Apple

A list of various articles and topics of discussion around Apple. Since they're a secretive company, I tend to avoid opining on a lot of things about them, out of respect for their desire and right to control their own messaging.

Apple Park

I visited Apple Park (Apple's new campus) a few times. I could tell you why I was there.... but as they said in Sherlock Holmes "The Hounds of Baskerville" and Top Gun), then I'd have to kill you. I shot a bunch of shots when they first opened... then later they started cracking down on that. "No Photos please". Um, OK, no more photos. I get that they're trying to control their image.

Apple's Greatest Misses

I'm not an Apple basher, or Apple fanboy. Apple is a company, like any other. The problem is once you're big, you attract attention (good and bad), and the most newsworthy stories are those with the most drama or sensationalism. I hate them both -- the rabid fans and Apple haters. But I do like to document the stuff others aren't. This article isn't into their many revolutions and successes, just a few highlights of technologies or ideas they went *splat*. Not to bash my Fruity Cupertino friends, but any mistake is useful, if you learn from it.

Tech

2015 iPad Pro (1st Gen)

A better iPad. It 's better in every way -- bigger, better, faster... and more expensive. OK, better in all ways but price. My Big-iPhone (7 Plus) meant that I was using my iPad's less -- but give me a bigger screen and keyboard that works, and I find that the iPad fills a niche for me, as a great travel/note-taking and entertainment device, when it's not worth bringing out my laptop. And with an App, it works as a second screen for my laptop when I do real work.

Movies

Steve Jobs (2015)

A fictionalized drama-mentory retelling of Steve Jobs life, by an ultra-Liberal director (Aaron Sorkin). Reviewers preferred it more than audiences +13% (86/73). While the dialog and story is the best of the rash of Steve Jobs pseudo-biographies, this one captured the spirit of many things better, while getting too many actual facts wrong. It would have been great, if only they were fictional characters.

Jobs (2013)

Hollywood has this attitude that fiction is more interesting than real life. It is more interesting to people that don't care about the truth as much as they care about shallow entertainment and becoming more misinformed about a topic or person. I'm not their audience, and this movie wasn't made for me. Walter Isaacson's book was pretty good, but flawed. This movie omitted the former and exaggerated the latter.

Conclusion

Don't anthropomorphize companies, they hate that.

Apple is neither good nor bad: it is a group of people making products and trying to get returns for investors and customers. That behavior can be good or bad (or a bit of both), depending on how they're doing it.

Sometimes the leadership can be good or bad, or making bad decisions. But mostly, I roll eye's when I see things that vilify the leadership for things that they have a responsibility to do. Tim Cook isn't evil for paying as few taxes as legally possible, and using that money to employ people and create great products -- he would be evil/negligent if he didn't do that, and wasted investors/employees/companies money on things he didn't have to.

Honorable mentions

Origins of the Internet

Government/ARPA research gave us the Internet the same way they invented the car or airplane. By 1976 (founding of ARPA) we had hundreds of computers networked, by 1993 the Internet only carried 1% of the information traffic (and we had plenty of traffic). But by 2007 that had flipped and most traffic was TCP/IP based, because it was free, standard and good enough. However, without TCP/IP, one of the other protocols would have become a standard, and we’d still have had everything we have today (in some areas, more). The government gave us nothing that we didn’t already have (or wouldn’t have). Politicians (as usual) took credit for other people’s work.

Information Age: History Repeating

Alan Kay thought up the idea of the DynaBook in 1968 (which later became laptops, or tablets), by listening to those around him, predicting the same things. History and progress is happening in slow motion. It only seems fast, because we're moving slower.