Apple’s Marketing Problem

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

via Apple has lost the functional high ground – Marco.org.

Another Digital Divide Coming

Niels Ole Finnemann, a professor and director of Netlab, DigHumLab in Denmark, said: “The citizens will divide between those who prefer convenience and those who prefer privacy.”

via The Future of Privacy | Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

I’ve long said that as the web continues to evolve, particularly as a social medium, we’ll see privacy and the idea of a federated web help shape a new digital divide.

On one side, there will be people who choose convenience and ease by utilizing networks akin to our current ones (ie Facebook). They’ll trade their privacy and data for connections for social connections in a walled garden with pretty flowers.

On the other side will be the federated web by those who are able (either technologically or financially or both) to have and sustain their own web presence that they own and control.

This isn’t a geek vs non-geek distinction as it has been since the web started or something like we have in 2014-2015 where people who care about things like federation or privacy are outsiders.

Now we just need to kill apps.

WSJ: You Can Ditch Your PC Now

Completely agree with the main idea of this article… Chromebooks (and tablets to some extent) are mature platforms and great devices for both creating and consuming content for personal and business use:

In short, I’m done with PCs—at least as they are conventionally defined. And I think the majority of long-suffering PC users would be too if they weren’t so accustomed to thinking of computers in the same way they have for decades. Building new technology is easy compared with changing the habits of those who use it.

via You Can Ditch Your PC Now – WSJ – WSJ.

The Next Printing Revolution

Having access to a 3D printer at Hammond has definitely changed the way I think about design, production, and consumption (in a school environment at least).

I greatly look forward to the concept of printing to continue to extend from hand written manuscripts to the printing press to 3D printing to this type of molecular crystal printing…

But the most interesting application has to be the potential for 3D-printed pills and medications. The technique could be adapted into a consumer-friendly machine allowing patients to simply print their own medicines in the exact dosages they need.

via Scientists Produce Rounded Crystals That Could Lead To 3D-Printed Pills.