Linked List: April 19, 2011

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

DF RSS Feed Sponsorship Openings 

Now is the first time in a few months that there are near-term openings on the DF sponsorship schedule, including this coming week and all of May. If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball’s audience of smart, good-looking readers, please do get in touch.

Why Weren’t Samsung and Apple Able to Settle? 

Jack Wellborn:

Given everything above, why weren’t the two companies able to come to an agreement? I have three possible answers:

  1. Apple demanded too many design concessions.
  2. Samsung sees the ability to model its own products after Apple’s as strategic enough to fight for.
  3. Ego.

Any combination of the three are plausible, but number two is the most compelling in my opinion.

The other possibility, of course, is that Apple never even contacted Samsung before filing the suit.

Samsung’s 2006 Phones 

And then here’s what they announced in February 2007, one month after the iPhone. (Via.)

I don’t think there’s any serious argument that Samsung has not ripped off the iPhone’s aesthetic — to a far greater extent than Android handset makers as a whole. The question is whether they’ve broken the law in doing so.

Never Say Never Again 

Regarding the aforelinked piece on refined sugar as a toxic substance, and it inspiring me to severely reduce the sugar in my diet, I’m reminded of this delightful scene from 1983’s Never Say Never Again:

M: Too many free radicals. That’s your problem.

James Bond: “Free radicals”, sir?

M: Yes. They’re toxins that destroy the body and the brain, caused by eating too much red meat and white bread and too many dry martinis!

James Bond: Then I shall cut out the white bread, sir.

Is Sugar Toxic? 

Gary Taubes examines the mounting evidence that refined sugar is killing us:

If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.

“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

It’s not often that a magazine article inspires me to change my life. This is one.

Nilay Patel on Apple’s Lawsuit Against Samsung 

Nilay Patel:

Taken as a group, it feels like a remarkably solid case — Samsung can’t just up and countersue Apple with its own patents and hope to walk away with a handshake and a cross-license because of the various trademark, trade dress, and design patent claims. How the company decides to deal with those issues remains to be seen; there’s no question in my mind that Samsung designed TouchWiz to look and feel as much like iOS as possible, and then marketed it as such. (More than one of my friends has come back from a Verizon store with a Fascinate having been told that it’s “basically the same as an iPhone.”)

NetNewsNostalgia 

Justin Williams looks back at NetNewsWire through the years. It’s rather remarkable how much has changed.

Review of Apple’s Unit Numbers Released in Legal Filing Prior to Earnings 

Speaking of how many iPod Touches and iPads have been sold, Horace Dediu has some interesting numbers drawn from Apple’s complaint against Samsung.

ComScore Discovers That Apple Sells iOS Devices Other Than the iPhone 

Aatekah Mir, reporting for the WSJ Digits blog:

Google Inc.’s Android might be the most popular smartphone platform, but if you add other mobile devices like tablets to the mix, Apple Inc.’s iOS beats Android in the U.S. by a wide margin — 59% to be exact. [...]

The research found that Apple’s iOS platform — on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches — reached 37.9 million people, while Android reached 23.8 million, on phones and tablets.

“The finding is incredible because it shows that Android being the most popular smartphone is not the whole story,” said Mark Donovan, the senior vice president of mobile at comScore.

No, it is not “incredible”. It is completely obvious to anyone who actually looks at how many iPod Touches and iPads people have bought. Smartphone market share is not platform market share.

This is interesting, though:

Among iPad owners, 27.3% also have iPhones, while 17.5% have BlackBerry devices and 14.2% have Android phones. (The rest use other operating systems or have flip phones rather than smartphones.)

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made 

If you missed out on Taschen’s 2,874-page $1,500 limited edition of this remarkable book, Amazon has the mass-market edition for just under $40. So great. (Via Uncrate.)

Andy Zaky: ‘Why Apple Shares Are Dirt Cheap’ 

Sharp piece by Andy Zaky on Apple’s finances and stock price. He expects a big move:

In fact, it is very likely that Apple will have more cash than its current market capitalization in less than five years. Once Wall Street begins to catch on to this reality, Apple shares should see a major upside correction. And this is precisely why Apple shouldn’t trade below a 20 P/E ratio over the next several years.