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Apple Is No Longer An Innovative Company, Says Former Steve Jobs Collaborator On Original Mac's Design
The Best Macs For Running Both Snow Leopard And Mavericks
Happy 50th Birthday, Compact Cassette! (Remember Them?)
Why Apple Should Make iWork Free on New Macs Too
Can The Internet Of Everything Bring Back The High-Growth Economy?
The Tesla S Is The Ford Model T Of The 21st Century
Apple Is No Longer An Innovative Company, Says Former Steve Jobs Collaborator On Original Mac's Design
Quartz's Christopher Mimsreports that former early days Steve Jobs associate Hartmut Esslinger, author of a new book recounting his time with Jobs, entitled "Keep it Simple," says Apple of today is no longer the Apple he experienced during the '80s, when he worked directly with Steve Jobs on the original Mac's industrial design. Esslinger tells Mims that Apple of today more aptly resembles Sony of the 1980s, a visionary founder who's been replaced by leaders who aren’t thinking beyond refinement and increasing profit. Essenger thinks that wherever the next big thing comes from, it’s likely to be from entrepreneurs and designers who are not steeped in existing ways of thinking in Silicon Valley, most likely from Asia.
For the full report, visit:
http://tinyurl.com/k7ukv2a
The Best Macs For Running Both Snow Leopard And Mavericks
Low End Mac's Dan Bashur says there are several things to consider that are very important to any Mac user who may want to keep legacy applications and features alive with OS X Snow Leopard as we enter the OS X Mavericks era, noting tha you'll need to steer clear of nearly all Macs sold after 2011, but recent enough to support Mavericks, which he expects to have the same minimum hardware requirements as Mountain Lion, meaning any Core 2 Duo or later Mac with a 64-bit kernel that shipped with Open CL graphics and is running with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM with 8 GB of available hard drive space.
He supplies a list of Macs currently supported by both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, and happily the spectrum of hardware is quite extensive.
You can check it out at:
http://tinyurl.com/n267u7d
Happy 50th Birthday, Compact Cassette! (Remember Them?)
Netherlands based technology firm Philips, the innovator behind Compact Cassette technology, is celebrating the cassette’s golden anniversary, maintaining that few inventions have been as culturally meaningful during the last 50 years as the compact cassette. It provided a portable and inexpensive way to capture moments in time and ultimately, helped shape the music industry, popular culture, politics, and the way we live today.
Philips notes that the romance, impact and nostalgia of the compact cassette can be seen in many popular movies and books, including High Fidelity (both the book and film), Wayne’s World, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Clockwork Orange, Electrick Children and Say Anything.
Not so jolly is that the 1979 Iran revolution was fueled by the audio cassette tape,mwith ecorded tapes of Ayatollah Khomeini’s sermons in Najaf distributed through the underground, undermining the House of Pahlavi's secular regime.
In addition, Philips notes that the "Cassette Scandal" of 2000 was one of the main political events in Ukraine's post-independence history, centering on accusations against the then-standing president Kuchma regarding his involvement in an abduction and other crimes – all caught on cassette tapes in secret conversations. The audio revelations dramatically changed the country's domestic and foreign policy following the scandal.
For more information, including the history of the cassette, it’s impact on popular culture, archived photos and advertisements, visit:
http://www.cassette50.com
Why Apple Should Make iWork Free on New Macs Too
Motley Fool contributor Daniel Sparks notes that first iWork was free on iCloud, now it's free on iOS, too, but what about free iWork on new Macs? Sparks notes that Apple's iWork productuvuty suite, consisting of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers -- the equivalent of Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, respectively, currently retails for a total of $60 on Apple's Mac App Store. However he contends that with the suite now free on both iCloud and iOS, there's little reason for Apple to continue selling it for a profit. Much better to bolster the Mac user experience and add value to Mac hardware purchases by bundling iWork with new Macs for free, similarly to the way Apple used to bundle ClarisWorks/AppleWorks with Macs back in the '90s.
With iWork software contributing only a minuscule proportion to Apple's balance sheet, Sparks contends that a decision to bundle iWork on Macs could provide an outsized gain in hardware revenue despite a loss in first-party software revenue, and concurrently apply a bit more pressure on Google and especially Microsoft at the same time.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/09/15/will-apple-make-iwork-free-on-new-macs
Can The Internet Of Everything Bring Back The High-Growth Economy?
A paper by chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute and senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management Michael Mandel says that rather than being fueled by consumption and borrowing, what he calls "the Internet of Everything" (IOE) will lead to an economy built on production and investment, with much more extensive education and training built right into the fabric of the economy rather than being separated out.
He says that in estimating the impact of the Internet Of Everything on the U.S. growth rate. starting with the mcKinsey global institute projections, he assumed that the U.S. would get one-third of the $2.7 to $6.2 trillion in global gains from the IOE, which translates into $0.9 to $2.1 trillion. Because the U.S. is likely to be the technological leader in implementing the IOE, this one-third assumption is larger than the current U.S. share of the global economy.
The paper suggests that part of those U.S. gains will show up as an increase in measured gross domestic product, and part will show up in unmeasured increase in consumer surplus - that is, non-monetary improvements in welfare. In reviewing a variety of studies on the consumer surplus generated by today’s Internet, including free web sites and services such as Wikipedia and YouTube. the researchers' assessment was that it was reasonable to assume that two-thirds of the economic benefits of IOE will show up in gross domestic product, with the rest showing up in unmeasured consumer surplus, yielding a net addition to GDP of $0.6 to $1.4 trillion in 2025, and assumptionthat reflects projected heavy use of IOE in manufacturing rather than consumer-oriented services. Rather than being fueled by consumption and borrowing, the Internet Of Everything will lead to an economy built on production and investment, with much more extensive education and training built right into the fabric of the economy rather than being separated out.
You can check out and download the report in PDF format at:
http://goo.gl/9UzksV
The Tesla S Is The Ford Model T Of The 21st Century
DigitalTrends' Bill Roberson notes that a hundred years ago, America was in the midst of a mobility revolution as the Ford Model T put the nation on wheels for the first time, and that today, we’re seeing the next era of mobility begin to unfold, with much of the credit going Elon Musk's Tesla Model S EV.
Roberson reports that he recently had the chance to do a side by side comparison of two revolutionary cars – a 1913 Ford Model T and a 2013 Tesla Model S - to see where we’ve been and where we’re headed, observing that history will show that the Model S was the Model T of our time, with both cars designed by men driven by their visions, and that both changed the course of mobility history. The photos alone are worth a look.
He notes that while electric vehicles today may seem like something from a science fiction future, they’re actually as old as cars themselves, but that the Tesla S is so tremendously good at this stage in its development cycle is a credit to Mr. Musk’s engineering prowess and his able employees. However, he says that years from now, history will show the Tesla S shifted the proverbial personal transportation paradigm just as the Model T did in the early 20th century, citing an observation by Model S owner Steve Ou that the Model S is essentially “a computer on wheels,” allowing give and take over the 3G cell network, and cars capable of interplay with 4G LTE are coming on line soon. Even people who are only moderately tech savvy can usually update their smartphone, computer or smart TV/appliance with a firmware update, apps and new OS. It will be the same for cars very soon, especially for electric vehicles. Beyond that, controlling the car with other connected information nodes, such as Google Glass, show how serious tech companies are about getting into the computerized car.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/b4Fgxa
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