Embracing Chaos

Even though Apple products are expensive, there’s a surprising similarity between Apple and Wal-Mart: both companies push hard on other parts of the value chain to deliver lower prices for consumers.
In Walmart’s case, it’s generally suppliers who get squeezed.  Walmart demands that manufacturers of goods produce them at the lowest possible price so that Walmart can charge [...]

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Apple has done a fabulous job in recent years of asserting itself as a major player in the computer industry.  One of their tools for accomplishing this has been a fanatical commitment to high-quality products.  They strive to make every product they offer to be the best in its class, and they’ve largely succeeded at [...]

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Arrington managed to get his hands on an iPad for a test drive before launch day, presumably from a company that had been given one to build apps for it. His description of the security under which these devices were loaned out is so funny I just have to share it with y’all…
Scores of [...]

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Back in 2007, I predicted that Apple would launch a subscription music service probably around 2010. My logic was based on how long it would take to get enough connected iPods into the world. Having spent a bunch of time with an unconnected mp3 player with a subscription music service I knew this [...]

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There’s lots of hubbub about Apple’s upcoming tablet device, but the stuff people are talking about I’m not actually all that excited about.  A giant iPhone?  Sure, that’ll be nice.  A color e-reader that can run apps.  Okay, I guess that’s better than kindle.  A super-thin netbook without a real keyboard.  Meh.  Actually, I don’t [...]

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DSLR cameras make very little sense today. Modern imaging technology is rapidly turning them into dinosaurs. The forces keeping them alive are a combination of a physical legacy in hunks of glass, and aspirational marketing. I’ll explain, but first, what’s a DSLR and why don’t they make sense? Background on SLRs and DSLRs (If you what “f-stop” means, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.) SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex. Practically speaking it refers to a camera where you can change the lens. You look through the same lens that actually takes the picture, letting you put…

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My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys. One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device. She is a scientist who is very much an information worker. Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her. (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!) She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing. So she’s often reading her kindle on…

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Here I propose an alternative explanation for iPhone scarcity: the difficulty in obtaining a new iPhone keeps people from complaining about problems with it. I will explore this sophisticated marketing technique that Apple may or may not be employing to cover up quality problems with the new iPhone 3G. Even if Apple is not doing this deliberately, I assert that it is a valid and potentially very useful technique if your product is lucky enough to have the prerequisites. New iPhones are hard to get The blogosphere is full of speculation about whether or not Apple deliberately made the iPhone…

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The way I see it, there’s no compelling reason to buy a heavy laptop. Light laptops are great because they’re portable. Their processors might be a little slower, but local processing power rarely limits what you can do with a computer these days. And unless you get a really tiny laptop they’re hardly slower. If you do get a tiny one then you’re trading reduced HCI-bandwidth for increased access to that bandwidth, which is often worthwhile. Today I’d probably argue that iPhone or iPod Touch is a pareto-optimal choice (sweet-spot) in this trade-off, beating out things like OQO and FlipStart….

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At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole. With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can search for music by artist, composer, album, or track. This feature works within your own local library or within music services such as Rhapsody. Up until now if you wanted to listen to an artist in Rhapsody that you hadn’t previously bookmarked, you would need to guess what top-level genre they were categorized under and then scroll through an enormous list to try to find the artist….

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