Linked List: January 2, 2014

Thursday, 2 January 2014

John Siracusa Grades Apple’s 2013 ★

He’s a tough but fair grader.

(An F for TV seems rough though. Apple TV added a bunch of channels this year. It’s not the “show them how it’s really done” revolution we all pine for, but it’s a very good little box.)

Alicia Keys Loses ‘Global Creative Director’ Job With BlackBerry ★

Shocker.

Chris Rawson of TUAW on 9to5 Mac’s 2013 Rumor Reporting ★

Chris Rawson:

I examined all of 9to5 Mac’s articles between January 1 and December 28 2013. This was 326 pages of content, at 6 articles per page, for a total of 1956 articles. […]

9to5 Mac posted an impressively high 73 rumor articles that turned out to be entirely true, and this included all of the articles derived from their own original sources — a truly impressive and commendable 30 articles in total. 9to5 Mac absolutely does have someone inside Apple (probably several someones) feeding them accurate information.

If that were the whole story, then it’d be time for me to shut up and retire. Unfortunately, 9to5 Mac isn’t content to stick with its own trusted sources, and it takes the same “shotgun” approach as everyone else by posting idiotic analyst speculation and Digitimes-derived BS with only occasional nods in the general direction of skepticism.

In short: Mark Gurman’s rumor reporting: excellent. All the random “some analyst says…” / “some random site is reporting…” bullshit that they parrot: crap.

Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border ★

David Kravets, reporting for Wired Threat Level:

A federal judge today upheld a President Barack Obama administration policy allowing authorities along the U.S. border to seize and search laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices for any reason.

Paul Haddad raises an interesting point on Twitter:

Laptop border searches are legal, but so is strong encryption. I don’t love the decision, but who doesn’t travel with everything encrypted?

They can’t force you to reveal your password — although they will “demand” you provide it to them, and most people comply — but they can confiscate your devices.

‘A Speck in the Sea’ ★

Riveting story by Paul Tough for the New York Times Magazine:

Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He needed to start pumping water into the Anna Mary’s holding tanks to chill, so that when he and his partner, Anthony Sosinski, reached their first string of traps a few miles farther south, the water would be cold enough to keep the lobsters alive for the return trip. In order to get to the tanks, he had to open a metal hatch on the deck. And the hatch was covered by two 35-gallon Coleman coolers, giant plastic insulated ice chests that he and Sosinski filled before leaving the dock in Montauk harbor seven hours earlier. The coolers, full, weighed about 200 pounds, and the only way for Aldridge to move them alone was to snag a box hook onto the plastic handle of the bottom one, brace his legs, lean back and pull with all his might.

And then the handle snapped.

‘Re/code’: Swisher and Mossberg’s Successor to AllThingsD ★

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg:

We are thrilled to announce that we are forming our own new and independent media company, Revere Digital, with a pair of respected investors and partners — the NBCUniversal News Group and Terry Semel’s Windsor Media. Revere will be operating news sites and apps, as well as a series of conferences.

First up is Re/code, a new tech and media news, reviews and analysis site launching today, with the same talented team we’ve worked with for many years at the former All Things Digital site we ran for Dow Jones & Co beginning in 2007.

As expected, it appears they took the entire AllThingsD reporting staff with them, and have added even more. Not sure what to make of the slash in the name.

(Mossberg’s first column for Re/code, “It’s Not a Church, It’s Just an Apple Store” struck me as a bit vapid, seemingly targeted at Artie MacStrawman.)

Motorola ‘Continuing Its Assault’ ★

WSJD is off to an inauspicious start, judging by this story by Rolfe Winkler on Motorola’s price cuts for the four-month-old Moto X:

Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility unit dropped the price on its flagship smartphone Wednesday, continuing its assault on the high margins of its smartphone rivals.

In a blog post, the company said its Moto X with 16 gigabytes of memory would now cost $399 without a wireless contract for U.S. customers, down from $550. The company offered the Moto X for brief periods in December at $349, but the latest price drop isn’t a temporary promotion.

For one thing, they don’t link to the original blog post. What is this, a printed newspaper? For another, why buy into this spin that it’s an aggressive offensive move against Samsung and Apple? The more obvious explanation is that the Moto X has not been selling well, and they’re slashing the price in response.

If Apple had yesterday cut the price of the iPhone 5C by 25 percent, would the WSJD headline call it an assault on Apple’s rivals? The real story here is that Motorola, even as a Google subsidiary, continues to flounder to make a popular Android phone.

(And, no, this is nothing like the price cut of the original iPhone in 2007. For one thing, the original iPhone sold well at its original price, and faced supply shortages all summer long. For another, Apple had no experience making cell phones of any kind, nor iOS devices, when the original pricing was announced in January 2007. They were flying by the seat of their pants, and rather than announce no pricing at all in January, Apple instead announced a conservative price — one which, once production started smoothing out, they realized they could undercut.)

Introducing WSJD ★

Jonathan Krim, introducing the Wall Street Journal’s replacement for AllThingsD. The Journal learned a lesson: this one feels like part of the Journal itself, everything from the name to the visual design. AllThingsD always looked and felt like an independent entity.

The Problem Is With the Product ★

Robert Scoble, in a long ramble on Google Glass:

I’m also worried at a new trend: I rarely see Google employees wearing theirs anymore. Most say “I just don’t like advertising that I work for Google.” I understand that. Quite a few people assume I work for Google when they see me with mine. I just hope it doesn’t mean that Google’s average employee won’t support it. That is really what killed the tablet PC efforts inside Microsoft until Apple forced them to react due to popularity of iPad.

Scoble has the cause and effect backwards. If Glass were a good product, people who have them would wear them. It’s that simple. Same with tablet PCs — the problem wasn’t that Microsoft employees wouldn’t use them and that the product thus lost momentum and didn’t catch on with consumers. The problem is that tablet PCs were crap products.

When your own employees don’t use or support your product, the problem is with the product, not the employees.