Janell Burley Hofmann: To My 13-Year-Old, An iPhone Contract From Your Mom, With Love. Dear Gregory Merry Christmas!
You are now the proud owner of an iPhone. Hot Damn! You are a good and responsible 13-year-old boy and you deserve this gift. But with the acceptance of this present comes rules and regulations. I love you madly and look forward to sharing several million text messages with you in the days to come. 1. It is my hope that you can agree to these terms. Xoxoxo, Mom WATCH: Janell and Gregory discussed this contract on "Good Morning America. " Steve Jobs’s Real Genius. Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto.
Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man.
Iqbal Brainch: The Soul of Apple. The news first came in the form of a text from a friend: "Just heard on the news that Steve Jobs died.
" I dismissed it as another erroneous report. Moments later my iPhone buzzed again with an AP Alert confirming the news. I stood stunned. My mind was blank as tears flooded my eyes. It was the end of an era. On the surface things are going well for Apple -- the stock is near all-time highs, the demand for the iPhone 5 is off the charts, and the company is on the verge of introducing an iPad mini which is sure to be the must-have gadget for the holiday season. Leadership Void It's hard to replace Steve Jobs. The Maps App Debacle Apple has always believed in seamless integration of hardware and software to promote the best possible user experience.
Complicating Matters Jobs was relentless in his focus on simplicity as key to the user experience. None of these individual miscues by Apple mean its downfall is imminent. W&L Entering Students Continue Trend Toward Apple. An annual survey of the entering students at Washington and Lee University has shown that the shift from Windows-based computers to Apple Macintosh has continued to grow.
The survey, conducted the W&L Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Information Technology Services, found that 70 percent of the respondents brought Macintosh computers with them as opposed to 30 percent who are using Windows-based machines. That represents a 10 percent increase in the number of first-years with Macintosh computers in the past four years. More than 98 percent of the entering class completed the survey, which identified the types of electronics the students brought to campus with them when they arrived earlier this month. When it came to telephones, all but one of the 471 respondents to the survey brought a cell phone to campus, and the vast majority of those (89 percent) were smartphones. That is up by just less than 13 percent from a year ago. What Will the 'Phone' of 2022 Look Like? - Alexis C. Madrigal.
A romp through the weird, scary, awesome future of mobile communications.
Edited Reuters. The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. The iPhone 5 was released yesterday and its similarity to every Apple phone since 2007 serves as a reminder that our current mobile devices have been sitting on the same plateau for years. Reflecting on Apple's recent product launches, author and professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program Clay Shirky told me, "They're selling transformation and shipping incrementalism. " Will Apple's Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt? By now it’s almost inevitable given the company’s track record: No matter what Apple unveils tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center (an iPad Mini?
iPhone 5?) , pundits will herald the company for its innovative thinking and bold hardware design. But the elephant in the room will be Apple’s software, which many inside the company believe has evolved for the worse in the last few years. Despite consistently glowing reviews from critics and consumers alike, iOS and OS X, Apple’s operating systems which tie Macs and iPads and iPhones together, have rubbed some the wrong way in recent years with their design directions. During my reporting for Fast Company's feature on design at Microsoft, which was part of our October design issue, I spoke with a number of designers, Apple veterans, and industry insiders hostile towards Apple’s approach to software design.
"Visual Masturbation" What’s skeuomorphism? Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Why is Skeuomorphism Bad? Is the iPhone 5 Boring? Apple’s new smartphone: Five out of ten.