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The Form-And-Model Edition Monday, April 11, 2016

The iPad Pro Is The Most Accessible Computer Apple Has Ever Built, by Steven Aquino, TechCrunch

The fact of the matter is that laptops are harder for me to use because I can’t get as close to the screen as I need to work effectively. It isn’t that I can’t use laptops; it’s that using them has always felt like an uphill battle I can’t win.

The iPad, particularly the 12.9-inch Pro, offers a vastly different experience. It’s roughly the size of the 12-inch Retina MacBook, but the tablet’s form factor and interaction model make it so much better for accessibility.

The Tablet Market Is 100 Million Units Smaller Than Expected. What Happened?, by Arik Hesseldahl, Re/code

Even so, there is another force in mobile computing brewing, though it’s smaller, quieter and coming from a less-expected place. Tablet sales overall have been declining — down 10 percent year-over-year in 2015. But sales of what IDC calls “detachables” — tablets that optionally attach to a keyboard of some kind, to somewhat convincingly mimic a laptop — have have been growing like crazy. (IDC considers the iPad Pro in this class.)

In The Trailer

Apple Is Going All-in On Celebrities To Sell New Apple TV, by Romain Dillet, TechCrunch

After Cookie Monster, Taylor Swift, Alison Brie and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Apple is releasing a new ad featuring a couple of celebrities. This time, basketball player Kobe Bryant and actor Michael B. Jordan are sitting on a couch watching a Bryant biopic.

Stuff

Narrative Clip 2 Review: Capture Your Life In Moments, by Daniel Bader, iMore

By default, the Clip takes a photo every 30 seconds, storing it in its 8 GB of internal memory. It can also capture 10-second clips of 1080p video by double-tapping on the front of the casing.

And that's pretty much it.

Develop

Apple Hand-picked Some Top Partners To Build Apps For The Apple Watch – Here's What They Think A Year Later, by Kif Leswing, Business Insider

But there is still lingering doubt over whether Apple's wearable can become the next big computing platform.

Business Insider spoke to several prominent independent developers, most of whom were invited to Apple's pre-launch sessions, and have been featured by Apple in the App Store, about how they're approaching the device and what they're hoping to see from Apple Watch 2, expected later this year.

What I Learned From Trying To Innovate At The New York Times, by John Geraci, Harvard Business Review

So what’s the solution for these companies, who have stocked themselves with entrepreneurial employees and VC-minded execs but still can’t seem to round the corner and start innovating and growing at a pace that keeps up with the outside world? Open the doors. Let the light stream in. Get out of the building. Interact. Not just the strategy team, not just the CEO, but everyone. The new value is not inside, it’s out there, at the edges of the network.

Notes

Apple Cash Move Will Not End EU Tax Probe, by Barney Jopson and Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times

The European Union’s competition commissioner has said that its probe into Apple’s tax deals with Ireland would continue even if the company moved some of its $200bn overseas cash pile back to the US.

Apple’s stated intention to repatriate a substantial portion of its overseas cash could prove crucial as it tries to fend off the EU’s long-running investigation into its alleged sweetheart tax deals with the Irish government.

How An Internet Mapping Glitch Turned A Random Kansas Farm Into A Digital Hell, by Kashmir Hill, Fusion

As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.

Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.

Bottom of the Page

I've made a new decision regarding my black -- I mean, Space Gray -- iPhone: From now on, I shall only use black wallpapers for the lock screen.

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I've also made a new resolution. Instead of "hating" Mondays, like everyone else, I'll take this as a weekly opportunity to remind myself that there are certain things in life that I can care less.

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Thanks for reading.