Displaying items by tag: Steve Jobs

As of today, Adobe's Flash is officially removed from Google Play. They announced last November “we are focusing our work with Flash on PC browsing and mobile apps packaged with Adobe AIR, and will be discontinuing our development of the Flash Player for mobile browsers.“ Android 4.1 wont have any certified implementations of Flash Player. Adobe will use configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that already have Flash Player installed.

We have been following Apple’s free run through the patent office for quite a while now (and I covered it long before starting this site). In the beginning Apple would patent advancements or refinements on technology they “borrowed” from others. Often these improvements were so noticeable that they were close to being a new technology. Even Steve Jobs once admitted to shamelessly stealing the ideas of others. What they were not doing at the time was using the patent system as a tool to stifle competition and they had not built the mythology that they invent everything just yet.

Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference took place today and with it came a flood of news articles about what Apple said today. Many of these were off the deep end as if what Apple was saying was music of unearthly quality. We did not attend (and were not invited anyway), but have been reading some of what is being pushed out to the Internet. What we have noticed in the video, articles and live feeds is something that we have talked about time and time again. Apple is not the same company as it was with Steve Jobs.

Sometimes things just do not go your way. Apple has been seeing that recently under the guidance of new CEO Tim Cook. We are not going to get into the debate about whether Tim Cook is a better or worse CEO as that is comparing Apples to Oranges. Tim Cook is a different type of CEO; he is a businessman first and foremost. It was one of the reasons that Steve Jobs wanted him in the position he was in. The company needed someone to “mind the back account” more than almost anything else.

Well, well, well; it looks like Apple has been caught altering the data that Siri returns to their users when asked specific questions. Last week it was reported that when users asked Siri “What is the best smartphone” it replied with the answer The Nokia Lumia 900. Now Apple has previously stated that the information from Siri all comes from WolframAlpha “computational knowledge engine” (pronounce that search engine) and they have no power to alter the data that Siri sends.

The New iPad is having a VERY rough time for a new Apple product. Even the iPhone 4 with its “antennagate” issue has not gotten as much press for so many problems. The first one that was brought to our attention was the heating issue. This little problem has been vilified and explained away by multiple sites. However, there is no mistaking the fact that under usage the New iPad runs up to 13 degrees hotter than the iPad2. Apple and others have tried to say it is an increase in the number of LEDs that are used for backlighting and that is plausible, but we should also look at the fact that you have a larger battery, beefier charging system, twice the number of GPU cores (4 PowerVR SGX 543s) and also twice the amount of memory under the hood. All of this adds up in a way that the Apple engineers appear to have missed. But the heat issue is not the only problem that has been brought up this week alone.

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.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has launched a new exhibit with the help of Invent Now, Inc. The Exhibit is features the Patents of Steve Jobs; and has been designed to look like a long string of iPhones. According to the USPTO the exhibit will feature over 300 patents that were awarded for Steve Jobs along with some of Apple’s trademarks.

In business it is often said that you need to have a thick skin to survive.  Now that may be true when you are dealing with vendors, manufacturers and even consumers but for your products sometimes thin is better.  We had the chance to talk to Troy Rutt at True Power about their new ThinSkin product for the iPhone 4.

Have you ever wondered how Apple does it? I mean how they really get the best information. Those low prices and just seem to be on top of things so well. Many have said that Steve Jobs just has his finger on the pulse of today’s computer consumers.  Now, I will grant that Steve is a marketing genius but there has to be something else. One of these things was the former inclusion of Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board (until an obvious conflict of interest came up) this gave Apple some amazing information into consumer wants and trends (after all Google is in the business of selling ads and collects a ton of data for this purpose).  But we have always had a feeling that there was something else going on behind the scenes.