zweben

They should buy some plastic chairs.

It seems that some people will never learn that going for market share first isn't always the path to maximizing profit. I could understand these arguments when Apple wasn't doing so well, but now it's just silly; Apple has, for ages, been extremely consistent in prioritizing margins over market share. By all measures, it's working brilliantly for them.

Success through high margins is less visible and less obvious than success through high market share, and I'm guessing that contributes to the strange idea that Apple is somehow making a mistake with a high-margin lower volume strategy, but come on, they make more money selling cell phones than almost any other company in the world.

Apple could certainly license their OS to other vendors. But in doing so, they would be throwing out an extremely successful business model for one that eliminates their biggest differentiation from their competitors: the polish and quality they can provide by having complete control over all aspects of their products.

I'm not greatly angered and I doubt anyone else is. It just strikes me as stupid, that's all.

That would be a good theory if their page wasn't titled "HTML5 and web standards." There's not much room for interpretation in that.

I suspect that they simply let their desire to make the demos really impressive distract them from the original point of the demos. They could, I imagine them thinking, make some cool demos that would work in Chrome and Firefox and Safari, or they could make some even cooler demos that showed off things only available in Safari, and have a nice way to promote Safari to boot.

The problem is, once they did that, it went from a showcase of HTML5 standards to a showcase of proprietary Safari features that might be standards eventually. Oops. I'm rarely critical of Apple, but this is one of those times that makes me wonder if anyone there had their brains turned on.

The point is that the iPad is helping, and will continue to help, HTML5 become the new best medium for rich content. Apple isn't always concerned with using whatever is best or most practical at the moment. Sometimes they want to help along less established technologies that have the potential to be even better.

I guess he was implying that the question was so uncomfortable to answer that he would rather talk about his sex life.

Some people probably just assume that switching to HTML5 content always uses fewer CPU resources. There are plenty of informed reasons to prefer HTML content over Flash though. One is that putting performance into the hands of multiple companies will introduce competition. Just like with Javascript speeds, you can expect browser-makers to start racing in other areas of HTML5 performance.

I wouldn't be surprised to see HTML5 outperform equivalent Flash content in a year or so.

I don't think it's ever reasonable to expect a business to do something that is not in their self interest; their existence is predicated upon selfish behavior. When companies take socially conscientious actions that would appear to go against the company's best interest, they are almost always doing so after weighing the relative benefits of increasing public goodwill and maintaining direct profits and finding goodwill to be of greater benefit.

I would argue that the same thing applies to individuals; that no rational actions are truly outside of self-interest, because we do what makes us happy, even if the action itself would appear to be selfless.

I suspect that this new unwritten policy is to prepare for the introduction of widgets in iPhone OS 4.0. That would explain why they want to get rid of widget-like apps, why they would try to keep it low-key, plus the timing fits. That the app store reviewer said that Apple 'doesn't like' widgets anymore is probably meaningless; I doubt he knows about Apple HQ's plans or motivations any more than this developer.

"But I wouldn't confuse that with true product innovation. They're just taking it step-by-step."

Iterative improvement and innovation are not mutually exclusive. Just like with the iPhone (which had no app store at launch, and would be boring by today's standards,) most of the iPad's innovations are ahead of it. You don't have to revolutionize a market right off the bat to be innovative.

I disagree. The only reason iPhones aren't high priced is because they got a unprecedentedly large subsidy with AT&T. The phones may sell for $100-300, but Apple makes closer to $500-800 on them after what AT&T pays out. That's why they're the most profitable company at selling cell phones despite their small market share.

Obviously Apple wants market share too, but I've seen no indication that they're willing to prioritize it over high margins.

I don't know if it's a given that they'll never catch up, but at the moment they're not really relevant in the market, so it makes sense to leave them out.

What would the articles say about them? Microsoft may regain relevance in the market when the first version of their new smartphone OS is released months from now? That's about all there is to say.

A program can suggest words or combinations that you might not think of yourself. It helps in the same way that having another person brainstorm with you would help.

If you're going to convert a completely pointless website to work on a specific device for absolutely no reason, you might as well go all out.

They sell non-free fonts that allow font-face embedding in their licenses. Google will only offer free fonts.

Yes. In fact, nearly all of the fonts are also available on fontsquirrel.com.

Is there any specific benefit to doing this? Does it decrease the number of files loaded?

No, the article headlines use it.

If that's what they want to do, they could still have the IE9 installer install the codec system-wide, but it doesn't sound like that's what they intend to do.

AFAIK, ClearType settings apply system-wide. It should be pretty easy to tell though; if any non-image text in your browser is smoothed, it's on. If it's not, it's off.

What it sounds like the white drop shadow did in your case was simply force ClearType on for that text.

What browser is that in, and do you have anti-aliasing enabled in your OS? The 'original' text in your screenshot isn't anti-aliased at all, which I don't think should happen unless you have AA off on a system level.

I've noticed this myself. Any idea why that happens?

I've noticed that sometimes adding a blurred shadow disables sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and sometimes that makes things look better. I think, though, that there's a separate effect that makes the font look thinner when a blurred shadow is added that I don't really understand.

Even if the sample were random, the numbers could be misleading. It's clear from browsing any category by release date (almost random) that many app store apps have no effort put into them at all. Trying to use a sample of mostly junk apps to gauge the chances of success for an app that has had serious effort put into it is just going to give needlessly discouraging numbers.

The best bet is probably to look at apps with both a similar quality level and a similar amount of marketing behind them.

There was an early iPad video on Apple's site that showed the lego icon while browsing a website (which they later edited), so it was there at least initially.

"A Bluetooth version of the AirTurn is currently under development for the Apple iPad, and is expected to be available towards the end of 2010."

Nice. Hopefully the iPad device is a lot less than $200 though.

I'll just confirm that I had the same problem and doing the -windowed trick worked for me. Once you do it, you can switch back to full screen in the settings.

As far as I can tell, Apple still doesn't care much about gaming on the Mac. I'm sure they could offer better graphics cards if they wanted to, it's just low on their list of priorities.

Hopefully Steam will get enough people to start using Macs for gaming that Apple feels pressure to start offering decent video card choices.

Their screenshot comparison is inaccurate. It didn't look right to me, so I duplicated their screenshot on my own Mac at 2560x1600. My Mac Portal screenshot matches their PC screenshot in sharpness. For some reason it looks like the Mac version was not running at 2560x1600 (or even close) in their screenshot.

Here is the Mac screenshot I made: http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg

Their Mac one: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png

Edit: thought_alarm noted that there was just an update that fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation". That's probably what was going on.

I installed Steam on my Mac, started download of Portal. It saturated my 15 megabit internet connection for nearly the entire download. Portal launched just fine and ran very smoothly at 1920x1200. I already beat portal on Xbox 360. Mac version is easily as good if not better.

I believe it. Apple device diagnostic modes are usually extremely rough. You can put iPods into diagnostic mode. It's just unadorned text, and, on older iPods at least, you had to click the forward and back buttons to scroll through the menus. I remember seeing a different iPhone test screen that was similarly unrefined.

Apple's 'character' is to have things looking good by release, not necessarily internally.