Buzzfeed has a really nice article about my home land, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He wrote about his seven day trip aroud the U.P. The article pairs well with 906 Day in case you were wondering what that was all about.
Current Thoughts About Tablets
Corporate Culture and Founders
The quote of Steve Jobs that Thompson has in his article about the iPhone 17 event I think encapsulates the difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs, which is the difference between a founder (Jobs) and a CEO (Cook). Capitalist America forces non-founder CEOs to prioritize profits and revenue over everything else, which is why people see Cook do things they believe Jobs wound never do.
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
The above defines the corporate culture of Apple, it’s why Apple exists and what Steve Sinek describes in his TED talk on leadership. I think this is why culture in corporations is created by founders because in corporations culture is the ultimate deliverable of leaders.
Ben Thompson says the camera bump (plateau?) is where all the brains of the iPhone Air reside, which is how it can be so thin. I assume then all that resides in the rest of the case is battery. Thompson pushes back as what he sees as negative opinions about the new phones, my guess is part of the negative reactions is that when you talk about a cost north of $1k it’s hard to feel value in incremental changes. The real solution is if you buy a new phone this year ignore the announcements about the next two years of phones. The iPhone 17 probably makes more sense to someone who owns an iPhone 15 or older. The manufacturers cannot make enough change to justify the upgrade from N-1 to N.
Happy iPhone Day!
Double arachnophobia
Last Friday I installed the QPR1 update of Android 16 on my Pixel 7a and I am really happy with the result. The update has enough changes to the UI and new features to make it feel more like an operating system upgrade, which is probably the point. In the past Google has released upgrades of Android in late August or early September so the release of Android 16 in June was unusual, but then it didn’t really seem like an upgrade because nothing looked or did anything different. I am not entirely sure about the benefit of this approach.
Saw this parked while I was on my evening walk. Gemini says this is a Ford Model A built around 1930.
Oh happy day
While reading Brent’s description of how he programmed in the 90s using UserLand Frontier I immediately thought of NewtonScript. Apple had much innovation in Newton that got overlooked and how apps were developed and ran on the operating system is one. Newton OS even had a database based file system that optimized sharing across applications to prevent redundancy. I think the Newton files system was not only needed due to the constraints of limited physical storage but also to enable fast and easy application development like Brent describes.