Linked List: April 21, 2017

Friday, 21 April 2017

The Talk Show: Apple VP Lisa Jackson 

Special guest Lisa Jackson — Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives — joins the show for an Earth Day discussion of the state of Apple’s environmental efforts: climate change, renewable energy, responsible packaging, and Apple’s new goal to create a “closed-loop supply chain”, wherein the company’s products would be manufactured entirely from recycled materials.

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How Apple Won Silicon: Why Galaxy S8 Can’t Go Core-to-Core With iPhone 7 

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

Conversely, Apple’s silicon team also doesn’t have to carry the baggage of competing vendors and devices. For example, Apple A10 doesn’t have to support Microsoft’s Direct X. It only and exactly has to support Apple’s specific technologies and implementations.

In other words, what iOS wants fast, the A-team can deliver fast.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: I’d prefer the iPhone over Android even if it were Android that had the massive lead in CPU performance. But Apple is literally over a year ahead of the competition — even the iPhone 6S and SE outperform the S8 in single-threaded performance.

New Apple Watch NikeLab 

New limited edition Nike Apple Watch — space gray watch with a bone-colored watch strap with near-black accents. Looks cool in a Stormtrooper-y way. (I’m thinking the pin for the watch strap should be space gray too, though, right?)

Update: Yours truly two years ago:

New Stormtroopers look like their armor was designed by Nike.

(This is a compliment, it’s a cool look.)

Apple’s New Earth Day Videos 

Lance Ulanoff, writing at Mashable:

A typical Apple promotional video has a type: Clean, dispassionate, slightly British (thanks Jony Ive) and self-congratulatory. It’s not quirky, whimsical, or funny.

But each of the four short animated stories detailing Apple’s efforts to become a 100 percent renewable company and released just a few days before Earth Day, are unlike anything Apple has produced before.

What’s more interesting is that the audio is 100 percent true and, taken by itself, not particularly funny. But when combined with the hand-drawn animation from illustrator James Blagden the stories become whimsical and even a little odd.

Apple is hosting versions of all four videos on their home page:

Speed Test Between iPhone 7 Plus and Top Android Phones 

I don’t know how much these sort of tests matter in terms of real-world experience, but it really is striking how much faster the iPhone is going through the loop the second time. Part of this is iOS being better at memory management than Android, but a big factor is that the A10 is a much faster chip than anything available for Android.