Technophilia

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John Gruber, daringfireball.net

I’m not sure what’s worse, the content of this piece by Sam Gustin for Time magazine, or the pun in the headline, “Google Hits ‘Glass’ Pedal as Apple Returns to Earth”:In short, Apple expectations are returning to Earth. “Apple has had a tremendou…

Well said. I think there's a valid argument from Google's perspective to appeal to the early adopter crowd, who will push new technologies out to their mainstream-tech friends. However, the claims that these new products will destroy Apple are laughable. Apple casts a broader net, attracting more people to a product initially because they've already removed some of the early adoption drawbacks in-house.

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Google announces Chromebook Pixel: a premium Chrome OS laptop shipping next week for $1,299 By Sean Hollister, theverge.com

When Google unveiled the very first Chrome OS lap­top, the vision was clear: Eric Schmidt told us that Chrome­books would be cheap, dis­pos­able prod­ucts that you could eas­i­ly replace at will. Today, how­ev­er, the com­pa­ny's tak­ing a…

Interesting move by Google to raise the bar for ChromeOS. I have the original Chromebook, and the real limiting factor is still the available software. My Chromebook is more of an iPad competitor, while the new Pixel looks like a MacBook Air or ThinkPad Yoga competitor.

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daringfireball.net

“iHKDe­sign” ably responds to this jack­tas­tic CNN piece by Steve Kovach, argu­ing that Sam­sung is “out-innovating” Apple. This bit (from Kovach) caught my eye:

Based on all this evi­dence, Apple fee …

I don't even use app folders on my iPad anymore because they just get in the way of scrolling through my home screen pages to find the one that I want.

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the team did a detailed analysis of Ann Arbor, MI, and concluded that a shared-driverless system could be fielded that offered customers about 90% savings compared with the cost of personal car ownership—while delivering better user experiences.

Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car -- Part 3: Sooner Than You Think

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Imagine a world where your iPhone, car or any electronic device charges fully in 30 seconds to a minute. Well, that world has arrived. 

Scientists at UCLA have accidentally found the future of batteries and its very exciting. Watch this short little clip & be amazed.

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Awesome. While everyone has been focusing on extending battery life, these guys may have alleviated the core problem from the other side. If you can charge your phone in a minute and have that charge last for hours, I’m sold.

Also, see: previous post.

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Save energy by switching to LED light bulbs.

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For an iWatch to kick butt, Apple must innovate in batteries by Josh Lowensohn and Shara Tibken, cnet.com

If the company is indeed working on a watch-size device with the bells and whistles of a smartphone, battery life could prove a challenge.

If Apple is hard at work on an "iWatch," it will have to over­come bat­tery issues bedev­il­ing exist­ing…

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Tilera's 72-core chip doubles down on multicore approach by Stephen Shankland, cnet.com

The Tile-Gx72 has twice the processing cores as its predecessor, showing that Tilera isn't shying away from its parallel-programming philosophy.

Tilera, one of the most aggres­sive advo­cates of the multicore-processor approach, today announced …

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Three trends that could transform the energy efficient data center Adam Lesser, gigaom.com

The quest for the ener­gy effi­cient data cen­ter has large­ly been the focus of web­scale data cen­ters like Google, Face­book and Ama­zon. But data cen­ter effi­cien­cy as a focus of small­er com­pa­nies is increas­ing. Part of this is dri­ven b…

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Nvidia Readies Its First Chip With LTE Built In Ina Fried, allthingsd.com

Qual­comm has a lit­tle more com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket for chips that can power the lat­est smart­phones.

Nvidia is announc­ing on Tues­day the Tegra 4i, its first chip to inte­grate a modem that can sup­port LTE net­work capa­bil­i­ties. Th…

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daringfireball.net

Matt Ygle­sias, on Microsoft’s “Scroogled” anti-Google ad cam­paign:

The prob­lem with Microsoft’s online ser­vice offer­ings isn’t that their TV cam­paigns are lame. It’s not even that the prod­ucts a …

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When iCloud isn’t enough: balancing other cloud storage options Mark Crump, gigaom.com

iCloud doesn’t work as a one-stop storage solution the way I’d hoped. Here’s a guide to how I incorporate several online storage solutions to make them work for my needs.

Rene Ritchie’s excel­lent arti­cle on iCloud and Drop­box has forced me to…

I was just going through this process this weekend, trying to figure out how to share iWork files. iCloud has no collaboration.

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Going with a prepaid plan for your Apple iPhone service can save you a lot of money compared to a contract. You pay more upfront to buy your phone outright, lose the contract, and gain a lower monthly payment.