What if the iPad were a PC?

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Philip Elmer-DeWitt on a report by Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore:

Exclude the iPad, and Apple’s PC sales grew 24% year-over-year. Include them, and Apple’s unit sales soared roughly 250%. By comparison, Hewlett-Packard grew 3% year-over-year and Dell units fell 5%.

When the iPad is part of the mix, Apple’s share of the U.S. PC market is about 25%. That makes it the market leader, having gained a remarkable 18 points in the space of two quarters.

John Gruber comments:

Like I just said, there’s no way Microsoft and Intel aren’t taking this seriously.

He's right.

Intel, Microsoft, and the Curious Case of the iPad

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Brook Crothers:

“That tablet thing? Yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.” That’s a crude but fairly accurate encapsulation of the attitude Microsoft, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices have toward the iPad and the tablet market in general.

Why the cavalier attitude? Before I defer to the opinion of an IDC analyst I interviewed (below), here’s one pretty obvious reason I’ll put forward. All three companies look at their revenue streams — traditional PC hardware and software on laptops, desktops, and servers — and come to the conclusion that the tablet is a marginal market. A deceptively accurate conclusion, because at this point in time — and even 12 months out — the tablet is marginal compared with the gargantuan laptop, desktop, and server markets.

John Gruber had some interesting thoughts on this, and rebutted with this comment:

An interesting take, but I disagree. I think Microsoft and Intel are both taking the iPad’s success extremely seriously. It may be a small market, as of today, but the trend line is heading north at a very steep angle. I think it’s a case where you can’t take what Microsoft and Intel say about it at face value. Intel has no processor to power an iPad-class devic. Microsoft has no OS to run an iPad-class device. Most worrying for these companies may not be the iPad itself, but the fact that iPad competitors — scant though they are, as of today — aren’t running Intel processors or Microsoft software.

Additionally, I think that as more Android driven tablets come out over the next year, they will still be 1-2 years off before they begin to catch up to the feature-set that the iPad launched with in April. And in that time Apple will have released the second version of the iPad, further raising the bar of what they will need to achieve to meet expectations that users have come to expect from the iPad. And even then? I'm sorry, but if I can't get Simplenote, Dropbox, Netflix, Osfoora, Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, Deliveries, Airvideo, Kindle, Elements, New York Times, Angry Birrds, Epicurious, Pandora, NPR, Scorecenter, and MLB At Bat all on this mythical Android tablet? Then you have not yet begun to compete with the iPad.

The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

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Empire Strikes Back Filming

Vanity Fair takes a look at the new book The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J. W. Rinzler.

Out this month, the slick coffee-table tome The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back chronicles the complete tale—from pre-release to blockbuster success—of what’s become the fan favorite of the Star Wars series. Released in 1980, George Lucas’s Episode V pushed the boundaries of special effects and left audiences with one of cinema’s most epic cliffhangers.

via Daring Fireball

Back Home

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I took several pictures on both my Canon 40D and my iPhone 4 while down at my grandparent's place in southern Virginia this past weekend. It was my grandfather's 85th birthday. While there, I walked out behind the house to snap a few photos on both the DSLR and iPhone. I was particularly pleased with how this specific photo, taken on my iPhone 4, turned out. I've not edited this photo in any way.

Click though to see a blown up version of this image.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4154/5072799364_925f8377d6.jpg

Lets see your Blackberry/Droid/Windows Phone 7 do that.

PSA: Tired of Twitterfeed intermittently working? Use Feedburner Socialize instead.

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Feedburner Socialize

For about 2 years now I've been using this 3rd party site, Twitterfeed, to auto tweet my blog posts to my Twitter account. On paper, the site looks great, but in practice, it works poorly and lacks certain features. It can only poll my blog every 30 minutes, at the most frequent setting, for new posts. Despite this setting, sometimes several hours go by after I post before it auto-Tweets the link. Additionally, sometimes it fails to do it at all.

When this happened today, around lunchtime, I finally decided to seek out an alternative. Little did I know that a far superior solution was sitting right in front of me this whole time, and I could have EASILY been using it.

Like many bloggers, I use Feedburner to re-host up my RSS feed for my site because of the greatly increased functionality and control it gives me over my RSS feed. You can do things such as insert code into each blog post (google ads, etc), get detailed analytics on your feed subscribers, and it gives you capabilities like PubSubHubBub.

A quick Google Search for "Twitterfeed Alternative" turned up this blog post from ThinkSplendid, which covered exactly what I was looking for. Apparently, and I did not know this, Feedburner has had the built-in capability of publishing blog post links/summaries to Twitter for some time now. You can find this functionality under the "Publicize" tab -> "Socialize" side-nav link. It does EXACTLY what Twitterfeed does, but with the added reliability of The Google™. What's even better: instead of polling my site every 30 minutes for new posts, it will post a Tweet whenever a new post shows up in my RSS feed - instantly - because my CMS, Squarespace, is PubHubSubBub compatible. Yes, I know this is a very first world problem to have, but it just made my Monday.