Edible Apple

For whatever reason or reasons, Apple is seemingly held to a higher standard than most other tech companies. This phenomenon is most apparent when it comes to working conditions in the factories that manufacture Apple products, and in particular, those owned by Foxconn.

For some inexplicable reason, perhaps because Apple has money, or perhaps because it makes for a good headline, the public is quick to call out Apple for factory working conditions while completely ignoring the multitude of other big, successful companies that also partner up with Foxconn.

Even more perplexing is that Apple is the target of everyone’s rage when they, especially under Tim Cook, have been more transparent about current labot practices and more pro-active in their attempts to alleviate horrid working conditions than their counterparts.

The New York Times recently tackled this issue, illustrating that Apple seems to get the bulk of the blame while their competitors appear to get off scott free.

Apple, no paragon of communication, has been publishing reports of the practices of its vendors since 2006, and it eventually, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, shared the names of 156 direct suppliers.

It has pledged to go “deeper into the supply chain” in its own published audits.

In the last week I have asked Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft and others about their reports on labor conditions. Most responded with a boilerplate public relations message. Some didn’t even respond.

The answer from Barnes & Noble, the maker of the Nook e-reader, was typical.

Mary Ellen Keating, a senior vice president, said only, “We don’t comment on our supply chain vendors.”

Lenovo e-mailed a general report on sustainability. Samsung, which sells more cellphones than Apple, gave no response.

But I suppose that those stories don’t make for sexy headlines, and thus don’t lend themselves to pageviews, so hey, why bother, right?

That’s not to say that Apple should never be taken to task and be given a free pass simply because they do more than most, but it does mean that advocates who publicly claim to be motivated by a fundamental worker rights would be well advised to look at the entire picture.

By singling out Apple in what’s often an attention-grab, these advocates undermine their own cause and ultimately do more harm than good.

Funny how many of the things Apple’s iPhone used to get chided for – lack of a removable battery, no Flash support – are now becoming standardized across all platforms.

In the most recent example, RIM is removing the ability for BlackBerry PlayBook users to sideload apps. Under the new scheme, users will have to go through RIM’s BlackBerry App World.

But what about user freedom?!

Well, Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations explained via twitter, and quite bluntly might I add, the reason for RIM’s about face.

piracy is a huge problem for Android devs, and we don’t want to duplicate the chaotic cesspool of Android market.

Well, at the very least, Saunders isn’t one to mince words.

via The Verge

Despite what critics were quick to call a “modest upgrade”, the iPhone 4S burst out of the gate this past October and quickly became Apple’s most popular iPhone ever. But as with all things Apple, the focus isn’t on what they’ve done, but tends to fall on what they’re going to do.

That said, and pushing aside rumors of an Apple HDTV for a second, Apple’s next big product launch will likely be the iPhone 5, though depending on who you ask, it may simply be called “The new iPhone” a’la the recently released iPad.

Last week,  a TV film crew interviewed a Foxconn recruiter who said that the upcoming iPhone would be released in June. While Apple has historically used the Summer months to launch its new iPhone, delays forced Apple to launch the iPhone 4S a few months later, in the Fall.

This of course sets up the question – will Apple’s next-gen iPhone be released in the Summer or in the Fall?

Addressing the issue, the Maeil Business Newspaper, based out of South Korea, recently published an article wherein they asked the head of human resources at one of Foxconn’s plants about the iPhone 5 release date, to which the HR honcho reportedly said, “We just got the order. It [the release] will be around October.”

Kotaku adds:

The original Japanese media’s report noticed that there were many Foxconn hiring notices throughout Taiyuan. The Foxconn factory that will apparently assemble the iPhone 5 is located there. The Maeil Business Newspaper reporter phoned the Foxconn factory in Taiyuan, and spoke to the H&R head. “Yes, it’s true we are hiring a large number of workers,” the human resources head told the paper.

Then, the reporter asked about the iPhone’s release date. As previously mentioned, the Foxconn employee said the company had just received the order, and the release date would be “around October.”

The paper followed up with Foxconn’s head of publicity. The paper, however, was told the PR head was “on vacation” and unavailable for comment.”

It’s hard to take any of this at face value, given that it is April, but reports of hiring ramping up have been making the rounds as of late.

But more importantly, it makes more business sense for Apple to give the iPhone 4S a full 12-month life cycle, thereby making October a good bet for the iPhone 5 launch.

A week ago, I clicked onto a New York Times article detailing how Apple might lose its design edge, much in the way that Braun – once the world’s darling of design in the 60s and 70s – became less and less of a player in the design world.

The article ostensibly appeared to be interesting and engaging. Apple, under the reign of Steve Jobs, went from teetering dangerously on the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world. And there’s no question Apple’s success has, in part, been fueled by its elegant and intuitive industrial design.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of Industrial Design, is the only tech related designer who has made a name for himself in the mainstream media. Beyond that, Apple’s hardware designs have won innumerable awards and have helped influence the design sensibilities of the entire tech community.

For example, the general style and shape of the iPhone has become the de-facto blueprint for almost every other successful smartphones out on the market.

That said, an article detailing the design challenges Apple faces in the years ahead promised to be quite a read.

Or so I thought.

Instead, Alice Rawsthorn of the Times failed to articulate any concrete examples of how Apple’s design prowess may falter in the years ahead. And though she works as the Times’ design critic, her tackling of design at Apple demonstrated a fundamental lack of knowledge regarding Apple and, to a certain extent, the purchasing habits of the mainstream consumer.

Given Apple’s status as the reigning champion of corporate design, it is not surprising that the design world has speculated frenziedly about the risk of the company losing its design luster since the death of its co-founder, Steven P. Jobs, in October. In the last few days alone, I have listened to one designer predicting confidently that the styling of Nokia’s new smart phones would soon surpass Apple’s, and read an editorial in Creative Review magazine, which cast Microsoft in the Nemesis role by claiming that it may “have edged ahead of Apple in the design stakes” with its new operating software.

What is she talking about here, industrial design or software?

As for Nokia, some of their new phones are admittedly quite stylish, but Apple’s formula for success is the fusion of hardware design with intuitive software. Sure, Nokia may have some nice looking phones, but the Windows Phone 7 operating system, while certainly unique, pales in comparison to Apple’s iOS.

Next, Rawsthorn writes that Apple’s penchant for design may erode over time if it continues to do the same things for way too long. It’s a valid point, but Apple, more so than any other company, has shown a willingness, and arguably a burning urge, to discard the old and usher in the new. Indeed, Apple has been able to stay atop of the tech heap precisely because they’re willing to take risks, push out new products, and not get fat and lazy on the riches of their past successes.

Okay, so far so good, but then Rawsthorn begins grasping at straws.

A more enticing possibility is that Apple will falter not by being beaten at its current game, but because one of its rivals achieves something that it has failed to do: by developing digital devices, which not only score highly on the traditional design criteria of aesthetics, efficiency and ease of use, but in terms of their ethical and environmental sensitivity.

So let me get this straight.

Apple’s design prowess may fade because competitors will design hardware that will rank highly in terms of ethical and environmental sensitivity?

That’s such an obtuse point of view that it’s hard to know where to even begin.

For starters, Apple, more than any other tech company, has stepped up to the plate to address the ethical concerns at the manufacturing plants that produce its products while also working hard to create products that are increasingly environmentally friendly.

From recycling to pollution, Apple is quite transparent with what it’s been doing to create products that take ethical and environmental considerations into account. They even set up a page on their website where consumers can explore all that Apple is doing in its efforts to create environmentally friendly products. And while they undoubtedly have a lot of hard work ahead of them in this regard, they’ve taken more of a pro-active approach to address these concerns than any competitor.

Whenever design commentators, like me, reflect on what does — and doesn’t — constitute “good design,” we tend to identify “sustainability” or “responsibility” as an indispensable element. We use those words as shorthand for saying that nothing can be considered to be well-designed if we have reason to feel guilty about any aspect of the way in which it was developed, manufactured, packaged, shipped or sold, and will eventually be disposed of. After all, how can we take pleasure in something that we know — or suspect — of being ecologically damaging, or of causing pain or hardship?

The reality, sadly, is that most consumers don’t care much about where their products come from. And again, given that Apple is doing more than almost any other tech company to be environmentally responsible and transparent about its efforts, one has to wonder what in the hell Rawsthorn is talking about.

Further, sustainability and responsibility may be two rubrics that design critics may use to measure good design, but that doesn’t translate down into the mainstream consumer. And again, just what is Rawsthorn talking about, exactly? Will Apple’s industrial design falter because competitors will have better designs? Or will it falter because of environmental and ethical concerns? It seems that Rawshtorn is focusing on the latter because she didn’t do any research into the former.

Then Rawsthorn drops this nugget.

If you look hard enough, you can find more sustainable phones and computers than Apple’s, but the differences are often modest, as in Samsung phones that are made partly from recyclable materials. And, in general, it is difficult to assess exactly how Apple’s ethical and environmental record compares to other companies.

It’d be nice if she actually defined specifically what she means by ‘sustainable’. The phrase is a catch-all word that can mean any number of different things.

What’s more, she admits the differences amongst Apple products and competing devices are “modest” and that it’s tough assess how Apple’s environmental efforts compare to others.

That’s not exactly true, and I think Rawsthorn, if she truly tried, could have written an interesting article detailing and comparing Apple’s environmental and ethical efforts to other tech companies. (Funny enough, Nick Bilton of the New York Times did something similar to that this past weekend).

But she didn’t, because I suppose it’s easier to say that something might affect Apple’s design prowess than actually doing the legwork to come up with cogent facts to back up those assertions.

Presumably, this is not an issue for the diehard fans, who waited in long lines outside Apple’s stores last month when the new iPad went on sale, a few weeks after global media coverage of the onerous working conditions and safety problems at some of the company’s Chinese suppliers.

Yes, because all of the 37 million people who purchased iPhones last quarter were diehard fans who waited outside Apple stores in long lines.

And as for the onerous working conditions and safety problems at the company’s Chinese suppliers, Rawshtorn would have more of a case she bothered to look into the working conditions at factories that churn out products for other tech companies. But doing so would have completely negated her article so why bother, right?

But if one of Apple’s competitors was to address its ethical and environmental responsibilities with such verve and rigor that it emerged as a role model, wouldn’t you want to buy its products? I would. (Assuming, of course, that it checked the other “good design” boxes.)

That’s a benefit, to be sure, but it’s not a factor most people include in their purchasing desicions.

Besides, it’s all too common, when looking at ethical and environmental responsibilities, to ignore many of the cultural, business, economic, and legal factors that underlie many of the reasons why things are the way they are.

Good design is good design, and despite what Rawshtorn may think as a design ‘critic’, it’s largely a separate issue from ethical and environmental issues. A company could have amazingly designed products manufactured in horrid working conditions, while another could develop horrible looking products put together in splendid working conditions.

The reality is that Rawshtorn, in looking at these issues as one, fails to really understand how most consumers go about making their  purchasing decisions.

What I hoped would be an interesting article explaining how Apple might lose its design edge was nothing more than a vapid lecture on the importance of being environmentally and ethically friendly.

You would expect more nuance from the New York Times.

As part of Apple’s defense against Samsung’s claims that iOS products infringe upon certain wireless patents owned by Samsung, Apple argues that they have an implied license via Qualcomm to those patents. In other words, because Qualcomm is licensed to use the patents at issue, Apple’s own contract with Qualcomm to provide the baseband chips in iOS products precludes Samsung from going after Apple.

To that end, Bloomberg is reporting that both Intel and Qualcomm have given Apple source code that will help it defend itself against Samsung.

Attorneys in the U.S. have inspected the code and Intel and Qualcomm have agreed to provide it to lawyers involved in a patent dispute in Australia, Andrew Fox, Apple’s lawyer, said at a hearing in Sydney today.

“Further non-infringing arguments can be made from that” disclosure of the source code, Fox said today.

Apple and Samsung, the largest maker of mobile phones, are preparing for the start of a trial in which the companies accuse each other of infringing patents. They have filed at least 30 suits on four continents against each other in the past year after talks initiated by former Apple founder Steve Jobs to resolve the disputes broke down.

Though Samsung and Apple continue to go after one another in the courtroom, a recent report, citing people familiar with Apple, noted that top executives from each respective company have “communicated lately about potential settlement options.”

Though Android fans like to downplay the problem, platform fragmentation remains a huge problem that manifests itself in a myriad of ways. Whether it means that your brand new Android device isn’t up to snuff to play the latest game or take advantage of the latest Android update, or that the user experience varies wildly from device to device, the continued success of Android has the simultaneous affect of increasing the fragmentation woes faced by users.

To this end, the MIT Technology Review is reporting that a number of hardware manufacturers are taking a closer look at what Amazon did with Android, namely fork it and come up with their own concoction, thereby negating their blind allegiance to Google’s requirements.

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, has a unique window onto this phenomenon, because his company provides geolocation services for these yet-to-be-announced devices.

“I’m spending a lot of time with companies forking Android,” says Morgan. “Nobody wants to just be a manufacturer for Google. You see that with what Amazon has done, where they made it their own, and you also see a whole host of manufacturers taking Android down their own path.”

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It’s funny how few people realize the tremendous technical underpinnings of a site like Facebook, that on its face, may seem to be pretty simple.

But don’t get it twisted, Facebook has some of the brightest engineers on the planet working on some pretty impressive underlying architecture to ensure that the hundreds of millions of Facebook users who use the site can do so without a hitch.

Recently, Facebook invited Ryan Paul of Ars Technica to take a look  at the process the company uses to roll out updates across the site.

The Facebook source code is largely written in the PHP programming language. PHP is conducive to rapid development, but it lacks the performance of lower-level languages and some more modern alternatives. In order to improve the scalability of its PHP-based infrastructure, Facebook developed a special transpiler called HipHop.

HipHop converts PHP into heavily optimized C++ code, which can then be compiled into an efficient native binary. When Facebook unveiled HipHop to the public in 2010 and began distributing it under an open source software license, the company’s engineers reported that it reduced average CPU consumption on Facebook by roughly 50 percent.

Because Facebook’s entire code base is compiled down to a single binary executable, the company’s deployment process is quite different from what you’d normally expect in a PHP environment. Rossi told me that the binary, which represents the entire Facebook application, is approximately 1.5GB in size. When Facebook updates its code and generates a new build, the new binary has to be pushed to all of the company’s servers.

The entire article is well worth a read and provides an unprecedented look into the technology and processes that make Facebook tick and run seamlessly. Interestingly enough, the article notes that Facebook typically rolls out a minor update every single day. As Mark Zuckerberg noted in his letter to investors recently, it’s all about the Hacker way – release, iterate, and release again.

It’s always fascinating to learn more about the culture that permeates through a successful tech company so hop on over here to Ars and take a look.

Much like the buzz surrounding the iPhone before it was officially announced, the hype that hovers over the mythical Apple HDTV continues to grow in unexpected directions.

The latest mutation, so to speak, comes in the form of a research note from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek who is calling the as of yet unreleased device the iPanel.

Now to be quite honest, that Misek would actually think Apple would call its much ballyhooed TV an iPanel sort of undercuts his credibility, but alas, here’s what he also had to say.

Well, for starters, Misek calls the product an iPanel because he anticipates it will be so much than a TV.

“It is a display, gaming center, media hub, computer, home automator, etc.,” Misek wrote. “Also, Apple would likely have difficulty getting naming rights from the UK TV network ITV.”

Fair enough, but perhaps Apple will just call it the Apple HDTV, and disregard a snazzy i-affixed name to begin with.

As for other details, Misek believes the product will sell for about $1,250 while also noting that specialized components for the rumored product, such as polarized films and display parts, have already started shipping to Apple’s Cupertino campus.

Regarding a release date, Misek writes that production for the product will begin in either May or June, with an eventual release date scheduled for sometime before 2013, likely in time for the busy holiday shopping season.

via AppleInsider

From Larry Page’s 2012 update which is well worth a read:

When I was a student at the University of Michigan, I went on a summer leadership course. The slogan was “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and it’s an idea that has stayed with me ever since. It may sound nuts, but I’ve found that it’s easier to make progress on mega-ambitious goals than on less risky projects. Few people are crazy enough to try, and the best people always want to work on the biggest challenges. We’ve also found that “failed” ambitious projects often yield other dividends. Believe it or not, the technological innovation behind AdSense, which, as I mentioned earlier, has paid out over $30 billion to partners, was the result of a “failed” more ambitious project to understand the Web. The team failed at understanding the Web, mostly, I think, because they were distracted by their work making advertisements amazingly relevant.

Last year, the Google+ team decided to integrate multi-person video into their efforts. They had a small committed team that was crazy enough to believe this was possible, and Google+ Hangouts was born. You can now video chat with anyone, anywhere, even from the Great Barrier Reef. It was the same with driverless cars, which we started on in 2008. Today we have driven over 200,000 miles, and Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, recently took a drive in one of them. So the one-sentence summary of how to change the world… work on something that is uncomfortably exciting!

Told via a Beer Game analogy:

Because of the bullwhip effect illustrated by the game, Apple needs to have factories in China because the supply chain is there. We learned in the Beer Game that minute changes have massive ripple effects along the supply chain.

The U.S. has lost that industrial base and it’s extremely difficult to get it back. It’s not about unions, jobs Americans don’t want – it’s about delay.

In a bizarre revelation, Google CEO Larry Page claimed in an interview yesterday that Jobs’ anger towards Android was just for show, and was simply a means to inspire the rank and file at Apple.

I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better…

Can Page really, in his heart of hearts, believe this?

Network World calls BS on Page’s claims:

Steve Jobs had a notoriously long memory and short temper. If you crossed him, ripped off one of his products, he wasn’t likely to ever forget about it.

Is it any wonder why Jobs, after being ousted from Apple in 1985 by John Sculley, never spoke to the former Pepsi CEO again? Or how about how Gizmodo curiously stopped receiving invitations to Apple’s special media events following their iPhone 4 expose? And in a more parallel example, Jobs never had the nicest of things to say about Windows and was quick, even in the 2000s, to bluntly state that Microsoft had ripped off the Mac.

That said, are we really supposed to believe that Jobs, a man who was driven in large part by raw emotion, concocted this whole Android battle-cry to rally the troops?

Exactly.

Especially considering that it’d be absolutely asinine, and arguably illegal, for Apple to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees just to inspire the Apple faithful.

Is Page really that naive?

Steve Jobs once said that tablets with smaller 7-inch screens would be dead on arrival. Customers, Jobs explained, wanted tablets with bigger screens and after much research, Apple deduced that 9.7-inch screens were the most optimal.

And for a while, Jobs’ prediction was spot-on. Many iPad competitors came and went without so much making the tiniest of dents in Apple’s iPad armor.

That was, of course, until Amazon released the Kindle Fire a few months back. Sporting a 7-inch screen, and more importantly, an attractively low $199 pricepoint, the Kindle Fire sold very well and may, in fact,  prompt Apple to release a smaller version of the iPad.

Going back a few months, we’ve heard a few rumors claiming that Apple was experimenting with a 7.85-inch iPad with the same 1024×768 resolution as the iPad. And yesterday, the always reliable John Gruber added his two cents to the rumored iPad Mini.

In his Talk Show podcast with Dan Benjamin yesterday, Gruber claims to have been told by “numerous” people that the rumored smaller version of the iPad remained something Apple was “noodling with.”

And when asked about the prospects of a smaller iPad hitting the market, Gruber responded:

Well, I don’t know. What I do know is that they have one in the lab…a 7.85 inch iPad that runs at 1024×768… it’s just like the 9.7″ iPad shrunk down a little bit. Apps wouldn’t need to be recompiled or redesigned to work optimally on it. It’s just the iPad smaller.

Gruber has great sources within Apple so we’re inclined to take this statement at face value.

Previous reports have claimed that the iPad Mini won’t feature a Retina Display and that it will likely be priced in the $249-$299 range.

via The Next Web