Don't Quote Me - Quote Them .... @fractallion - Tumblr Blog

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👁️ The good news is that my drafts count continues to go down. A few weeks ago just shy of 300 - today below 60. And yes - I know that people keep thousands of drafts in that world - but I am not one of those. To me it is the first stage of any text that will pass through any number of workflows. If it is in Drafts - it’s in my ‘inbox’ and needs to be dealt with. Like the next one.

Google Sucks

🔗 Daring Fireball: Remember When Chrome Went Bad on MacOS?

🔗 Daring Fireball: Google’s Gemini Mac App Is Native, in a Distinctly Google Way, But Annoyingly Presumptuous

I experienced this about 9 months ago - cant recall how I fixed it - but Google was definitely not on my ‘things to check’ list

👁️ via @dave .. interesting 🔗 Tweeter Feeder - Stream Spigot - tried it out - not for me.

🔗 The Underworld Market to Remove the Recording Indicator Light on Meta Glasses

Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.

💬 John Gruber

🔗 Transparency and trust

Part of the problem is that we measure what’s easy, not what’s relevant. And part of the problem is that we have trouble explaining trust, while it’s easy to pursue ever more transparency.

💬 Seth Godin

🖋️ Sometimes 'Non Obvious' comes disguised as 'Obvious'

I just read 🔗 Apple design and balance.

there’s a deeper problem with Apple: they rarely build anything now except the most obvious products.|

💬 Manton Reece

I wonder what the unobvious products might be?

Well if we knew that - they wouldn’t be unobvious. Would they?

So let’s just choose one on my favourite unobvious products from earlier this year - The Neo.

But it’s just a laptop ….

Well, it is definitely a laptop, but it is not ‘just a laptop’ - it is a non obvious laptop.

not a rehash of old parts - brand new

with a price point that nobody predicted

resulting in substantial sales growth in Macs whilst the rest of the PC industry is declining

with performance that beats out PCs that sell for over $1,000

side note - I would also argue that the Apple Vision was also 'not obvious' - but people didn't like it (well that is what the news said) so it gets dumped into the 'antenna-gate' list and seen as a an example of #FAIL but as Wayne said: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take”

So What Is Happening

🔗 Horace Dediu reminds us that all this comes from from a manufacturer that already has …

sales of about 24 million Macs for a base of 260 million users - implying a life span for Macs of nearly 11 years - compared to the life span for the non-Mac PC of 5.

$33 billion in annual revenues - putting them among the top four three PC vendors in terms of revenue and number one in operating margin - making Apple not only the most profitable PC vendor, but also capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits

It seems to be that the Apple cognoscenti see this as a Ternus driven program - and of course - along with ‘Johny’ I would full expect more of this after September because this is about to become another pivot - and a welcome one - assuming that Tim’s engines continue to work.

Steve Era - CEO plus design - because that was mainly about differentiation in an age of (very) bland.

Tim Era - CEO plus operations - because that was mainly about scaling up with unrivalled supply chains, effectiveness and efficiencies.

John Era - CEO plus hardware - because we are now moving into the next stage of evolution where they are starting with a highly differentiated vertically integrated hardware stack. Differentiation again - but mainly defining new categories. (No need to differentiate if you are the category).

AND I think 🔗 Om’s recent piece about AI having their ‘iPhone’ moment relates needs to be absorbed.

The plateau came faster than anyone expected. By the early 2010s, the core smartphone experience was essentially perfected in functional terms. The differential between one year’s model and the next shrank from obvious to marginal.

💬 Om

This is the innovation comparison. Too often I sense a tone that “if you haven’t ‘destroyed something and rebuilt from the ashes’ - then it wasn’t innovation - it was just a marginal improvement” I would beg to differ - but that is for a different time.

But this obvious / non obvious distinction falls into the same bucket.

We are so tuned into expecting the next big thing to be totally different - to not be obvious - that we have become jaded because we only see what is in front of us - and judge based on what we see - the device. The truth is that we should be looking at what we used to call ‘Whole Product’ … developed by Kotler, built up by Levitt - and turned mainstream by a combination of Tom Peters, Regis McKenna and Geoff Moore. Not going into it here - maybe another post - but easy to 🔗 look up a wiki primer.

And Then

To work with a computing device … you need ‘I’ and ‘O’

We have things like keyboard, touch, speech, mouse, gestures on the ‘I’ side

We have other things like screens and speakers to manage the ‘O’ side.

It probably is why I have never worked at Apple - but I have a hard time imagining how to bypass my 5 (6?) senses so that I can interact with a computing device - though if the pre-publicity of the broship of ‘Sam and Jonny’ is to be believed - they have done it. I look forward to it.

Possible Futures? We seem to be excited about a variety of new form factors coming down the pike - but really - revolutionary? Unobvious- I don’t think so - I’m looking at you folding screens, rolled up keyboards and retro music players …

BUT

We are seeing labs exploring mind control - and really quite brilliant - but ’labs’ is the giveaway.

Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin both ‘arrived’ with grand applause and were then stomped on.

To me the Vision Pro was a truly new and innovative - NON OBVIOUS - device - sounds like it is going to be scrapped under Ternus - but the fact remains it didn’t sell well (at least that is what we read) and so relegated to ‘forgotten’ - see above.

Heavens we even have ‘Matrix chips’ under development - thanks to Musk - so unclear what that adoption is likely to be.

All to say: like always, life ain’t simple. Life is so hard and complicated in so much of our lives these days that we yearn for simple. But simple is a very thin edge of a very thick wedge.

Flagging this post with 🚧 because I have a feeling I will be coming back to it.

Pink Floyd has Nick’s ‘Saucerful’ Genesis has Steve’s ‘Genesis Revisited’

🔗📼🎵 Not Voyage 35 - and yet is.

It was announced a while back - but seems to begging to take shape ….

Porcupine Tree now has Colin’s ‘Voyage 35’

👁️ Have to say when I look around at other services in film, shows, music and books - Letterboxd (sadly only film) seem to have it more right than the others.

🔗 The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

👁️ The end of an era. When I first arrived in SF they were the bedrock of support for places like KQED and related programming. They did - and do - a lot more beside. I hope the ‘kids’ get the future right.

The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, one of San Francisco’s largest philanthropic foundations, is closing at the end of 2028 as younger generations of the Haas family transition to new giving initiatives.

🎙️🎛️ How Many Seconds of Audio does it take?

Some places have ‘Street Art’ .. we have ‘Beach Art’

The beach is no Oneroa - but makes up with proximity.

The coast is taking a toll - eventually, the fight will be lost.

Every nobody is a somebody to somebody

➡️🔷 Johnisms. They have been around forever and new ones are constantly emerging. Some of them get posted here.

No decision is a decision

➡️🔷 Johnisms. They have been around forever and new ones are constantly emerging. Some of them get posted here.

🔗📼 The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum has been circulating around a number of places I tend to go, so gave it a whirl. So should you.

Of course it is about curiosity, discovery, history, inaccuracies, putting things right, timelines, typesetting, layout, design .. and more .. and you might think ‘l’m not that interested - yeah nah’. Which would be sad because it would be your loss and you would never know what a lovely man 🔗 Richard McClintock is.

Not only that, but you’d miss out on how just one dedicated person can have impact, no matter how seemingly small.

(Stick to the end to discover the deets.)

👁️🏗️ One step forward - two steps back. I hope the design will be back soon.

🔗 Welcome, IBM. Seriously.

I’ve decided that it’s time to end the “Soft Opening” era of my new site/blog. Lots of folks discovered it on their own. I incorrectly supposed that by hiding it behind a mysterious URL identical to my last name, I’d be able to live-test the CMS and my customizations in secrecy.

💬 Andy Ihnatko

I have zero expectations that this is going to be my story - other than - ‘developing in plain site’ - now that I have been 🔗🔎 doing off and on for a while (recategorisation on going) - it’s just nobody notices because only I am there!

👁️ So with him.

🔗 The Enification of Enification

When there’s a change to a thing and you don’t like it or approve of it, you need to consider a frightening alternative possibility. Maybe it isn’t enshittification. Maybe it’s just change.

💬 Andy Ihnatko

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