We’ve all seen the joke . Those of us in app development love to talk about how ridiculous it is that people will drop $4 every other day on a cup of coffee but will not “waste” 99 cents on our hot new app. I hope by now we’ve learned something: This comparison doesn’t work. Why haven’t we seen…

The iPad mini has been out a few days now and it seems everybody is going bananas over it. Because I'm weak, I pre-ordered one as soon as I could. My wife received the delivery and did the initial set up for me. (iCloud makes that so easy.) As a result, it got handed to me as I sat down to record…

When I worked at Apple all new Mac Genius made the trip to Cupertino California to be trained by those who had been behind the bar before us. Customer service was part of our initial “Core Training.” At Apple Headquarters we were taught and tested on Macintosh hardware and software. Shown how to use…

Or another killer product? Or, on the pessimistic side, a loser defensive move showing Apple’s fear of competitors such as Amazon, with its Kindle Fire, and Google’s 7" Nexus tablet? Recent leaks from purported sources inside Apple’s traditional suppliers have ignited a new frenzy of speculation.…

The classic criticism that thoughtless Apple haters use against the company is that it makes products that are pretty but dumb. Usually those criticisms are by people who don't understand the value of a comprehensible user experience, frustrated by the reality that many people will eagerly trade the…

The iPhone 5 is really nice. It feels great, looks great, has the best display I’ve seen at any size, runs noticeably faster, networks noticeably faster, is way thinner and lighter than any of its predecessors, takes better photos, and, in my six days of testing, gets totally decent iPhone-4S-level…

The video of Amazon’s Kindle press event last week is well worth watching. Amazon is, to my eyes, the only company playing in the same league as Apple. The only ding is that the event was oddly-paced — it felt too slow. It lasted over an hour but I think it could been done in 45 minutes or so…

I love Instapaper, and recommended to everyone I know who reads a lot of online content, and uses Mac and iOS devices. (I don’t recommend it to Android or PC users, even though the app now works for them, but because I’ve never used it on those platforms.) One feature that I really appreciate within…

The time has finally come: today, Ars Technica released John Siracusa’s review of the newest version of OS X . It’s only been about a year since the last review’s release, an uncharacteristically short interval. With Apple now targeting an annual release cycle for OS X, we might now also expect…

It seems like another era, but back in the ’00s, major new-cat-name updates of Mac OS X were a big deal. They were packed with major new features, new built-in apps, significant performance improvements, and often sported refreshed system-wide UI appearances (the long slow fading out of the 10.0…

In the wake of the recent announcement that Google Play will allow developers to respond to user reviews of apps ( Google Play being the Android version of Apple’s iOS App Store, iBookstore and iTunes Store combined), there’s been a resurgence of sentiment amongst iOS and Mac developers that Apple…

Jun 22, 2012 A short while after the WWDC 2012 keynote, when Apple made the iOS 6 BETA publicly available, somebody tweeted in German that there are probably already more devices running iOS 6 than Android 4. I translated the tweet to English and tweeted it for everybody’s amusement. According to…

Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? http://t.co/1Hrjqy6R Absolutely fantastic read from @tculpan via @glennf

This is a long-ass post. In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and…

March 27, 2012 The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades. Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store…

Home > Interview with John Gruber Welcome to the interview with John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball and long-time critic and observer of Mac OS X interface. Do you still remember your reaction after Steve Jobs first demoed Aqua? No, I don’t think so. Meaning I don’t remember seeing Jobs do…