I wouldn’t buy an unlocked iPhone 4–even if I could do it at an Apple Store in the U.S., starting this week. But if the iPhone 5 is available unlocked from the get-go–well, that would be sort of tempting.
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
How Polaroid Failed to Introduce the Kindle in the Mid-1940s
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is justly famous for his 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think.” It proposes a device called a memex which bears an uncanny resemblance to a personal computer connected to the World Wide Web–or at least as close as anyone could come five decades before the Web changed the world.
As described in the Atlantic article, the memex was the size of a desk. But Bush also had an idea for a portable microfilm reader–which sounds like it would have been to the Kindle as the memex was to the PC–and tried to convince Edwin Land, cofounder of Polaroid, to help him build it. That’s one of the innumerable interesting things about Polaroid which I learned but couldn’t fit into my story “Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible.”
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Remember Polaroid? That Company That Made Unsanitary 3D Glasses?
In “Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible,” I had a lot to say about a single fascinating Polaroid camera. But almost everything Polaroid did was fascinating, and it didn’t all involve instant photography. I came across a lot of stuff that didn’t fit into the SX-70 story. Such as this…
Before Edwin Land invented the instant camera, he invented synthetic polarizers. He realized in the 1930s that one application of the technology would be 3D movies, but it wasn’t until 1952 that the idea took off–and only briefly at the time.
In its May 16th 1953 issue, the New Yorker published a story on Polaroid’s 3D glasses and concerns over whether they were unsanitary. Polaroid had been selling instant cameras for five years at that point, but they didn’t merit a mention in the story–Land was apparently still more famous as the polarizer guy.
If you replaced the references to Polaroid with RealD and the one to Bwana Devil with, say, Thor, you could practically republish this story today. Fifty-eight years later, people are still freaking out over germy 3D glasses and figuring out ways to disinfect them.
And hey, I just learned that Polaroid Eyewear–a separate company from the current version of the Polaroid that sells photography-related stuff, but descended from the original Polaroid–is selling 3D glasses all over again.
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PCMag.com Tries to Shop for Windows Phone 7 Handsets
Maybe Windows Phone 7’s sluggish start in the market is due–at least in part–to carriers not doing a very good job of explaining and selling it.
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The Blu-Ray Cup is Fifteen Percent Full
Retail research company NPD is out with a new report on Blu-Ray, and among the tidbits in its press release is the fact that 15 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD report having used a Blu-Ray player in the past six months. Analyst Russ Krupnick provides a sound bite in the press release that sounds, well, lukewarm:
While Blu-ray may not be the replacement for DVD that many once hoped for, it is certainly adding strength to the physical video-disc market. This added stability is helping to extend the life of discs, even as digital options gain in popularity.
So is 15 percent penetration good, bad, or indifferent? Well, Blu-Ray was launched in June of 2006, so it’s now a half-decade old. By way of (imprecise) comparison, DVD turned five in 2002–and that year, the CEA reported that DVD players were in 35 percent of U.S. households that year. Sounds like Blu-Ray is off to a far more sluggish start than its predecessor.
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Windows 8/Lion/iOS 5/iCloud Wrapup
Between Windows 8, OS X 10.7 Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, we’ve been inundated with previews of new operating-system stuff over the last week or so–and the one thing they all have in common is that they look beyond the era of the PC as we knew it. (Even Windows 8–when Microsoft seems to be thinking in post-PC terms, you know something’s afoot.) That’s what I wrote about for my Technologizer column for TIME.com this week.
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Disaster Averted: Apple Revises App Store Content Rules
Whew! Every time I’ve bought a Kindle book over the past few months, I’ve worried about the new iOS App Store guidelines Apple announced earlier this year, which said that app developers could only give iOS users access to content purchased outside of the App Store if the same content was available inside the App Store at the same price.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the money publishers make inside the App Store. So the new rule seemed to force some companies into an impossible situation–such as Amazon, which was already handing 70 percent of Kindle book prices over to publishers. Apple apparently wanted all of the remaining 30 percent for itself, destroying Amazon’s business model.
But as MacRumors’ Jordan Golson is reporting, Apple has quietly blinked. Now the rules don’t say that app developers need to match content offers made outside of the App Store inside the App Store. Companies don’t need to use In App Purchases at all. They just can’t provide a “Buy” button inside an app that makes it easy for a user to go to the Web and buy new content.
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Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible
Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land with an SX-70 and an SX-70 snapshot in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office on November 1st, 1972. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/Getty Images
What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back in 2005, when I helped choose a list of the fifty greatest gadgets of the past fifty years, we ranked the Sony Walkman as #1 and Apple’s iPod as #2. Fabulous gizmos both; I suspect, however, that they wouldn’t have topped the list if they hadn’t been bestsellers of epic proportions.
The SX-70–specifically, the SX-70 which I bought at an antique store in Redwood City, California in April of 2011.
But greatness isn’t a popularity contest–not primarily one, at least. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.
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A Quick Look at iOS 5
Engadget’s Jacob Schulman has a nice walkthrough of iOS 5’s major new features on the iPhone and iPad.
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Where’s the Voice?
And a bonus WWDC question #1: what happened to the voice recognition–provided through technology from the Siri app which Apple acquired last year and/or a partnership with Nuance–which was allegedly going to be part of iOS 5?