Rene Richie has some great insights on Apple Watch.

First the problem with ‘day-of’ reaction pieces:

Demo areas aren’t real life. The product you’re experiencing isn’t yours. It isn’t connected to your accounts, it doesn’t have your data, and it isn’t set up to your personal tastes. You’re also surrounded by people and noise, you have limited time, and you want to try out as many features as you can. It’s tough to keep the context in mind, to set your expectations accordingly, and to try and extrapolate a product’s demo to its real-life usage. It’s what leads to day-of reaction stories that are sometimes very different to week-in review pieces to months-in review pieces.

And on how Apple Watch fits into the hierarchy of devices (Mac > iPhone > Watch): Notifications and, to some extent Siri, not icons, are going to be the primary portal to apps and activities.

If deeper, longer-form interaction is needed, you’ll absolutely still be able to do it. You’ll be able to tap and spin and swipe and otherwise move through glances and apps and do almost anything you want to do. You’ll even be able to use handoff to continue an especially deep or time-consuming activity on your iPhone, the same way you can handoff from your iPhone to your Mac today.

That’s the advantage of Apple staging convenience and complexity. You can do more with an iPhone than ever before, but you still can’t do everything you can do on Mac, and some things you certainly can’t do as efficiently. You can do a lot of very important things, however, and do them even more conveniently. And that means you don’t have to go running back to your Mac as much as once did.

With the Apple Watch you’ll also be able to do a lot, but not everything you can do with the iPhone. You’ll be able to do some very important things, however, and even some unique things, even more conveniently. And that’ll mean you won’t have to go reaching for your iPhone as much as you do now.

The iPhone is a finer-grained convenience than the Mac/MacBook (for certain things) and the Watch is a finer-grained convenience than the iPhone (for certain things).

AGENT: We got you into a few emoticons.

ASTERISK: Even Semi-Colon is eating our lunch in the emoticon space. If I see one more winking smile…

AGENT: Yeah, but Go the F**k to Sleep bought you a cottage in Montauk.

—McSweeney’s: The Asterisk Kvetches to Its Agent

—taken from “You Have Too Much Shit.” by Chris Thomas

When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.

—Joni Mitchell

via The Selvedge Yard

via Colossal

The Gothamist says data provided to them by Trulia determined Don Draper couldn’t afford his Manhattan apartment in 2015:

• With Don’s title as Creative Director and Junior Partner it is estimated that he made around $45,000 in the 1960s
• In 2015, that has a buying power of $355,297
• Median home values in New York in the ’60s were $75,000, which is pretty good if he was making $45k a year
• Today, a Creative Director in New York City makes an average of $154,838+ a year [ed. note: Don was also a founding partner]
• Today, places in Don and Megan’s Park Ave. apartment are going for a cool $16.5 Million

There are lots of fun nit-pickers in the comments too.

Elon Musk: cars you can drive will eventually be outlawed:

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk believes that cars you can control will eventually be outlawed in favor of ones that are controlled by robots. The simple explanation: Musk believes computers will do a much better job than us to the point where, statistically, humans would be a liability on roadways.

“I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

Bryan and I have talked about this more than once on the Weekly Exhaust podcast.

We humans are fucking idiots, driven by emotion and occasionally use our higher brains to achieve amazing things in areas like science, literature, and healthcare.

I’ll tell you a few things a self-driving car won’t do:

• text his friend while driving
• drive after drinking 7 Coronas
• drive angry after a blowout fight with her boyfriend

I look forward to the day manual cars are leisure vehicles we enjoy on the weekends and not something we have to endure on the highway 2 hours a day to go to and from work.

If you’re into manufacturing and machining porn, Greg Koenig has some details descriptions of the processes behind making the Apple Watch:

Apple is the world’s foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as “consumer goods” or “electronic goods,” but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787’s weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours. When we add the rest of the product line to the mix, it becomes clear that Apple’s supply chain is one of the largest scale production organizations in the world.

While Boeing is happy to provide tours of their Everett, WA facility, Apple continues to operate with Willy Wonka levels of secrecy. In the manufacturing world, we hear rumors of entire German CNC mill factories being built to supply Apple exclusively, or even occasionally hear that one of our supplier’s process experts has been “disappeared” to move to Cupertino or Shenzhen. While we all are massively impressed with the scale of Apple’s operations, there is constant intrigue as to exactly how they pull it all off with the level of fit, finish and precision obvious to anyone who has examined their hardware.

It’s attention like this which gives Apple the ability to charge a premium for their products.

Again, something I don’t thing Samsung as a company can do (or cares about).

News flash, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and 3-D print objects:

The technology, called CLIP — for Continuous Liquid Interface Production — manipulates light and oxygen to fuse objects in liquid media, creating the first 3-D printing process that uses tunable photochemistry instead of the layer-by-layer approach that has defined the technology for decades. It works by projecting beams of light through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Working in tandem, light and oxygen control the solidification of the resin, creating commercially viable objects that can have feature sizes below 20 microns, or less than one-quarter of the width of a piece of paper.

“By rethinking the whole approach to 3-D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” said DeSimone, who was scheduled to reveal the technology at a TED talk on March 16 in the opening session of the conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here’s the video:

via DrewBot

Kevin C. Tofel on the nut Apple has to crack with their Watch:

The Apple Watch offers most – but not all – of the features I have with my Sony and arguably, has a more elegant interface. Apple’s big advantage here is complete control of both the hardware and software experience; particularly with how well the watch integrates with a connected iPhone. At its core, however, it does most of the same things your phone already can do; just like an Android Wear watch or a Pebble. The watch brings a convenience factor though. Presumably, you can spend less time on your phone because certain glanceable information is available on your wrist.

There’s one commonality with all of these devices however and has to do with the challenge of bringing simplicity and value to the wrist without adding complexity. If an activity takes too long to do on a watch, for example, or requires too much engagement, you’re likely better off just pulling out your phone for a better, faster interaction.

I’m really interested to see how Apple Watch changes the dynamic between me and my iPhone.

via Colossal

Interesting look behind-the-scenes at Chris Lindland’s company, Betabrand:

When San Francisco saw yet another influx of tech workers a few years ago, Betabrand was in a position to capture a new audience – an audience that lived on the internet, enjoyed its wacky bent, and was seeking a kind of practicality and comfort that wasn’t being addressed by other clothing companies. This was around the same time that Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Yelp were gaining tons of attention for their huge IPOs. In the spirit of maximizing press potential, Lindland created the Executive Hoodie, a hooded sweatshirt made out of pinstriped blazer material, an official sport coat of Silicon Valley, and launched it concurrent with Facebook’s IPO in 2012. Its tongue was both firmly in its cheek and sticking out at the rest of the tech world. Subsequently the company started to specialize in what it calls West Coast Workwear: Bike to Work Pants, to ease a cycling commute with a “slightly higher back rise that is optimal for crack-coverage”; Dress Pants Sweat Pants; Sons of Britches, pants for the “amateur stuntman lifestyle”; and a Ping Pong Polo shirt, for the type of people who have a ping-pong table near their workstation because they don’t want to seem so stuffy that they go to an office, or so square that they have to put on big-boy dress-up clothes.

Betabrand is filling a void in the current fashion and retail landscapes. It’s a great position to be in.

Over at Forbes, Ewan Spence on the pricing of the Samsung S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge:

Pricing details around Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge are starting to come out, with an expected street price in the UK of £550 for the SIM-free Galaxy S6 (and £650 for the Galaxy S6 Edge). While these prices are unconfirmed, they are higher than the entry-level competition of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Arguably the price difference could come down to Samsung running with 32 GB of storage compared to the 16 GB Apple has fitted to the iPhones, but I do like the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple. If the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets turn out to be more expensive than the Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, then Samsung will have some powerful arguments available to help sell the device.

Spence “likes the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple.”

That’s cute.

Wait, Spence has more brilliance in his brain to share:

Now the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have the advantage Samsung should push hard on the specifications battle. That will be helped by Apple essentially ducking the numbers fight, so Samsung should be able to play hard on the fact that the S6 is a more powerful phone with more features.

And the easiest way to say that a phone is ‘better’ than another phone is to be more expensive.

Is that the easiest way to say ‘better’? Just make it more expensive? Maybe Toyota should try that with their Corolla. Just add $10K to the price tag.

Premium pricing only works if your brand is perceived at premium and this perception is controlled by people who buy your products, not the company making them.

I don’t think this will prove a winning strategy for Samsung, but since they’re clearly in the game to copy everything Apple does, fuck it. Go for it, Samsung.

Dan Weiden (of Weiden & Kennedy) on the genesis of Nike’s slogan:

“I was recalling a man in Portland,” Wieden told Dezeen, remembering how in 1988 he was struggling to come up with a line that would tie together a number of different TV commercials the fledgling agency had created for the sportswear brand.

“He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman, and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad.”

Wieden continued: “They asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let’s do it’. I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”

I know innovation is all about recontextualization, but man.