky to have an identity system this thought out.

Update: Over at Designer News, Matt Legrand reminds me of Co.Design’s track record of click-bait-bullshit articles.

This week Michael and Bryan discuss John Wick, Guardians of the Galaxy, synthetic diamonds, car racing season, Bryan’s bricked PS4, developers & designers working together, accurately estimating freelance jobs, restaurant websites, miscreant Wikipedia editors, global warming, the shortsightedness of humans and rental cars. The episode opens with the exhaust from a Porsche 356 Sebring.

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Regarding the last post on antiwork.

Most of us would like far more leisure – we dream of it. But we believe it comes with a price. And so we resent the unemployed for (supposedly) “sitting around all day”, while we identify with our jobs and righteously grumble, or boast, about our hard work, like demented subjects in a behaviourist’s divide-and-rule experiment.

Leisure, like happiness, tends to be seen as something that’s earned through work. The underlying idea is that you’re endlessly undeserving – that reward, ie happiness, will always be contingent on the endurance of some unpleasant activity (eg “hard work”). Again, we could trace this notion to early moral ideas – eg original sin and redemption through suffering – but the important point is that we seem to have a nasty, and very persistent, cultural neurosis in the form of an archaic cognitive frame for work and leisure.

So what the fuck is “antiwork”?

Antiwork is what we do out of love, fun, interest, talent, enthusiasm, inspiration, etc. Only a lucky few get paid enough from it to live on, yet it probably enriches our lives and benefits society more than most jobs do.

—Antiwork – a radical shift in how we view “jobs”

And Columbia producer Mitch Miller, back in 1958, told Dwight MacDonald for a New Yorker piece, “The kids don’t want recognized stars doing their music. They don’t want real professionals. They want faceless young people doing it in order to retain the feeling that it’s their own.”

—When Did Rock’n’Roll Become “Authentic”?

Kitchen Ghosts

via thisisnthappiness

The Verge on J.J. Abrams interview with Collider:

Abrams also spoke to Collider briefly about his use of computer-generated effects in Episode VII. We’ve known all along that Abrams is leaning heavily on real sets and effects, but it’s also a Star Wars movie, so there’s no escaping CG. It turns out, Abrams use of CG is actually more reductive than additive — which is basically the total opposite approach that George Lucas would take.

“I feel like the beauty of this age of filmmaking is that there are more tools at your disposal, but it doesn’t mean that any of these new tools are automatically the right tools,” Abrams says. “And there are a lot of situations where we went very much old school and in fact used CG more to remove things than to add things.”

In a similar way as Apple has prospered despite the death of Steve Jobs, it’s great to see there’s the potential (we haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie) for the Star Wars franchise to prosper in the absence of George Lucas.

At Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo reviews Samsung’s first Tizen smartphone:

The million dollar question for any new OS is always “Why would anyone pick this over Android?” Google’s free OS seems purpose-built to smother upstart operating systems like Tizen. It has tons of developer support (even Samsung supports Android more than Tizen), killer integration with Google services, and is available on any kind of hardware you can imagine.

Samsung hasn’t provided a good answer to this question, which makes its outlook especially bleak in the hyper-competitive smartphone OS market. New OSes always have problems, usually with app selection and hardware availability, but they’re supposed to make up for their ecosystem problems by bringing something new to the table. Windows Phone had a new interface style. Blackberry 10 devices have a small but vocal built-in fanbase, well-made hardware with physical keyboards, and lots of enterprise experience. But Tizen doesn’t have any stand-out aspect. It’s all the negatives of a new OS without any of the positives.

Samsung seems better at ripping off Apple’s hardware designs than it is at ripping off Android’s software designs. They really epitomize the textbook definition of shameless. Also: the typography on Tizen is horrendous.

via Gizmodo