Barry Ritholtz wrote Why Apple Should Grab Twitter over at The Big Picture.
Needless to say, I think this is a terrible idea. The last thing that Twitter needs is to get swallowed up by a larger company and the last thing Apple needs is a large acquisition to possibly steal any focus away from what they do best.
Let Twitter be Twitter and Apple be Apple. The acquisitions need to stop.
This was bound to happen when you take a theater performance as wholly true.
This does not mean that there is no improvement to be made in China (duh), but sometimes shortcuts are not the best way to go about things. Apple seems to be the main go-to buzz word for getting more hits and more money for your site.
I sigh.
It makes me very sad to see people bemoaning consumer-facing improvements in a device just so that we don’t have to deal with problems we have been ignoring for a LONG time. The web has pretty much been content serving terribly compressed and downsized images as a hack around poor bandwidth.
Guess what, those days are now coming to a close.
You can sit by and say:
I’m very afraid that exactly because of its excellence the Retina display will be a severe set-back for the mobile web, and maybe also for native iOS apps. Apple shouldn’t have ignored the fact that Moore’s Law doesn’t go for data connections.
Or you can take it as a challenge to figure out the best way to push things forward. High resolution displays on smaller devices MAKES THE DEVICE BETTER.
That’s really the only things that matters.
With the iOS 5.1 update, an iPhone 4S attached to a HSPA+ network will display a little “4G” after the network provider name (in this case, AT&T). Before, it displayed “3G” instead.
This has put parts of the technology blogosphere into a tizzy (and what doesn’t these days) about this faux-controversy. Here are some facts at the moment:
I think sometimes that people think Apple somehow can just walk into any board room and demand that a company do what it wants. AT&T is using 4G to define its HSPA+ network and that spills over into their coverage maps as well. If anything, using the marketing terms that AT&T has defined for their own network allows people to make a better-informed decision because they will know how their phone will perform in certain areas as defined by AT&T.
Yes, this is 3G technology and it would be better if Apple could just stick with labeling it as 3G and be done with it, but they are tied by what the carriers do and this time they needed to change the labeling to, perhaps, better server their customers.
The only people who really care about the change are those looking for something to complain about.
I love my current Apple TV, and now Apple has announced its follow-up.
It looks the same. It feels the same. It IS the same … well, not quite.
Only notable changes are switching from a single-core A4 processor to a single-core A5 processor and the ability to output 1080p to the television. Of course, those two are related.
The A5, even with just a single-core, allows the Apple TV to now decode 1080p content and output it to the television. The 2nd generation Apple TV (the one I have) was only able to do the same for 720p content. So …
Apple has announced that movies and TV available on iTunes will now be available in 1080p (for free) for those who have purchased the old 720p versions. They are still updating all of their offerings (and some will be delayed because of other content and licensing deals), but that is good news.
Apple also announced an expansion of their cloud offering by moving movies into the cloud as well. Now you can download (again) the movies you have purchased in the past. I believe you can also purchase new movies from your Apple TV without the need to work with iTunes on your Mac or PC. All good news.
There is also the iTunes Digital Copy as well, which will allow you to stream movies that you bought in the store. It is kind of like iTunes Match for Movies. Also, more good news.
The Apple TV (2nd generation) and the new Apple TV also get a complete refresh of the UI and software. It is far more “app like” and puts pretty much everything on equal footing. So far I’ve updated my Apple TV and I like it a lot better than the last version. The fact that it came as a free update to your Apple TV is really cool and further cements that the Apple TV is far more like an iOS device than the old, first-gen Apple TV.
Another update thrown out was to the iOS Remote application. The main addition is that you have controls for your iTunes Match library right within the application. It is a HUGE update as far as convenience goes when choosing music you have stored with iTunes Match.
It is interesting to note that the Apple TV was brought into the iPad event even if it makes a lot of sense. The content updates were needed for the new iPad, but the Apple TV needed a slight refresh in order to take advantage.
More and more of Apple’s outlook on the importance of iCloud is coming into view, which is fun to see. The devices are becoming endpoints for the data which is stored by Apple … which is really, really nice. I don’t need to have a computer with my iTunes library awake to play music, I just play the music through iTunes Match. I don’t need to have a computer awake to watch a movie, I just watch the movie through my Apple TV.
These are good things.
It will be interesting to see if the Apple TV gets a boost in sales by getting more exposure from the higher-profile iPad event. Another thing to think about.
Also, thank goodness there was no Apple TV Set.