Linked List: September 24, 2013

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

Motorola Ships 100,000 Moto X Phones Per Week ★

How many seconds did it take Friday morning for Apple to sell the first 100,000 new iPhones?

iPhone 5S Slow Motion Test Footage by Rishi Kaneria ★

Not bad for a cell phone camera.

Investigating Touch ID and the Secure Enclave ★

More from Rich Mogull on Touch ID and the A7’s “Secure Enclave”:

I suspect Apple will eventually release more details in response to public pressure — they still tend to underestimate the level of security information the world needs before placing trust in Apple (or anyone else). But if my assumptions are even close to accurate, Touch ID looks like a good part of a strong system that avoids a bunch of potential pitfalls and will be hard to crack.

The Myth of Steve Jobs’s Constant Breakthroughs ★

Harry McCracken:

The golden age of Apple that Cannold pines for never existed. Steve Jobs didn’t change the world every two years like clockwork, and he was incrementalism’s grand master.

A Brief Comment on Josh Centers’s 39-Word Review of Apple’s $39 iPhone 5S Case ★

Agreed.

Stephen Elop’s Contract With Nokia Rewarded His Failure ★

Tero Kuittinen, writing for Forbes:

This adjustment meant that unlike previous CEOs, Elop was facing an instant, massive windfall should the following sequence happen to take place:

Nokia’s share price drops steeply as the company drifts close to cash flow crisis under Elop.

Elop sells the company’s handset unit to Microsoft under pressure to raise cash.

The share price rebounds sharply, though remains far below where it was when Elop joined the company.

Should this unlikely chain of events ever occur, Elop would be entitled to an accelerated, $25M payoff. Through some strange coincidence, that very sequence of events actually did happen to take place between 2011-2013. Practically instantly after Elop was handed his contract.

iOS 7: The Pixel Envy Review ★

Nick Heer’s comprehensive take on iOS 7 fell to the bottom of my reading list last week. Wish it hadn’t — it’s fantastic. Detailed, insightful, and fair.

Computers Are Too Difficult and People Are Computer Illiterate ★

Baldur Bjarnason:

Computers can both be too complex and people can be too lazy to apply themselves in computing. You can both criticise people for taking pride in ignorance and criticise computers for being needlessly complex. Despite what many commenters seem to think, pointing out the latter does not invalidate the former. And, conversely, pointing out the former doesn’t invalidate the latter.

Screens 3.0 ★

Solid update to Edovia’s excellent $20 utility for remotely logging into a Mac or PC from an iPhone or iPad.

On the Effective Security of Touch ID ★

Marc Rogers, on Touch ID’s susceptibility to high-quality spoofed fingerprints:

Touch ID is not a “strong” security control. It is a “convenient” security control. Today just over 50 percent of users have a PIN on their smartphones at all, and the number one reason people give for not using the PIN is that it’s inconvenient. TouchID is strong enough to protect users from casual or opportunistic attackers (with one concern I will cover later on) and it is substantially better than nothing.

Clearly Touch ID is better than no passcode at all — which Apple claims is how the majority of iPhone users (and smartphone owners in general) have their devices configured. Further, I think it’s better than a 4-digit PIN. It seems far easier to me to spy on someone entering their PIN than it would be to capture a high-resolution fingerprint (from their correct finger) and reproduce it in way that works to fool Touch ID.

(The new lock screen PIN entry UI in iOS 7 might even make it easier than before to snoop someone’s PIN.)

Tee Trilogy 3 ★

11 great t-shirts, printed by my pal Brian Jaramillo (the maestro responsible for the quality of DF’s own shirts). $20 each, or pick three for just $51.

‘iMessage Chat’ Android App in Google Play Store ★

My favorite part is the UI design mimicking (badly) the old iOS look.

Update: Google has pulled the app from the store.

Apple Releases iMac Speed-Bump: Faster Processors, Graphics, Wi-Fi ★

I’m curious what Apple is going to do with the hopefully imminent new Mac Pro and Mavericks. My guess is that they’re going to show them off onstage at next month’s press event for the new iPads.

Suzanne LaBarre:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

Hard to believe it took them this long.

Dean Holland’s iPhone 5S Camera Review ★

Dean Holland has written a great review of the new iPhone 5S camera:

I often get phone calls asking me what camera I use, and I first have to clarify “Do you mean for work or pleasure?”. The answers are very different. My workhorse cameras are no-compromise performance tools, with no concessions at all to being easy to carry or enjoyable to use. They are all business, and they’re the last thing that I would want to take with me on holiday. I see the iPhone 5S as an attempt to make the opposite, a no-compromise fun phone-camera that adds to life. Each does its job better for not trying to do what the other does so well.

Totally agree. The 5S was the only camera I took with me to Portland for XOXO last weekend, and I got some great shots of the event and my friends. Over the years I’ve usually taken a “good” camera with me to conferences; the difference with the iPhone as my main camera is interesting. I get worse photos, technically, particularly in low light. But I get more of them, because the camera is always with me.