J.R. Raphael at Computerworld has a great, straightforward set of questions for anyone who isn’t sure if a Chromebook would be a good idea for them. (It will also give you a good idea of what a Chromebook is if you don’t know already.) It actually helped me clear up some things in my own mind about how useful or feasible such a thing might be for someone like me, who’s been devoted to Macs for more than 10 years.... Read more
New flagship Android phones are being announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, right now. There’s the new HTC One M9, which is a nice evolution of the One line, which is fine (but apparently now playing catchup camera-wise after two generations of a noble and failed experiment with “ultrapixels”). The Samsung Galaxy S6 is also coming any moment, with an all- or mostly-metal build and one version with the “Edge” side screens. That’s a yawn for me. Here’s... Read more
Google’s head-of-pretty-much-everything, Sundar Pichai, gave a lengthy interview to Forbes, which I was really excited about. As a new-ish fan of Android, a heavy user of Google services, and someone who is very bullish on Chromebooks, I was very interested to hear what the man at the center of it all might have to say about the company’s grand vision. And Christ, it was hard to get through. Interviewer Miguel Helft asks Pichai to name a few of Google’s big... Read more
Turns out that the young folks these days prefer to read longform material in print, not, as one might expect, on the screens of their devices. In fact, they seem to be the demographic that most prefers print to digital reading. I find it a tad baffling, but as one of the subjects of Michael S. Rosenwald’s piece in the Washington Post notes, unlike a smartphone or a tablet, a print book asks nothing more of you than to be... Read more
Here’s Federico Veticci on iPads as cameras: And yes, I think I’d look silly shooting photos with an iPad in public. But, to put it bluntly, whatever. At the end of the day, any device that facilitates memories is a welcome addition to our computing lives. I’d always been put off by the hostility from tech elites about people taking pictures with their iPads’ and tablets’ cameras. (Excepting of course at events like concerts where they rudely obstruct others’ views.)... Read more
Oliver Sacks thinks differently from me. He will be dead soon. He’s handling it much better than I would. Read more
There exists an attitude that no matter what Apple does wrong, there’s nowhere else to go, and to use another company’s products or services is a kind of heresy, somehow personally tainting. Read more
I am not generally impressed by Taylor Swift. I like some Nine Inch Nails and respect Trent Reznor, but I also think the whole act is a little overwrought and silly sometimes. I had no idea that the two, not unlike peanut butter and chocolate, could be so good together. And now, of course, “Shake it Off” is stuck in my head, and I’m beginning to get why the people like this Swift person so much. God dammit. Read more
Ewan Spence declares that Apple has “taken down” Android, and it’s hard to argue with him: Through careful financial management, Apple built up the resources to invest heavily in component hedging. The ability to buy components years in advance and have a monopoly on supplies of a product, has been used time and again to keep Apple’s bill of materials low while restricting the availability of new technology to its rivals. … If you’re competing against Apple, you’re not going... Read more
Adam Frank at NPR’s 13.7 blog on why we shouldn’t be hung up about death, even though there’s no afterlife: [E]ven though none of us existed 1,000 years ago, you don’t find many people worrying about their nonexistence during the Dark Ages. Our not-being in the past doesn’t worry us. So, why does our not-being in the future freak us out so much? Oh pick me! I know! Because we experience time linearly, in one single direction, so we’d have... Read more
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