Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities. The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years
Apple is the most profitable, can’t make enough products to meet demand, is the most admired by its peers, yet it is doomed. Reality distortion field.
The facts don’t line up with the picture being presented by the street and the headline seeking mainstream media. And the most unfortunate thing…
Horace Dediu has written another brilliant piece titled “ Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple? ”. As he points out, Apple is fairly unique in its command of vertical integration and many people point to th
Never mind whiskey aficionados; tongues on even vodka lovers were wagging earlier this month over a rare public relations stumble in Kentucky. Rob Samuels, COO of Maker's Mark, announced that the alcoholic strength of the company's signature bourbon was to be lowered from 90 proof to 84 proof.
My initial reaction to that, when I first saw it, was similar to the blood-soaked-rags tweet: I was shocked. But I wasn’t offended. (Again: I’m not saying it’s wrong if others were offended, okay? But I wasn’t.) What shocked me was how incisively it cut through the utter bullshit about how women…
It's not a tremendous story, but I finally wrote about Ryan, the blind Apple Store employee who sold me an iPhone.
Now I'm told he works for Apple HQ, how great is that?
http://j.mp/WfkMYj
One thing that has really been on my mind lately is how publishing is changing. Many think it is a bit crazy that I went with a paywall, but even more crazy is that I was thinking of shutting down the site as it is and doing a periodical on the iPad instead (cooler heads prevailed).
I am concerned that as we head further down the path of Bravo reality shows, developer-trafficking websites, and tech press coverage that reads more like a tabloid than an industry, we’re perpetuating a false narrative about what motivates technical innovators and what true technical innovation can…
was enjoying my recent blog fame, sitting alone, doing nothing. I opened a new tab in Safari on my Mac and up popped the top sites page. I decided to go to CNN and I browse around the technology section until I see something that makes me scream. I read through it again and again, trying to make…
At around 9:20 local time on Friday morning, a brilliant fireball, believed to be a meteor, appeared in the sky above the Russian Urals and shot across the horizon, leaving a trail of billowing smoke.
iCloud promised ubiquitous access -- all our stuff, every where and every when we wanted it. Not sync, Apple very carefully, almost awkwardly explained it, but an idea that was and is just as simple.
How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more…
02.12. 2013 The cassowary is a two-meter high bird with a large horn on its head, cankles, a red wattle, and a bright blue neck. The fact that it is well-camouflaged in the Australian rain forest tell
John E. Karlin, 1918-2013 John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94 John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use. Credit... Courte
In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I had the chance to talk with John Siracusa. John is well known in the Apple community for his detailed OS X re
Jan talks about retina displays and the way that the human eye can only perceive a certain number of pixels at a certain range and something about PPI. I think Panasonic has invented a new kind of pixel. A bendy pixel. I don’t understand. What does PPI stand for? What am I doing with my life? Why am…
In the beginning, there was the tube. The cathode-ray tube, that is, and "The Tube," that squat shiny box that ate up half the living room and all of your family’s attention. Then came cable, and vide
Instead of rest, I have been frantically trying to explain, to connect, and to make sense of all of this. Endless emails responding to incredible kindness, phone call after phone call with reporters and friends, and the only solace I know: writing.
Here’s a little fantasy for you to ponder: what if one of our senior foreign policy officials accidentally swallowed some sodium pentothal (aka "truth serum") before some public hearing or press confe
You may remember McKayla Maroney’s reaction to winning the silver medal (losing gold?) in the vault during the 2012 Summer Olympics. It became such an online sensation that the president struck the po
As we’ve scaled Instagram to an ever-growing number of active users, Postgres has continued to be our solid foundation and the canonical data storage for most of the data created by our users. While less than a year ago, we blogged about how we “stored a lot of data” at Instagram at 90 likes per…
The Dwindling Deficit It’s hard to turn on your TV or read an editorial page these days without encountering someone declaring, with an air of great seriousness, that excessive spending and the result
I like to make apps look good. It’s what I enjoy most, and I think it’s a very important part of the app-creation process. In fact, so do users.
“Probably the biggest impediment to this app’s success is how ugly it looks.”–Top review from a popular travel app
While there is much to be said about…
Wow, thank you. It’s been an amazing year hasn’t it? We are just killing it with all the gadgets every quarter. Hey, have you ever wondered why we do that with the quarters? So much extra reporting. We should just split the fiscal year in half, even Steven, right down the middle. Make it like a…
Okay, before we decide once and for all whether this is a win or a loss, there are a few things I want out on the table. And the first point, appropriately enough, is that whenever you're talking about the Senate, since the answer to any question about it is either "well, yes and no," or, "it…
Cute kids. Cute puppy. Cute extortion scheme. The Heisenberg principle states : the act of observing alters the reality being observed. The Carr principle (which I came up with this morning while eati
You know what they say about the obvious. ‘ Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees .’ So it is with the ongoing battles between Apple’s iOS devices and Google’s Android. On the surface, at f
It’s the funny season in technology land. The holidays are over, the major technology trade shows are soon to pass, and thousands of tech writers have nothing to report. So we get stories like the Wal
Jodie Foster's 'coming out' speech at the Golden Globes was beautiful. And it wasn't just what she said that impressed her audience, but the clever, elegant way she used the power of rhetoric to get her point across
Latest from News + Blog 6 Reasons LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Poe’s Quest for Survival is Essential StarWars.com talks with producer Orion Kellogg about why this new DLC is a must-play. BY: Games + Apps OCTOBER 5, 2016 How LEGOLAND California is Building a Jakku Diorama Brick By Brick…
The last 24 hours have been an emotional roller coaster. I woke up yesterday to find that a friend of mine – Aaron Swartz – had taken his life. My Twitter feed went into mourning – shock, sadness, ang
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