It fucking sucks! I hate it! It’s total bullshit! Who are you people??? What is going on??? Oh my GOD I just hate EVERYTHING. I sold my iPad, and now I’m waiting a day for a return and exchange on a phone to go through. Thus, no mobile device. Ugh! Why would anyone voluntarily do this? Gah!!! Read more
The tech punditocracy is abuzz, talking about this post by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, The Magazine, and Overcast, co-host of Accidental Tech Podcast, and who’s probably as famous as an iOS developer can be. It’s a kind of catharsis post, a kind of throwing up of the hands at the myriad problems and unkept promises plaguing the Apple ecosystem. “The problem seems to be quite simple,” he writes. “They’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.” And the result is... Read more
Alan Jacobs foreswears the Internet of analytics: Twitter and Tumblr […] have something important in common, which they share with most social media sites: they invite you to measure people’s response to you. For many people this probably means nothing, but for me it has always had an effect. Over the years I developed a sense of how many RTs a tweet was likely to earn, how many reblogs or likes a Tumblr post would receive – and I couldn’t... Read more
It occurred to me that after my 3400-word opus on how the tablet is being squeezed out of its reason-for-being by big phones and sleeker laptops, that I owed it to myself and my tens of readers to give a serious look at one use-case for large tablets that I suspect no other device can match, and one that Steve Jobs never mentioned when he first introduced the iPad: comic books and graphic novels. The Google Play Store was having... Read more
The tablet computer as we know it is about to turn 5 years old. Yes, tablet computers in some for or another existed before then, but on January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, which truly formed the basis for what we currently understand a tablet to be. Whatever we considered a tablet computer to be before then no longer counted. The iPad line itself is now in its sixth generation of iterations. So now that we’ve had tablets... Read more
I don’t have a lot to say about this video by Clayton M. Christensen sent around by Troy University chancellor Jack Hawkins. We all know it’s a ridiculous notion that somehow democracy would crumble without religion. But there was one part of the video that really did bother me. It was at the very end when Christensen says, “If you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.” Think about what an awful thing to say that is. And think... Read more
Would it be a big deal to be sans tablet? Despite my 2015 tech-setup pronouncement the other day, I’m stuck on the idea that my phone, a 5.5″ phablet, covers most of a tablet’s territory, and I really hate having objects that are both expensive and redundant. Admittedly, this is the first-est of all first-world problems, but it’s a genuine question for those of us working out what tech devices we’re going to invest our money in, and live our... Read more
I’m thinking about podcasting once again, after abandoning two previous attempts. First was the Obcast, a longform interview show with me and a guest, and the iMortal Show, a panel discussion show with a roster of rotating guests. I enjoyed both shows very much, but I think in each case I became overwhelmed by work surrounding each episode. Beyond the editing and posting which would be necessary for any format, both Obcast and iMortal demanded the recruiting and coordinating of... Read more
Android devices are apparently vacuuming money from device manufacturers. Uh oh. Here’s Ina Fried at Re/Code: Analyst Chetan Sharma estimates that global profits in the Android hardware market for 2014 were down by half from the prior year — the first year that there has been any significant drop. A lot of that is due to the big drop in profits at Samsung, the largest player in the Android market. China’s Xiaomi gained significant market share, but is only modestly... Read more
I’ve spent much of the final months of 2014 settling myself technologically. This, as you can imagine, is a Big Deal for someone as fussy about their tech as I am. As I’ve recounted on this site, I lost interest in being an iPhone user, and found myself irresistibly attracted to the beautiful cacophony coming from the Android space. Through a convoluted system of sells, trades, and deal-hunts, I experimented with several premium Android handsets, and at several points thought... Read more
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