Linked List: August 21, 2014

Thursday, 21 August 2014

The Talk Show: ‘That New Laptop Smell’ 

Special guest Joanna Stern. Topics include Joanna’s recent review of over 20 laptops; the HTC One M8 for Windows Phone; why Windows Phone is still struggling to gain traction; the role of Microsoft Office in today’s world; and speculation on Apple’s upcoming iPhone event.

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Ode to Susan Kare’s Chicago 

Alissa Walker:

It was square, squat, and inherently cute. It was friendly. It was easy to use. I’m talking about the beige box with the blue grinning face that came to live with us in 1985. But I’m also talking about the font that came with it. It was the typeface Chicago that spelled out “Welcome to Macintosh,” ushering us into a new age of personal computing. But it was also a new age for digital type. Here was a typeface created explicitly for the Macintosh, part of designer Susan Kare’s strategy to customize everything from the characters to the icons — that happy computer, the wristwatch, an actual trashcan — to make it feel more human and less machine.

Area Facebook User Incredibly Stupid 

The Onion responds to Facebook’s test of a “satire” flag.

Ed Bott: ‘How Apple Took Over the Only Segment of the PC Market That Still Matters’ 

Ed Bott:

In recent years, most attention has been focused on the eye-popping numbers associated with the iPhone and iPad lines, which sold 150 million and 71 million units, respectively, in Apple’s 2013 fiscal year.

Compared to those stratospheric sales volumes, the Mac division appears downright anemic, selling a total of only 16.3 million units in the company’s 2013 fiscal year, the last full year to be reported. Macs similarly represent only a tiny percentage of the global PC market, with less than 6 percent of the 300 million PCs sold last year having an Apple logo on them.

But those numbers are deceiving. Macs are still enormously profitable, and their high average selling price makes this division a formidable cash cow. In addition, Apple’s product planners have shrewdly targeted the most important segment of the market, the only segment that’s growing and the one that is by far the most profitable.

Focus on quality, and the sort of customers who are willing to pay for it. That’s what Apple does with all its products.

Xiaomi Mi3 Product Quality 

Arjit Singh, Android Origin:

Several enraged Xiaomi Mi3 customers have now taken it upon themselves to fill the official Mi India fanpage at Facebook, with reports of how their newly bought smartphone has turned out to be a nightmare for them. Apparently, apart from suffering from severe manufacturing defects such as the SIM tray not working properly, exceptionally low screen quality for a smartphone which is supposed to have Gorilla Glass 3, troubles with the microUSB port, and unusually high overheating issues, the phone is also suffering from some serious software bugs, such as contacts mysteriously not showing up when accessed through the dialer app, and several other complaints of unstable software and random WiFi/cellular signal drops.

What is even worse is that, even though Xiaomi Mi3′s official product listing page on Flipkart clearly states that the customers are entitled for “1 year manufacturer warranty for the phone,” so far we’re yet to find even a single customer who was able to get his phone replaced successfully (one user has been waiting for nearly 3 weeks now).

Shocker.

Wired: ‘Apple’s iMessage Is Being Taken Over by Spammers’ 

Robert McMillan, reporting for Wired:

A year ago, Tom Landesman — who works for security and anti-spam company Cloudmark — had never seen an iMessage spam. But he and his company now say that, thanks to one particularly aggressive campaign from a junk mailer, it accounts for more than 30 percent of all mobile spam messages.

These kinds of spam campaigns come and go. Cloudmark spotted its first one late last year, when the scammers were flogging imitation designer handbags. Lately, the spammers have been pushing deals on knock-off Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses. […]

“It’s almost like a spammer’s dream,” says Landesman. “With four lines of code, using Apple scripts, you can tell your Mac machine to send message to whoever they want.”

I think the headline is hyperbole, but I have gotten two iMessage spams this month, both of them hawking those knock-off Ray-Bans. I just went ahead and reported them to Apple.