Linked List: August 15, 2012

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Michael Burford devised a more clever way of guesstimating the weight of an iPad Air than I did. I like his assumptions and I like his math.

MG Siegler on the Weights of Various Devices ★

My guesstimated weight for the iPad Air sure looks light, looking at this list. Even if I overshot and the thing weighs somewhere in the 300-400 gram range, that’d still be pretty damn light. (And that Surface Pro sure seems like a brick at 903 grams.)

Bonus Points for Using ‘Festooned’ in a Sentence ★

David Pogue, reviewing the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1:

Moreover, Samsung’s software designers must be former Hollywood art directors who fabricated alien spacecraft; Samsung’s apps are festooned with bizarre icons. None of them have identifying text labels, and their logos are frequently so unhelpful they may as well be random Cyrillic letters. Would you guess, for example, that to turn on handwriting recognition, you tap an icon that shows a circle in front of a mountain?

Some of the icons in S Note actually display a different menu every other time you tap them. I’m not making this up.

So I guess they’ve stopped copying Apple’s icons.

Engadget: Surface RT Tablet Might Cost Just $199 ★

Blockbuster rumor from Tim Stevens at Engadget:

According to an inside source, a session was held at Microsoft’s recent TechReady15 conference in which all the launch details were laid out. If things go according to the plan detailed then, the Surface for Windows RT tablet will be launching October 26th — no surprise there — at a compelling price of $199.

That MSRP, almost certainly lower than Microsoft’s own cost, would line it up against the Nexus 7 and even the Kindle Fire.

If true, it’s an aggressive, almost incredibly bold move by Microsoft. They’d not only be losing billions of dollars to juice sales, they’d be throwing their OEM partners under a bus. Microsoft might be willing to lose money on each sale to grow the platform, but OEM PC makers need to sell tablets for a profit.

If false, this is a perfect example of Microsoft mismanaging expectations. By not giving a price at the introduction, they opened themselves up to something like this. Now, if it actually ships with an utterly reasonable price of, say, $399, everyone who believed this $199 rumor is going to see it as being twice as expensive as they expected. Under-promise and over-deliver — Microsoft should have given a price at the introduction and then tried to beat that price when the Surface actually shipped later in the year. Compare and contrast with the iPad, which, two months ahead of its introduction, was leaked to The Wall Street Journal as being expected to cost “under $1,000”. That expectation made the actual starting price of $499 seem not merely acceptable, but downright remarkable.

‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ to Be Re-Released Theatrically on Imax ★

Steven Spielberg, in an interview with Dave Itzkoff:

But there’s not a lot of movies I want to go back into my archives and do this for. Raiders is a movie of my own, that I can actually stand to watch from beginning to end. In that sense, it has a special place in my heart. I don’t rewrite it in my mind, I’m not kicking myself for what I didn’t do. I’m just going along for the ride like everybody else. It’s one of the few films that I’ve directed that I can sit back objectively and observe and enjoy with my family or whoever I’m with, or even alone. Most of my other films, I’m hypercritical of them. I don’t have any plans to re-release Close Encounters or Jaws.

One of my top five films. Very excited to see it on a huge screen.

Data Visualization of the DF Archive, Article by Article ★

Rather remarkable bit of work by Kemper Smith from Distant Shape, spelunking the DF archive. He read and tagged all 963 articles I wrote (before yesterday’s). I feel a little bad, as I’ve been tagging my articles all along, but my tagging data isn’t (yet) publicly exposed. If it were it could have saved Smith quite a bit of work. But on the other hand, I’m fascinated by the tags he chose (e.g. “Gruber Has Inside Information”, “Was Wrong About Something”). The whole desktop-vs.-mobile color spectrum thing is eye opening, as are the cyclical patterns for article length.