Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
"Cook is maintaining, by words and actions, most of Apple's unique corporate culture. But shifts of behavior and tone are absolutely apparent; some of them affect the core of Apple's critical product-development process"
Enjoyable two-part interview with Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guru. "We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense"
They did at first. They thought apps would be a digital enabler of paid content and single-copy sales. Wrong. Apps are fiendishly difficult to make. Horribly expensive. Readers don't like walled gardens. And Apple is the boss
George Hotz started the hacker wars. The grungy teenager from New Jersey was the first person to unlock an iPhone. But it was when he defeated Sony's PS3 that things started getting really out of hand
Long feature takes us inside the patent litigation between Apple and Samsung, and what it means for the wider ongoing commercial struggle between Android and Apple. A dense read, but some interesting points for the committed
Microsoft already has. "The future of entertainment is bound to be fragmented. And in a fragmented world, the Xbox's magical powers to cut through the clutter may be the best thing to happen to your TV." How could Apple top it?
Reporter decides to try hacking. "I got an iPod Touch to be my experimental ninja device. I wanted to push it as far as I could. If Apple was limiting me in any way, I wanted to break those limits. I had no idea what I was doing"
The dominant narrative in the Western media about Chinese factories is that conditions are oppressive and our demand for cheap goods makes them so. But, says Chang, there are other ways of looking at the situation
"In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it." Some insightful but most not, thinks Isaacson. Here's what he encourages us to learn from Apple's old boss
"I’ve covered the company as a reporter for more than a decade, since before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye." In brief: It's not a perfect employer, but it's pretty good. You can see why people want to work there
It is the sun around which tech revolves. But for competitors Apple is a "black hole, sucking matter and energy into its gaping maw, or a hegemonic swarm, converting adjacent life into copies of itself and extinguishing diversity"
Turns out Apple's app store isn't as carefully controlled and curated as you might think. For $9,000 Chang-Min Pak will make sure your app shows up on Apple's most popular list. Although nobody understands quite how he does it
"As we all know from our Blackberries, work invades leisure; but as we also all know from our iPhone, leisure invades work"
