December 5, 2010 – 2:07 pm
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée This year, three wishes were on top of my list: A smaller, lighter MacBook, an app store for the Mac, and a curated iOS app store. I got two out of three. The 11” MacBook Air works quite well when the passenger in front of me fully reclines his seat; and Apple, [...]
November 14, 2010 – 11:24 pm
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Two weeks ago, I argued that iOS will evolve into the operating system for future incarnations of iMacs and MacBooks. The comments on the article provided abundant food for thought, so much so that I decided to argue the opposite point of view: Yes, OS X and iOS share some bits of [...]
October 31, 2010 – 6:37 pm
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Operating systems don’t age well. Some have better genes than others or they have more competent caretakers, but sooner or later they are stricken by a cancer of bug fixes upon bug fixes, upgrades upon upgrades. I know, I lived inside two OS sausage factories, Apple and Be, and was closely associated [...]
September 6, 2010 – 6:46 am
TweetIn an alternate universe, Apple has announced the App Store Guide and Blog. Choice morsels from the PR material follow. “We came to realize that a quarter million apps meant worse than nothing to Apple users”, said Apple’s CEO. “I get confused too! Reviews are often fake, lame, or downright incompetent. PR firms have been [...]
TweetDaniel Lyons, the Newsweek tech writer notorious for his Fake Steve Jobs blog, penned an epistolary piece last week (R.I.P., Macintosh) in which he asks and answers the question: “Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.” The columnist claims that with the iPhone and the iPad as the Dear Leader’s new [...]
TweetThe center of financial gravity in the computing world—the Center of Money—has shifted. No longer directed at the PC, the money pump now gushes full blast at the smartphones market. One of my colleagues, Bob Ackerman, calls smartphones the very personal computers. Measured by size and potential, they’re both smaller and bigger than today’s PCs. [...]
Tweet1. Design The iPad is all about design, and interface expectations. From a graphic design standpoint, with the iPad, the quantum leap is its ability to render layouts, typefaces, page structure. No more web HTML lowest common denominator, here. What comes out from an art director gets WYSIWYGed on the iPad — if the implementation [...]
TweetThe frenzy surrounding Apple’s new product, the iPad, could give a new life to the old pickup line. I just got mine, that thing is an equal opportunity guy and chick magnet. Better than the proverbial (and fake) Ferrari car keys negligently dropped on the counter in a bar. Here, with the iPad, you can [...]
TweetYou’ll recognize an echo of the August 2009 note: The Jesus Tablet: What For? This time, we’ll walk around another increasingly popular topic: Apple’s putative entry into television sets, a huge Consumer Electronics segment. The argument for Apple making TVs is two-pronged: the money and the UI. For the money, there is the $31B television [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:45 pm
TweetOnce again, Apple, or, getting to the point, Steve Jobs defies common wisdom. This time it’s about communication, positioning, propaganda. Never let others take control of the story, don’t let anything go unanswered, ever. (Well, almost anything, there is the ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ exception.) The recent and still on-going –raging might [...]