Microsoft is celebrating a milestone:
As we near the one year anniversary of the availability of Windows 10, we’re excited to share that Windows 10 is now running on 300 million active devices around the world.
It’s too bad hardly any of those devices are the ones people carry around in their pockets.
From Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is planning sweeping changes to its year-old music streaming service after the first iteration of the product was met with tepid reviews and several executives brought in to revive the company’s music strategy departed.
Hey Apple, fuck Apple Music. How about fixing iTunes?
Oh, also fix the Music app on iOS.
Ina Fried at Re/Code on Intel missing the mobile boat:
After missing the early days of the smartphone revolution, Intel spent in excess of $10 billion over the last three years in an effort to get a foothold in mobile devices.
Now, having gained little ground in phones and with the tablet market shrinking, Intel is essentially throwing in the towel. The company quietly confirmed last week that it has axed several chips from its roadmap, including all of the smartphone processors in its current plans.
It’s a stunning admission of failure that saw the company throw good money after bad in its bid to make up for lost ground.
Intel is right there with their old buddy Microsoft on the sidelines of the mobile devices game.
This week Mike talks about the human tendency to harp on the negative, pattern recognition, loss aversion, the new basic economy class for flights, how great it is to fly Virgin America, and digging deep to find great culture.
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Over at The Wall Street Journal Daisuke Wakabayashi on Apple Watch first-year sales:
Apple Inc. sold twice as many Watches as iPhones in each device’s debut year. Yet the smartwatch is dogged by a perception that seems premature given the history of Apple’s most popular devices: disappointment.
As the Watch marks its first anniversary on Sunday—two days before Apple’s quarterly earnings announcement—the product’s fate is critical to the company. It is Apple’s first all-new product since the iPad and a test of its ability to innovate under Chief Executive Tim Cook, when sales of iPhones are slowing.
Right on cue, the tech press continues it’s modern tradition of showing us how Apple can do no right, ever.
Kottke on the new speed record for Super Mario Bros:
NES player darbian just broke his own record for the fastest time through Super Mario Bros. He completed the entire game in just 4 minutes 57.260 seconds. But the most entertaining part of the video is watching his heart rate slowly creep up from 80 bpm at the beginning to ~140 bpm in World 8-2 and spiking to 171 bpm when he beats the record.
This is a game I grew up with and played over 30 years ago and kids are still playing it AND breaking records.
Nuts.
Khoi Vinh is not down with the new Kindle Oasis:
The Kindle’s surprisingly resilient upward trajectory—the company insists that the Kindle line is still a source of revenue growth, even in the face of smartphone and tablet ubiquity—is a reminder that “good design” is hardly universal. When it comes to digital products, people value things that work well more than they value things that look good. Apparently working really well is good enough for this audience—Kindle users love their Kindles. It doesn’t much matter, I guess, that my stomach goes queasy and my eyes start to bleed every time I try to read anything in a Kindle.
I haven’t owned or used a Kindle since the first generation model, but I do use the iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. My #1 complaint? The Kindle app still paginates books without the ability to continuous scroll (as if every book were a huge, single page a la Kerouac’s On the Road scroll).
Pagination is an artificial construct that doesn’t make sense when reading on touchscreen devices.
Bryan has voiced his problems with the Kindle before on this site, here, here, and here.
In an unusual chain of events, it appears Apple is announcing the WWDC dates through Siri. Although the Apple website has not been updated with any new info, Siri is proudly proclaiming that WWDC 2016 will indeed be held in San Francisco from June 13th to June 17th. Although Siri didn’t explicitly say, it is almost certain that WWDC will once again be held at Moscone West, simply because it’s the best choice of venue for an event like this in San Francisco. This is an unusual announcement nonetheless, it being the first time Apple has used Siri as the primary announcement vehicle for one of its events. WWDC is expected to feature the unveiling of iOS 10, OS X 10.12 and more…
I remember when tech news sites were mocking Apple when they introduced gold color finishing on iPhones, and then on the ‘new’ MacBook.
Seems the mocking is over as Samsung and LG continue to copy Apple’s product designs.
Check out the web page for LG’s new, ultra-thin laptop, the ‘gram’ (really? the whole product name is lowercase?)
And as David Barker noted on Designer News, they even pasted in a shot from Final Cut Pro on OS X.
And here’s the new MacBook Apple debuted in 2015:
Sharp take by Ben Thompson on the new Tesla Model 3 and the parallels of Tesla to Apple:
When it comes to the iPhone I have argued that Apple’s smartphone was, relative to the phones on the market, Obsoletive: the iPhone effectively reduced the phones that came before it to apps on a general purpose computer, justifying a higher price even as it made cheaper incumbents obsolete.
This doesn’t quite work for Tesla: at the end of the day a Model S is still doing the same job as a traditional BMW or Mercedes-Benz. It just does it better: a Model S accelerates faster, it has more storage, it has innovative features like limited auto-pilot and a huge touch-screen interface, and you don’t have to stop at the gas station. Most importantly, though, it is a Tesla.
The real payoff of Musk’s “Master Plan” is the fact that Tesla means something: yes, it stands for sustainability and caring for the environment, but more important is that Tesla also means amazing performance and Silicon Valley cool. To be sure Tesla’s focus on the high end has helped them move down the cost curve but it was Musk’s insistence on making “An electric car without compromises” that ultimately led to 276,000 people reserving a Model 3, many without even seeing the car: after all, it’s a Tesla.
Thompson refutes the Clayton Christensen’s idea of ‘disruptive innovators’ like he and many others claim Apple and Tesla to be. It’s the strength of the Tesla and Apple brands that allows them to do and achieve what they do, not because they’re necessarily disruptive.
Put that in your disruptive pipe and innovatively smoke it, Christensen.
