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“It felt like a geeky ode to Moore’s Law rather than an homage to Dieter Rams.”
“With the shiny bands at the top and bottom, the iPhone 5 looks like a half-finished stretch-limo conversion.”
“It’s the Nokia Lumia 900—an iPod that was placed inside of a gutted Windows Phone, like Rambo hiding from the cops in the gutted carcass of a deer.”
Apple’s forest is cleverly made to make us forget the trees.
The iPhone 5 has been improved significantly over the previous generation—from its screen to its shell to its dock connector. But most of the tech specs featured by Tim Cook and crew at Apple’s event on Wednesday can be found in other devices by Apple’s competitors. Not one, single device, mind you—that’s a unique feat Apple pulls off with most of its launches. But take a look at the hallmark iPhone 5 features compared to its competition:
SRI International, the brains behind Apple’s Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI’s labs to find out why you haven’t you heard of any of them.
Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.
“I was sitting on the plane waiting for the flight to take off, and I asked Siri, ‘How long will flight 927 be delayed?’ And Siri came back to me and said the flight would be delayed 15 minutes,” recalls Winarsky, who was the SRI executive on the spin-off company’s board before it was sold to Apple. “The guy next to me looked at me and said ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that … why are you in coach?’”
Siri: What’s The Difference Between Invention And Innovation?
Apple is getting into streaming radio, according to The Wall Street Journal. But Pandora has survived worse.
Savage Beast Technologies launched its music kiosk software business in 2000—at exactly the wrong time. The brick and mortar music industry was collapsing. Tower Records, the first to offer Savage Beast’s service, closed the last of its U.S. stores in 2006. Virgin Megastores shuttered in 2009. Other major retailers that sold CDs, including Circuit City and Borders Books, followed suit.
“Unfortunately, that was a dying business,” said Joe Kennedy, CEO of Savage Beast successor Pandora. “The company hit hard times very very early in the process.”
Read on: How Pandora Soothed The Savage Beast
Under intense scrutiny from the Fair Labor Association, Apple’s Chinese supplier has revised its labor policies, including changes to its internship program “to ensure that the job relates to the intern’s field of study” and that interns’ “skills before and after” are measured “to document the benefits of the training.” And the company is also said to have taken measures to ensure fair wages and prevent 40-plus-hour work weeks. Now one of the paragons of bad labor practices is treating interns better than most U.S. companies.
Are Foxconn Internships Now Better Than American Internships?
“Who wants a Stylus? You have to get ‘em; put ‘em away; you lose ‘em—yuck! Nobody wants a Stylus! We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world…We’re going to use our fingers.”
That was Steve Jobs in 2007, as he unveiled the iPhone to the world. But even five years after the unrivaled success of Apple’s smartphone and its subsequent touch-screen iPad cousin, competitors in the space are still heralding the Stylus pen as central to interacting with mobile devices—fingers be damned. A whole range of smartphones and tablets still come with a pen accessory; Microsoft showed off a Stylus in June when it revealed its much ballyhooed Surface tablet; and only this week, Samsung made the S Pen the key differentiator for its Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. “The S Pen…really, truly changes the game,” said Samsung Electronics America president Tim Baxter.
But even after over a decade on the market, it’s clear brands still have no idea how to market e-ink accessories. Looking back at years of promotions for Stylus pens, what’s readily apparent is how few benefits marketers can imagine for the devices—which is perhaps indicative of how little benefit Stylus pens actually provide consumers.
The Pointless History of Stylus Advertising: The Worst E-Ink Spots From Samsung, HP, Apple
With Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.
Apple’s Not-So-Secret Weapon: How iCloud Keeps Them One Step Ahead Ahead Of Windows
In the 35 years since a cardigan-clad Jimmy Carter called on America to turn down the thermostat, the technology behind household climate control hasn’t changed much. Sure, there were some incremental improvements, but the world’s brightest minds weren’t exactly set on revolutionizing your A/C. After all, it’s far sexier to build smartphones, right?
Not to Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, who left Apple’s iPod and iPhone development division in 2010 to start Nest, a technology company working to bring thermostats into the 21st century.
Why Nest Founders Tony Fadell And Matt Rogers Left Apple To Build A Thermostat
I can’t pretend to understand the logic. Ford, like many other auto manufacturers, has embraced NFC key fobs, allowing you to unlock your car without fiddling with pesky keys. And to demonstrate it, they created one of the most awesome password tools for computers ever—one that has nothing at all to do with cars.
Ford Keyfree is a Chrome extension that stores passwords for Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Then, whenever you’re near your Mac using a pre-approved smartphone, the app can “unlock” these sites automatically via Bluetooth.Your phone serves as your ID, thanks to the unique identifiers already in Bluetooth.
In an actual use case scenario, this means you can sit down to your computer, and without hitting any buttons at all, log in to your social networks. It’s freaking magic.
Now let us return to the tale of C1. Or should I say, MacMan. The agency team was heartbroken to learn that Steve had fallen in love with such a disappointing name as “MacMan.” Unlike C1 itself, for which our feelings had evolved from shock to love, there could be no love for “MacMan.” Ever. It had so many things wrong with it, we didn’t know where to start. Phil Schiller, Apple’s worldwide marketing manager, was in the room, and Steve revealed that “MacMan” was Phil’s contribution.
“I think it’s sort of reminiscent of Sony,” said Steve, referring of course to Sony’s legendary Walkman line of personal music players. “But I have to tell you, I don’t mind a little rub-off from Sony. They’re a famous consumer company, and if MacMan seems like a Sony kind of consumer product, that might be a good thing.” It was hard to know where to start picking at that argument. It seemed that Apple, more than any company in the world, stood for originality. Having a name that so blatantly echoed another company’s style couldn’t be the right way to go. We were also disturbed by the “man” part of “Mac-Man,” with its obvious gender bias. And then there was the fact that the name just gave us hives, but we’d need to be a bit more tactful on that one.
Steve Jobs Almost Named The iMac The MacMan, Until This Guy Stopped Him
According to J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Mickey Drexler, Jobs even envisioned rethinking the automotive industry. Speaking at Fast Company’s recent Innovation Uncensored conference, Drexler clued the audience in on some insider Apple knowledge.
“Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?” Drexler said. “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”
(Source: Fast Company)
“Look at the car industry; it’s a tragedy in America. Who is designing the cars?” Drexler said. “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.”
“Beijing was such a different city,” says Ma Jun, China’s preeminent environmental watchdog, remembering the capital as it was during his childhood. “There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles.” The 44-year-old pauses. “I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky. Today, the sky is different.”
“That’s probably … certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.”
