Linked List: November 7, 2014

Friday, 7 November 2014

Meh.com 

I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s. The sponsor is Meh, a new daily deal site from the founders of Woot. Here’s the sponsored RSS entry they wrote, in its entirety:

Fucking Amazon

I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored.

I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh.

Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go to meh.com.

The headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so bizarre that when it hit the @daringfireball Twitter account, I got about a dozen replies asking if the account had been hacked.

These guys don’t do marketing like other people do marketing. They really do have amazing prices on the products they sell, but the heart of Meh is what made Woot interesting back in the day: the writing. Click through and see for yourself. My thanks to them for sponsoring DF this week. Also: Don’t miss this great profile of Meh/Woot founder Matt Rutledge in D Magazine from earlier this year.

Apple to Sapphire Supplier: ‘Put on Your Big Boy Pants and Accept the Agreement’ 

Kif Leswing, reporting for GigaOm:

Even if you’re uninterested in GT Advanced Technologies, there are a number of details about how much power Apple exercises over its suppliers.

Squiller says that Apple did not ever really enter into negotiations, warning that GTAT’s managers should “not waste their time” negotiating because Apple does not negotiate with its suppliers. According to GTAT, after the company balked, Apple told GTAT that its terms are standard for other Apple suppliers and that GTAT should “put on your big boy pants and accept the agreement.”

GTAT’s take seems to be:

  1. Apple doesn’t negotiate terms.
  2. Apple’s terms were onerous.
  3. We accepted Apple’s terms.
Dan Frakes Lands at The Wirecutter 

One of the best sites on the web just got better.

Amazon’s Echo Chamber 

Dustin Curtis on Amazon’s hardware aspirations:

It’s an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing back. You can’t buy a phone and put it in a lonely drawer, never to use it again, like you would with a Fire Tablet. You can’t dupe your customers by selling them a shitty phone, because a phone becomes a part of its user’s identity.

Marco Arment on Business Insider 

He’s spot-on about whether there’s actually any evidence of more developers going Android-first (spoiler: no), but the real gem in this piece is his dispassionate delineation of Business Insider’s web page design cruft in footnote 1.

Expectations for WatchKit 

David Smith on the imminent release of the first WatchKit SDK:

So to start with we will be given the ability to implement actionable notifications and Glances. This is what I believe we are getting with the SDK release this month.

It will only be later next year that full apps will be possible. It is not a stretch to think that later next year is code for WWDC next June. Likely along with WatchOS (or whatever they call it) version 2.0. There is a delightful symmetry with the history of iPhone OS, where we didn’t get a full SDK until 2.0 (though I’m sure people will similarly jailbreak to get a head-start).

An Established Product Category 

The lead from James Trew’s Engadget review of the new LG G Watch R:

I think it’s fair to say by now that smartwatches are no longer the “hot new thing.” It’s an established product category. The paint might still be a little wet on the whole idea, and some might argue there are areas that still need improving, but these clever timepieces are officially here to stay.

I find this perspective to be staggeringly shallow, but it’s an accurate reflection of what I find so inane about mainstream tech journalism. To say that smartwatches are “no longer the ‘hot new thing’” boggles the mind. They’ve never been the hot new thing. It remains to be seen if they ever will be. “Some might argue there are areas that still need improving”? You don’t say. This is as silly a thing to say in 2014 about watches as the same paragraph would have been about phones in 2004, or PCs in 1984.

Paul Ford: ‘The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing’ 

Put aside some time to truly savor this piece. So good, in so many ways.