Tag: Apple

Apple, China, and the Truth

Seth Anderson0 comment

Torn and Frayed
Torn and Frayed

Mike Daisey deceived a lot of people with his fable about Chinese factory workers, including This American Life.

Ira Glass writes:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors – our friends and colleagues – have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It’s trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.

A press release with more details about all this is below. We’ll be posting the audio of the program and the transcript on Friday night this week, instead of waiting till Sunday.

(click here to continue reading Retracting “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” | This American Life.)

Yikes! G4 - still chugging

Yikes! G4 – still chugging

Evan Osnos of The New Yorker adds:

“This American Life,” the public-radio show, has retracted a China piece that it says it never should’ve run. …The retracted story was by a monologist named Mike Daisey, who described journeying to the gates of Foxconn, the Apple supplier in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. He said he interviewed hundreds of workers, finding girls who were twelve and thirteen years old and others whose “hands shake uncontrollably” from chemicals used to clean iPhone screens. He said he visited other factories and saw surveillance cameras over the beds in dorm rooms, some kind of “sci-fi, dystopian, ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘1984’ bull[BLEEP].” And in the end, he winds his warning around to us, the consumers: “They’re making your crap that way today.”

But Daisey lied. He made up things about his trip, and the show’s attempts at fact-checking failed to uncover them. It all fell apart when Rob Schmitz, a seasoned reporter who is the China correspondent for the public-radio program “Marketplace,” got suspicious and tracked down the translator who’d worked with Daisey. It’s worth a listen, but, in short, Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?

(click here to continue reading Letter from China: Apple, China, and the Truth : The New Yorker.)

Pip and his MBA

Pip and his MBA

Rob Schmitz:

For the past year and a half, I’ve reported on Apple’s supply chain in China, where I work as Marketplace’s China Correspondent, based in Shanghai. When I heard Daisey’s story, certain details didn’t sound right. I tracked down Daisey’s Chinese translator to see for myself.

“My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater.” – Mike Daisey For years, reporters in China have uncovered a sizable list of problems that have shown the dark side of what it’s like to work at factories that assemble Apple products. Mike Daisey would have you believe that he encountered—first-hand—some of the most egregious examples of this history all in just a six-day trip he took to the city of Shenzhen.

(click here to continue reading An acclaimed Apple critic made up the details | Marketplace from American Public Media.)

Hofmann, Jobs and LSD

Seth Anderson0 comment

Steve Jobs and Albert Hofmann (source unknown)

stevejobsgrim.jpg

I know we’ve discussed Steve Jobs and LSD previously in this space, but I’m too lazy to find the link at the moment…

Anyway, too many of the obituaries of SJ omit this one facet of his life: he was imbued with the ethos of the counter-culture, possibly due to his experimentation with mind-expanding chemicals like Albert Hofmann’s “problem child”

“Dear Mr. Jobs,” begins the 2007 letter from Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann to Apple’s (AAPL) CEO. “I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.” Hofmann, as students of the sixties will recall, was the chemist who first synthesized, ingested and experienced the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide.

LSD Art
LSD Art.jpeg

Steve Jobs, as readers of John Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” may remember, dabbled in psychedelics in the 1970s and has called his LSD experiences “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” “I’m writing now,” Hofmann’s letter continues, “shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser’s proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.”

(click here to continue reading Dr. LSD to Steve Jobs: How was your trip? – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech.)

Ryan Grim adds:

The letter led to a roughly 30-minute conversation between Doblin and Jobs, says Doblin, but no contribution to the cause. “He was still thinking, ‘Let’s put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,'” recalls a disappointed Doblin, who says he still hasn’t given up hope that Jobs will come around and contribute.

That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America’s foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates, would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn’t deny having dosed as a young man.

Thinking differently–or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it–is a hallmark of the acid experience. “When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing,” Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann’s one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly “solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead.”

“It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain,” said Herbert. “Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used.”

 

(click here to continue reading Ryan Grim: Read the Never-Before-Published Letter From LSD-Inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.)

Apple and Its Cash Hoard

Seth Anderson0 comment

Apple Store in Soho
Apple Store in Soho

Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune Magazine links to an utterly fascinating perspective on what Apple is doing with its very large hoard of cash (in the neighborhood of $70,000,000,000 at the moment)

Apple’s cash for short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $65.8 billion at the end of the March quarter. Cash increased by $6.1 billion.

The increase in cash is net of approximately $900 million for prepayments and capital expenditures related to the strategic supply agreements that Apple announced last quarter.

(click here to continue reading If Cash is King, Apple’s is an Emperor [Updated] | asymco.)

Instead of giving this money to stock holders as dividend payments, or using it to purchase other companies, Apple uses it as leverage to make arrangements with component factories, as explained below.

Apple actually uses its cash hoard in a very interesting way to maintain a decisive advantage over its rivals: When new component technologies (touchscreens, chips, LED displays) first come out, they are very expensive to produce, and building a factory that can produce them in mass quantities is even more expensive. Oftentimes, the upfront capital expenditure can be so huge and the margins are small enough (and shrink over time as the component is rapidly commoditized) that the companies who would build these factories cannot raise sufficient investment capital to cover the costs.

What Apple does is use its cash hoard to pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of the factory in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time (maybe 6 – 36 months), and then for a discounted rate afterwards.

This yields two advantages: Apple has access to new component technology months or years before its rivals. This allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate. Remember how for up to a year or so after the introduction of the iPhone, none of the would-be iPhone clones could even get a capacitive touchscreen to work as well as the iPhone’s? It wasn’t just the software – Apple simply has access to new components earlier, before anyone else in the world can gain access to it in mass quantities to make a consumer device.

One extraordinary example of this is the aluminum machining technology used to make Apple’s laptops – this remains a trade secret that Apple continues to have exclusive access to and allows them to make laptops with (for now) unsurpassed strength and lightness. Eventually its competitors catch up in component production technology, but by then Apple has their arrangement in place whereby it can source those parts at a lower cost due to the discounted rate they have negotiated with the (now) most-experienced and skilled provider of those parts – who has probably also brought his production costs down too. This discount is also potentially subsidized by its competitors buying those same parts from that provider – the part is now commoditized so the factory is allowed to produce them for all buyers, but Apple gets special pricing.

Apple is not just crushing its rivals through superiority in design, Steve Jobs’s deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet. If it feels like new Apple products appear futuristic, it is because Apple really is sending back technology from the future. Once those technologies (or more accurately, their mass production techniques) become sufficiently commoditized, Apple is then able to compete effectively on cost and undercut rivals. It’s a myth that Apple only makes premium products – it makes them all right, but that is because they are literally more advanced than anything else (i.e. the price premium is not just for design), and once the product line is no longer premium, they are produced more cheaply than competitor equivalents, yielding higher margins, more cash, which results in more ability to continue the cycle.

(click here to continue reading How Apple became a monopsonist – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech.)

That is pretty ingenious, I think.

Ghostery

Seth Anderson7 Comments

Daily News

Within a couple of minutes after reading these paragraphs, I had installed and configured Ghostery to block cookies from over 500 advertising-related tracking sites.

The recent iPhone location-logging controversy caused quite a stir in the media. But as I noted on Twitter a couple weeks back, many of the people upset that their phone keeps track of nearby GPS towers and WiFi access points are oblivious to the fact that their Web-browsing habits are being tracked—often with far more detail—every time they go online.

For example, pretty much any blog or news site you visit (yes, including Macworld.com) uses scripts and tiny (or invisible) images—often called bugs—to track your online behavior and, usually, provide that information to ad networks and other Web-usage trackers. Whereas prior to iOS 4.3.3, someone with access to your iPhone’s backup could get a general idea of where you’ve been, chances are numerous companies have detailed profiles that include the kinds of sites you visit, which topics you find interesting, and possibly even specific items you’ve purchased.

Ghostery’s notification panel Some will say this is just part of using the Web. But if, like me, you’d rather not make it so easy for companies to build a profile of your ‘net activity—or if you’d at least like to be able to know when that activity is being tracked—check out Ghostery, a Safari extension (also available for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer). With Ghostery installed, whenever you visit a Web page that uses such tricks to track, you’ll briefly see a box listing all the services that are tracking your visit to that page.

 

(click here to continue reading Evidon/The Better Advertising Project, Inc. Ghostery 1.0.0 for Safari Web Browser Review | Macworld.)

I allowed Google Analytics, and SiteMeter, because I don’t mind letting webmasters knowing I visited their site, but why should DoubleClick get my data? Or worse, why should a company like Right Media or Facebook be able to profit off of me? I realize that if every browser blocked advertising cookies, some websites might vanish, or switch to a pay-to-view model, but I don’t care. Would my life really be less enjoyable if I couldn’t visit ESPN to check NBA scores? Or read about the latest vapid pop-culture meme at the Huffington Post?

So if you use Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, or if you are stuck using Internet Explorer, you should go ahead and install Ghostery. Simple, and useful. You don’t even have to automatically block cookies, you can just decide as you encounter them, or allow them from certain websites if you wish1

Footnotes:
  1. like mine, for instance. Though I don’t care if you do block the ads that help pay for my site, I just ask that you allow SiteMeter and Google Analytics access so I can fritter away time contemplating my site traffic [↩]

links for 2011-04-14

swanksalot0 comment
  • When Alan Met Ayn: “Atlas Shrugged” And Our Tanked Economy
    (tags: economics ayn_rand history)

    • That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both. The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy and somber.

  • The Real Housewives of Wall Streetlwa14.jpg
    (tags: finance economics wall_street corruption)

    • America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

    Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

    Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

  • Ryan’s plan to devastate the US economy
    (tags: economics united_states deficit us_economy )

    • The budget plan that Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has put forward for the House Republicans is truly stunning. It takes the war on America’s middle class not to the next level but about three levels down the road.

    There’s something we should start with, though, when we think about this budget. And that’s where we are now. Mark Sumner points us to this graph:

    That’s the deficit, and that big orange stripe, the one getting wider by the year, is how much of the deficit the Bush tax cuts are creating.

    8c52104u.jpg

  • Apple Adds Do-Not-Track Tool to New Browser
    (tags: privacy browsers )

    • Apple Inc. has added a do-not-track privacy tool to a test version of its latest Web browser for keeping customers’ online activities from being monitored by marketers.

    The tool is included within the latest test release of Lion, a version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system that is currently available only to developers. The final version of the operating system is scheduled to be released to the public this summer. Mentions of the do-not-track feature in Apple’s Safari browser began to appear recently in online discussion forums and on Twitter.

    The move by the Cupertino, Calif., company leaves Google Inc. as the only major browser provider that hasn’t yet committed to supporting a do-no-track capability in its browser, called Chrome. Microsoft Corp. and Mozilla Corp. both offer do-not-track features in their latest browsers.

  • The Huffington Post lawsuit, explained
    (tags: law )

    • The Other Writers: “We did all of that writing for free, and now that you made a bunch of money, we’re entitled to some of it!”

    AOLHuffPo: “LOL!”

    1496-2.jpg

Google Lackadaisical Over App Security

Seth Anderson0 comment

Do Not Overreach

Google needs to do a lot more to protect its users. The internet is a wild and wooly place, and Google knows better1 than to trust every developer is honest.

A major software attack on mobile phones has put pressure on Google Inc. to do more to secure its online store for smartphone applications.

The company behind the now ubiquitous Android operating system came under fire after computer-security experts last week uncovered more than 50 malicious applications that were uploaded to and distributed from Google’s Android Market.

Some security experts said the incident shows Google, which doesn’t inspect Android apps before they are published, needs to do more to try to ensure the apps are safe before they are offered to smartphone users.

Google largely relies on users to rate apps and raise the alarm about any problems with them. It also requires consumers to give their consent for an app to access their personal data. But that approach isn’t enough, according to Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of computer-security firm Veracode. “App stores need to get serious about vetting code before it is available for customer download,” Mr. Wysopal wrote on his blog.

Google has said 58 malicious apps were uploaded to Android Market and then downloaded to around 260,000 devices before Google removed the affected apps last Tuesday evening. It isn’t clear how many users activated the applications, a Google spokesman said.

(click here to continue reading Google Takes Heat Over App Security – WSJ.com.)

Google doesn’t like to invest money in these sorts of human dimensions, preferring to let people self-help. Remember the Nexus phone debacle? No live tech support was even planned. Customers of Google are supposed to use web forums for all issues, including I guess spreading the word about malicious apps in the Android Market.

Cell phone-iphile

There are problems with the Apple App Store model2, but fearing that malicious apps will compromise users’ data is not one of them. I have zero fear that an iPhone app will give root access to my phone, for example.

Footnotes:
  1. or should know better [↩]
  2. mostly based on how successful the Apple App Store is – takes a long time to get an app approved, or updated, because there are just so many damn apps! From my admittedly non-developer perspective, seems like Apple needs to hire more staff, but maybe they’ve gotten better [↩]

links for 2011-01-22

swanksalot0 comment
  • Brian Marshall, Broadpoint AmTech   7.0
  • David Bailey, Goldman Sachs           6.2
  • Kathryn Huberty, Morgan Stanley     6.0
  • Shaw Wu, Kauffman Bros.              5.0
  • Mike Abramsky, RBC Capital Markets   5.0
  • Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray           3.5
  • Ben Reitzes, Barclays Capital           2.9
  • Keith Bachman, BMO Capital         2.5
  • Jeff Fidacaro, Susquehanna           2.1
  • Chris Whitmore, Deutsche Bank       2.0
  • Scott Craig, Merrill Lynch               1.2
  • Peter Misek, Canaccord Adams       1.2
  • Doug Reid, Thomas Weisel             1.1
  • Yair Reiner, Oppenheimer             1.1

…

Apple sold 14.8 million iPads in 2010.

Goldman Vs. Apple

Seth Anderson0 comment

Apple Blues

John Cassidy, of The New Yorker, writes:

Contrary to appearances, I’m not obsessed with Goldman Sachs, and this will be my last post on the subject for a while. But the Wall Street firm issued its latest profit report today, and I thought it would be interesting to compare its results to those of Apple, another iconic American business, which yesterday published its own profit figures.

Many people are put off by financial accounts, but they provide an invaluable window into what is really going on in a given corporation, and to how much it is contributing to society. I may be weird, but sometimes I actually like poking around in 10-Qs, 8-Ks, and other disclosure forms that public companies have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. One word of warning, though. What follows should be considered a process of me thinking out loud, and pointing out some things that strike me, rather than reaching any definitive conclusions.

As everybody knows, Goldman and Apple are both making tons of money (although Goldman’s latest results disappointed investors somewhat). In the final quarter of 2010, the bank generated net profits of $2.39 billion on revenues of $8.64 billion. Apple, which has a much bigger turnover, made profits of $6 billion on revenues of $26.4 billion.

…

Another way to gauge a firm’s performance is to take everything it possesses—its buildings, its machinery and other equipment, its product designs, and its financial holdings—and look at how much profit it generates for each dollar of assets on its books. In my opinion, this measure, which is known as return on assets (ROA), is the best way to judge a business, because it excludes the amplifying effect of leverage. Now let’s apply it to Goldman and Apple.

According to its latest filing with the S.E.C., Goldman ended 2010 with assets of $911 billion, which means its ROA for the year was roughly .91 per cent. (Yes, that is less than one per cent.) Apple ended 2010 with total assets of $86.7 billion, which means it generated an ROA of about 20.3 per cent.

To summarize: Apple isn’t merely generating a higher return on the capital it employs than Goldman; it is more than twenty times as profitable! How can this be?

(click to continue reading Rational Irrationality: Goldman Vs. Apple: Who Generates the Highest Economic Return? : The New Yorker.)

Maybe I’m irrational, but I have less than zero interest in working for Goldman Sachs, and would love to even be an outside vendor for Apple, Inc., even though Goldman employees are paid much, much more than Apple employees:

Another thing that differentiates Goldman from Apple is how much it pays its employees. In 2010, Goldman’s 35,700 employees took home an average of $430,700. Apple doesn’t publish much information about its labor costs. According to the jobs Web site Simply Hired, the average salary at Apple is $46,000. Another Web site, Salary List, quotes a substantially higher figure—$107,719—but that doesn’t appear to include people working at Apple’s more than three hundred retail stores. Whichever number is more accurate, the basic message is the same. Apple employees earn a lot less than their counterparts at Goldman despite the fact they generate a much higher return—private and social—on the capital they use.

 

links for 2010-12-29

swanksalot0 comment
  • The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995 « counternotions
    As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s. Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple’s stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info. Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google’s model.
    phone+heads.jpg
    (tags: google iPhone Apple)
  • 80% Of All US’ Antibiotics Given To Farm Animals : TreeHugger
    Even for someone who follows sustainable agriculture and animal welfare issues, this is pretty astounding: New analysis by the Center for a Livable Future shows that 80% of all antibiotics sold in the United States go to farm animals (Wired). The last time that stat was calculated, a decade ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists, it stood at 70%.
    all-you-can-eat_25.jpg
    (tags: health agribusiness)
  • How Many Documents Has WikiLeaks Published? : NPR
    In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish “251,287 leaked United States embassy cables,” as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released.
    (tags: wikileaks cablegate)
    anti propaganda hemp anslinger marijuana-girl-reefer-madness-poster.jpg

CTA Apple Station A No Bid Process, So?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Apple Blues

The CTA accepted Apple’s offer, as presented, without soliciting other bids, probably because no other corporation was offering anything. Why would there be a bidding war for the (formerly) decrepit North & Clybourn El stop? Theoretical money isn’t the same as the actual money Apple spent.

The Chicago Transit Authority announced last month that it is looking for a consulting firm to help develop a “revenue-generating corporate sponsorship program” — a plan to sell private companies the naming rights to CTA train lines, train stations and bus routes.

The consultant will determine which of the agency’s assets might attract sponsorships and what the naming rights would be worth, according to a request for proposals issued by the CTA. Public bidding would be central to the consultant’s work, the CTA said, to assure “transparency and increased competition.”

But there was no such bidding last year when the CTA agreed to let Apple spend nearly $4 million on renovation of the North and Clybourn train station. The CTA agreed to let Apple turn an unused bus driveway into a plaza and to renovate the inside of the station to the company’s specifications. In return, Apple was given the rights to lease the plaza space for no charge for at least 10 years, to advertise anywhere in the station at rates set by the CTA, and to purchase station naming rights if the agency ever sells them.

(click to continue reading Competition Wasn’t Part of CTA’s Apple Deal – NYTimes.com.)

Now that Apple was so successful in refurbishing a station in their chosen manner, future similar CTA station deals will have more public bidding processes, I don’t have a problem with that. I also don’t care if private businesses adopt other train stations, and clean them up in exchange for naming rights or whatever. What’s the harm? The oft-criticised parking privatization sold off future Chicago revenue streams to a for-profit corporation for 99 years, the Apple CTA station is a quite different scenario.

CTA Apple Stop

Seth Anderson0 comment

Apple store

Apple has so much cash in their corporate coffers1, they can afford to spend a little money fixing infrastructure. In a country that cared about people more than foreign wars, the Chicago Transit Authority would have enough budget to maintain its own stations, but we don’t live in such a magical place. Infrastructure investment for public transit2 is not a priority, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, I salute Apple for doing this, no matter their motives. I would applaud other corporations for jumping into this breach, and sprucing up other stations, shoring up bridges, etc. Too bad they mostly only focus on naming rights for stadiums.

Even while the neighborhood took on a high gloss, the CTA station looked the way it had for decades — like the stop closest to the poverty of the Cabrini-Green housing project.

Now this woman stood gawking at the Apple Store and the plaza that linked it to the station.

“The plaza just knocked my socks off,” she said. “A plaza, with seats. Like these guys weren’t so terrified of homeless people sitting down that they weren’t going to let anyone else sit down, either. And a fountain, that instant supplier of peace. It made me want to sit down on a nice day with a cup of tea and a book. OK, in gratitude to Apple, it should be an iPad, but whatever. I say thank you to Apple.”

Exactly the effect Apple intends.

There’s reason to be grateful to Apple for the metamorphosis of this patch of Chicago. Apple has not only built a store more stylish than anything nearby, it has invested close to $4 million in the North/Clybourn station.

It’s the equivalent of mowing the neighbor’s weedy lawn — and paying the neighbor to let you.

Outside, the station has clean new brick, big new windows and a sleek new look, partly 1940s and entirely 2010.

The inside isn’t stylish, but it’s improved. Someone has scrubbed the red concrete floors, brushed red paint on the old railings, tried to wipe the grime from the escalator stairs.

(click to continue reading CTA station is the apple of computer giant’s eye, Mary Schmich says – chicagotribune.com.)

Apple Logos

Footnotes:
  1. over $50,000,000,000 last time I looked [↩]
  2. Amtrak, CTA, et al [↩]

links for 2010-10-15

swanksalot0 comment

 

  • John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript | Cult of Mac
    The Apple logo was multicolor because the Apple II was the first color computer. No one else could do color, so that’s why they put the color blocks into the logo. If you wanted to print the logo in a magazine ad or on a package you could print it with four colors but Steve being Steve insisted on six colors. So whenever the Apple logo was printed, it was always printed in six colors. It added another 30 to 40 percent to the cost of everything, but that’s what Steve wanted. That’s what we always did. He was a perfectionist even from the early days.
    (tags: Apple design Steve_Jobs)
    Apple Authorized Service.jpg
  • Sloppy police work? | News | Chicago Journal
    The corner of North Leavitt and West Randolph looks a far cry from the most dangerous neighborhood in America as reported my several large national and local media outlets.
    (tags: West_Loop chicago)
    miKbX.jpg
  • CB2 moves to Near West Side | News | Chicago Journal
    Mayor Richard M. Daley joined Near West Side residents and members of the business community in dedicating the national headquarters of CB2 — a sister brand of Crate and Barrel — in a re-developed department store building at 240 N. Ashland in late September.
    (tags: chicago)
  • Rich Whitney is Rich ‘Whitey’ on some ballots :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Election 2010
    The name of Green Party gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney is misspelled as Rich “Whitey” on electronic-voting machines in nearly two dozen wards — about half in predominantly African-American areas — and election officials said Wednesday the problem cannot be corrected by Election Day.

     

    The misspelling turned up on touch-screen machines in 23 wards overall.

    (tags: chicago elections green)
    2010-10-12-danzcolor4527.jpg
  • “Populist” Glenn Beck wants listeners to donate money to corporate interests | Media Matters for America
    Glenn Beck is urging his listeners to donate money to the Chamber of Commerce.

     

    Now, the Chamber of Commerce is not simply an advocacy organization pursing an ideological agenda, like the National Rifle Association or the National Right to Life Committee. It is a trade association representing some of the largest corporations you can think of. Its board of directors counts among its members executives from Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, AT&T, US Airways, JPMorgan Chase & Co., IBM, and Verizon. It is The Establishment incarnate.

    And Glenn Beck is calling on his hardworking listeners to donate money to the Chamber.

    (tags: USCC)

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Don’t Steal Mac OS X Extension

Seth Anderson0 comment

As a means of procrastination, I followed these instructions to print out my desktop’s complete configuration, per these instructions:

Basically, it’s a printout of all the information that’s stored in System Profiler. Here’s how to do it. From the Apple Menu, select About this Mac. A new window appears. Click More Info to launch System Profiler. From there, select print and watch as your Mac prepares the System Profiler info for printing.

You’ll notice that it’s taking a long, long time. That’s because there’s a huge amount of information being compiled. Aside from the basics that we addressed last time, it’s grabbing every error log entry, vitals on every app you’ve got installed, network information and a whole heck of a lot more. When I ran this report the resulting document was 2.7MB and 500 pages!

(click to continue reading Mac 101: Comprehensive Mac system information.)

Mac OS 9 box

The resulting file was 830 pages, 4.2 MB large. Every application, every system extension, every font, every network configuration, every peripheral attached, etc. An extension called “Don’t Steal Mac OS X” amused me: wonder how it is ever triggered? I’ve never noticed it before1

 

Dont Steal Mac OS X:

Version: 7.0.0

Last Modified: 8/1/09 12:55 AM

Get Info String: Copyright © 2006,2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

The purpose of this Apple software is to protect Apple copyrighted materials from unauthorized copying and use. You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, transfer or redistribute this file, in whole or in part. If you have obtained a copy of this Apple software and do not have a valid license from Apple to use it, please immediately destroy or delete it from your computer.

Kind: Intel

Architectures: i386, x86_64

64-Bit (Intel): Yes

Location: /System/Library/Extensions/Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext

Kext Version: 7.0.0

Load Address: 0x87a73000

Valid: Yes

Authentic: Yes

Dependencies: Satisfied

Footnotes:
  1. but then I pay my Apple tax whenever due, and happily, since sticking with Apple products through all these years has helped me to be in the position I’m currently enjoying [↩]

We are Apple We Don’t Even Own Suits

Seth Anderson0 comment

Loved this quote about wardrobe choice in the middle of a long, interesting article about the fractious relationship between Apple and AT&T1. I’ve had a contract with Verizon previously, and the restrictions Verizon placed on the phone were ridiculous.

Topic of the Day

Looking back, it’s clear that the cracks in the Apple-AT&T relationship began forming as soon as Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007. It was the first time the public got to see the long-rumored device — and, shockingly, the first time AT&T’s board of directors saw it as well. (Apple refused to show the phone to all but a handful of top AT&T execs before the launch.) The split only deepened from there. Apple and AT&T have bickered about how the iPhone was to be displayed in AT&T’s stores: Apple insisted the phone be presented on its own display stand, away from other models. They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

(click to continue reading Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown | Magazine.)

Also, kudos to Steve Jobs for telling the AT&T hack to piss off. Apple isn’t a servant to AT&T, if anything, they are equals, and one could actually argue that Apple is in the dominant position.

Solipsistic note – was recently at a high level meeting, and I wore a suit, sans necktie, and was happy when the room full of execs we met were all in business casual attire, and not a suit to be found. I don’t mind having to wear a suit actually, as long as I don’t have to put on a tie.

Footnotes:
  1. SBC [↩]

Martin Peers Despises the iPhone

Seth Anderson1 Comment

After reading articles like this, you have to wonder if Martin Peers is short-selling Apple stock, or perhaps a paid consultant for a competing cellphone corporation. Or else is quoting, without attribution, trash-talk from a friend who is a member of one of these cult-like Wall Street industries.

Original Palm Pilot

If the iPhone 4 has become “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” as the company says, one wouldn’t want to imagine the worst.

Apple’s statement overlooked the fact that its fourth-generation phone has an antenna design that may require consumers either to buy a case or learn to hold the phone in a particular way to ensure reception. Usually the idea is to produce phones that get clearly better, not worse, with each new version.

So far at least, Apple’s cult-like fan base seems willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. Apple said Monday the product had sold a remarkable 1.7 million units in the first three days.

Investors shouldn’t take too much comfort, however. A lot of those sales likely came from preorders placed before reports of the antenna weakness circulated. What’s more, many of the initial sales also were likely upgrades by existing iPhone owners. These people already have shown themselves willing to put up with reception problems—although in the past they could blame AT&T’s clogged network.

The real question has to be whether concerns about the antenna, combined with carrier congestion issues, will slow uptake of the iPhone among customers not yet converted to Apple worship. Not only are they likely to be less patient with any product failings, they can now choose from an ever-widening array of alternative smartphones.

(click to continue reading HEARD ON THE STREET: The Curious Case of iPhone 4 – WSJ.com.)

Oh yes, this is the worst launch of a new product, evah! Worse than the Edsel, worse than the Palm Pre, worse than Zune, yadda yadda. Even worse than the Apple Lisa!

In Mr. Peers world, isolated media reports about antenna failure if you hold your fingers in an odd spot is the same as an antenna failure in all 1,700,000 iPhone 4s sold.1 Also, if you purchase an iPhone, you apparently join some sort of religious cult, though I don’t know why this is even relevant to the WSJ readership. I’m not sure how purchasing an electronic gadget transforms one into a brain-eating zombie, Mr. Peers forgot to include his exposition explaining how this occurs, or the editors removed it for space reasons. Maybe FaceTime does something to your neurons?

Another point worth noting, Mr. Peers believes there are exactly zero improvements in the iPhone 4; battery life increases, better camera, higher pixel display, these are actually downgrades. Who knew? Silly me for believing that doubling the RAM2 would be an enhancement.

Look, corporations are not people3, and Apple is not your aunt Millie – Apple deserves and should receive criticism sometimes. But this Martin Peers dude isn’t dishing any valid criticisms, he’s just asking to replace John Dvorak as linkbait troll of the day, worthy of cynical laughter, no more.

Footnotes:
  1. disclaimer, I don’t have an iPhone 4, nor have I ever held one myself. I plan on joining the cult once my application essay is approved sometime soon [↩]
  2. from 256MB to 512MB [↩]
  3. despite the morons in the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling to the contrary [↩]