Posts in the “apple” category

Back in April when I was 2,000 miles from home, my iPhone began crashing and I had to learn the “hard reboot” technique. Then right before my surgery last month it quit working for cell calls, and I learned more iPhone restoration techniques. After that, the Bluetooth failed. I bought a cheap Moto E so I could make calls.

Over the weekend I dropped a phone for the first time in my life, and I ended up with some iPhone 5s Gorilla Glass in my fingers. But still, it works for music and messages.

If you like to watch movies and videos on your tablet, this tablet stand is very cool. The up-and-down rotation is nice and stiff, so you can set it at any angle, and it has rubber cushions in the right places to keep your tablet from sliding or getting damaged. I just bought this a few days ago, and it’s a definite “thumbs up.” It works great with my Nexus 9, and an old iPad 2 (that I only use for music these days).

(I show it next to an apple because the shiny images on Amazon may give you the impression that it’s larger.)

Apple didn’t put a little home in each of its stores, but TechCrunch reports, “Apple has unveiled interactive HomeKit experiences in 46 of its retail stores worldwide ... when you go into Apple’s new retail stores you’ll be able to use the Home app from either an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad to control devices like the Philips Hue light bulb, the Hunter ceiling fan and many others.”

This is an interesting assessment from this Vogue piece on Jonathan Ive. As a consultant, I’ll also add that people will pay more for great service.

(On a slightly related note, this is my collection of Jonathan Ive design interview quotes.)

John Gruber writes today that The Mac Pro Lives. Perhaps more accurately, at least it seems to have a future.

A quote from this article by Guy Kawasaki about Steve Jobs:

This experience taught me that you should tell the truth and worry less about the consequences for three reasons:

1) Telling the truth is a test of your character and intelligence. You need strength to tell the truth and intelligence to recognize what is true.

2) People yearn for the truth—that is, telling people that their product is good just to be positive doesn’t help them improve it.

3) There’s only one truth, so it’s easier to be consistent if you’re honest. If you are dishonest, you have to keep track of what you said.

From this interview with former Apple retail head Ron Johnson:

“I remember the day I came in and told Steve (Jobs) about the Genius Bar idea and he says, ‘That’s so idiotic! It’ll never work!’” Johnson said. “He said, ‘Ron, you might have the right idea, but here’s the big gap: I’ve never met someone who knows technology who knows how to connect with people. They’re all geeks! You can call it the Geek Bar.’”

From a Reuters article titled, Apple seeks design perfection at new “spaceship” campus:

“But de la Torre ultimately saw that Apple executives were not trying to evoke the iPhone per se, but rather following something akin to the Platonic ideal of form and dimension. ‘They have arrived at design principles somehow through many years of experimentation, and they are faithful to those principles,’ de la Torre said. Fanatical attention to detail is a key tenet.”

As a follow-up to my popular first GarageBand tutorial, my second tutorial on creating a podcast with GarageBand shows you how to add introductory music, special effects, delete recordings, and move clips to control gaps in your podcasts, and introduces the concept of ducking.

I’ve written about this before, but I was just reminded in this article about Steve Jobs advice to Nike: Get rid of the crap.

A website named digibarn.com has a collection of images and short stories they call Daniel Kottke’s Amazing Apple Relics. If you’re interested in Apple history it’s a nice little find.

Here’s a decent interview with Tony Fadell on bbc.com about the creation of the first iPhone.

bgr.com found a nice part of a talk by Steve Jobs in 1998 where he talked about products vs profits. I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that Apple has lost their way in this regard. macOS keeps getting more and more clumsy, and both it and iOS have more bugs (that affect me) than ever. And then there’s the battery issues in the 2016 MacBook Pro and macOS, which is discussed in the bgr.com article.

Here’s a link to an article titled, Could you get a job at Apple? It depends on your answers to these 25 questions.

The last line in that image is amazing/sad: “None of Apple’s newest laptops can connect to its own flagship smartphones without using a dongle or purchasing a separate cable that doesn’t otherwise ship with any of Apple’s hardware.”

(Image from extremetech.com.)

Here’s a little more discussion from this Twitter thread about why developers don’t like Apple’s latest laptop design.

I haven’t been blown away by MacOS (nee OS X) in quite some time, and the latest MacBook design seems to have annoyed even more developers. A good thing about this is that it got me looking into Qubes OS, “a reasonably secure operating system.”

Apple’s philosophy of “we design the hardware and software” works well when people like your work, but when people don’t like your design it’s easy to lose customers.

“We don’t design for price, we design for the experience and the quality people expect from Mac.”

~ Phil Schiller, Apple

I just upgraded to iOS 10 yesterday. So far it seems to work a lot like Android, with “cards” for notifications, and you swipe right on the home screen to see Google Now, or whatever Apple calls that screen.

IBM says the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Macs is lower than that of PCs. You can read more about it at MacRumors and other websites.