Linked List: April 24, 2015

Friday, 24 April 2015

Good collection from Serenity Caldwell. Clearing all notifications with a force tap is a great feature — and something that’s sorely missing on iOS and OS X.

Suzy Menkes Interviews Jony Ive and Marc Newson at Condé Nast Luxury Conference in Florence ★

Suzy Menkes: “There’s no doubt that you are now producing things that may be more desirable than traditional luxury to consumers, particularly the younger consumers, don’t you think?”

Jony Ive: “I don’t know — we’ll see!” Smiles while audience laughs. “We’ll see.”

(Via Abdel Ibrahim.)

Once Comcast’s Deal Shifted to a Focus on Broadband, Its Ambitions Were Sunk ★

Jonathan Mahler, reporting for the NYT on how Comcast’s close ties to the Obama administration didn’t help it get approval for acquiring Time Warner Cable:

But now the $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is dead. Comcast is folding, in anticipation of regulators rejecting the deal.

The news, which broke on Thursday afternoon, was certainly dramatic. But the air of inevitability that once hung over the deal had been dissipating for months, as the debate over net neutrality — in short, the question of whether Internet providers should be allowed to charge content providers for speedier service — played out in Washington. And a merger that had at first seemed to be primarily about cable television turned into something much different.

Three New Apple Watch Commercials ★

All three are good, hit the right tone. They’re humane — emotional, not technical. My favorite is “Us”. That’s the one I’d put in heaviest rotation on TV.

My wife’s watch arrived a few hours ago. After setting it up and playing with the communication features, she said something to the effect of, “I saw people asking you whether Apple gave you two of these, so you could test these features. They should have — this is way more fun.”

Note too: in the context of these ads, the Edition models are simply peers to the Sport and steel ones.

Apple Watch Waterproof Test ★

Impressive results from FoneFox in Australia: they had it submerged in a pool for 15 minutes and it came out no worse for the wear.

Jackson Arn on Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Cut of ‘2001’ ★

Good piece by Jackson Arn for Film Comment:

These kinds of complaints are inevitable, but Soderbergh rises above them with his bold reimagining of Kubrick’s work. The new center of gravity in 2001.5, uniting the visceral and the coldly Kubrickian, is HAL — the sentient computer whose fate is to be perfectly objective and yet hopelessly subjective (indeed, in the Discovery One section, Soderbergh preserves all of the computer’s-eye-view shots, reminding me that HAL sees the world through the same wide-angle lens through which we view Alex’s depravity in A Clockwork Orange). In Kubrick’s original, HAL’s presence feels like a fascinating but nonessential step in man’s journey from ape to star child. Watching the new cut, one gets the idea that this movie was about HAL all along.

Largely in agreement with my tweet-length review of Soderbergh’s cut back in January.

(Thanks to Dave Nanian.)