Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail
In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the sleep-indicator light fades in and out on most Apple laptops. Older models such as the Macintosh PowerBook, however, use a blinking LED indicator, with discrete pulses in one-second intervals.
This creeps me out. I already have an unhealthy way of projecting human-like qualities onto inanimate objects: for example, I feel guilty when I leave the DVD player running with a disc inside, because it has to sit there and replay the same thirty second clips over and over and over again. And I apologize to my car when I bump a curb or close the door on the seatbelt. So for Apple to subliminally suggest that my computer breathes when it sleeps takes the metaphor a little too far for comfort.
Not to mention the fact that the rhythm is psychologically comforting because we like things that breathe because they are alive. The feeling that we derive from the Macbook’s indicator light originates in some reptilian part of our brain that sees the pattern and says, take comfort, for you are not alone. But the problem is that when we are with our laptops and no one else we are, of course, alone. And to suggest otherwise is creepy.
In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life.
The real reason why First Contact is the best Trek film? It’s Picard’s film - and by extension, Stewart’s film. Picard defined Stewart’s career, and this film is two hours of physical and psychological battle against Picard’s most personal demons. Chris Pine may be charming and cocksure, but he’s no match for Stewart for pure intensity of presence.
In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.
Articles like these are why I love The New Yorker. Can you imagine trying to pitch this to any other magazine? ”I want to write an 8,000 word article on elevators. Not about anything specific - just a bunch of interesting stuff about elevators.” They’d laugh you out of the room.
Rufus.
This is getting ridiculous.
“Here,” the receptionist said. She handed me two pieces of paper, stapled and folded into fourths. “If you ever get cataract surgery in your life, you will need to show these to your surgeon.”
We need electronic fucking medical records.
When you need more unread counts for your digital self to obsess over, don’t despair: Google has you covered.
Also I had never seen this message before today.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
How To Think About Apple and Google.
In Chuck Klosterman’s IV he reprints an essay from 2004 about how to tell the difference between your nemesis and your archenemy:
You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. If your nemesis invited you out for cocktails, you would accept the offer. If he died, you would attend his funeral and—privately—you might shed a tear over his passing. But you would never have drinks with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike his gin with hemlock. If you were to perish, your archenemy would dance on your grave, and then he’d burn down your house and molest your children.
We measure ourselves against our nemeses, and we long to destroy our archenemies. Nemeses and archenemies are the catalysts for everything.
I actually think this is the most useful way to think about the Apple - Google rivalry that’s sprung up in the last few years.
Apple and Google are typical nemeses. Sure, they’re competitors, and they’ve been taking a lot of little jabs at one another recently - Apple made Bing a search-engine option on the iPhone, Google devoted most of their recent I/O Conference to unveiling products that directly compete with Apple.
But deep down they maintain an affection for one another, and after every product launch, every escalation, every new gauntlet thrown down, their respective leaders shake their heads, smile, and mutter “clever bastards - I’ll show them”. They’re like the Beatles and the Beach Boys circa 1967 - Android being the Pet Sounds to the iPhone’s Rubber Soul, if you will.
Apple’s archenemy has and always will be Microsoft, which is why their passing of Microsoft in market-share was such sweet revenge.1 Steve Jobs may sit down to sip coffee and talk smack with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, but whenever Jobs sees Steve Ballmer he just wants to punch Ballmer in the throat.2
As for Adobe - well, they’re not really important enough to be Apple’s nemesis or archenemy. Adobe is that guy that you were friends with in high school but who grew up to sell car insurance, and now he’s always calling you up and guilt-tripping you by playing on your former friendship, except his policies suck and his deductible is too high and also he has a crappy custom UI and crashes all the time.
So incredibly frustrating.
