File transfer is complicated

Apple would love us to believe it’s all “Eureka.” But Apple produces 10 pixel-perfect prototypes for each feature. They compete — and are winnowed down to three, then one, resulting in a highly evolved winner. Because Apple knows the more you compete inside, the less you’ll have to compete outside.

Source: daringfireball.net

Comparing your Mac’s raw performance with other Macs

The benchmark is a PowerMac G5 1.6GHz at 1000 points, measured using GeekBench. You can switch between 32-bit and 64-bit performances.

My late 2007 2.2GHz MacBook scored 3281 for 64bit performance, just 50 points ahead of the same speed MacBook Pro released earlier in the same year, which means it’s just over three times more powerful than the baseline PowerMac G5. The base model 2011 MacBook Air with Core i5 though, scored 4988, nearly five times more powerful.

Lenovo executive claims Samsung sold only 20,000 Galaxy Tabs

Samsung said at the end of 2010 that it had shipped 1m of its 7-inch Galaxy devices, which were seen as the first real Android competitors to Apple’s iPad. However, according to Barrow, Samsung only sold 20,000 of the tablets. Samsung had not returned a request for comment on Barrow’s claim by the time of publication.

A claim by Samsung’s Lee Young-hee earlier this year that the sales of the first Galaxy Tab Android tablet was “smooth” was apparently misheard as slow. If what Andrew Barrow of Lenovo said is true or close to the truth, slow and smooth apparently mean the same thing to Samsung. Also, how many people you know would describe sales performance as smooth?

Lenovo executive claims Samsung sold only 20,000 Galaxy Tabs

It was more than frustrating,” the former White House aide said. “Here we were, this young hip administration, and we were using stodgy BlackBerrys and old Microsoft programs. A lot of us were starting to get iPhones and iPads and we couldn’t really use them.

The White House is running a pilot program to get Apple’s mobile products approved for official use – Politico

Source: politico.com

Apple claims Android has roots at Apple

Before you go all crazy and accuse me of fanboyism or Apple being ridiculous (or both), go read the piece from Florian Mueller. In one of Apple’s filing against HTC, it says that when Andy Rubin worked at Apple in the 90s, his superiors were the ones who came up with a patent that Rubin later used to create Android, which means he may have been a contributor to the patent that Apple owns. If the ITC judge holds up Apple’s argument, this clearly will not bode well for Android.

Rubin worked at Apple long before the iPhone – even long before the iPod. If Apple had just claimed without particularity that Android started at Apple, most people would dismiss such an allegation as complete nonsense. But Apple now asserts – in a filing with the ITC, which means Apple has a legal obligation to make truthful representations of fact – that Rubin’s superiors at Apple were the inventors of that realtime API patent and he worked for them at the very time they made that invention. He worked as a low-level engineer while the inventors were senior people. It’s possible that he then contributed to the implementation of the claimed invention.

Apple claims Android has roots at Apple

What’s going on with Michael Arrington?

At the beginning it looked like Arrington simply wanted to go back to investing since that’s how he got into this blogging business in the first place and even more so recently when he put money into a number of startups.

The way AOL is going about the news from today however, is a lot less clear. AOL had committed Arrington for three years as part of the TechCrunch acquisition which means he’s still got about two years to go but if AOL wanted him out of TC, they could be shifting him aside to another arm outside of the Huffington media group.

Here’s a summary by Dan Primack at Fortune:

It told the NYT that Arrington would still have a (reduced) role with the site, and continue reporting directly to Arianna Huffington. Then AOL said he would report to AOL Ventures. Today it says that he is no longer employed by the company, but can continue contributing to TechCrunch as an unpaid blogger. In other words, AOL is acting like AOL typically acts: Scattershot.

It’s been less than 24 hours so the flurry of news is still coming in and even news out of AOL itself isn’t clear. Nobody seems to have a straight story to tell.

Meanwhile, not a peep from TechCrunch but a monster rant from Kara Swisher.

[update] Paul Carr has his say on the matter. Yes, AOL screwed up in announcing the CrunchFund.

What’s going on with Michael Arrington?

Would personal computers have gained GUIs without Jobs? Sure, but not as early. It took Microsoft 10 years to come up with a decent GUI, and that was with the example of the Mac staring them in the face. How likely is it that non-Apple smartphones would look and behave the way they do now if the iPhone hadn’t come out in ’07? And we’re still waiting for good tablets other than the iPad.

…

In a sense, you’re using a Steve Jobs product whether it has an Apple logo or not

@drdrang