Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Woz Speaks

Dan Lyons of Newsweek has a good, unedited interview with Steve Wozniak:

I took a year off from college to earn money for tuition. I was working as a programmer and I told the company that I knew how to design minicomputers. This exec said “If you can design one, we’ll get you the parts.” So I designed a very simple computer, and they got me the chips. I was working on it with a friend, Bill Fernandez. We were in his garage building this thing. Bill said “You should meet this guy Steve Jobs, he’s at our high school and he knows about this digital stuff. And he’s played some pranks too.” So Steve came over. We talked about what pranks we had done. Then we started talking about music. I was turned on to Dylan, reading the words and analyzing them. We agreed Dylan was more important than the Beatles because he had words that meant things. He was serious. He was not just about enjoyment. We started going to Dylan concerts together. We would go through music stores looking for Dylan bootlegs. We found some pamphlets with Dylan interviews, and then we drove down to Santa Cruz to meet the guy who wrote the pamphlets. He showed us some rare pictures of Dylan and we listened to some rare music of Dylan.

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iOS 5 is Great. Don’t Rush to Get It!

One of the top two or three advantages that the iPhone has over Android handsets has nothing to do with new handsets. It’s the fact that when a new iPhone is imminent, owners of old iPhones can upgrade to the new version of iOS as soon as they like. Lack of fragmentation is a wonderful thing.

Apple released iOS 5 on Wednesday. It’s excellent–and Dan Moren’s Macworld review is an excellent summary of what’s new and worthwhile. If you have a recent iPhone and/or an iPad, get it–the new notification features alone are a huge deal, and they’re just the beginning. But taking your time about the upgrade is a perfectly rational strategy.

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RIM’s BlackBerry Outage is Getting Worse, Not Better

The BlackBerry e-mail outage that has been impacting parts of Europe and the Middle East for days has now crept into the U.S. Here’s Ina Fried’s report on a conference call RIM held to (sort of) explain what’s going on.

I’m not an expert on e-mail back-end architecture, and it’s possible that BlackBerry’s overall uptime remains excellent. But these sweeping outages have happened before. Isn’t it a major problem for RIM customers who run their own BlackBerry servers that they’re still so dependent on things working properly up in Canada?

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Sony, Bring This Android-Powered Walkman Over Here

One of the ongoing mysteries of consumer electronics is why the enormously popular iPod Touch has its market–touch-screen media players that can run apps–pretty much all to itself. (I still think you could make a nice Windows Phone-powered Touch competitor; Microsoft apparently isn’t interested.) But at Sony’s booth at CEATEC in Tokyo last week, there was a row of Walkman devices–and one of them, the NW-Z1000, is the Touch alternative I’ve been wondering about.

It’s got a 4.3″ display and runs Android–and while the user interface is in Japanese, limiting my ability to judge it, it looks quite nice. It’s coming out in December in Tokyo, but Sony apparently doesn’t have any plans to bring it to the U.S. I’d love to see see it get here, if only to see how it would fare against the iPod Touch.

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iPhones: Always Evolutionary

“…really just a minor improvement…”

“Trust me, Apple won’t maintain its lead in the market if it continues making iterative updates.”

“But one thing didn’t happen today: We weren’t blown away. We weren’t surprised. We didn’t jump up and down, screaming. We don’t even know if we’ll rush right out and get one.”

Boy, people really aren’t all that giddy over the iPhone 4S, are they? It’s not like the old days, when every iPhone upgrade prompted hooting, stomping, and cheering by throngs of grateful Apple fans. Apple should be worried. Very worried.

Except: Those quotes above aren’t about the iPhone 4S. They’re about the iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4, and you can read the stories they came from here, here, and here, respectively.

I dug those sound bites up as I thought about some of the initial commentary that declared the iPhone 4S to be a snooze compared to earlier upgrades. I had a nagging suspicion that a fair number of people always say that about new iPhones. And in fact, they always do.

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Seen at CEATEC, Tokyo’s Big Gadget Show

I had a good time last week visiting Tokyo to attend the CEATEC show. Back here in the states, most people don’t know what that is–and I explain that it’s similar to CES and IFA the biggest consumer electronics exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, respectively. But that doesn’t fully describe CEATEC, which is a smaller show (though still pretty expansive) and focused on the Japanese market rather than a global marketplace.

The best way to convey what it’s like is to share some of the photos I snapped. So here we go.

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The Early iPhone 4S Reviews Are Here

I don’t have an iPhone 4S yet, so I’ve been reading the first round of reviews from folks who got them ahead of the handset’s release this Friday. I don’t see any stunning conclusions. Everybody likes the phone either a lot or a lot, everybody’s impressed by the Siri voice assistant and likes the improved camera, and nobody’s overly traumatized by the fact that the case design hasn’t changed. As per Hallowed Technologizer Tradition, let’s look at the final paragraph (or two) of some of the reviews, which is the place where most reviewers finally tell you what they really think.

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WebOS’s Moment of Truth

According to AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger, the fate of HP’s WebOS may be decided this week:

While webOS is now largely finished and its hardware was ready to sell, HP’s cancellation of the hardware side of the equation, motivated by dismal sales, means that a spinoff of Palm would result in a return to square one for the group, forcing it to formulate a new licensing business in a market where even Microsoft has had a very difficult time assembling a viable ecosystem of mobile licensees.

I hope it lives, even though I’m afraid it’ll break my heart again.

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