Designing an API properly does take a long time, but they had to do that anyway for first-party apps, whether they made it public or not. To be fair, the bar is a little higher for a public API because of the need for maintainability, but it isn't that much higher, particularly given that the non-UI parts of the SDK were mostly shared with OS X, which was already a public API.

I seriously considered starting that post by saying that Nokia committed suicide by not picking an OS and sticking with it, but even with all their problems, they might have survived relatively unscathed had it not been for the glut of cheap Android phones washing the ground out from under their foundation. :-)

That is indeed what he said, but I suspect that was just spin.

I'm about 99% sure it wasn't. As evidence, I cite the fact that the head of the iPod team left Apple for Palm and started an OS that was web-based just like iOS was originally going to be. I think it was more that the people Rubinstein left behind clung on to the iPod mentality of a closed architecture that allowed only a handful of developers to write code for it for a very long time before finally giving up.

I think the iPhone was successful before they supported 3rd party apps.

Not particularly. The pre-app-store iOS market coincides precisely with the original iPhone's sales. Apple sold only 6.1 million of them over the course of about a year. The iPhone 3G sold a million in the first three days. And yes, the original iPhone hardware was behind the times, so that contributed to the difference somewhat, but there's little doubt that the App Store is a big part of why iOS is a success.

Want to know how I know this? Palm WebOS. Notice where Palm's top engineering management came from. Yup, you guessed it. Apple. They followed Apple's original plan, and they completely cornered the market... no, wait, that other thing... tanked.

Chromebooks have the advantage of four more years of improvements in web browser technology. With that said, remember that the #1 thing people do with their phones is play games, and that games are pretty high on the list for laptops as well. Without native apps, gaming isn't very practical, which is why the Chromebook is still just a low single-digit percentage of laptop sales, and why a web-only phone would be pretty much DOA even in today's market, with today's technology.

It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android. Their big niche was cheap feature phones. When Android came along, suddenly, there were cheap smartphones, and nobody wanted cheap feature phones when they could get cheap smartphones. To be fair, Apple had a lot to do with forcing the UI changes in Android that made it popular, but the mere existence of Android in any form would have pretty much cut the legs out from under Nokia.

As for Blackberry, Apple didn't really start killing them until much later, as iPhone hardware wasn't really all that welcome in the business world until after Apple started adding stuff like mobile device management. I always found it odd that they were a hardware manufacturer, given that their hardware was fairly boring, and most of their interesting creations involved software and services. I'd expect them to reinvent themselves as a software and services company fairly handily, and freed from the shackles of having to build their own hardware, I'd expect them to do fairly well.

Ericsson got bought out by Sony, who still builds plenty of phones and other devices. Given Sony's size, I wouldn't count them out just yet. But if somebody does drive them out of the market, it will be Samsung, by undercutting them.

have you ever worked in a union? while this is true, most of them make it hard as heck to jump through the hoops needed to jump through to ensure none of your dues are used towards political campaigns.

Yes, I worked in a union shop. I didn't join, but I seem to recall that being one of the checkboxes on the paperwork you had to fill out whether you joined or not, along with the option to opt out of the union and pay "fair share" fees.

Yeah, but park ramps have been around for a couple of decades (the earliest patent filing I could find was filed in 1992), and they only started having insane levels of trouble fairly recently (by comparison). So it's probably the combination of excessive amounts of parking (as you mentioned) and having less structural support for the heads that makes them so problematic.

Not all devices show LTE bars identically, so your mileage may vary. To compare apples to apples, we'd both need to be using dBm. Truthfully, even that wouldn't necessarily be a valid comparison, depending on multipath interference and a whole host of other factors. My point was that there are a lot of places that have service, but where the minute-long connection latency caused by high packet loss results in such a horrid real-world speed that it might as well be truly slow.

Would be nice. I also wish they'd go back to the pre-retina enclosure, and instead of wasting space on an optical drive, I'd like to see them use most of that extra space for additional battery capacity. If I run Photoshop or Finale or Xcode or any of the other software that I use to actually get stuff done with my retina MBP (about one year old), I'm lucky to get 2.5 to 3.5 hours out of it. If I were designing a computer to meet my needs, the "four cores running at full tilt" duration would be eight or ten hours, and the "just wasting time doing light-duty web browsing" number would be measured in days.

Or just bring back removable batteries. Either way.

Union contributions are, more or less, under the control of the people who are in the unions, and if you don't agree with a union's political agenda, you have a legal right to withhold that portion of your dues, so your portion of that contribution is 100% under your control.

Corporate contributions, by contrast, are entirely under the control of its board of directors. As a shareholder or normal employee of that corporation, you have no control over your portion of the contribution. Corporate contributions represent a concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, which makes them fundamentally different.

Real-world LTE speeds only qualify as broadband if you're very close to the tower. By the time you get into two-bar territory (where their LTE network is "available"), you'll be lucky to get EDGE speeds, and at one bar, you'll be lucky to get any data at all. Yet technically, LTE is available in all those places. That's the problem with wireless; the speed falls off a cliff as distance increases.

In a curiously ironic twist, the hardware designed to protect consumer-grade disks from damage ends up destroying them. As I understand it, a number of fairly recent consumer drives exhibit a higher than normal failure rate because the heads break off of the arms when they collide with the park ramp. This is, at least in part, a consequence of making the arms smaller and lighter to improve seek times.

Obligatory Henry Ford reference: The Nook Simple Touch can display any color you want, so long as it is black... or grey.

We have a pretty good idea; trees are still trees, and most paper today is acid-free (unlike the paper made from the late 1800s up until about 1980), so it doesn't degrade too badly. But if you're really concerned, buy certified 100% cotton, acid-free paper.

At more than 8 cents per gigabyte, archival DVDs are horribly expensive. You could cycle your backups across three hard drives for about the same amount of money, and then you have three backups instead of one.

Not to mention... have you ever tried backing up your 4 TB hard drive onto a spindle of 1,000 DVDs? Have you ever seen a spindle of 1,000 DVDs? It's slightly taller than an average person. Yes, if you don't have much data, you can do what you're proposing, but....

Hard drives are really the only viable backup medium unless you have a big enough collection of data for tape drives to make sense—maybe Blu-Ray, but only if you don't have more than about a 100-disc spindle worth of data (2.5 or 5 TB) to back up (and really, most people lose interest at more like ten or fifteen discs).