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onethingwell:

Forgive the excursion into hardware, but the MagicWand—a doodad that clips together your Apple Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad—looks to do one thing very well indeed.

Via MacUser.

Looks great!

Lifenotes • How to beat Apple and how not to:

To beat Apple you’ll have to play in another league. Marginal improvements (which are what Jason suggests) aren’t the way to beat that company at this point.

Andrés makes a great point here. I started to add something in the vein to my post last night regarding this fact but could not come up with the right flow.

I’m reminded of the scene in The Matrix where the young guru tells Neo that in order to bend the spoon one only must recognize the truth – there is no spoon. In the analogy, a competing company should not try to be Apple, that’s impossible. Instead, try to create the products that people did not know they needed, like Apple. Then you will see that it is not Apple that must be beat, it is yourself.

How to beat Apple:

I love it when Jason writes longer form things. This piece is no exception. Some very smart observations. I’m especially fond of this one:

I can’t remember if this is my own theory or I read about this on Daring Fireball or something, but the Apple products & services that Apple does well are the ones that Steve Jobs uses (or cares about) and the ones he doesn’t use/care about are less good (or just plain bad). Jobs uses Keynote and it’s very good…but I’m pretty sure Jobs never has had to schedule his own appointments with iCal so that program is less good.

I never thought about it that way. I also have no clue what Steve Jobs and the executive branch at Apple use. That said, I knew that information at one point long after iCal had been in Mac OS X and I know it was not iCal.

There is one point I think Jason did not make, and that is this: Sometimes Apple lets it’s competitors “mature” a market before they come in. In other words, let some third party software developer become moderately successful in a space, see what works and what doesn’t, and then Apple will come in with something ”better”. And often “better” means “like yours but with less features and built in” thus rendering the burgeoning third party offering effectively moot.

Americans Now Spend $1.2 Trillion a Year on Stuff We Don’t Need - Culture - GOOD:

Despite the fact that most Americans are still struggling in the worst economy since the Great Depression, a “non-scientific study” from the Wall Street Journal says that U.S. citizens now spend $1.2 trillion annually on nonessential goods. For context, that’s more than 11 percent of overall consumer spending.

From the Department of No Big Surprise.

Mac Menu Bars – Patrick Rhone:

Pssst! Hey you. Yeah, you. Wanna see what’s on my menubar? Of course you do. Well, just click on that little link up there. Go ahead. I won’t tell. Your secret is safe with me.