Even in the darkest times (for Apple), in the mid to late 1990s, the importance of the Macintosh could not be understated. Today, exactly 40 years to the day, Apple is constantly contending for the top spot in market cap globally, the Mac is far from Apple’s most profitable product, but it’s arguably, still, one […]
These past few years have been a somewhat turbulent time for Apple. Its market dominance in the smartphone race diminished, its profits holding strong, but investor and analyst confidence evaporated, its once infallible strategy, product line, image and appeal gone and its appeal lacklustre compared to the past. The post-Steve Jobs Apple gradually shifted its […]
It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]
Mere hours after pressing ‘Publish’ on the previous mini-article concerning walled gardens, an article on TechCrunch, this morning, clarified the situation we have more or less been suspecting for a while now: that Apple, after deprecating UDIDs (one of the things they truly did well in iOS from the beginning), they will start rejecting apps […]
It took less than an hour before most of the world’s mainstream (and alternative) media posted their canned obituaries. This time it’s for Steve Jobs; his death a long time coming. Feared, loathed, inspiring and adored like few of his contemporaries, he led a life full of contradiction; from his early Buddhist ideas and bohème […]
Yesterday a story about Apple’s unauthorised logging of timestamped location data on iPhones running iOS 4.x versions of the system software was published in several articles in technical and mainstream media worldwide. This is important, not only because of the ubiquity of location-based services available to consumers worldwide and the significance of location in safeguarding […]
The Macintosh has always been unique in terms of software, ever since it came out in 1984. From the now almost disappeared ‘Resource Fork’ of MFS/HFS, the pascal slant of Mac OS releases up until the early 1990s, the multiple architectural and design transitions, the Carbon/Cocoa duality of early Mac OS X, ‘Classic’ and ‘Rosetta’, […]
When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4, admittedly a jaw dropping design of a mobile device, he talked about its antenna, part of the chassis of the device, calling it ‘really cool engineering’. What Steve Jobs, meant to say was ‘great design’, for the iPhone 4 antennæ are likely one of the worst engineering examples […]
I came to know of C4 after finding online videos from some of the talks there in 2007. Living in an — almost bankrupt financially, intellectually and creatively — land, the C4 videos brought a glitter of hope; like Google Video lectures, Microsoft’s MURL (now ResearchChannel), C4 presented a community, a world so rare in […]
If its anything like the demo video Microsoft’s Courier is the closest device I’ve seen to Apple’s — now classic — demonstration entitled the Knowledge Navigator. See the resemblance? From the few images and videos around, the device seems beautiful, but that’s not the point; as the Mac and then the iPhone have demonstrated, it’s […]