This is awesome.

Order the Poster Here – Framed or Unframed.

via TNW

I remember when Steve first hired us, he said: ‘I hired you because you’ve done very good large buildings, and you’ve done great houses.’ If you’re doing houses, then you’re thinking about the subtleties of a building.’

As is legend now, Jobs’ laser focus on the user experience within Apple’s products also extended all the way to the retail experience, to the point where Jobs perceived retail as simply an extension of the overall Apple product line.

via NY Times

via NPR

There have always existed disputes among the competing parties, divergent opinions, while the fans of each brand were convinced that theirs was the best product. Last, but not least, the rivals have even conducted ad campaigns against the competing brands. This project mostly approaches the visual “conversations” between the company logos and the ways that they influence each other, hence the name of the project, Brandversations. It is a parallel between the modern and the old, some of the slogans dating back to the 40s and 50s.

Yes, I am a heretic for displaying the one above. :)

via Logo Design Love

Steve Jobs presenting Apple’s plans for its new, stunningly gorgeous corporate campus to the Cupertino City Council. Its awesome.

Via Business Insider

Apple has just announced the availability of the white iPhone. Unlike the black iPhone, it is able to reflect all colors of the visible spectrum, thereby making it white.

Via TechCrunch

Apple’s iPhone represents about half of their $12.3 Billion in revenue. And while the iPad numbers flattened off in Q1, I would argue that a big reason for that was the impending release of iPad 2 coupled with the inventory issues that hampered iPad 2 sales. None the less, its pretty crazy to look at this graph and think that the iPhone was only released in 2006 and now represents such a huge element of Apple’s business. Amazing.

via Business Insider

Actually, I already have it.  And I love it.

I’m bringing this up because Crunchgear reported that ATV has sold ~2 Million In about 7 months. Clearly I’m not alone.

What I’m liking is the on demand element of the service. Whatever I want to watch is only a few clicks away. Its seamlessly integrated with Netflix, YouTube and many of the top video podcasts out there. I can easily buy/rent movies from iTunes, although Netflix somewhat solves for that. And it enables me to connect to online services like Flickr and other “cloud” services. One big downfall has been the lack of support for “have to watch live” events like sports…but that was recently solved with MLB.TV and NBA League Pass announcing deals with Apple where you can stream any and all league games via Apple TV. For someone like me who’s a Red Sox/Celtics fan living in pseudo – enemy territory (New Jersey…but I do like the Knicks. Long story.), this is a huge win.

But what really pushes it further for me is the seamless integration with the iOS “ecosystem”. Drop a movie in iTunes, and you can easily stream it to your TV via ATV. Want to listen to your music in your TV room via your surround sound speakers, just navigate to your music library and hit play.

I’m not going to get all “tech pundit” on you and say you “have to get it”. Go get a Roku box if you prefer. But go try it. Its only around $100 for either ATV or Roku. You won’t be disappointed.

As I’ve mentioned before, Apple and its iPhone get all the hype from the fan boys, however Apple once again is fighting and losing the exact same battle as it did in the 1980′s and 1990′s

Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought–and lost–in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are “better,” but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers Windows in the 1990s, Android now. 

As the SAI article I’ve quoted notes, I would have to agree that Apple and the others in the mobile space (RIM, Windows) need to really consider the implications here.

My mobile contract on Verizon is up in July and while Verizon now has the iPhone, and I have recently acquired other Apple products like iPad and iPad 2, I have to say that I am pretty reticent to switch over to iPhone for my mobile device. The flexibility of the Android phone is something that I’m not ready to give up yet, and I get the sense from these numbers that others are feeling the same way.

via SAI.

Much of the buzz around Apple’s new iPad 2 is about the cool Smart Covers that attach to the iPad using powerful magnets, while also offering the flexibility not to impede on the new cameras that are part of the device.

Now we are seeing some 3rd party companies coming to market with their own flavor of the Smart Cover, none more interesting than Miniot’s all Wood cover.  Its garnered so much interest, their website is crying for mercy.  You can see a video of how it works here.

Earlier this week, I purchased an iPad 2 for my wife…a late Valentines Day gift. I have to admit that the form factor of the new iPad is quite nice – its noticeably thinner and lighter – and the Smart Cover is quite slick.

via NYTimes.com

Conan nails a hilarious parody of the iPad 2 video and announcement.

The iPhone is like omakase, the style of sushi where the chef chooses what you’re going to eat, and might even tell you how to eat it—no wasabi allowed on this, no soy sauce allowed on that. Definitely no California rolls.

That’s the way Apple has always been.  One of Apple’s big failures 15-20 years ago in the PC “wars” was the fact that it would not cede control over its licensing and distribution…and on that war, it got its ass kicked by Microsoft from a market share perspective (Yes, Apple’s products are more profitable per user but that’s a story for anther post).  We’re actualy seeing signs of this scenario repeat itself with Android surpassing iOS in terms of installed devices and market share .

The game is much different now with Applications, Mobile, Social Networks and, most importantly, the clear shift of power and conversation to the customer through the Internet and self publishing tools.  You could argue that Apple’s “rigid” approach is a metaphor for the old school marketing approach, where the “brand” talked to the customer as opposed to talking with the customer.

No doubt that Android has its flaws, while Apple has some amazing features and benefits.  And there is no way to avoid the fact of their recent success and valuation in the marketplace. But to me, it will be very interesting to see if people will be willing to let Apple dictate the experience so rigidly with something so personal as your personal mobile device.  Combine this with Apple’s recent announcement that they will be taking 30% of all subscription revenues and its impact on publishers’ iOS content and service offerings, and you really have to step back and wonder how this will all play out

In a lot of ways, this is exactly what tablets are meant for: easy access to data via wireless networks, high-quality photos, and portability. And from a coach’s or player’s perspective, imagine being able to quickly sort through a large set of plays, look at them in a stylish graphical presentation, see animations of them in action, and more–or to download a photo of the last play seconds later.

From a geek perspective, I think this is a super cool idea and could really be beneficial to teams – consider when they need to look up plays quickly, or check out a photo of a formation the opposition just ran. I think the hang up is that athletes and coaches are supremely superstitious animals. They like their routines, they find comfort in knowing their system so they don’t have to worry about anything else other than the game and its elements. I think there is a place for tablets on the NFL sideline, and other pro sports sidelines for that matter, but I think its going to be a bigger U/X transition than is anticipated. And thats saying nothing about the security issues that need to be factored in and managed.

via CNET News

Walt Mossberg over at All Things D has an initial review of the Verizon iPhone 4. Yes, the Verizon iPhone addresses AT&T’s most glaring flaw, the ability to actually use it as a phone, however it appears that the other elements of the device – data services, et al – are somewhat lagging.

Bottom line: In my tests, the new Verizon version of the iPhone did much better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and offers some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T

From his POV, it appears it may be worthwhile to wait a bit on the new Verizon iPhone.

At the same time, MG Siegler over at TechCrunch also posted a review that was decidedly more upbeat, as he was really focusing on how the consistent Verizon signal and connectivity outweighed the speed advantages that AT&T provided:

There’s no question that AT&T’s network is faster than Verizon’s for data transfers — both up and down. I’ve tried this all over the city a number of times. AT&T is faster. But — and this is a very big but — in order for AT&T to be faster, it needs to have a signal. And again, that’s simply not the case in large parts of the city. So speed or not, Verizon still wins this battle hands down in my book. I’ll take Verizon’s coverage over AT&T’s speed any day.

Conveniently, my Verizon phone contract will be up in the July timeframe which is traditionally around when Apple releases new flavors of the iPhone. And I’ve been more than happy with my Android phone so far. What to do?!? Big decisions lie ahead!

via AllThingsD and Techcrunch

About 26 percent of U.S. smartphone users said an Android device was their primary phone in the three months ending in November, compared with 25 percent using Apple Inc.’s iPhones, comScore said. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. still held the first-place spot, but its share of users declined to 33.5 percent from 37.6 percent in August.

It will be interesting to see if this will now influence developers to release Android apps at the same time as iOS/Apple apps, or shift to release Android first and then iOS/Apple.

via All Things D.

RIM had a complete internal panic when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a former employee revealed this weekend. The BlackBerry maker is now known to have held multiple all-hands meetings on January 10 that year, a day after the iPhone was on stage, and to have made outlandish claims about its features. Apple was effectively accused of lying as it was supposedly impossible that a device could have such a large touchscreen but still get a usable lifespan away from a power outlet.

RIM’s reaction? The equivalent of a panic pick when the time is running out during the 3rd round of your Fantasy Football draft: The RIM Storm, which hit the market two years later and clearly not started until after the iPhone release.

This has been sitting in my “Drafts” for a month or so and I forgot about it after going on vacation and all. In any case, better late than never. With all the recent issues over the iPhone 4 reception issues has spawned some great humor (the one above being my personal favorite). Here are 16 hilarious spoofs of the Apple iPhone.

What’s wrong with this picture? Apple has built a page to state that it supports web standards, but you can only use their browser to view the demonstrations on the site. Am I missing something here? Isn’t the whole point of Web Standards that they are standards that are compatible across any browser?

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

There is a massive steel cage death match going on in the tech world between Apple, Google, along with HP (now that it has Palm OS) and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s head is so “in the clouds” they are rapidly becoming the Sears of the technology world and on the fast track to being “Walmarted” by Google.  They won’t know what hit them until its too late (if that has not happened already).  From its very early years Apple has always been one to have tight controls over its ecosystem and we are starting to see Apple’s transformation from a PC maker to a platform developer.  They acquired Lala recently and just today, I received an email from them saying that they will be shutting their doors.  Why shut such a great service?  So Apple can seamlessly integrate it into iTunes, put all your music on the cloud, and turning a desktop app into software as a service that Apple can use to charge a monthly/annual fee.   Take this model and scale it to everything Apple does.  This is where it is going.  With all the rapid changes taking place around media, data, technology and how people consumer information, it will be very interesting to see how this all nets out.  The big wildcard in all of this?  Google and its Android/Chrome OS.

Posted via email from Stephen’s Posterous

For every design project in the pipeline, Mr. Jobs will hold meetings of two or three hours every week or two with key members of the product team. At those meetings, Mr. Jobs will critique the work in progress and also suggest adding or cutting features. Glenn Reid, a software developer during Apple’s early years who had another stint at the company that ended in 2003, recalls one such meeting just days before a photo-editing program was to go into production. Mr. Jobs decided at the last minute that an index feature on the software made the system unnecessarily complex, and decided to eliminate it, even though documentation for the product had already been printed. It was frustrating to Mr. Reid and his software team, “but it made the product better,” Mr. Reid says.

Mr. Jobs’s unwillingness to accept compromises – and the unquestioned authority that lets him issue last-minute edicts – have become a key to Apple’s success in developing new products, Mr. Reid says. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, noted that the company struggled during the years when Mr. Jobs was not running Apple.

On the other hand, certain of Mr. Jobs’s uncompromising principles with computers – such as wanting “to make the inside beautiful” – ran counter to more practical impulses. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says, Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple’s early rainbow logo (Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense). On another machine that Mr. Crow worked on for NeXT – the computer maker Mr. Jobs founded between Apple stints – he says Mr. Jobs insisted that the internal power supply be nickel plated, an expensive ornamentation that was eventually discontinued.

His most recent run at Apple has been nothing short of spectacular. He is going to be a tough act to follow but they are going to have to face reality soon.

The Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ad from Microsoft is just terrible. I’ve read that it was developed “to make people talk” and start the conversation. Well, people are talking and I think the word of the day is confusion and a yawn. This is such a typical Microsoft-like response to Apple’s innovation. Two years late and not nearly as good.

Is it me, or does this image remind you of “Big Brother” from Apple’s 1984 ad?

Did you notice that the person who created the “controversial” Hillary Clinton 1984 “Vote Different” knock off of the Apple 1984 ad went to the detail and trouble of putting an iPod, ear buds/wire and all, on the sledge hammer toting woman in the video? Now that’s a pretty impressive bit of editing.

As any normal person would do, I started to hit every button to see if it would start playing again but nothing happened.  Then, I went to the Internet.  How can I reboot this thing?  Maybe it just needs a little refresh as in my 1.5 years of owning it, I’d never rebooted it.  As we all know, we all need to reboot every once in a while.

A ha! I found it. A very informative iPod site detailing exact instructions on how to reboot my iPod.  "Your data will not be effected when you reboot your iPod." it said.  I hit the "Menu" and "Play" buttons at the same time for about 10 seconds (yes, I had the 3rd generation iPod which I’ve always been somewhat bitter about, being that I purchaed it all of two weeks ahead of the 4th generation release…but we won’t go there) and it rebooted.  Ok, this is good, I said.  It appears to be working fine now.  But to my horror, every song, podcast, and piece of information on my iPod was gone…Casper…no where to be found.  Yes, everything was in iTunes on my home computer, so it was not an unmitigated catastrophe (unless you consider the commute home that evening), but this was not expected based on what I read (Mistake #1:  Everything on the internet is not fact).  And the iPod was still smoking hot on the back too.  Now I knew something was seriously wrong.

I wake up on Saturday and try to sync it with iTunes, and again it fails.  I bitterly head downstairs to eat breakfast, and there it is…slapping me right in the face.  Its an article in the NY Times by Joe Nocera titled "Good Luck With That Broken iPod" (fyi…the online article is behind the NYTimes "Select" service, so I can’t link to it).  The timing was impeccable.  The article essentially said that if your iPod breaks, there is little that Apple will do to help other than saying "Go buy a new one" and offering an extended warranty.  Bitterness turned to frustration.

On Sunday, fearing the worst, I took my injured iPod to the local Apple store right when it opened.  One of the salespeople took it and tried to bring its software back to factory condition.  Alas, that did not work as he determined it was a component issue, which costs $250 minimum.  As the article said, "Go buy a new one."  So I did, reluctantly.  Some silver lining is that I was able to give my broken one back to Apple and they took 10% off the cost of my new one.  This time, I did buy the warranty.

So now I have the new iPod Video with an extended warranty.  My plans to replace my 5 year old behemouth of a digital camera will have to wait another year or so.  I use my iPod every day when I commute to work.  I’m not going to say "its more trouble than its worth" because there is no way I could survive my commute without it.  But still, its been a rocky relationship….

But even if you don’t download a single video, the bigger screen, the larger amount of disc space, and the increased battery life are reasons alone to seriously consider an upgrade. My iPod is now closing in on 1.5 years old, and while its still serving me quite well, I am starting to get a little bit of iPod envy.

A bit over a year ago, I purchased an iPod. While I have had a few bumps in the road while owning this product, I am pretty much lost without it, especially with the commute I have to work.

I key accessory of the iPod that I use all the time is the clip on remote, which enables me to forward past songs and podcasts I don’t want to listen to at that time without having to take the actual iPod out of my pocket, shoulder bag, or whever it is being held. About three months ago, the little “Hold” switch broke on the remote. I took it back to Apple and they replaced it with no problems. Then today, I noticed that the cable of the headphones was “fraying” and exposing its wiring. And being that I had this replaced almost three months ago, the warrenty on the replacements expired tomrrow.

So at lunch today, I went to the Apple Soho store to see if I could get replacement headphones before the warrenty expired. I walked into the Apple store, found a salesperson, and told them the issue. In the middle of my explaination, another floor person joined the conversation, assessed the issue as I showed the fraying headphones, and said “Come with me”. We walked over to the Genius Bar, they then took the old pair of headphones, and gave me a new pair on the spot, no questions asked. I did have to provide some info about my iPod but that was it. I was there and back in 45 minutes (took the subway).

So I ordered an Apple iPod this weekend. Looking forward to loading it up and using it!! I ordered the 20GB size basically because I could not justify spending $500 for it. They were running a promotion where I could get it engraved for free, which I gladly took advantage of. I put this url and my email address on it figuring that if I ever lost it, maybe some kind soul would email me and return it. Also, I figure 20GB is more than enough space for most of my current CD collection plus other songs that I will eventually acquire from iTunes. My wife was even nice enough to purchase a $15 Gift Certificate for me to get started on iTunes. I would have preferred the BMW for my iPod but beggars can’t be choosers. Rock on.