toadkick's comments

I did read the article. Sorry, I conflated pinch-zoom with double-tap zooming. facepalm

How about we instead stop turning off page zooming on mobile sites. The least of my concerns here is the stupid 300ms lag, when it seems like 80% of mobile sites these days don't even allow pinch-zooming anyway. Remember when one of the great things about smartphones was that you could use the "real" internet? Yeah. My poor eyeballs (and fat fingers) miss those days.

Sure, if taste is not at all a factor. But since we're human beings, it is a factor. It's "easy" unless you are someone who is repulsed completely by the taste of most vegetables. There's nothing "easy" about choking down food that tastes like poison to me. I wish I could flip a switch in my brain and suddenly love vegetables, for more reasons than just potential animal cruelty. But I can't. So it will always be "hard" for me to not eat meat.

I posted a very similar reply to a post a couple of days ago linking to the same article (uh..see EDIT below, this is slightly different article), submitted by the same person, who also happens to be the the author of the story (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4425673). It appears that post was either flagged or downvoted into oblivion, because it disappeared shortly thereafter (and after seeing this hit again 2 days later, I'm thinking it was pretty justifiable...)

EDIT: okay, so I missed a small detail, the other was about the MBP, this one is about the MBA. My bad..I guess.

Anyway, my experience has been largely the same as yours...I lost a significant amount of battery life when I upgraded to Lion, and apparently it seems like the problem is only getting worse.

The author replied in the other post that he would add Snow Leopard to the test, which should be interesting...I'm expecting that the difference between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion will be huge.

I wish they would/could also include Snow Leopard in this comparison. I lost about 20-30% of my battery life after upgrading to Lion, so the further reduction seems pretty horrible. Guess I'll be waiting a little longer still before upgrading to Mountain Lion.

It's one thing for suppliers to leak info on hardware they are supplying, but I'm sure Apple doesn't give inside information such as pricing strategy to them. It's BS. And the fact that it's coming from Digitimes makes it even more suspect.

It's one thing for suppliers to leak info on hardware they are supplying, but I'm sure Apple doesn't give inside information such as end product pricing to them. It's BS. And the fact that it's coming from Digitimes makes it even more suspect.

Yeah, Digitimes is notorious for being completely wrong about Apple's plans.

#1 and #2 are fair points, in light of the fact that the iPhone completely cannibalized the iPod market. But, the amazing iPod sales weren't going to continue forever, and I think Apple just took the next logical step when they released the iPhone.

As you mentioned, an $800 MB Air would be in iPad + Keyboard/other accessory price range territory, which could certainly cannibalize iPad sales. But in this case it doesn't make much sense to cannibalize the still young and very profitable iPad market with a product that has been around much longer, has historically had low market share, and doesn't have the same "new and cool" factor.

#3 I don't see happening as long as Apple still intends to sell Macs, because that would dilute one of the things that makes a Mac a Mac (the combination of the hardware + Mac OS X), and they've fought pretty hard to keep Mac OS off of other machines.

Well, typically Apple just sells all of the stock of their current Macs when they are about to release a new model. The rumor mill usually kicks into high gear around the time all of the retail and online stores start running low on stock. In fact, with Macs, they typically do just upgrade the hardware and keep the price point the same on the newer models. I'm not saying that it's impossible that Apple would release an $800 MB Air, just that it would be atypical for them, and it seems unlikely. Maybe if this story offered some actual evidence for why Apple would drop it's prices, but it didn't. All it says is "Somebody somewhere said so", and continues on to actually weaken it's point by saying that everybody else in the "ultrabook" segment is cutting back production, presumably because they aren't selling well vs. the MB Air.

I don't think that's competing on price first, I think that's a graceful and inexpensive way to increase market share in a very competitive mobile environment. From everything I've read, it's the $0 with contract 3GS that is accomplishing this, and I don't think the people who would get a 2-year old iPhone because it's free are the same kind of people who would spend $800 on a laptop, regardless of the brand. I don't think the drop from $1000 to $800 would really be that compelling to them, because they likely aren't type to care about getting the super-thin awesome hotness with a small hard drive and no optical drive at a significant cost over a run-of-the-mill Dell (or comparable) laptop. The Mac has never had huge market share, and their Mac business brings in a scant amount of profit compared to the iPhone and iPad business, where they can much more afford to lose a small amount of profit in the interest of increasing market share. I don't see why they would kneecap themselves by reducing the price so much just to increase market share, when they make such a nice margin already with what little market share they do have.

I'd hardly call the 64 GB in the $999 model "massive". I still know a lot of people who won't make the switch to an Air due to the lack of an optical drive, and reducing the already small hard disk capacity would reduce the attractiveness of the Air to those folks even further. Also, I don't think iCloud and iTunes Match are good enough (yet) to convince people that the don't really need a hard drive anymore.

I don't buy it, and this article doesn't really make a strong case for it either. If the MB Air is a strong seller (and by all accounts it is), what sense does it make for Apple to drop the price down $200 to "compete" in a segment where it is already dominating? Clearly other "ultrabook" makers are already having a hard time competing at even the $999 price point, so there's no need for Apple to eat into its (presumably healthy) profit margins for the MB Air. With that said, I wouldn't mind if this was true, I would have a hard time turning it down at that price. The only way I could see this happening is if Apple takes a similar approach as it does with iPhones (and now iPads), where they keep the last gen hardware on the market at a reduced price when they update the lineup. But still...a $200 price drop seems unrealistic.

Mysteriously, AT&T changed their plans very shortly after Apple announced iMessage. Obviously they foresaw a lot of people downgrading their plans so they just did away with the tiered plans completely.

I worked at BB for a year back in the day. I can say that the blue shirt employees were only good for 2 things: attaching overpriced high-margin peripherals/cables to sales, and pushing the extended warranties. Those who were not good at either did not last long there.

Yeah, I was wondering how they would have let something like this slip through. I figure either a) they weren't aware of the exploit (unlikely, but possible...Draw Something, while fun, is not a very polished game), or b) they know of the exploit, but fixing it is a non-trivial. I suspect b) because the game does not appear to store any state between the time you start guessing the other player's drawing, and the time you complete you drawing (so it just starts over if the round is interrupted, as if nothing ever happened). So, in order to remember the list of words that was previously presented to you, the game would have to 1) maintain state that indicates which "phase" of each round you are in for a given game, and 2) maintain the original list of words presented to you after you get to the "choose a word to draw" phase. I suspect they just decided that fixing the exploit isn't worth it, because a lot of iOS users don't even know that they can force quit the app, and a lot of the ones who do probably still wouldn't be bothered to actually do it. Also, having to go through the process of watching/skipping the other player draw his picture again can be tedious.

That's very strange. My girlfriend's iPhone 4 handles it just fine.

Heh, which I find myself doing frequently. Every time I get to the point where there are no "easy" choices for words to draw, I find myself force-quitting the app, relaunching, and playing a round with someone different, and then coming back to the round I skipped (incidentally, you get offered new word choices in this case). Hard to say whether having a "back" button would end up discouraging people from continuing the game or not without some A/B testing, and I have a hunch that not having a back button probably keeps people in the game a little longer, but I still wish there was a back button. I'd like to be able to return to the same point in the round instead of having to completely restart the round again.

EDIT: something else occurs to me too. When you are presented with a list of words to draw, you have the option to "bomb" the list and get new words. As I mentioned, if you force quit the app at this point, and come back to that round, you will be offered different words, for free (definitely an exploit if you are patient enough to go through the process of force-quitting and restarting). I guess putting a back button on this screen would pretty much obviate the need for the "bomb" button, and would directly impact their bottom line since people wouldn't have as many opportunities to use their bombs. I have a suspicion that that's the reason there is no back button...the fact that it doesn't give players a chance to back out and keeps them a little more engaged it probably just a happy side effect.

Sounds like on the new iPad the max has further increased to 4096x4096

The max texture size has been 2048x2048 since the 3GS

Agreed. I've had to use factories in Obj-C plenty. I guess the argument that I would make is that they are much easier to implement in Obj-C and require less boilerplate (especially if you use blocks), not that the pattern doesn't exist in Obj-C.