Bits & Pieces

At least according to The Awl. Check out this video compilation of Apple products’ appearances in movies and on TV.

Apple’s Greatest Cinematic Achievements from The Awl on Vimeo.

This information was not really new. But Apple stock tends to move for unknown reasons.

Disclosure: I am long in AAPL. Nothing on this blog should be treated as investment advice.

Featuring none other than Steve Jobs.

The winner of the $10,000 iTunes gift card (received for downloading the 10 Billions song from iTunes) got a personal call from Steve Jobs. The winner didn’t believe it, at first.

When Steve Jobs personally called Woodstock, Georgia native Louie Sulcer to tell him he’d won Apple’s iTunes Store 10 Billion Song Sold contest, Sulcer first thought was that he was being pranked. “He called me and said, ‘This is Steve Jobs from Apple.’ I said, ‘Yeah right,’ ” Sulcer tells Rolling Stone.

That’s billion with a “b.” Today, around 4:30 pm, Apple sold its 10 billionth song from its iTunes store. As Steve Jobs would say, amazing. Whoever downloaded that song won a $10,000 iTunes gift certificate.

It wasn’t me.

Oh, and happy birthday Steve.

Get it here.

Jon Gruber, a true thinker on all things Apple, gave this presentation a couple of weeks ago at MacWorld Expo.  Worth a watch if you an Apple follower. Also, do look at his blog Daring Fireball, which is (and has been) in my Blogroll.

Want some help snaring $10,000 worth of media from the Apple iTunes store. Watch this widget:

On Thursday night, Charlie Rose interviewed the Wall Street Journal/All Things D’s Walt Mossberg, The New York Times’ David Carr and our Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington.  These are three smart guys, but they are all, to one degree or another, tend to believe in Apple generally.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing on this blog should be construed as investment advice.

Official White House photo of staff during YouTube interview of the President. (via MacDailyNews)

So Apple has announced that 3G based VOIP is now allowed on the iPhone. A couple of apps are out already, but the Skype app still does not work on 3G. But the company says that will change, real soon now. I can’t wait. It means you can make calls while connected on 3G without using minutes against your AT&T account.

(from Hoggworks Studios)

Disclosure: I own Apple stock. Nothing on this website should be viewed as investment advice.

Steven Frank (of Panic Software) has penned a thought-provoking essay on the history and direction of personal computing, analyzing where the iPad might fit in to the bigger picture.  He notes the relatively short history of personal computing (as compared to other technologies) and hypothesizes that big changes are coming. Overall a great essay.

In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”

Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”

The Old World

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

The New World

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.