The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday • California Theatre
Tickets Available • Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: April 21, 2006

Friday, 21 April 2006

Jon Rubinstein retired as vice president of Apple’s iPod division earlier this month, but according to a regulatory filing last week, he’ll still be working for Apple as a consultant:

Apple of Cupertino, Calif., said Rubinstein, through his J.R. Ruby Consulting Corp., agreed to make himself available for an average of one business day per week until April 16, 2007. He will be paid a “non-material” flat fee, Apple said.

Build-It-Yourself PCs Cost More Than Discount Machines From Dell ★

Bill O’Brien configures a comparable system to a $399 Dell POS using cheap components from New Egg, and the tally ran to $599. (Via John Siracusa via AIM.)

Apple Offers Free Computer Take-Back Program ★

Apple:

US customers who buy a new Mac through the Apple Store (www.apple.com) or Apple’s retail stores will receive free shipping and environmentally friendly disposal of their old computer as part of the Apple Recycling program. Equipment received by the program in the US is recycled domestically and no hazardous material is shipped overseas.

‘Close Enough’ ★

New aptly-titled short film from my fellow Kubrick aficionados at Coudal Partners.

Gallery of Netflix Mailers from 1999–2006 ★

Nice gallery from Business 2.0 showing the design evolution of Netflix’s mailers, and explaining the reasons behind the changes over the years. (Via John Siracusa via AIM.)

Steven Frank: More on Tech Complexity ★

Nice essay from Steven Frank on burdgeoning tech complexity, and why it might be the leading factor weighing Windows Vista down:

Clearly, market forces are demanding the production of increasingly complex computers and devices that do 80 million things, none of them well. But then, said market forces get pissed off when they can’t get into Outlook or whatever because of some DLL error. You can’t have it both ways, though.

And that’s the weird thing. If you made a little box, and all it did was read email, and it did it exactly perfectly, but it didn’t do anything else — well, nobody would buy that. Or close enough to nobody that you would only survive as an extremely niche product.

I don’t agree with that last paragraph, though. Substitute “play MP3s” for “read email” and you’d have a description of the iPod, which has been a raging success even though it’s up against a bunch of multi-purpose gadgets that can read email (poorly, usually), surf the web (poorly, usually), place phone calls, take photographs (poorly), and so forth. I’m not saying an iPod-esque device that just did email would sell well for sure, but it might. And one might argue that BlackBerries are such devices — they do more than just email, but everyone I know who uses one bought it just because they do handheld email so well.

Apple Reports Second Quarter Results ★

Apple released their Q2 2006 quarterly results, and they’re great: $410 million in profit on $4.3 billion in revenue. I missed this yesterday while I was toiling away on my “Initiative” announcement. Things are only going to get better as more Intel-based Macs are released this year.