Daring Fireball

Intriguing report by Rita Trichur, Grant Robertson, Boyd Erman, and Steve Ladurantaye, For the Globe and Mail:

While the iTV product remains cloaked in secrecy, sources say Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has approached Rogers and Bell as it actively pursues partnerships with Canadian carriers.

“They’re not closed to doing it with one [company] or doing it with two,” said one source who is familiar with the talks. “They’re looking for a partner. They’re looking for someone with wireless and broadband capabilities.”

Another source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers and Bell already have the product in their labs.

I’ve never heard anything about this before, but if true, it suggests that Apple is approaching this new (or perhaps just updated?) TV product as something akin to the iPhone — with broadband providers playing the role mobile carriers do with the iPhone.

Jim Cramer:

But there was one ad that struck me as the most honest, most riveting and most compelling of all. You see, the game had just ended, and Colts great Raymond Berry ran the Giant gantlet with the Lombardi Trophy. Suddenly it seemed like every other Giant pulled out an Apple iPhone to snap pictures of the moment. One after another after another. And I said to myself, there it is, not some pet dangling a bag of chips or some headlights killing vampires or King Elton getting trapdoored. Nope, there was an ad worthy of Steve Jobs and the company he built.

Screenshots here.

Have you noticed that Safari’s hovering-over-a-link pointing-finger cursor looks a little different in Mac OS X 10.7.3? It’s not just that the finger is at a slightly different angle — it’s a new UI resource that scales gracefully to larger sizes. That’s not the only new high-DPI image resource in 10.7.3: the grabby hand in Mail, the camera cursor for selecting an individual window to take a screenshot of, and a few other UI elements got the high-DPI treatment in 10.7.3.

The simplest explanation is that Apple only just now got around to increasing the resolution of these elements for the benefit of users who use the cursor-zooming Universal Access feature. But, combined with the fact that some people with Mac Minis connected to TVs via HDMI are reporting that after upgrading to 10.7.3, their system rebooted in HiDPI mode, I can’t help but wonder whether we may be on the cusp of Apple releasing HiDPI Mac displays and/or HiDPI MacBooks. I.e.: retina display Macs.

I’ve been anticipating super-high-resolution Mac displays for over five years, so take my conjecture here with a grain of wishful-thinking salt.

After noting that Apple’s iPhone business now generates more revenue than all of Microsoft combined, MG Siegler linked once again to this classic 2007 interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Nobody enjoys laughing at utterly-wrong-in-hindsight claim chowder like I do, but in all seriousness, this interview, to me, is all the proof Microsoft’s board needs that Ballmer should be asked to step down. (Or, really, that he should have been asked to step down a few years ago, as soon as it became clear just how successful the iPhone was going to be.) The damning thing isn’t that Apple got there first; it’s that even after Apple revealed it, that Ballmer didn’t get it, that he didn’t see instantly that Apple had unveiled something amazing and transformative. All Ballmer could see was the near future, the next few months where the iPhone was indeed too expensive and where typing on a touchscreen was a novelty.

Of course Microsoft’s CEO wasn’t going to sing the iPhone’s praises. But if he had a true understanding of what they suddenly found themselves up against, he sure as shit would not have laughed at it.

So depressing. It’d be one thing if Honeywell had an even vaguely Nest-like product to defend. But they don’t. And how did they get a patent for this:

U.S. Patent No. 7,634,504 - this patent was filed in 2006 (issued 2009) and covers displaying grammatically complete sentences while programming a thermostat.

Lance Ulanoff thinks Apple should have advertised during yesterday’s Super Bowl:

I worry that without Steve Jobs, Apple may have lost some of its fighting spirit. For all his quirks, Jobs was a fighter. He liked to deride the competition and then beat them, as publicly as possible. Imagine if right after the Samsung Super Bowl ad, Apple had run some sort of iconic spot for, say, the Apple iTV: “Television is about to change forever, thanks to the company that, 28 years ago, changed computing forever. Watch…” Now that would’ve been cool. Jobs would have done it.

No he wouldn’t have. The 1984 Super Bowl ad was amazing, but it’s ancient history. An Apple Super Bowl ad yesterday teasing an upcoming product — Apple TV, iPad, anything — would have been a sign of post-Jobs strategic change.

Jobs is only dead for a few months, but Ulanoff has seemingly already forgotten how he ran the company. I can’t remember the last time Apple ran a Super Bowl ad. Super Bowl ads bring high-profile attention to major announcements. Apple doesn’t need to pay for Super Bowl ads to get high-profile attention for major announcements. Apple uses TV advertisements to reinforce the message and branding of its most popular existing products. The Super Bowl is of questionable value for that sort of advertising.

Apple doesn’t tease upcoming products. They announce them when they’re ready. As for Samsung’s ads mocking those who wait in line for new Apple products, I imagine Apple sees no more need to respond than Coke does to Pepsi’s decades-long “we’re happy to be in second place” advertising strategy of making fun of Coke.

Chris Davies, SlashGear:

HTC “dropped the ball” on its 2011 devices, the company’s CFO has admitted, with LTE-equipped handsets simply too thick and offering insufficient battery life. Speaking on the company’s financial results call today, following HTC’s unappealing Q4 2011 results, Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung conceded that HTC had plenty of work to do improving both “design and components.”

I, for one, am shocked — shocked! — that big thick phones with poor battery life fared poorly.

Federico Viticci:

The iOS-ification of OS X is, at this point, inevitable, and anyone who doesn’t see it, or tries to neglect, is either software-blind or has some kind of interest in that way of thinking.

Terrific short film by Ben Wu and David Usui about Prime Burger Restaurant, a midtown Manhattan institution. (Via Rusty Blazenhoff.)

Robert McMillan, writing for Wired:

Could the low-power chip design that’s used in your iPhone someday show up inside the chips built by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices?

Definitely maybe. Or as AMD’s brand new Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster put it to us: “The answer is not no.”

Yeah, that Mark Papermaster.

My thanks to Apparent for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their new Doxie Go + Wi-Fi — a tiny, portable, wireless scanner that works anywhere. It includes great Mac software that creates searchable PDFs and integrates easily with just about any imaginable workflow. Save scans to Dropbox, Evernote, Yojimbo, your iPhone/iPad photo roll, or keep them in the Doxie app. And with Wi-Fi, your scans push wirelessly and instantly to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Doxie Go helps you go not just paperless, but wireless. I bought one a few months ago and love it.

Avram Piltch of Laptop magazine, talking to Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch:

“Dell and Hewlett Packard are not doing as good as Apple is doing right now,” Li Said. “But when we talk about publicity and public relations, it’s another story.”

So who does CLW spend the most effort criticizing — the companies whose actual labor practices are worse, or the one whose “public relations” (read: willingness to take a meeting with CLW) are worse? Take a guess.

Matthew Panzarino:

Apple has updated its iBooks Author app in order to clarify the language of its End User License Agreement. The changes to the EULA clarify that Apple does indeed intend the packaged product to be sold on the iBookstore only, but also make it clear that it does not lay claim to the content that you use to create the book, nor does it try to limit what you can do with that content elsewhere.

Horace Dediu:

Apple reached 75% of profit share, nearly 40% of revenue share and 9% of units share.

Apple and Samsung combined for about 91% of profits with RIM third at 3.7%, HTC fourth at 3.0% and Nokia last at 1.8% of a $15 billion total for the quarter.

Not bad.

Paul Krugman, writing for Slate back in 1997:

Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

Keep in mind that Krugman is, by anyone’s standards, a true liberal.

If you’re as disappointed as I am with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision to drop funding for breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood, do what I did: donate to Planned Parenthood.

(Cupertino-area readers, take note: Planned Parenthood is a registered 501c3, and thus eligible for a matching donation from Apple.)

The good news: Best Buy is selling iTunes gift cards at 80 cents on the dollar.

The bad news: you have to shop at Best Buy.

The good news: Best Buy is selling iTunes gift cards at 80 cents on the dollar.

The bad news: you have to shop at Best Buy.

The good news: Best Buy is selling iTunes gift cards at 80 cents on the dollar.

The bad news: you have to shop at Best Buy.

The good news: Best Buy is selling iTunes gift cards at 80 cents on the dollar.

The bad news: you have to shop at Best Buy.