Linked List: January 6, 2016

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

The H. Moser & Cie. Swiss Alp Watch ★

Ben Clymer:

The first thing you’ll notice about the Swiss Alp Watch is that it, well, looks exactly like the Apple Watch. You’ve got that beautiful, rounded, rectangular-shaped case that oozes the great Jony Ive-led Apple Design team. But instead of a touch screen with any number of apps, you have a gorgeous grey fume dial, something for which Moser is well known among watch aficionados. […]

The Moser Swiss Alp Watch looks and feels just like the Apple Watch on the wrist, and in fact is the same size as the 38 mm variation. It is white gold, so the weight is considerably more, but the feel is very much the same. Only 50 pieces will be made, all in white gold, and at a price of $24,900 — only a little bit more than the all-rose-gold Apple Watch Edition.

Kind of crazy.

Ken Griffey Jr. Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame With Record-Breaking, But Not Unanimous, Vote ★

Andrew Simon, reporting for MLB.com:

Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza are headed to Cooperstown as the Class of 2016.

Both were announced as Hall of Famers on Wednesday, when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voting was revealed live on MLB Network and MLB.com. Griffey was named on 99.3 percent of ballots (437 of 440), breaking the record of 98.84 percent set by Tom Seaver in 1992.

It’s certainly an honor to have the highest percentage of votes in history, but it’s ridiculous that anyone voted against Griffey. He was fucking amazing — high OBP, 630 career home runs, 10 Gold Gloves in the outfield. If Ken Griffey Jr. isn’t a Hall of Fame baseball player, no one is. This handful of BBWAA voters who believe no one should get in unanimously think they’re protecting some sort of noble tradition (“If Babe Ruth wasn’t elected unanimously, no one should be” is how I’ve heard it argued), but they’re just making fools of themselves. That 3 out of 440 voters didn’t vote for Griffey makes it look like some of the voters don’t know anything about baseball.

Same for Greg Maddux two years ago, Randy Johnson last year, and just about everyone else who’s ever gotten 97 percent or higher. Who didn’t vote for Tony Gwynn or Cal Ripken in 2007? It boggles the mind.

(Bookmark this for a few years from now, when Mariano Rivera is eligible, and the year after, when Derek Jeter is.)

Why the 2012 Non-Retina MacBook Pro Still Sells ★

Great post from Marco Arment:

The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, model MD101LL/A, was launched in 2012 for $1199. Almost four years later, it’s still for sale, completely unchanged except for a price drop to $1099 in 2013.

Despite the low-resolution screen, slow hard drives, very little RAM, and CPUs that were middling even in 2012, it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.

Geeks like me often wonder why anyone would still buy such an outdated machine. I’ve heard from many people who buy it (or who’ve been unsuccessful in talking others out of it), and it’s surprisingly compelling, especially for volume-buying, price-conscious customers such as schools and big businesses.

In short: it’s cheap, can use cheap spinning hard drives (with large capacities), has a DVD drive, and performance is not that far behind today’s current retina MacBook Pros. (That last one is on Intel’s shoulders.) I care deeply about retina displays, SSD storage reliability and performance, and I have no interest in a DVD drive. Others do, though.

It occurs to me that for all our collective worrying about the iOS-ification of Mac OS X, it’s the MacBook hardware that’s gotten iOS-ified, not the software. Thinness as a top priority, and an almost complete lack of upgradeability. The MacBook Pro 101 is the last MacBook that was meant for hardware tinkering.

Circus Ponies Is Out of Business ★

Sort of a confusing announcement from long-time Mac (and NeXT — we’re talking really long-time) developer Circus Ponies:

After 13 years in business, Circus Ponies has gone to that great Alphabet company in the sky. It was a good run, but we are done (as in no longer in business).

If you need a copy of NoteBook 4.0 (3.x and earlier don’t run on OS X El Capitan) or need technical support, you can try sending an e-mail to [email protected]. There’s a chance someone will respond but no guarantees.

Best of luck.

I don’t understand the clause “that great Alphabet company in the sky”. The app is clearly dead, but is developer Jayson Adams going to work at Google? Or is it just an excuse for the Alphabet parody page now at “circusponies.xyz”?

NoteBook exemplified peak skeuomorphism: page curls, lined notebook paper background — it even had spiral rings along the side of the window. Crazy days. The history of the app is interesting. Ted Goranson covered it in his outliner column for About This Particular Macintosh back in May 2004:

A particular background is always mentioned in this context: once upon a time there was a much admired NeXT notebook outliner called “NoteBook,” from Millennium Software. At some point, the two principals left and started their own companies, those we see here. Jayson Adams is the man behind Circus Ponies NoteBook; Scott Love heads AquaMinds and NoteTaker.

Both seem to have kept the rights to the original NoteBook code and certainly some NeXT code has been brought forward, but I suspect it to be a small portion in each case.

Most prospective users might think this indicates that the products are as similar as they initially appear. But consider that these two developers quarrelled severely enough to get a divorce. Presumably they differed on fundamental aspects of the notebook and the philosophies behind it. I think this is the case, because under the similar skins are two different religions.

NoteTaker, for what it’s worth, is still around, but the app hasn’t been updated since 2013, and the user manual hasn’t been updated since July 2012.

(Also: How great is it that ATPM had a regular column dedicated to outliners?)

Revisiting Gartner and IDC 2011 Predictions That Windows Phone Would Pass iOS in 2015 ★

Bryan Chaffin, writing for The Mac Observer:

Let us harken back to 2011. The global economy was climbing its way out of the Great Recession of 2008. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part 2 was all the rage. Apple released iPad 2 and iPhone 4s, and of course, that was the year Steve Jobs died after many years of battling cancer.

It was also when Gartner and IDC both predicted that Microsoft’s Windows Phone would surpass Apple’s iPhone to become the world’s second biggest mobile platform. They both penciled in Research In Motion’s (now BlackBerry) BlackBerry for 4th place.

It was very, very hard for analysts who witnessed the ’80s and (especially) the ’90s to wrap their brains around the fact that Microsoft was going to lose an OS war. There was no good reason for anyone in 2011 to think Windows Phone was going to thrive other than a belief that “Microsoft always finds a way to win”.

(I hope to avoid the same trap with Apple.)

The Toaster-Fridge Awakens ★

Michael Gartenberg, fresh off his stint as a director in Apple’s product marketing group, surveys the field at CES 2016:

CES started as a trade show for retail. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was a venue for great technology intros such as the CD (1981), the DVD, (1986) and HDTV (1998). By 2000, CES was the place to launch major products such as Xbox (2001). When I look at this year’s show, I see a lot of things no one needs, and few people will want. It’s a Sharper Image catalog brought to life, the ultimate “Why? Because I can!” So why is it still an important event? It’s the place to try and spot the new, new thing that might get consumers to replace the old, old thing. So far, I don’t see it but here’s what I do see.

Can You Spot the Difference? ★

The shamelessness on the part of Lenovo is almost breathtaking.

Update: And then there’s Samsung’s new TV interface: white frosted translucent overlay with 16:9 sharp-cornered app icons. Rings a bell.

Apple: Record-Breaking Holiday Season for the App Store ★

Apple press release:

In the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases, setting back-to-back weekly records for traffic and purchases. January 1, 2016 marked the biggest day in App Store history with customers spending over $144 million. It broke the previous single-day record set just a week earlier on Christmas Day. […]

Worldwide, the App Store has brought in nearly $40 billion for developers since 2008, with over one-third generated in the last year alone.

I’m really curious how that figure breaks down across app categories. I can’t help but suspect a huge chunk of it is in-app consumables for games.

Largely as a result of the App Store’s success, Apple is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Nearly three-quarters of those jobs — over 1.4 million — are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy.*

That asterisk at the end is a footnote pointing to the source for this claim: “App Economy Jobs in the United States”, a paper by Michael Mandel published today by the Progressive Policy Institute.