Every now and again I revisit this post on The Art of Non-Conformity. I almost never have the time to read it straight through, but I usually pick one section, and I always read THE FIRST THING:
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." ~ Ayn Rand
This Boy Genius Report has some thoughts on the Nexus One that I've always held (although the author seems to feel more strongly about them)
there's practically no human emotion with Google when it comes to technology. Everything is statistical and analytical. While you could argue that being this way is way superior to "feeling" and "emotion"- it might be 95% of the time -- you still will almost always lose that charm and that amazing feeling of connecting to something.
This sums up my feelings about a lot of products when compared to Apple. If you've met me, you may know I have a thing for Apple products, and it's not because I'm a blind fan-boy, instead it's because their products are easy to make a emotional connection to. There's a lot of thought, hard work and love put into most of them, and it's easy for me to make a human connection to them.
An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.
I finally sprung for an iPhone, picking up a new shiny 3Gs over the weekend. I'm still getting used to it, my previous phone was very "dumb", but honestly I'm having mixed feelings about the constant connection. I know now that I can pretty much always check Twitter, but that doesn't mean I should. Frankly there are many times I enjoy being completely disconnected, but now I can't really do that unless I leave my phone off/behind.
I'm very excited to start developing though. As the internet becomes more and more accessible through devices like this, it becomes more and more important to make our sites compatible and in some situations optimized for small screen size.
From John Gruber at Daring Fireball::
And so Microsoft's official stance regarding Apple's growing domination of the $1,000+ market is that Apple is charging hundreds of extra dollars in pure margin -- $500 in the case Turner cited in his prepared remarks. The computers that Microsoft chooses to brag about on stage at a major conference are the $650 17-inch laptops advertised in Best Buy Sunday circulars.
There's no question that retailers sell tens of millions of cheap Windows laptops every year. But no one with a pair of eyes thinks such machines are of comparable quality to Apple MacBooks. Even without turning the machines on, anyone can see the difference in design and build quality. In fact, you don't even need eyes -- just pick them up and see which one squeaks. Apple is selling more MacBooks every quarter. Microsoft thinks it is sitting pretty because Best Buy has a 17-inch Dell for $650.
Well said.
