Three Things That Should Trouble Apple
Guy English:
If I watched the first season of Community via Netflix streaming and now want to rewatch it on my TV as fed from an Apple TV? Make it work. I don’t care how. If you want to pop up a dialog thats asks if you’ll charge me $4.99 to $9.99 for the privilege, I’d pay. Let me pick what I want to watch, regardless of the source, and let me watch it. I have very little allegiance to the network that funded the show — I want the content. Figure out how to make that work.
Fans want to watch their shows. They’ll pay to make that happen. Everything else is mired in entrenched interests. Find a way to make that happen and we’ll all agree that Firefly jumped the shark during its seventh season.
(Source: daringfireball.net)
In Praise of Bad Steve
D.B. Grady:
When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.
The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.
“Those are air bubbles,” he snapped. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”
This comment on Hacker News really struck a chord with me:
I’ve worked briefly at Apple, but had only one face-to-face encounter with Steve. It was intensely scary. He was loved—LOVED—on the Apple campus. But he was also feared. And I felt that fear when I saw him. He was, and remains, the only person I’ve been genuinely “star struck” upon encountering. A lot of that was born of admiration, but just as much was born of terror.
In retrospect, I realized that I wasn’t really afraid of Steve. I was afraid of myself: my limitations, my shortcomings, my relative talent (or lack thereof), and my performance in life vis-a-vis my self-theorized potential. When I saw Steve Jobs in the flesh, I saw an embodiment of everything I was not, and probably never would be. Frankly, I felt like a fraud. I felt unworthy.
Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot
John Gruber:
After the WWDC keynote four months ago, I saw Steve, up close.
He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs.
But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 991s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels.
Another quote from the same article:
It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.
Excerpt from Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN
Gruber suspects it’s the much maligned Mobile ESPN Samsung ACE.
(Source: twitter.com)
