Edible Apple

Marco Arment lays it all out perfectly over here.

This London, a week ago, conducted a rare interview with Apple’s design chief Jony Ive wherein the influential designer toucheed upon a number of issues, including what makes design at Apple so special and tough for competitors to duplicate.

Regarding what makes design at Apple so different, Ive explains that it’s a confluence of design and prototyping. When those variables are worked on independently of one another, the final result suffers as a result. One of the challenges in design, Ive notes, is that when you’re creating something completely new, as Apple has been known to do, there’s no blueprint to refer back to. Designers are trusted to pave their own way, confronting and solving new problems as they appear. This, Ive explains, requires an immense amount of focus.

Speaking to the design of a new product, Ive says that when he transforms an idea into a 3D model, it becomes less of a murky idea and changes everything. “The entire process shifts.”

As for Apple’s goals when designing a new product, Ive drives home a point Steve Jobs and other executives at Apple seemed to stress quite often, namely that if they can’t make a product that’s better than what the rest of the market offers, they’re not even going to waste their time.

When asked why Apple’s rivals often struggle to succeed in the realm of design, Ive responded:

Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us — a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

Regarding Apple’s process when designing a product and the different ways ideas and product initiatives can come about, Ive adds:

There are different approaches — sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging. What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware of, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions: what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge and very exciting.

And briefly touching on software, Ive notes that the end goal of every product is to get the product out of the way and have the user focus on the actual experience. As an example, Ive mentions the newly released iPhoto app for the iPad, which Ive notes “consumes you” and makes you forget you’re even using an iPad.

Check out the entire interview over here.

Thankfully, Samsung’s disingenuous efforts to wield its RAND encumbered patents against Apple seems to be falling short. One week ago, a court in the Netherlands ruled that Samsung cannot pursue injunctive relief against Apple so long as Apple is open to negotiating a license with Samsung for their 3G patents.

The decision was handed down from the District Court of The Hague, and as we’ve covered before, Samsung is taking Apple to task for infringing upon patents that are essential to 3G standards. Consequently, Samsung is obligated to make those patents available for licensing on fair and non discriminatory terms.

What’s more, the Court ruled that Samsung can’t assert its 3G/UMTS wireless patents against the iPhone 4S due to patent exhaustion. In other words, because the iPhone 4S employs a chipset from Qualcomm, and because Qualcomm has a license to Samsung’s patents, Samsung can’t assert those patents against Apple since Apple’s right to those patents are transferred over via Qualcomm.

Florian Mueller adds:

Apple is licensed by extension since it purchases baseband chips from Qualcomm, and Samsung’s attempt to terminate its license agreement with Qualcomm as far as third-party beneficiary Apple is concerned failed because Samsung had made a commitment to ETSI, the standards body in charge of 3G, that it would grant irrevocable licenses to its 3G/UMTS essential patents.

Mueller declared the decision an “meaningful victory” for Apple, in part because the court’s position on FRAND patents means Samsung is unlikely to get much money out of the current litigation.

“So far, Samsung has not been able to prevail with any of its offensive claims against Apple anywhere on this planet,” he explained. “Today’s ruling is only the latest in a series of losses.”
Even though Samsung and Apple continue to battle it out in legal battles across the globe, the two companies remain important partners in a number of areas. Samsung, for instance is believed to be the lead supplier of the Retina Displays Apple is using on its newly released iPad.

Apple issued a statement addressing the issue, or non-issue perhaps, to The Loop:

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications,” Apple representative Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

A must read:

Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple, and the journalism of the New York Times and ABC News in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and environmental issues in Apple’s Asian supply chain that do exist.

He has hurt the true cause, not helped it.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and its name is Draw Something, the wildly popular game from OMGPOP. Over the past few days, the apps popularity has skyrocketed, now boasting over 25 million registered users.

9to5Mac adds:

A few days ago, the developer told TechCrunch it reached 25 million registered users, 10 million active daily users, and close to 1 billion paid ad impressions every day. That is just over 5 weeks after launching. With even more press following reports that Zynga is in talks to acquire developer OMGPOP, the app is continuing to climb app charts in both the App Store and on Google Play.

Last we checked, the app was the number one free and paid app on iTunes.

I guess if you overtake Words with Friends, Zynga takes notice.

Tweakers reports via Google Translate:

Thermal Images Tweakers.net with an infrared camera made confirm the higher temperature. A new iPad was placed next to an iPad 2, both tablets were entrusted with the GLBenchmark. After five minutes, per tablet, the temperature of the hottest point is measured. On the left is the new iPad. Noted that the lower right corner at the rear a temperature of 33.6 ° C. The iPad 2 scored in the same place a temperature of 28.3 ° C, a difference of 5.3 ° C.

But John Gruber astutely points out:

Celsius and Fahrenheit are relative temperature scales, not absolute, so you can’t do percentage-based comparisons. Think about it: 33.6 / 28.3 gives you an “18.7 percent” increase, but if you do the math with the same temperatures in Fahrenheit, you get 92.5 / 82.9 = “11.6 percent” increase. If you really want to do a percentage based comparison, you need to convert to an absolute temperature scale like Kelvin, which shows you that it’s actually a 1.8 percent increase in temperature (306.75 / 301.45). This is middle school science.

CiccareseDesign a few weeks ago put together some interesting iPhone 5 mockups. They look pretty sleek, admittedly, but at the risk of being a total and complete buzzkill, it’s essentially just an iPhone UI melded with Apple’s Magic Mouse design. It also borrows heavily from the rumored iPhone 5 teardrop design that many expected to see in stores this past fall.

In any event, the mockups are certainly interesting and worth checking out until we get our hands on legit iPhone 5 mockups.

Looks good, and truthfully, this design is much more ergonomic (or as Michael Scott from The Office once said, “Urkelnomic”) than the leaked iPhone 5 teardrop designs we saw last Summer. The only issue is that a phone with this design would shake and wobble incessantly when placed down on a flat surface.

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There’s nothing fun about getting an MRI, and if you happen to be even a little bit claustrophobic, the experience can quite easily be jarring. So to help alleviate the emotional stress that can accompany an MRI, GE and PDC are exploring ways to integrate the iPad into the MRI experience.

The Apple Blog reports:

As part of what the company is calling the MR Suite, patients are given an iPad that has an app tailored to the experience. From the app they can adjust the lighting levels in the room as well as choose the music. Or, if patients don’t like the selection, they can dock their own iOS device to the MR Suite iPad. They can then stream their own music, video and photos from their own device through the MR Suite’s docking station…

On the ceiling above the MRI machine is an LED panel that can show images like nature scenes and videos that are meant to be calming, which the patient can swipe through to choose via the iPad.

And so Apple’s iPad continues to seep into all aspects of our daily lives.

The USA Today reports on the ongoing and close relationship Apple has with Stanford University. The connections between Stanford and Apple are of course extensive and well documented. Stanford has a wildly popular iPhone development course taught by Apple employees, and Apple plucks with great regularity Stanford grads. One prominent Stanford alum is Scott Forstall who now serves as Apple’s senior VP of iOS software. And of course, Jobs’ now legendary commencement speech was given at Stanford.

One story touched upon is that of Jonathan Tilley, a Stanford student who created a decently popular app called Eggaduppa.

Apple noticed and offered Tilley an intern position. “I had to pull down the app,” he says. “Apple doesn’t like you working on side projects.” The intern gig turned into a paid part-time position, says Tilley, who is finishing his senior year. Apple wants him full time after graduation, he adds.

Check out the full story over here.

Well, Tim Cook certainly wasn’t lying today when he said Apple’s new iPad saw a record breaking weekend. Not long ago, Apple issued a press release announcing that they’ve sold 3 million of their Retina Display enabled iPads since it first launched this past Friday.

Apple today announced it has sold three million of its incredible new iPad, since its launch on Friday, March 16. The new iPad features a stunning new Retina™ display, Apple’s new A5X chip with quad-core graphics, a 5 megapixel iSight camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video, and still delivers the same all-day 10 hour battery life* while remaining amazingly thin and light. iPad Wi-Fi + 4G supports ultrafast 4G LTE networks in the US and Canada, and fast networks around the world including those based on HSPA+ and DC-HSDPA.**

“The new iPad is a blockbuster with three million sold―the strongest iPad launch yet,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Customers are loving the incredible new features of iPad, including the stunning Retina display, and we can’t wait to get it into the hands of even more customers around the world this Friday.”

Putting the figure into context, it took Apple 28 days to hit the 1 million mark with the original iPad. The tablet market, at this point, is the iPad.

The iPad 3rd generation is currently available in 12 countries and is poised to go on sale in 24 more countries this coming Friday on march 23.

Following Tim Cook’s statement that Apple saw a record weekend with respect to iPad sales, AT&T issued a brief press release a short while ago touting a record breaking number of iPad activations.

On Friday, March 16, AT&T set a new single-day record for its iPad sales and activations, demonstrating robust demand for the new iPad on the nation’s largest 4G network, covering nearly 250 million people.

via Marketwatch