Linked List: January 6, 2014

Monday, 6 January 2014

Felix Salmon:

Netflix’s big problem, it seems to me, is that it can’t afford the content that its subscribers most want to watch. It could try to buy streaming rights to every major Hollywood blockbuster in history — but doing so would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and could never be recouped with $7.99 monthly fees. What’s more, the studios can watch the Netflix share price as easily as anybody else, and when they see it ending 2013 at $360 a share, valuing the company at well over $20 billion, that’s their sign to start raising rates sharply during the next round of negotiations. Which in turn helps explain why Netflix is losing so many great movies.

Netflix’s movie selection is getting so bad that I’m quite surprised when it actually has a movie I’m looking for.

See also: Can I Stream It — a unified search service for movies and TV shows across iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go, and more.

MacRumors: ‘Apple Said to Be Targeting Fall 2014 Launch for 12-Inch iPad Focused on Enterprise’ ★

“Focused on enterprise”. An Apple product. And this analyst gets taken seriously?

The Verge: ‘The Striking Pebble Steel Could Change Your Mind About Smartwatches’ ★

Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

Count me in with Rob Beschizza, though:

Pebble’s ‘high-end’ new smartwatches look like stuff from the wobbly plastic carousel of $15 Diesel knockoffs at Macys.

It’s not merely that the new Pebble Steel is not to my liking, not my style. To me they look downright crude.

Darrell Etherington: ‘Go Ahead, CES 2014 – Prove There’s Tech I Want to Wear’ ★

Darrell Etherington, writing for TechCrunch:

Gadgets don’t interest general consumers by virtue of their potential or their value as objects unto themselves, they appeal because of their use value, and because they answer a specific question consumers have of “How I can I do x, y or z?” They gain mass adoption and traction when they can provide the best possible answer to that question, and when they can do those things consistently and reliably with a minimum of frustration and a maximum of joy.

Exactly. Reminded of Tim Cook’s relatively forthright response at the D11 conference last May, when asked about Google Glass:

“There are lots of gadgets in the space. I would say that [of] the ones that are doing more than one thing, there’s nothing great out there that I’ve seen. Nothing that’s going to convince a kid that’s never worn glasses or a band or a watch or whatever to wear one. At least I haven’t seen it. So there’s lots of things to solve in this space. It is an area for exploration. It is ripe for getting excited about. There are a lot of companies in the space.”

‘The Type Is All Off, Sorry’ ★

Samsung brought film director Michael Bay on stage at CES to tout their new TV sets. It did not end well.

Gareth Beavis: ‘Apple: Make an iPhad or Get Ready to iPhail’ ★

This piece by Gareth Beavis for TechRadar is pretty much exactly what Ben Bajarin was addressing in the previous item:

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but 2014 could well be the year that Apple makes its biggest mistake in recent history.

No, I’m not talking about the iWatch - I still think that could actually be rather good - no, Apple has to, HAS TO, bring out a large screen version of the iPhone or it’s going to really struggle to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Again, I think it’s quite possible that Apple will release a bigger-screened iPhone this year. But if they don’t, it’s nonsensical to argue that Apple will be struggling for relevance a year from today.

Apple’s Strategy ★

Ben Bajarin, arguing that we shouldn’t be surprised if Apple releases none of the new products in 2014 — TV set, smartwatch, bigger iPad, bigger iPhone — that many pundits claim it “has to”:

The broad claims that are made about what Apple should do are almost always based around competitive reasons. Folks claim that because Apple’s competition is doing something that Apple should also or they will lose. Yet what I love about Apple’s strategy is that it is never around what the competition is doing. Apple marches to beat of their own drum. This is fundamentally mis-understood by so many. In fact, Apple’s strategy is best understood within the view that internally they literally believe they have no competition (I personally believe this also but that’s the subject of a much longer essay.) Apple has customers not competition. The decisions they make as a company are not based around what their competition is doing but around what is best for their customers. Like it or not, this is their strategy.

It’s an interesting way to think about Apple, and it mostly fits. It certainly helps explain why Apple, and Apple alone, has never been part of the CES herd. [Update: The final clause of that sentence originally read, “… and Apple alone, is sitting out CES again this year.” The “again” was my main point, thus the rewrite, but as Nilay Patel points out, other big American tech companies like Google and formerly-perennial CES keynoter Microsoft aren’t at CES 2014, either.]

Phones are the one major product line where Apple clearly has competition — not because any other phone maker has produced a rival device that Apple need worry about, but because of the role that carriers play. Carriers own the networks, and carriers sell most of the phones on their networks. And so of the four aforementioned new products Apple is widely speculated to be releasing this coming year, the one I think we’re most likely to see is an iPhone with a bigger display. Make the iPhone line-up akin to the iPad Air/Mini — simply a difference in size and price, with no significant difference in quality or performance.

Pebble Steel ★

To me, these look even uglier than the first-gen Pebble. The first-gen Pebble has a casual plastic look — it’s far from elegant, but it at least feels true to itself, in a low-res digital watch sort of way. These new Steel models are aping the design cues from high-end wristwatches but fall horribly short. They reside in an uncanny valley. And the huge “Pebble” logo below the display? Gross.

If Pebble, or any “smartwatch” maker, wants to succeed in the real world, they need to make watches that look good compared to any watch, not just “looks good compared to other even uglier smartwatches”.

See also: iMore’s interview with Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.

The Period vs. The Unpunctuated, Un-Ended Sentence ★

Ben Crair, story editor for The New Republic:

In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off?

I used to write more formally in texts and IMs, but as time goes on I’ve developed/accepted more of a dashed-off style, super terse, and without thinking about it, I do often omit the trailing period. Hitting “Send” feels like punctuation enough.

(Via Kevin Drum.)