Minus Apple.

What if, instead of bringing Apple back from the brink in 1996, something different had happened? Bringing Steve Jobs back too late, or any of a number of other choices and Apple failed back in the late 1990s.

What would have happened?  Sorry Microsoft, "Windows or Nothing" really dead-ended your technological progress.  You'd had the ideas, but 10 years of shoehorning Windows onto tablet and phone type devices hadn't worked as well as Apple did it on their first try*.

Even being shown the way with the iPad and iPhone, and having a Metro UI that (to me) seems best designed for Tablets out of all devices, you still couldn't make Surface work.  Nobody at the top could tell the Office team to "make Office work on this tablet, damn it"?  Office makes money, but isn't exciting** so doesn't sell tablets to people at home.

No Apple means no iPod, no iPhone, no iPad.  We'd have nice tiny little cell phones that lasted a month on a charge.  That seems like what cell phone companies were competing on before the iPhone--size and battery life; but like the older ones with a tiny screen and hardware keyboard or number pad.

Could anyone else gotten something like iTunes launched--and been friendly to people with 99¢ songs?

Tablets would have stayed as weird niche devices that ran bastard versions of Windows.

No Macbook Air and we'd be stuck with monstrous yet plastic and flimsy laptops.


Who could have developed those without Apple to show the way?

I'd bet that the company to finally pull things off would have been Amazon.  The first Kindle came out in late 2007 so must have been in development before the iPhone was announced in early 2007.  Amazon started selling books, so an e-reader device made sense.

For them, moving to something like the Kindle Fire type tablet that did books as well as video would be the next step.  (Though without Apple it might have had a decent size screen with a hardware keyboard under it like the first few versions of the Kindle did.  Looking back, the design of the first Kindle was crazy and weird.)

We'd have gotten tablets, but even more oriented as entertainment consumption.  Would there have been apps?


Thankfully, Apple didn't die.

----

* Apple surely had 100s of tries too, but all internal things that nobody else saw.  

** Lots of money, so far.  But that won't last.  People use Office because they have to for work.  I'm sure the new versions are a bit more advanced than the nearly 20 year old(!) versions for Windows 95.  But they do the same thing.  Most people would still be happy with that years old version.  I've been happy with Google Docs for the few times a year I needed printed documents, but the new iCloud ones look great so I've been using them too.

Flying Brick!

We had no plans to make any sort of Flappy Bird clone, until I read about the FlappyJam :)  80% was done sitting in a hospital waiting room, so it was a nice break and distraction from that.

Two main ideas for our variation.

1) First was to have something that doesn't fly well, so takes a LOT of tapping*.  A brick was the first thought.

2) And I had a crazy idea for monetization.  Let people pay to buy "Cheats" kinda like a point doubler in many games.  But taken to extremes.  $0.99 for a simple point doubler (2 points per tunnel), all the way up to $99 for a thousand points per tunnel.  

For awhile, it was $999 for the thousand pointer, but we decided that might be too crazy to start--but if people buy the $99 one, we'll add it in an update as a Million or Billion pointer!  Even in testing mode, with a test iTunes account that has no credit card, it gave me butterflies to click to buy that $999 one.

Spend $99 and you'll pretty much be guaranteed to set one of the top scores :)


News came out as it was in progress, that "Flappy" in the name was getting rejected.  So it is "Flying Brick" (Somebody else had squatted on Flappy Brick in iTunes anyway, so just as well we had to change it.)

All the graphics from WORLD 1-1 made it easy, Shawn drew a cute face to add to a simple red brick.  A couple days from start to finish :)


* One of the game testing/evaluating things my brother Pete thought of a year or two ago:  How many taps or actions you do in the first minute of gameplay.  It led to a couple games getting put on the back burner, since as action games, they didn't get to the action quick enough.

That's something that the original Flappy Bird nailed.

Flying Brick passes that test with flying colors too.  I counted 12 taps in about the first 2 seconds of gameplay, getting to the first obstacle.

Flushing $9.5 Billion.

"I bet it would take longer to literally flush $9.5 billion in cash down a toilet than it took for Google to do so figuratively on the Motorola acquisition." - DaringFireball

My toilet is ready to flush again after 30 seconds.  That gives 2,880 flushes a day.

I'd say 20 bills at a time is the max before my toilet would start to get clogged (and that's being generous...and I'm not going to test this number.)

Going with the smallest bill, flushing single dollars, that's only $57,600 a day.  You're flushing for 166,666 days or 456 years.

Google is rich, so say they're flushing $100 bills.  That's $5,760,000 a day.  Flushing for 1,666 days or 4.5 years.


The days between buying and selling really was 617.  Huh, according to Wikipedia, the US no longer makes bills bigger than $100.  So, no, with a standard toilet, and readily available US currency, you could not flush it fast enough.

Apple's Big Number problem.

To please Wall Street and Analysts, Apple has to keep the numbers growing.  Which they did, but not enough.

From here (embedded below), about 57% of Apple's revenue is from the iPhone.
~57% of their $57.6 Billion in revenues last quarter is $32.8 Billion.
~20% is iPad, for $11.5 Billion.
~12% is Mac, for $6.9 Billion.

In the most recent quarter, Microsoft had revenue of $24.5 Billion. And a recent quarter had Google at $14.9 Billion.

So to really grow more, Apple really has to invent a product or product category the size of a Microsoft or a Google.

Easier said than done...but they might :)  Or they can just keep printing money...

Apple revenue PERCENTAGE by product line, since 2005. pic.twitter.com/V1WYoBFE23
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) January 27, 2014

You2GIF

A cool app that will never see the light of day.

It let you use your iPhone or iPad to make a GIF from a YouTube video.  (With a hard limit of 7 seconds at most.)  

Browse to the video you want, then hold the button to record as it plays.  The options for setting the speed/looping work exactly like our camera app Giffish, so you can see all but the YouTube recording part in that app.

A nice cool icon too.

And of course we made a couple GIFs to show off how it worked...browse to your video & tap the Record button.

Then hold the red button to record.

We thought it would fall into the same Fair Use area that YouTube itself fits.  But Apple said that YouTube would say "No" so it was rejected.  Sorry Internets!

Interested?  Maybe I'll sell the source code or something so you could put it on your own devices... 

michael@burford.net

Interesting Wording

Saw Intel's ad for convertible laptops.  (Guy breaking his old laptop with a cup of coffee so his employer would have to buy him a new computer.)

The tag line at the end is "A Laptop when you need it, a Tablet when you WANT it."

Even right there in the ad saying that a tablet is what people really WANT ("want" was very emphasized by Mr. Lipton doing the voiceover).

Yes, many people still need a laptop for work...but that's not what they want.  Given the choice, people are going to buy what they WANT.

(And I've seen more and more iPads out for work too.  At the grocery store yesterday and a manager was using one to track something.  Before, he might have had some specialized device or even a paper printed report to check off; I don't remember ever seeing someone with a laptop walking around doing inventory.  Now it's an iPad.  People who say tablets aren't for work are only thinking about their one specific job type.)

Rich Corinthian Leather

I'd read the reviews when the new iPhone 5S came out, how the leather case quickly got marked and scuffed.  I bought the light cream colored one, knowing it would get distressed and stained the most.

Month One.  

Not much on the back, but nice polished sheen along all the edges.  Even more polished sheen on the corners.

Month Two.  
Still not much on the back, getting a really nice sheen around the edges and on the corners.  (It's a shadow from the iPad taking the picture on the bottom).

Getting quite dark on the front edge.

Even the buttons for volume showing some wear.