Apple-Orange

Apple:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

That’s good enough for me.

My friend Ronald Suwandi finally switched to Simplenote after deleting his account twice before.

If you are not using Simplenote, you’d better have a really convincing reason. If you are on a Mac, you’ve also got to try Justnotes for your Simplenote. This is not an ad and I do not get any money from this post.

Out of all the acquisitions by Google, this is the one product I really don’t want them to shut down.

Stef Lewandowski:

That each of us dies, and at some point it’s going to be me. Luckily not that day, but some day. We might write songs about how we’re going to live forever and make outlandish predictions about the length of human life, but it doesn’t make it so, sadly.

Read the whole post. This is a very brilliant piece by Stef Lewandowski. A reminder for each of us to keep creating something every day, no matter how small it is.

Because we’ll never know when our time is up.

Trevor McKendrick:

These men all deserve the success Vesper will enjoy. But let’s recognize that it will succeed not because of a few interesting design decisions and the work of the past few months.

Instead, we’d do ourselves better by remembering that the the real work is being great – whatever that means in your field – over long periods of time. That is what earns you the trust of an audience, and that is why these three have succeeded.

McKendrick’s point is not that they don’t deserve the success, but that their credibility also helped the success of Vesper.

If you haven’t subscribed to McKendrick’s blog I strongly suggest you to do so. His blog posts are very very interesting.

Kara Swisher:

Zynga is laying off 18 percent of its workforce — which represents 520 employees — in a bid to reduce costs and more drastically restructure its troubled business toward mobile, according to sources close to the situation.

I wonder why they are not waiting until next week to do this.

Marco Arment:

On June 1, Glenn Fleishman will take ownership of The Magazine. I’ll be stepping back to an advisory role.

I didn’t expect this to come from Marco, but I think this is a really good move for The Magazine customers, him, and Glenn Fleishman. Congrats!

Before today, you can only buy 32GB or 64GB iPod touch for $299 or $399 (USD) respectively. Now you can buy a 16GB iPod touch for $229 without rear camera. Incidentally, this cheap iPod does not come in colours like the pricier counterparts.

This is a pretty interesting move from Apple. Last year before they release fifth generation iPod touch and iPhone 5, all the reports indicate that iPod touch sales are very strong. In the financial reports from last few quarters, it doesn’t seem like the iPod line grew at all. Before this year, thanks to the iPod touch the decline of the iPod line was actually not as bad as some people thought.

It might be the case that the sales of iPod touch this year is dwindling. $299 is indeed quite a high price point for someone to buy an iPod touch. For the iOS platform, offering an entry level iOS device that is lower than $200 is actually a very good strategy. It’s a pretty good pocket computer and gaming device for most people¹. Even at $229 price point, it is very appealing compared to other gaming device such as Nintendo 3DS.

Speirs kept a log of damages on the 115 iPads that he deployed, I assume, to a school. 14 devices out of 115 iPads replaced by Apple over the three years, that is 4% failure per year.

The next someone tells me Apple devices are fragile, I’m going to scream “show me the statistics!” and show them this article.

Let’s see if I got this right:

• They uses ASUS VivoTab to compare with iPad 64 GB, instead of using Surface RT.
• On the Microsoft Surface RT tab, they sneakily swap the iPad with the 32GB model to compare with Surface RT 32GB. Why? Because the 64GB Surface RT costs the same as iPad 64GB.
• They are touting 7GB of SkyDrive when Google just came out with 15GB storage of Google Docs, and most people use Dropbox nowadays anyway.
• They are touting that Windows 8 runs Microsoft Office while iPad doesn’t. I guess now we know why they still haven’t released Office for iOS yet.
• They still love product comparison checklist. Marco should make one for them too.

Update: So apparently there is a SkyDrive app in the AppStore. So if you use iOS, why not use both?

Marissa Meyer:

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Do you want to know what Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Gandhi, and Ryan Seacrest have in common?

Larry Page:

About 14 years ago, I got a bad cold, and my voice became hoarse. At the time I didn’t think much about it. But my voice never fully recovered. So I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with left vocal cord paralysis. This is a nerve problem that causes your left vocal cord to not move properly. Despite extensive examination, the doctors never identified a cause — though there was speculation of virus-based damage from my cold. It is quite common in cases like these that a definitive cause is not found.

Best wishes to one of the best computer scientists of this generation.