Apple Archive

I'm more or less assuming all of us are familiar with the Apple Lisa, Apple's and Steve Jobs' first attempt at turning Xerox PARC's work into a marketable product. It was a flop, but many of its ideas carried over onto the Macintosh, and in fact, Macintosh development took place on the Lisa.

Due to the fact few Lisas were sold, it's hard to get your hands on a working model, meaning most of us will never get the opportunity to actually use one. Luckily, there's a very advanced Lisa emulator available, written by Ray Arachelian. It's open source (GPL) and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Setting it up is remarkably easy (there are non-hqx Lisa operating system files too), but do note that technically, you need to own a Lisa yourself in order to use the ROMs. But, of course you do.

The Lisa user interface takes a bit of time to get used to, as its terminology is a bit alien, and some things feel quite a bit arbitrary from our modern, harmonised perspective. For instance, it took me a while to figure out how to open a new file in the Lisa office applications; it turns out that you need to double-click a special kind of icon ('stationary'), which the Lisa calls 'tear off stationary', which creates what to me looks like a copy of said stationary icon. This icon is the actual new file; double-click it to open it.

I'm having quite some fun poking around the Lisa, and the emulator has been holding up perfectly - no crashes, and it's remarkably easy to use. I would definitely advise giving this a go if you have some spare time.

An incredibly detailed look at the state of iOS and OS X development. Grab a drink.

It's been corroborated by just about any major news outlet, so it has merit. I'm in no way an Apple expert, but this acquisition seems completely random and weird. Beats is essentially the Monster of headphones.

iOS has many complexity-inducing frustrations born out of "keep it simple", but none as big as this one. File handling on iOS is so incredibly frustrating and needlessly complex that I have a hard time considering it a mature operating system at all. My line of work requires constant opening and closing of a quarter metric frickton of files, and that kind of stuff is simply impossible on iOS.

AnandTech on Apple's A7 processor:

This is one area where Apple really took everyone by surprise recently. When people talk about Apple losing its taste for disruption, they usually disregard the things they do not understand - such as hardcore processor design.

An 8GB smartphone for $500. You can buy six Lumia 520s for that - almost one for every day of the week. You have to be utterly void of common sense to buy this phone. Then again, that seems to be the general attitude towards the 5C anyway.

Getting the update is easy indeed. There's a certain other mobile operating system that could learn a few things from that one.

Apple is also asking what your first Mac experience was. For me, it was a computer I had saved up for for a long time. Back in those days - around 2002-2003 - the Mac was virtually non-existent here in The Netherlands (or at least in the area where I lived), and the only place I'd ever seen Macs was at the dental department. Colourful iMacs - fun machines.

In any case, I was intrigued, and eventually bought an iMac G4 800Mhz. In my view, the most beautiful design the iMac ever had, but mine eventually died of a logic board failure within a few years (a notorious problem). I still think they're beautiful little machines, and would love to have the ultimate G4 iMac.

After that first iMac, I owned several Macs - an original iMac, a PowerBook G4 15", a PowerMac G4 dual 450Mhz, a Cube, my current iMac from 2012, and my favourite, a 12.1" iBook G4. There's one Mac I really want to add to my collection as soon as possible: the iBook G3/466 Special Edition. If you have one of these and would like to get rid of it - let me know.

This thing is so damn awesome. I don't need it, but I still want one.

It's amazing what's possible on these old machines.

Since my contract renewal was up, I had the option to renew it and buy a new phone alongside with it. Since I have an unofficial policy of never buying into the same platform twice in a row, and because it has been a long time since I bought something from Cupertino, I decided to go with the newest iPhone, the 5S. I'm planning on a more thorough review sometime later this year after more thorough use, but here are a few short first impressions.

Remarkable documentary - several planning meetings and discussions during NeXT's early days, with Steve Jobs and his team, many of which also worked on the Macintosh. You have to see this.

Via Typographica.

Insightful article by John Gruber.

As insightful as the article is, it does pivot on the assumption that Apple does, indeed, " a lead over its rivals" in design and quality. Design is largely a matter of taste, but as far as quality goes, Apple has, in my view, been surpassed in almost every aspect by Android - at least, when it comes to software. And let's not even get started on internet services, where Apple is a complete and utter joke compared to its competitors. As far as hardware goes, however, Apple's supposed lead is harder to debate - I've held a lot of phones and tablets in my hands over the years, and while many come close to Apple's, I've never held anything that outright surpassed it (save for maybe the HTC One which no one is buying).

Unsurprisingly, Gruber believes Apple does maintain that lead, and as such, arguing his point becomes relatively easy. However, if you ascribe to the view that Android has surpassed iOS in quality (and certainly in design, in my view), it becomes a lot harder to accept that Apple can, this time, avoid the trap it fell into in the '90s.

Now, before people will twist and turn this into me saying Apple is doomed - I don't believe for a second that it is. However, that doesn't mean a repeat of the '90s is somehow magically off the table - Apple has a lot of work to do in order to avoid it. As Tom Dale stated so aptly almost a year ago, "Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services". With Motorola and the Moto X, design might not be the only thing Google is getting better at faster.