You might suggest I stop reading tech news sites if I have so many problems with them. The truth is, that’s where most of the tech scoops happen, so I keep reading them. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop calling bullshit on them when they post stupid headlines, like this one from BGR.com:

Watch Google show off the craziest experimental smartphone we’ve ever seen

After watching the YouTube video of Google’s demonstration of the first “working” Project Ara device, I couldn’t help but laugh.

First off, the audience of Android nerds OOHs and AHHHs when the demonstrator gets a very, very rough prototype device to merely boot up and show the Android logo. Really, guys?

Secondly, while the idea of a modular mobile computer sounds awesome, tell me exactly what person would customize a phone like you’re proposing:

This is the kind of phone the 15-year-old version of myself would have designed. A speaker! A clock! Yeah! Totally!

NO.

I think there’s a hobbyist market for such a device, but it’s nothing that would ever have mass appeal. It’s also a difference in philosophy from a company like Apple. Apple has very opinionated design in their products.

They build devices and user experiences based on what they feel is best. Your ability to customize such experiences is severely limited (although this is changing a bit with iOS 7 customizations).

Robots aren’t going to replace designers, Kanye-fucking-West will:

Kanye West has offered to redesign Instagram, suggesting that it would be “a simple task” for him to beautify the popular photo app. Speaking at a seminar at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, West cited the success of his instagrammed wedding kiss with Kim Kardashian, which is already the most-liked photo in the history of the app.
West knows how to produce an album, I’ll give him that. But to consider the act of redesigning a mobile application ‘a simple task’ is insulting. Kanye knows the creative process well. Whether you’re creating music or creating a mobile applications, you have to gather resources, and then iterate and iterate and iterate until you achieve what you’re aiming for. Once that’s done you might even need to go back and refine and rework what you’ve made.
I think mobile applications suffer from the perception they’re “simple” and couldn’t be that hard to make because they’re (usually) simple to use, (usually) free to download and have small, cute little icons on your screen.
Custom iconography? Secure databases to store user accounts? Wireframes and user flows to map out the experience of the app? Interactions, animations and transitions? Quality assurance testing? Bug fixing? Image optimization, uploading and storage?
Now take all your requirements and multiple them by a potential install base of 100,000,000 (1/8 of the total number of iTunes accounts, I’m being nice).
Designing and building mobile applications is not a simple task.
But hey, it’s Kanye. I expect batshit crazy comments from him every now and then.

In a memorable scene from the 1996 comedy “Swingers,” Jon Favreau’s romantically inept protagonist, Mike, deluges the answering machine of a woman he’s just met at a bar with a spate of excruciatingly self-sabotaging messages.

If the movie were remade today, Mike would have to find another outlet for his miscues. The concept of leaving (and checking) voice mail is, to millennials, as obsolete as swing-dancing and playing NHL ’94 on Sega Genesis. That red number on their iPhones announcing how many voice mail messages are waiting? Ignored. The recording? Instantly deleted. Mike’s oral-to-aural disaster? Averted.
—Teddy Wayne, NYTimes.com

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.
—Elon Musk, Telsa Blog

—[Garth Braithwaite](GarthDB: With Feedly down I don’t know what to do when I open a browser.)
Feedly and Evernote have been down all day because hackers launched a DDoS attack and are demanding a ransom. Charming shit.

Albert Einstein said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
One of the best ways to explain something to someone is through metaphor and analogy.
Horace Dediu, as usual, nails Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference:

The path to realizing this is to imagine the world as the “D” in WWDC see it. Developers don’t just build. Using an analogy of building or construction, they are architects and designers as well as contractors and craftsmen and artists as well as builders. And not of just of houses but of cities and communities. They see and think through tools and techniques for building and innovations in building materials. Innovations which allow them to imagine first and, later, to build new cities in ways that were never before possible.

We were therefore witnesses to an event which was, in essence, a cement conference. A new building material was introduced along with the methods for using it and the tools for shaping it. Perhaps some observers expected to see skyscrapers and interstate highways presented, and thus were disappointed. But they should not have had such expectations. A cement conference is esoteric. It’s about the rudiments which, when combined with imagination, ingenuity and a lot of work, generate livable spaces.
Outsiders seemed disappointed with last week’s WWDC. No new toys, nothing shiny to take pictures of and post on their websites, but every insider (including a coworker of mine) who went was super-excited with all the announcements.
Such is life, though. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve explained something (like a Kickstarter project) I’ve envisioned and it’s fallen on deaf ears. Most people have shitty imaginations. Only once you’ve executed your vision do they jump on the bandwagon (to be fair to my imaginary skeptic, most people never execute, they just love to talk).
It’s no different with what Apple announced at WWDC. The hundreds of new features and tools in iOS and OS X open up countless new ways of doing things we’ve never been able to do before on these platforms, but most people will not “get it” until developers start building new things.

Kindle version 4.3 was released today, and it has some great features, including the ability listen to audiobooks directly in the app. But…does it have scrolling view yet? No, it does not.

It wasn’t touted onstage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havoc for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.
—Russell Brandom, The Verge

Pretty soon, you may be plugging new headphones into the iPhone’s Lightning port. Apple is reportedly expanding its Made for iPhone program with new terms that allow manufacturers to make headphones that link with iOS devices via the small connector– first introduced with the iPhone 5 in 2012. 9to5Mac claims that Apple will add support for Lightning headphones in an upcoming iOS firmware update. The company has a history of doing away with dated components (i.e. the 30-pin dock connector), but eliminating the headphone jack would be a drastic step even for Cupertino. It’d be another way for Apple to achieve consumer lock-in, but aside from that, it’s hard to come up with obvious or practical benefits to such a change.
—Chris Welch, Apple reportedly paving the way for Lightning headphones, but benefits are unclear
Just as the iPhone isn’t really a phone (it’s a mobile computer with cellular capabilities), maybe we should think about headphones having the potential to be more than headphones.
Last month’s rumor about Apple making headphones that track your pulse might have been a hoax, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out not to be (or not far from the mark).

While I watched Apple’s WWDC 2014 opening keynote on Monday morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about the infectious mixture of fun and confidence everyone onstage seemed to be exuding. It was something new for this era of Apple, and it felt like a mirror image of the announcements being made. The message was loud and resonant from where I sat: We’re back, we’re ready to play, and we know who we are.
—Joshua Topolsky, The Verge
I got the same feeling watching the keynote intermittently as I “worked” at my desk Monday morning. Only experience will tell if OS X and iOS 8 work as well as they looked on stage, but everything appears tighter and more consistent across both platforms.
And as the guys said on the latest episode of ATP, there wasn’t enough time to talk about all the great new features and functionality under the hood of both operating systems. In the days since the Keynote news stories continue to pop up discussing things the Apple leadership either failed to mention due to time constraints or gave only a few minutes of attention to.
Regardless of how tight the Apple ship appears to be running, we’ll continue to hear from the naysayers and clueless analysts who are still convinced Apple is lost without Steve Jobs and they’re no longer able to innovate.

Kickstarter’s human approval process was never billed as an endorsement — it consisted of a simple check for rule violations that could take as little as five minutes. That check will now be done by an algorithm that looks at keywords in the campaign, the creator’s track record on Kickstarter, and other metrics to create a profile of the project and compare it to similar projects that have been approved, rejected, flagged, and removed. If the campaign passes the algorithmic check, the creator can choose to either launch without a human review or request feedback from the Kickstarter team.
—Adrianne Jeffries, The Verge
At what point will the algorithms be able to create new Kickstarter projects for us to then submit them for approval to the algorithms of Kickstarter?
Is there an algorithm to ship all the hardcover books from my Kickstarter project? Because that would save my ass a hell of a lot of time.

“Double you tee eff?” you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for “Infinity” when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn’t, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn’t going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he’s a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can’t even find the cat.
—Peter Welch, Programming Sucks
[I’m not a programmer/developer, but I know enough to know this blog post is golden. Wow.]

I’m a little confused.
A 12-inch Surface Pro 3 with 512GB of storage and an Intel i7 core costs $1,949.00 (shit, no wonder they aren’t competing against iPads). If you want a keyboard—which Microsoft insists you need to make the most of the device—the price is $2079.00:

A 13-inch MacBook Air with a dual i7 core, 4GB of RAM and 512GB of Flash Storage costs $1,649.00:

So, to be clear, Microsoft is marketing a device to replace your laptop that costs more than a better-performing Macbook Air, but it costs more and doesn’t include a keyboard.
What was that about Apple products costing a premium over their Windows rivals?
Keep up the great work, Microsoft.

Kids react to old computers:

via BGR