Good luck, Windows 10.
Image taken from Ars Technica

via Subtraction

The Verge reporting on Apple Watch battery life:

According the latest in a string of scoops from 9to5Mac, battery life has been a pressing concern for Apple throughout the development of the Apple Watch. And for the first time, “sources familiar with the Watch’s development” have provided some early figures on what consumers can expect when the device ships sometime this year. In short, Apple Watch will exhibit similar longevity to what we’ve seen from many Android Wear devices on the market today.
Shocker.
So Apple wasn’t able to alter battery physics and make a smart watch that lasts for 3 months?
They’re doomed.

Microsoft is still trying to make Windows Phone relevant:

According to The Information, Microsoft this week will show off “a single code base inside the software that will allow an app to run well on phones, tablets and PCs, as opposed to being optimized for one screen size.” This is a big deal because while Windows Phone doesn’t have a strong app developer base, the desktop version of Windows absolutely does. So in theory, anyone who makes software and applications for Windows should soon be able to make Windows Phone apps with ease.

Microsoft reminds me of the smart student in college who misses the deadline for the thesis paper, but manages to get it in late, accepting the grade deductions and has tons of typos and continuity errors. They eventually turn in a solid paper over the summer, but by then it’s too late. This cycle continues into the next semester as Microsoft brags about the amazing but late paper they wrote but everyone has moved on to new classes. No one cares.

Analogy translation: Microsoft joined the smartphone competition over 3 years after the iPhone and Android were announced. They keep refining and fixing things on their platform, but everyone else has moved on so they’re stuck in a perpetual state of catch-up.

Apple announces the iPhone in 2007 …three years later Microsoft announces Windows Phone

Apple announces the iPad in 2010 …two years later Microsoft announces the Surface

Apple announces the Apple Watch in September 2014 …and Microsoft announces the Microsoft Band a month later.

People used to buy Windows computers because everyone used Windows at the office. This is no longer the case. More often then not, the reverse cycle has been happening in the last decade: people decide to get a Macbook or iMac for work because they use iPhones and iPads at home.

Microsoft needs to throw in the towel on consumer electronics. Focus on enterprise. It’s over.

Intel’s $150 HDMI Stick Turns Any TV Into a Windows Desktop

Got an HDMI port handy? Sure, you could plug in a Chromecast, Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick to get your Netflix fix. Or you could pay $150 to get a full Windows 8.1 PC in the same form factor.
Why would anyone want to do this to their TV?
It’s like saying, “I’d like to turn my TV into a piece of shit.”

Tero Kuittinen at BGR on the irrelevance of CES:

I’ll be heading for CES again tomorrow, but mainly to meet people. As a device showcase, CES has demonstrated an uncanny ability to highlight trends that will never be. Perhaps the most legendary example was the year 2006, one year before the iPhone arrived. The highlights of CES 2006 pretty much represented every trend that was going to fizzle out far before anyone expected.
All I want to know is where is my 9K resolution television?!

I stumbled upon a great interview with Steve Wozniak on the Merv Griffin Show back in 1984. My favorite part is around the 3:30 minute mark where Woz talks about how hackers have certain ethics around how and what they hack and that it’s impossible for kids to hack into large institutions.

“There’s this big, huge myth that got evolved about hackers with personal computers being so smart that somehow they can invade computers that have valuable and vital information but it’s a total lie and a myth and there are no valuable and vital information sources that are really ever tampered with. You won’t even find a thousand dollars worth of finds in the whole history of this country because all these kids just get onto public accounts, they play but they’re very cautious. It’s a hacker ethic. They do not destroy anything and they do not have access to any sort of military computers. They’re all protected by the proper keys which are called passwords. It’s a big myth we’ve built up and it’s interesting to have this intrigue in our heads and think that the kids are the sort of people who rip off billions of dollars by embezzling…but an accountant always had a key to the vault and now he’s got the password to the computer.”
Woz really was (is) too nice a guy. I can’t help but think about how different Woz is to Jobs. I guess that’s what made them a great team in the early days of Apple.

Ed Bott on the dire outlook for Windows Phone:

If the problems with Windows Phone as a platform were as simple as Microsoft getting their product strategy together, it would probably be easy to fix. But that focus ignores the real problem.

This isn’t an equal partnership between Microsoft and U.S. mobile carriers, except perhaps in the most technical sense.

Thanks to Microsoft’s minuscule market share (small single-digit percentages in the U.S.), the carriers have almost no interest in collaborating with it on mobile devices. And Microsoft has almost no leverage when negotiating with carriers. The resulting not-so-virtuous circle is what stacks the deck against the Windows Phone platform and makes the experience so frustrating for the few who actually use it.
Maybe if Microsoft asks Santa for more customers, they’ll get em.

I’ve been using computers since I was 4 years old, so I know a little bit about how to use them and how they work. For instance, there’s times I’ll know when my frozen MacBook Pro will unfreeze, or whether the beachball will continue to spill for infinity. This is not black magic, but based on knowing what processes are running and thinking about what could be clogging up the system.
It’s not just that I troubleshoot computers, but I know how to.
Most people who know me know that I’m good with computers so they ask for my help. What usually happens is this:

Broken Computer Person: Mike, can you figure out why [name of broken thing] won’t work on my computer?

Me: Sure, let me take a look.

[I sit down at the computer, troubleshoot for a few minutes and fix the issue]

Me: There. Should work now.

Broken Computer Person: Holy crap. Awesome! What did you do?

Me: I just did [description of solution].

Broken Computer Person: I JUST did the very same thing, but it didn’t do anything!!! Why did it work for you and not for me?!
If I had a dollar for every time a version of the above has happened to me, I’d uh, have many hundreds of dollars.
I needed a name for this phenomenon, so I enlisted the help of my brother Mark. I explained to him how in quantum mechanics, they have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle–where the observer affects the outcome of the experiment.
What I needed was a name for what happens in situations like the above scenario.
A few days later, my brother replied:
Competency entanglement (n.) The phenomenon of problem-solving success that competent individuals impart on a given situation by the influence of their sheer presence, resulting in outcomes otherwise unobtainable by incompetent agents.
Nice job, Mark. I consider this an early Christmas present.

Steve Wozniak dispelled a bullshit myth about Apple with Bloomberg Businessweek:

“The garage is a bit of a myth,” Woz tells Bloomberg Businessweek. “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home. We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money.”

Woz says that he did a lot of the hard work of building the computer at his cubicle at HP in the ’70s, where he would spend his time “soldering things together, putting the chips together, designing them, drawing them on drafting tables.”
Full interview here.

It seems Amazon wants to blanket the world in cheap Kindles, not great Kindles. Not surprising.
Marco Arment on the Kindle Voyage:

And this crisp, new, high-resolution screen is still displaying justified text with very few, mostly bad font choices. Some of these choices, like the default PMN Caecilia font, made sense on the old, low-resolution Kindle screens but need to be reconsidered for this decade. Some of them, like forced justification and forced publisher font overrides, have always been bad ideas.

But Amazon doesn’t care. Nothing about the Voyage’s software feels modern, or even maintained. It feels like it has a staff of one person who’s only allowed to work on it for a few weeks each year.
If you’re making devices to read books on and you don’t give a shit about typography and readability, then what do you care about?
It’s like a car maker not caring that their tires are lopsided and their seats have no cushions.
Oh, and Bryan is still waiting for page scrolling on the Kindle app for iOS.

BGR’s headline:
What if iOS 9 came with a major interface overhaul inspired by the Apple Watch?
Really interesting question.

Hendo Hoverboards on Kickstarter

Across the Web today is news that Apple accidentally leaked specs and images on the new iPads being announced tomorrow.
From The Verge:

Regardless, if you were hoping for major design changes, the iTunes document all but confirms they’re not coming this year.
This is everything that is wrong with tech news today. If it’s not new, it sucks. It’s boring. Old news. They act like 5-year-olds getting bored with a new toy five minutes after opening it up.
What exactly is wrong with the current design of the iPad and iPad Mini that The Verge wants to see changed?