Tagged: Apple

And Now, the Apple Watch Makes Sense

Remember how I seemed pretty cool to the whole Apple Watch thing? As certain as I was that this new piece of technology would be expertly designed, well-constructed, and very user-friendly, I could not figure out what function it would serve that my iPhone wasn’t already doing. After all, the wonderful thing about a smartphone is that it is the computer you always have with you. Reaching for it, I reasoned, will always be easy.

Or so I thought before going on a bike ride today.

Ride-to-Panera-in-Northvale.png

Last Saturday, I had planned to ride to the Panera Bread in Northvale, New Jersey with the cycle club.1 But, bitterly cold temperatures, icy roads, and the closure of the George Washington Bridge pedestrian/bicycle path kept me off the bike for the entire weekend. Feeling restless, I rode to my various jobs this entire week, which I had not been able to do since mid-December, and, today, I scheduled a makeup ride to Northvale to eat that long-awaited soup–and–half-sandwich combo.

Not sure why I find biking 50 miles to a Panera in New Jersey so amusing, but we have to train for beer rides #irodemybikehere

A “Bicycle for the Mind” for the Bicycle

It was on today’s ride through Bergen and Rockland counties that I recognized the utility of a smartwatch. I could care less about monitoring my heart rate, my speed/cadence, and elevation gain during a ride. At one time, that mattered to me, but in the last few years, I don’t consider it as important. No, as someone who likes to explore new routes and brewery tap rooms, it’s really important to not end up horribly lost. An Apple Watch would actually be really helpful as a navigation aid because, even on group rides, we often have to stop to find directions.

Peepin'

Decades ago, Steve Jobs called the computer a “bicycle for our minds” because he saw it as a tool that can elevate the human mind above its natural ability. Similarly, applications elevate the computer from a machine to a tool. What made iPhone different from all other smartphones and PDAs before it were all the apps developed for it. Although I never had a smartphone before getting an iPhone 3G in 2008, I did have a series of Palm PDAs. Those were useful personal organizers and decent notetakers. However, each one was really limited—not because it had a crummy screen or required a stylus to use, but because it simply didn’t do very much. Today, I have about 200 apps loaded on my iPhone, including task managers, an array of readers and writing apps, and apps for dozens of other functions. I may not regularly use all 200+ apps, but having them gives my iPhone purpose, especially compared to the PDAs and smartphones of yore.

Palm Vx

For the past two cycling seasons, I’ve been using a Garmin Edge 200 on my long bike rides. I can track my speed, my distance pedaled, the time of day, and if I load my course before heading out on the road, which I almost always do, I can follow a route. I know I could use my iPhone with some app, such as Strava or Ride with GPS, to function like my Garmin, but there are a lot of drawbacks to this. On a warm day, the battery can power my Garmin for over 12 hours; the battery inside my iPhone might not. If I get caught in a rainstorm, my Garmin is water-resistant, whereas soaking my iPhone would be devastating. And, the plastic-and-rubber Garmin sits on my handlebars taking various shocks and shakes from our bumpy potholed roads: I’m not certain my glass-and-metal iPhone would fare as well.

The Garmin is only useful because of the various websites that communicate with the device. The stock Garmin Connect is fine for beginners, but the third-party apps are much, much better. For example, Strava is for those who obsess over every esoteric metric imaginable, and Ride with GPS is for those who love to plan routes, as I do. In due time, I can see the latter two making apps for the Apple Watch, just as they do for iPhone and other smartphones. Their smartwatch apps could communicate with an iPhone, securely stored in a Ziploc bag and safely tucked away in a jersey pockets. In fact, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that both of these companies have at least considered developing for the Apple Watch. Sorry, Garmin.

Free to Escape

The great thing about going on a long bike ride is to escape life for a few hours, which is why I rode a lot during the latter half of 2014. Though I keep my phone stashed away in my pocket during a ride, I can still hear it dinging and feel it buzzing whenever I get a new message, phone call, or some other notification. Today, I heard a series of alerts as I pedaled through the relatively quiet suburban streets of Bergen County, New Jersey. I tried to put those distractions out of my mind, but as a product of the digital age, I simply could not. As soon as I encountered a red traffic signal, I hurriedly pulled out my phone to check who had been messaging and calling me. Fortunately, none of the callers had anything pressing to tell me, but right there, I recognized the value of having a smartwatch. Instead of kvetching about "who could be trying to reach me right now," I could have just glanced at my watch, saw that it was a doting relative, and continued on my way.

Part of me is bothered that I have cannot have a few hours on a bike without being interrupted, but I realized today that a smartwatch is a piece of technology that allows me to do what I want without being disconnected. Twenty years ago, when mobile phones started to become a thing, one of my mentors said that she would never carry a cell phone because she wanted to preserve the freedom from always being reachable. It was a sensible argument at the time. A few years later, after I got some Nokia candy-bar phone, I realized that the mobile phone didn’t tether me to work or other obligations, as I had feared. Instead, it allowed me to do whatever I wanted—and to go wherever I wanted. I didn’t have to sit by the phone waiting for someone to call me or, worse even, to keep calling my answering machine at home checking for any incoming messages.2 With a cell phone, I gained a new freedom from my landline telephone.

Maybe that’s what this new piece of technology—the Apple Watch with its plethora of apps and seamless connection to an iPhone—is supposed to do: ever-so-slightly liberate us from our older devices, even if one of those devices is only about eight years old.

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  1. It’s something we did last year, and I thought it was funny that we were biking all that way just to eat at a ubiquitous bakery chain. ↩
  2. Kids today—who probably never use voicemail—must presumably consider the practice of calling your home answering machine to retrieve messages a positively antediluvian ritual. ↩

HBO Now and the Technology We Need

Monday’s Apple event wasn’t just about an ultralight notebook computer that I really want and a watch that I don’t. There were also two announcements regarding television that were quite interesting.1

  1. The price for the current Apple TV dropped to $69. This third-generation model has been on the market since 2012 and was available for $99 as recently as this past weekend. I imagine that this is an intermediate move on Apple’s part. There are clearly better options for OTT streaming devices, even for die-hard Apple nerds, and I would hope Apple plans to release an improved version in the near future for the $70 same price. (Or not… what do I know?)
  2. HBO Now will launch exclusively on Apple devices for $15 per month. In some ways, this move is big because it marks the first time HBO is available without a multichannel TV subscription and could be a threat to multichannel TV as we know it. Consumers begged HBO to offer something like this, and now we know that it will be a full-featured service, not a crippled version that only the pay TV subscribers get.

In my most recent New Media class, I addressed the second announcement as an example of a technology adapting to our needs. We were discussing how social network sites were great for, you know, networking socially. Facebook has been great for sharing with your nearby friends, distant classmates, and obsessively doting relatives. After a while, though, we learned that our unsavory activities, such as our party pics, can be found by a potential employer, a college recruiter, or that human you are trying to date. The sharing aspect of Facebook is great, but the permanence is not. So, we now have something like Snapchat, and that is where we share indiscriminately because of its evanescence. We found a technology that better suited a particular need.

HBO Now is intended to provide stream HBO to those without pay TV subscriptions. But a lot of people I know already stream HBO programming with HBO Go. They just use someone else’s credentials to access it. As intrepid cord cutters, we already figured out how to get the product we need without HBO offering it. I’m not going to guess whether HBO Now is going to succeed. It could be a decade-long lifeline as iTunes was for the music industry or it could be as negligible as News Corp making an iPad-native Daily newsmagazine.

The Technology We Deserve

Net Neutrality plays an important role with this OTT service. Chris Morran at Consumerist speculates about the power of an ISP without net neutrality rules, where one could theoretically “throttle HBO Now while still allowing HBO Go to get through at full speed, effectively saying that the only way to get a decent HBO streaming service is if you have a cable package.” But with net neutrality rules, the two services should operate at the same level of performance. I won’t need to have my TV polluted with reality TV shows and shitty reruns in order to watch The Wire in 1080p.

The only not-neutral thing about the HBO Now service is that it will initially launch on only Apple devices, such as Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Roku, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast users will have to miss out on Game of Thrones until midsummer. Perhaps Mark Cuban was right when he said that we shouldn’t worry about the power of ISPs and that instead we should “worry about Google and Apple” because they make the operating systems of our mobile devices.

The Technology We Don’t Need

A few years ago, only the most devoted Internet libertarians were cognizant of that an ISP could potentially throttle or block a service it didn’t “like.” Today, even casual Internet users are skeptical about the control their ISP could potentially wield. For example, after the HBO Now announcement, Comcast subscribers were unable to access the http://hbonow.com website. It turns out that it was a technical problem caused by a DNS issue on HBO’s part, not some sinister shenanigans at the hands of Comcast. But because everyone hates their cable companies and because Comcast is as big as a cable company gets, the Internet reflexively blamed Comcast.

https://twitter.com/Peekaso/status/575110519369129984

It’s hard to shed a tear for Comcast though. As I mentioned earlier, when a technology fails to meet our needs or desires, we move on to something else. Cable television as we know it evolved from two converging technologies: Community Antenna TV and satellite cable.2 CATV was a demand-side technology. Starting in the 1940s, CATV operators piped TV signals to TV set owners living in areas where an over-the-air signal wasn’t available. CATV was almost a necessity for people living in a valley, such as in rural Pennsylvania, or in densely populated and overbuilt area, such as Manhattan, because the terrain blocked the radio signals necessary for TV reception. Satellite cable, on the other hand, was a supply-side technology. Beginning in the 1970s, it allowed national distribution for emerging television channels, such as Ted Turner’s WTBS-TV in Atlanta and the Manhattan-based Home Box Office. In both cases, CATV and satellite cable—eventually merging as the modern cable TV industry—enabled TV viewers to get what the broadcasters were failing to provide them. Today, however, the cable companies are the ones failing to provide us what we want, and that’s why we’ve migrated to something that does.

And, I’m sorry, Apple. As of right now, I still can’t figure out why I need a smartwatch.

The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.

  1. All that health stuff was not interesting. ↩
  2. Read Megan Mullen, The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) for a great account of the evolution of the cable TV indusry. ↩

This is Why I’ve Waited to Replace My MacBook Pro

As a bonafide Apple nerd and someone who spends no fewer than five hours a day tapping away at a computer, I’ve been surprisingly passive in upgrading computers over the last decade. My current MacBook Pro is from mid-2009, replacing a late-2004 Powerbook G4 that measured 15 inches, weighed nearly five pounds, and was the object of ridicule from an undergraduate student. In the course of a decade, I’ve had only two Mac portables. That really would have surprised the twenty-year–old version of me.1

Mid-2009 MacBook Pro 13"

My Mid-2009 MacBook Pro still gets it done six years after hitting the market.

The 2009 MacBook Pro was the first 13-inch notebook in the Unibody design, and it has aged well. It not only looks like a recent computer, it preforms reasonably well. It’s responsive, and I almost never get those dreaded spinning beachballs. Undoubtedly, upgrading the RAM to eight gigabytes and replacing the spinning-disk hard drive with a solid-state drive have forestalled its obsolesce.

As I’ve chronicled here, this computer has taken some lumps over the years, and I constantly dread its inevitable demise. I’ve not only spent quite a bit of time and money upgrading this computer, I’ve also sacrificed dollars and hours repairing it, including soldering the fan to the logic board and replacing the keyboard. I’ve stubbornly continued to do so because I knew someday Apple would release something fundamentally different to my six-year–old MacBook Pro.

Yesterday, along with a cheaper AppleTV and the new HBO Now streaming service, Apple announced the new MacBook. I am almost certain it will be my next computer. It has everything I would want in a portable. It is light and thin, it has a Retina display, and it promises all-day battery life.

The new 2015 MacBook

So svelte!

Of course, there are some sacrifices to making something so light and thin.

  • The display is an inch smaller than my current 13-inch MacBook Pro and, in 2x mode, will have fewer pixels than my current 1280 x 800 resolution,
  • There is no SD card slot, which I regularly use to import photos from my DSLR and mirrorless camera,
  • There is only one USB-C port,
  • The only other connector is an audio port,
  • The Intel Core M processor is not an i5 or i7,
  • The maximum storage is 512 GB, and maximum RAM is 8 GB.

These are not deal breakers, though. I rarely work with anything connected to my Mac other than the power supply and maybe a pair of headphones. Aside from connecting my cameras or SD cards to import photos, I usually only plug-in a VGA adapter for work and my Garmin Edge GPS for play. I’m sure that in due time I will find a cheap USB 2.0–USB-C adpater to upload and import my bike ride data and photos. And as for presentations, I can go back to presenting from my iPhone or iPad until Monoprice releases the requisite VGA/HDMI adapters.

I look forward to getting my hands on a MacBook on April 10, because, unlike the Apple Watch that also ships next month, this new MacBook makes sense to me.

Or maybe I should see what they do with the MacBook Pros later this year…

Update: If you’re looking to sell your old MacBook Pro, Gazelle is offering a $20 bonus on any MacBook Pro valued at $50 or more. As an affiliate, I get a commission on your transaction.

The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.

  1. I also bought an iMac in 2009 that I sold in aftermath of my “divorce”. ↩

That Time I Had to Reset My MacBook Pro’s SMC to Slow Down the High-Speed, Whirring Fan

Last night, I came home after a long day and found that my MacBook Pro would not wake from sleep after I took it out of my backpack. This is an occasional problem with my aging notebook, but after a reboot, it usually operates as it should. But this time, after I rebooted the machine, the fan spun to full speed, making that disconcerting whirring sound, despite the fact that the computer was not running any applications and was cool to the touch.

I opened up the computer and found that the outermost RAM DIMM had popped out of the slot. That would explain why, after letting it boot earlier, it reported only 4 GB of RAM. After reseating the RAM and securing each connection, I rebooted the machine again, but the fan kept spinning at maximum speed. Fuck!

This computer has been through a lot. I not only spilled seltzer on it, followed by black coffee. Eventually, the liquids damaged the keyboard, which I had to replace. And, let’s not forget about the time I had to solder the cable connecting the fan to the logic board. I suspected that whatever dislodged my RAM must have damaged the temperature sensor, and I dreaded that it would finally be beyond repair.

But then I noticed that MagSafe Power adapter, which was connected to my computer, was not illuminated—whereas it is always either green or amber. Moreover, the battery status lights also did not illuminate to show the charge level. Those additional symptoms led me to the underlying problem. The System Management Controller was corrupted, and I needed to reset it.

Key sequences: Resetting the SMC and Zapping the PRAM

Resetting the SMC is the new Zapping the PRAM. Image from Chickaboo Designs.

I’m old enough now to remember when our Macs would develop unexplainable problems, someone would advise us to zap the PRAM. In my over twenty years of working with Macs, zapping the PRAM never once fixed any mysterious problems. Would resetting the SMC do any good?

The Apple Support page outlines the steps for resetting the SMC for particular kinds of computer, such as portables with removable batteries, portables with sealed batteries, and desktop computers. In my case, I needed to shut down the computer, hold down Shift–Control–Option with my left hand and depress the power button with my right hand at the same time. Once I did that, the lights on the MagSafe adapter came on.

Once again, I rebooted up the computer with baited breath. This time, as it had done countless other times, the fan came on at the normal speed.

While zapping the PRAM was for me pretty ineffective, resetting the SMC had a different result. It did indeed fix something!

QuickType Like You’ve Had a Few

One of the least heralded features of iOS 8 is QuickType, often known as “Auto-Complete”. Instead of rudely correcting your misspellings like Auto Correct, QuickType suggests three possibilities for what you might want to type next: the more keys you press, the more precise the suggestion. On rare occasions, it doesn’t suggest what you want to type and you must type the entire word. But a more common occurrence is that you get the next word you were going to type with one or two key presses. While you could probably type the word faster than reviewing and accepting the appropriate suggestion, QuickType saves a significant amount of screen-tapping.

Somewhere in between those two situations is when you can just accept the first suggestion without any input. The results can be amusing. Although sentences composed this way appear grammatically correct, they are semantically nonsensical. When the featured debuted last fall, the world saw a Twitter account of these amusing missives and even a song composed using only QuickType.

Last night, a friend and I wrote to each other using only QuickType suggestions. It made no sense but was amusing nonetheless.

She began:

The fact that the company said the government of national security and stability in the world is full of people who are not in a row

Look at the end of the best thing

To which I replied:

The fact I can get it right away with the best of the year and I don’t think that I have a great way of the year.

To which she replied:

Thanks to my mom
I love the new version of a sudden urge
I’m at a time when you are so

To which I replied:

I’m at a time when you are not

To which she replied:

The fact I can see it

The only thing that would have to go back and I don’t think that I have a great way of the day

And I then wrote:

No more. I’m at a time when you are not in my room for a long way in hell

I have no idea how I feel so good

And she concluded:

Ok so I have a good idea but I can’t even get the hang of the year

You really have to appreciate the things computers say. Reads like we had a few, doesn’t it?

Apple Shutters Development of Aperture

Since I became more serious about photography in 2010, I have been using Aperture to edit and manage my photo library. While most every other DSLR photographer I’ve ever met prefers Adobe’s Lightroom or Capture One, a small niche of photographers have stuck with Aperture. I preferred it to Lightroom partly because I bought it for about $60, thanks to a substantial academic discount, and because I have had some problems with Adobe software in the past that I would like to avoid in the future.

Earlier today, the small niche of Aperture users learned that Apple will stop development of Aperture and migrate us to their new Photos app, due in 2015.

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” said Apple in a statement provided to The Loop. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.

That explains why Apple hasn’t updated Aperture since November 2013 and why it still bears the antiquated Aqua look on its buttons and dialog boxes. Adobe has already began courting Aperture users promising that will double-down on its development of Lightroom. And Capture One’s pricing doesn’t look half bad should the new Photos app not do it for me.

Apple Figures Out How To Price the Final Season of Mad Men

Do you remember how everyone who bought Season 5 of Breaking Bad on iTunes in 2012 was angry to learn they also had to buy the second-half of Season 5 in 2013? A litany of complaints and a class-action lawsuit forced Apple and AMC to give away the last eight episodes of the series to those customers. At the time, I had predicted that this might pose a similar issue for the final season of Mad Men, which is also scheduled to air over two years in 2014 and in 2015.

On Monday morning, I bought the season pass for the final season of Mad Men on iTunes, and I noticed the price was $35, based on fourteen episodes, not seven for this year and seven for next. Apple figured it out and even included an explanatory note: “Mad Men, The Final Season is expected to include 14 episodes (actual number of episodes may vary).”

The price is a little steep because of the upfront cost of buying fourteen episodes. It’s not as nice as getting the early adopter credit of buying the first eight episodes and getting the back eight free. However, come next year, I’ll be relieved to find seven episodes appearing each week in my queue, ready to stream.

And streaming at home is still way better than watching it at a bar.

Fool Me Once…

Today is April Fool’s Day. Since yesterday, I’ve been on high alert carefully scrutinizing anything that could be a prank. I usually forget about today—being too preoccupied with this, that, or something else, but this year, I was expecting it so I’ve been fully prepared. Although this heighten skepticism has taken most of the fun out of today, I did get a few choice pranks.

Make a Photo without a Camera

The folks at Lomography, makers of analog film cameras for the hip art-school set, has announced a new spray that will allow you to slowly expose an image onto a roll of film.


I fell for this one at first, partly because I saw it on March 31. It seems completely feasible until you read that it takes up to 24 hours for a decent exposure. I thought that was a typo. But the giveaway in this video was in the time-lapse sequence, where the guy stands with the roll of film in the dark. I’m no expert in Greek, but I know you need light to make a photograph.

Canon Wildlife Camera

Speaking of photography, I saw this announcement come across my RSS feed this morning from The Digital Picture, an expert website for Canon photographers.

Fake Canon 1D W (Wildlife) for April Fool's Day 2014

This is a very compelling prank. A camera like this makes some sense. However, as far as I know, no one has ever made a flagship (D)SLR camera specifically for one application. (Okay, fine, Canon has made two cameras specifically for astrophotography.) As I skimmed the article, I thought it was real, until I realized what day it was.

Bryan, the site’s owner, even included a link to the B&H website so you can pre-order this camera. However, that link takes you to an “April Fool’s” page, revealing that you have been had!

Apple Buys iFixit

A good April Fool’s Prank is one that seems plausible and incredible at the same time. Apple buying the hub for online do-it-yourself repair manuals seems both plausible and incredible. The press release includes some very humorous details, admitting they sold out.

“Everyone has a number”, admitted Kyle Wiens, iFixit’s CEO. “I didn’t think there was a reasonable number that would make me say, ‘You know I was going to change the world with repair documentation but here’s a number.’” In the end, Apple gave us a number that we couldn’t refuse.

I saw this from the spoil-sports at MacRumors, who not only revealed this and other “stories” to be April Fool’s hoaxes, but admitted that they did not intend to “participate” in any prank news stories. That makes sense since some of the rumors they reference are a bit unbelievable, even if some are spot-on.

Hulu Announces New Spin-Offs

Hulu announced two new spin-offs of hit series available on the streaming service, including one where Hannibal gets a cooking show.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/615757
The other is, The Field, a spin-off of the critically acclaimed series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which I haven’t yet seen (shame on me, yes, I know). 

http://www.hulu.com/watch/615758
Honestly, I figured out that these spin-offs were fake. However, I was very impressed that they went through the trouble to make two very good looking videos. 

Fake United Jeff’s Improvements for United Airlines

The Twitter account for the fake Jeff Smisek, CEO of United Airlines, is one of the few Twitter feeds I read like a blog, where I scroll back to each tweet until I read them all. Today, he’s been dispatching fake announcements to improve United Airlines, such as this one to solve the labor dispute between the airline and its two sets of pilots (former Continental and former United).


Some, however, are more sensible, so much so that you know that they’re fake.


I really hate the new logo, and I’m not alone.

EFF Reports that MPAA is to Update its Copyright Curriculum for Kindergartners

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent out a “very special” issue of its newsletter, the EFFector. 

A few of the stories were pretty obvious pranks. For example, they mention an NSA program, IMPENDINGSLUMBER, that is designed to “intercept children’s bedtime stories.” But one was a little too close to reality to be an obvious prank. Here it is in its entirety:

Citing numerous psychological studies that indicate children under the age of eight respond primarily to fear-based cues, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is adding another character to its “Sharing Is Bad” copyright curriculum: the “Fair Use Creep,” a four-headed monster in a trench coat. “We think these children will respond well to characters like the Fair Use Creep,” said MPAA chief Chris Dodd in a press conference Friday. “And by respond well, we mean cower in fear.”

Doesn’t it seem a bit extreme for the motion picture industry to infiltrate children’s curriculum with lessons on copyright maximalism? This must be a joke, right? Sadly, it’s not.

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Winners at Product Placement

Product Placements are on Target in *Josie and the Pussycats*

With Sunday’s Academy Awards marking the end of the award season, Brandcameo announced its 2014 Product Placement Awards.

I used to find product placements tasteless, but my thinking has evolved. Years ago I read an interview with a respected TV writer and producer[1] who said that if done properly product placements can add to the character and setting of the story. If memory serves, he said something like “if there’s a character who drinks whiskey, and Bushmill will pay us for placement, let’s monetize that.”

There’s a nuanced difference between a Johnny Walker drinker (someone who tries too hard) and a Bulleit rye drinker (a straight-shooter). That changed my thinking. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of bean counters in media studies for whom each time a logo or product appears on screen, creativity has died by one point.

Free as in beer signs.
Free as in beer signs.

Winning and placing in this year’s Brandcameo Awards are Budweiser and Apple, respectively. I’ve always hated when a character ask for a generic “beer” on television or in a movie so I guess it’s a little more realistic that someone asks for a “Bud.” It’s the same number of syllables as “beer,” and the set designer will probably get a neon sign or painted mirror to hang in the bar set.

As for computers, according to worlds of films and TV shows I watch, seemingly everyone uses a Mac or an iPhone. Apparently, Apple products also appear on movies or TV shows I don’t watch:

Between 2001 and 2011, 129 of the 374 No. 1 films (34.4 percent) had Apple product placement. But Apple is still a product placement power, with 2013 films like Drinking Buddies and We’re the Millers both featuring the brand, as did China’s Midnight Weibo. Then there is TV, where Apple has upped its presence in hit series like House of Cards and Ray Donovan and overseas in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes and China’s knock-off of The Apprentice.

Speaking of House of Cards, the product placement of computers and smartphones in that series is pretty systematic. The government apparatchiks use Blackberry phones, presumably for their rock solid security, and a unremarkable brand of desktop computers. But everyone’s personal phone is an iPhone. Men usually carry a black phone, and women sport a white one. The rich and powerful Frank and Claire Underwood both carry gleamingly new iPhones, in the new iPhone 5/5S form factor. By contrast, Zoe Barnes, a symbol of youthful enthusiasm and early–20s poverty, is still using a stumpy iPhone 4/4S. I’m surprised it doesn’t have a cracked screen.

Zoe Barnes has apparently not finished her contract and is still stuck with an iPhone 4 in 2013
Zoe Barnes has apparently not finished her contract and is still stuck with an iPhone 4 in 2013

And speaking of personal computing, does anyone take a computer, that is not a MacBook Pro or Air, to bed?

It’s hard not to get caught up in the Apple vs. Google debate, and the Brandcameo Awards also fall prey to this polemic. They point to a film that is entirely about Google:

More than one movie plot this year was knitted together with a brand name…. The Internship is the clear winner in the category with nearly the entire film’s shenanigans set inside the search engine behemoth’s campus and revolving around Google.

*The Internship* searches for a product placement contract.

The Internship had its moments, but I really preferred House of Cards.

  1. I’m pretty certain that it was David Simon, the creative force behind Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, but I didn’t bookmark the article nor did I find it through a bunch of web searches. Maybe it was Matthew Weiner.  ↩

Can Apple Be “Energy Shamed”?

Energy shaming 2x

In his epic review of Mac OS X Mavericks, John Siracusa writes of the operating system’s method of showing apps that are using “significant energy.” 

But perhaps most importantly, the battery status menu in Mavericks now includes a “hall of shame” section that lists applications that are currently using “significant energy” on the system. The battery status menu now calls out energy-hogging applications. I can imagine Mac developers everywhere cringing at the thought of the e-mail they’re going to receive from users when their application shows up as an energy hog.

Since I learned of this feature, I’ve noticed four apps that regularly appear in that list:

  • Handbrake
  • Aperture
  • Mail
  • Safari

It makes sense that Handbrake draws a lot of energy, since it’s busting ass to decode and encode video. Aperture, too, can suck a lot of power after I’ve imported a ton of RAW photos. Siracusa notes as much, “Some applications need ‘significant energy’ to do the task they’re designed to do.” But Mail and Safari!? Both of these are Apple apps. Both were updated for Mavericks, but they still consume “significant energy.” And in the image to illustrate Siracusa’s review, it shows Photo Booth, another Apple application.

Can we “energy shame” Apple?