Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Fortune on Apple’s Education Event

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 17, 2012 at 8:07 am

Wait! Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune says that Apple’s education event isn’t about “a GarageBand for e-books” at all:

MacInnis also mentioned GarageBand in our interview. But what he was describing was a sample iPad textbook, produced in-house and packed with pedological bells and whistles, that would serve as a reference design for textbook publishers, much in the way GarageBand for the iPad showed iOS developers what the new platform could do.

MacInnis does expect Apple to unveil new tools for creating iPad textbooks, along with a new content repository to make e-textbooks easily available to teachers. But the tools are not a “GarageBand for e-books.” And according to MacInnis, they’re designed to support the textbook industry, not to do an end-run around it.

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Wikipedia’s Anti-SOPA Blackout

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 16, 2012 at 11:27 am

Looks like Wikipedia will protest the proposed anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA by disappearing for 24 hours:

“The emerging consensus of the community seems to be for a global blackout of English Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, said on Twitter on Monday afternoon.  “Final details [are] under consideration but consensus seems to be for ‘full’ rather than ‘soft’ blackout… This is going to be wow.”

Wikipedians have been considering the radical measure for several weeks, alongside other sites such as Reddit. This weekend’s statement from the White House, which appeared to side with Silicon Valley – prompting criticism from media owners including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch – has failed to dissuade them of the need for a blackout, making it a controversial decision among some users and editors.

I’m not sure if the people with the most power to nix SOPA–lawmakers–care that much about Wikipedia. But how would they react if even a small percentage of us who do care about Wikipedia were moved by the blackout to call our congresspeople and voice opposition to SOPA?

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MHL, a Possible Solution for the Scarcity of Android Add-Ons

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 16, 2012 at 12:52 am
Pioneer's AppRadio 2

Pioneer's AppRadio 2.

If you own an iPhone, you can choose from a surging sea of add-ons that work with it: speaker docks, in-car gizmos, game controllers, and much more. If you have an Android phone–well, if you’re lucky, the company that made it sells some peripheral devices. (Motorola, invented of such add-ons as the Lapdock, is especially conscientious here.)

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Coming on Thursday: Live Blog Coverage of Apple’s Education Event

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 16, 2012 at 12:13 am

On Thursday, January 19th, Apple is holding a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum. It says that the topic involves education. Lots of folks are logically assuming that iPad textbooks are at least part of the story. We won’t know any more details for sure until the event gets underway at 10am ET, but once it does, I’ll liveblog the whole thing at technologizer.com/appleeducation–and I hope you’ll join me. (Head there now if you’d like to get an e-mail reminder when the event begins.)

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CES 2012 Was Big, Very Big

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 15, 2012 at 2:56 pm

Whenever anyone asked me how my CES was going, I said something along the lines of “It seems pretty darn vibrant for a show that’s allegedly in trouble.” Now the official stats are in, and they report record-breaking numbers for both attendees and exhibitors. Chris Ziegler of the Verge:

The fact that neither Microsoft nor Apple are participating in these kinds of events anymore is certainly a sign of something, but 153,000 press, exhibitors, analysts, and staff are suggesting that the death knell could be a bit premature.

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Phineas J. Whoopee, You’re Like Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 13, 2012 at 11:57 pm

TIME’s James Poniewozik makes a point that seems obvious, how that I think of it: Tennessee Tuxedo, the semi-educational 1960s TV cartoon starring Don Adams as a penguin, featured elements that are uncannily reminiscent of Google and the iPad.

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Dell’s Little Big Ultrabook Looks Like a Winner

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 11, 2012 at 3:41 am

The more Ultrabooks that get unveiled here at CES, the more convinced I am that it’s silly to discuss them as if they were a coherent new class of portable computer. No two manufacturers seem to agree on what an Ultrabook should be. That’s neat, since it means they’re experimenting. And on Tuesday, Dell introduced my favorite answer so far to the question “What is an Ultrabook?” in the form of its new XPS 13.

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Samsung Stretches the Definition of Ultrabook

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 9, 2012 at 2:34 pm

When Intel started talking about the concept of Ultrabooks last year, I thought the definition was pretty simple: Ultrabooks were MacBook Air knockoffs that had Intel processors and ran Windows 7.

It turned out to be more complicated than that. Ultrabooks do use Intel CPUs–they’re Intel’s idea, after all–and they do run Windows. But not all of them bear much resemblance at all to the Air. Really, as long as PC makers design Ultrabooks to be fairly thin, they have lots of latitude to build different sorts of portable computers at different price points.

Case in point: Samsung’s Series 5 Ultra systems, the company’s first official Ultrabooks, which it’s announcing here at CES. There’s a Series 5 Ultra with a 14″ display. (Most Ultrabooks to date have been 13-inchers.) There are ones with 500GB hard disks. (Most Ultrabooks use pricey flash storage and max out at 256GB.) There’s even an optical drive option. (I’d assumed that every Ultrabook would ditch the drive in order to achieve the maximum possible razor-thinness.) And while there’s certainly a dash of Air-like look-and-feel to the industrial design, they’re not clones.

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