Linked List: December 16, 2011

Friday, 16 December 2011

Zaky on Apple’s Next Quarter: The Biggest Earnings Blowout in History ★

Andy Zaky:

The largest company in America is about to grow its earnings by a whopping 84% this quarter, and Wall Street is asleep at the wheel.

Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P. ★

Christopher Buckley:

Yes, everything he said was brilliant. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of “God Is Not Great” did not himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a great soul.

Via Roger Ebert, this quote from Hitch: “Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do.”

Teen Texting ★

Nielsen:

Messaging remains the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. The number of messages exchanged monthly (SMS and MMS) hit 3,417 per teen in Q3 2011, averaging seven messages per waking hour.

How Does iMessage Know That the Recipient Is an iOS 5 Device? ★

The end result is pretty slick.

On Being Reasonable ★

Horace Dediu:

I believe that institutional financial advisors are conditioned (or coerced) into assuming that nothing unreasonable ever happens. That seems like a completely flawed foundation to stand on.

Made in Texas: Apple’s A5 iPhone Chip ★

Great scoop by Poornima Gupta, reporting for Reuters:

The A5 processor — the brain in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — is now made in a sprawling 1.6 million square feet factory in Austin owned by Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics, according to people familiar with the operation. […]

Nearly all of the output of the non-memory chip production from the factory — which is the size of about nine football fields — is dedicated to producing Apple chips, one of the people said.

Surprising (to me at least) and cool news.

Picky Prowlers Only Want iPhones ★

Katy Tur, reporting for NBC New York:

Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.

The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.

Reads like something out of The Onion.

Bonus joke: This gets under my skin because it is a pompous, privileged, insulting, and myopic viewpoint which reeks of class warfare — and it is indicative of a growing sentiment I see amongst people in the thief community.