Displaying items by tag: Apple

A couple of weeks ago there was an uproar over the data collection practices of the iPhone social networking app Path. This app was intended to allow users to have a more intimate social networking experience. Well like an intimate partner they appear to have been going through some of their users personal information. In fact Path was requesting and uploading users contacts lists; including phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and anything else that was attached to the contact in question (there is a lot you can put in a contact entry).

Apple has been playing a dangerous game for some time now. They have been filing ambiguous patents and copyrights in the hopes that they can protect their mobile devices. For the most part this strategy was working just fine for Apple until a few Judges began to notice a pattern of suppression in their efforts. That was a turning point in Apple legal battles against companies like Samsung, HTC and others in the Android family. Now, however, Apple is facing something they never expected; a smaller corporation is fighting for the copyright they already have on the iPad.

Yesterday a round of happy articles from members of the press that are getting tired of Apple’s dominance in the tablet market hit the internet. Their primary focus was something that we have talked about since the original iPad hit the market; productivity. Although many companies try to use the iPad and Android based tablets they are often web-only options or rely on virtualization applications like Citrix’s Xen or VMWare’s View. These products are expensive to own and operate (in addition to the money for the tablets) and are usually not justifiable by the bean counters.

Apple has announced that they are going to have the Fair Labor Association begin inspecting their factories beginning this month. The move comes after public outcry and much bad press over working conditions at the Foxconn factories where Apple’s products are manufactured. The question that begs to be asked now is; why does Apple need to bring in the FLA if they have been monitoring and are aware of the situation at these factories?

The patent war between Apple and the rest of the world has become old news. To most people the continuous fighting back and forth over patents, designs, and copyright is boring and is causing the products offered by the companies in question to put our little more than refreshes of existing technology. We have stopped reporting on much of it simply because it is the same news with different countries attached to it. However, something new and unusual is happening in the suit between Motorola and Apple in Germany…

When the iPhone 4S launched with Siri it was quickly discovered that you could get Siri to say from rather entertaining things. This prompted the site Sh*t Siri Says and started a short lived phenomenon of people trying everything to get Siri to say something funny or inappropriate. This site is sort of ironic now as we now have enough entertaining and inappropriate comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook to start up another website called, yep you guessed it Sh*t Tim Cook Says.

There are many things that bother me about the way the media portrays things and how this portrayal develops corporate myths that are then bought into by the consumer market. One of these has always been the superiority of Apple products over the rest of the competition. The myth all started many years ago when Apple manufactured everything they made here in the US pretty much by hand. They were a boutique dealer and could afford to take the extra time and effort to get all of the details right. However, all of that changed when Tim Cook arrived on the scene.

You know, it has been a long time since we have written anything about Apple and their… let’s say company culture. Really there has not been too much to write about lately, but all of that changed a today when one event happened that made me laugh; quite literally out loud.

CES 2012 - Las Vegas Nevada; nVidia had their big press conference for CES 2012 and as has been the trend for the last three years it is all about Tegra. This time we had a look at Tegra 3; As most of you know Tegra 3 is nVidia’s Quad/Quint Core SoC and is hitting the market in the form of Asus’ Transformer Prime Tablet. This new SoC (System on Chip) has been seen as the major competitor for Apple’s A6 SoC (although some still feel that the A6 has better and more elegant caching instructions).

Over the course of the next few weeks you will read dozens of articles on the web and in print talking about the top technology and how this or that product shaped the market. However, no matter how impressive the technology was there was one thing that shaped the world of consumer electronics more than anything else. The lawsuit; it is a simple and unfortunate fact that patent and copyright lawsuits had a bigger impact on the consumer electronic market than any 5 products put together.