Linked List: March 18, 2015

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

PC Makers Mock New MacBook 

Three thoughts:

  • There’s no clearer sign that Apple now rules the PC industry. A decade ago, it was Apple that was the underdog, mocking PCs. Now, the tables are turned.

  • Note the completely bogus scaling factors on the thinness comparisons from Lenovo and Asus. Shameful.

  • None of these PC makers have been able to make a trackpad as good as Apple’s (now) old multitouch trackpad. Now Apple’s blown their own work away with the Force Touch Trackpad. Good luck copying that.

‘Director of Moonshots’ Astro Teller on Google Glass’s Failure 

Taylor Hatmaker, writing for The Daily Dot:

“I’m amazed by how sensitively people responded to some of the privacy issues,” Teller explains, expressing frustration about the backlash against Glass in public, given the prevalence of mobile video. “When someone walks into a bar wearing Glass… there are video cameras all over that bar recording everything.” If it were around a year ago “they’d be Meerkatting,” Teller joked.

That he was “amazed” by people’s visceral reaction to Glass is all the explanation necessary to explain why Glass failed. It started right at the top.

‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ Authors Interview Tim Cook 

Tim Cook, in a great interview with Becoming Steve Jobs authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli:

There’s this thing in technology, almost a disease, where the definition of success is making the most. How many clicks did you get, how many active users do you have, how many units did you sell? Everybody in technology seems to want big numbers. Steve never got carried away with that. He focused on making the best.

Later:

Q: Many people seem to have a hard time imagining the usefulness of the watch.

A: Yes, but people didn’t realize they had to have an iPod, and they really didn’t realize they had to have the iPhone. And the iPad was totally panned. Critics asked, “Why do you need this?” Honestly, I don’t think anything revolutionary that we have done was predicted to be a hit when released. It was only in retrospect that people could see its value. Maybe this will be received the same way.