Linked List: March 5, 2013

Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Why Andy Ihnatko Switched From iPhone to Android ★

Andy Ihnatko:

People whom I know, respect, and even consider to be friends have dismissed large phone screens as a cheap marketing gimmick that targets gullible consumers in the showroom, and which doesn’t offer any practical benefits.

Yikes. That’s so incorrect, so far out of whack with reality as I experience it every day with the Samsung Galaxy S III, and with other flagship Android phones, that I can’t even mount an argument against it. I can’t think of anything to say other than “Nope. Wrong.”

Most surprising thing to me is the phone he switched to — the Galaxy S3, not the Nexus 4.

Jon Stewart Taking Hiatus from ‘The Daily Show’ to Direct Feature Film ★

Mike Fleming, reporting for Deadline:

Stewart has written the script, and will direct Rosewater, an adaptation of the book Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival. Published in 2011 by Random House, the book is Maziar Bahari’s harrowing ordeal of leaving London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential elections. With a pregnant fiancée left behind, the BBC journalist expected to be away for a week. Instead, he spent the next 118 days in Iran’s most notorious prison being brutally interrogated by a man he knew only by one thing: he smelled of rosewater.

How Miguel de Icaza Ended Up With the Mac ★

“Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm.”

Rene Ritchie: ‘iPhone 5S Planned for August, Next iPads May Debut as Soon as April’ ★

Ritchie’s track record on this sort of stuff has been impeccable.

Matt Groening’s Pre-Simpsons Artwork for Apple ★

Love that they needed a booklet titled “Who Needs a Computer Anyway?” And as the post-PC era evolves, how long until the Mac needs to answer that question again?

‘Telepod’, ‘Mobi’, ‘iPad’, and ‘Tripod’ ★

Some of the names Apple considered but rejected for the original iPhone, according to Ken Segall.

Five-for-Six, Not Five-for-Five ★

So Andy Zaky’s “buy” call on Apple stock last May indeed made him five-for-five at the time, but, he made another “buy” call on October 10:

History has repeatedly taught us that the best time to buy Apple is when the bearish sentiment in the stock has reached the pinnacle of extreme pessimism. When every guest on CNBC is calling for the imminent demise of Apple, when every headline is making a case for why Apple has peaked, and when the stock continues to slide by over a 2% a day right in the face of a market rally, that’s when you know it’s time to buy.

AAPL was trading around $630 that day, and soon sunk to $500 and today is down around $430, so Zaky’s streak on buy calls ended there.

Malware, Too ★

Dave Winer:

Back to 2005, the first thing I noticed about the white Mac laptop, that aside from being a really nice computer, there was no malware. In 2005, Windows was a horror. Once a virus got on your machine, that was pretty much it. And Microsoft wasn’t doing much to stop the infestation. For a long time they didn’t even see it as their problem. In retrospect, it was the computer equivalent of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.

So many factors, all of them in the Mac’s favor.

That Whole Internet Thing ★

Smart piece by Mike Arrington (I swear) on Apple’s comeback from its 1997 nadir.