Linked List: April 27, 2012

Friday, 27 April 2012

Nice trip down memory lane.

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‘Insanely Simple’ ★

Advertising executive Ken Segall’s behind-the-scenes book about working with Steve Jobs and Apple. The emphasis on simplicity rings true.

Can’t quite come to grips with this bit, though, excerpted by Eric Slivka at MacRumors:

Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus.

Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.

ComScore: Amazon Kindle Fire Accounts for 54 Percent of U.S. Android Tablets ★

Electronista:

Amazon’s Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the country. At second place, the entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup comprised just 15.4 percent of Android slates.

No other manufacturer got above 10 percent, with Google’s reference tablet, the Motorola Xoom, stopping at seven percent.

No word from ComScore, though, on what the Fire’s share of the overall tablet market is. Clearly, though, Amazon is Apple’s top competitor. Makes me wonder how long it would take for a Kindle phone to become the number two phone in the U.S. Also makes me wonder what the Android tablet market looks like outside the U.S., where the Kindle Fire has no distribution.

Sidenote: ComScore’s report also contained an interesting bit on tablet screen sizes:

Analysis of page view consumption by screen size found a strong positive association between screen size and content consumption. Specifically, 10-inch tablets have a 39-percent higher consumption rate than 7-inch tablets and a 58-percent higher rate than 5-inch tablets.

Horace Dediu on Apple’s Astounding Q2 Operating Margin ★

It boggles the mind that any hardware company, even the world’s most profitable one, could achieve higher margins than Microsoft or Google. (Via MG Siegler.)