Linked List: April 25, 2013

Thursday, 25 April 2013

The Sad State of MLB’s Blackout Policy 

Linus Edwards:

Thus, as long as I am standing in Carlisle, PA, I can’t watch Phillies broadcasts. However, if I go a half hour to the west in Chambersburg, PA, Phillies games are not shown on television, but also are not blacked out in the packages. If I go a half hour to the east in Harrisburg, PA, Phillies games are blacked out in the packages, but shown on local television. Therefore, this tiny strip of land in Central PA is the only spot in the entire country that one can not legally watch Phillies games. It is purgatory for a Phillies fan.

New iPhone Commercial: Every Day 

Good one.

Marco Arment Sells Instapaper to Betaworks 

Marco Arment:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

Twitter Updates Twitter for Mac 

Includes retina display support. They’ve been sitting on this for a long time, glad to see it released. Now, if only they would let Apple open this app instead of the twitter.com website when you get notifications through OS X’s built-in Twitter support.

Listen to Alexander Graham Bell’s Voice 

Sounds like he’s on AT&T.

WWDC Sells Out in Two Minutes 

Might have even been quicker than that. Not sure anyone got a ticket if they didn’t get one in the first minute after they went on sale.

(Remember that guy a few days ago who claimed developer interest in iOS and OS X is waning?)

iPhone Tipping Points 

Benedict Evans:

There are fewer and fewer new high-end buyers coming into the market and the ones you sold to in the past may increasingly be tempted by ever improving cheaper phones. So a high-end phone maker risks losing sales if it stays at the high-end, or losing margin if it makes cheaper phones, or both.

In case it isn’ t obvious, this is the essence of the bear story for Apple. There’s lots of froth and nonsense swirling around as well, but this is a perfectly coherent and intelligent story. It isn’t that Apple is losing sales to Android (it isn’t, at least not yet) - it’s that the high-end market itself may be close to tapped out.

Smart analysis. One thing Evans neglects to address, though, is that the above is not really the bear story for Apple, it’s the bear story for the iPhone. The bear story for Apple is that they’ll never have another hit to take the iPhone’s place. Go back a decade, and it was the same with the iPod.

But Apple already has the next big iPhone-sized hit: iPad. That’s where the crazy year-over-year growth remains.

Jim Ray on Twitter Music 

Jim Ray:

The Popular pane is useless to anyone over the age of 17. Emerging seems to simply be the inverse of Popular and is therefore equally hopeless. Swipe over to Suggested and we’re finally getting somewhere, save for the fact that the secret sauce of what makes an artist “suggested” is completely opaque. I have no idea what I should do to improve the algorithmic guidance or what the fuck @beth_orton is doing in there.

Tellingly, you can’t get to a musician’s tweets from within the app to decide whether you want to follow them based on the content of their stream, you’re just supposed to follow all of your favorite musicians and be in awe of their celebrity, I guess.

So he really likes it, I guess.