If you are deciding between these two new machines, highly recommend you walk into an Apple store and literally hold each laptop in your hand — you’ll be amazed that there is nearly no difference in weight, and the MacBook Pro is actually narrower.
And I was a bit of a skeptic on the whole Retina thing, but the high resolution display does in fact makes a huge difference, to the point of making non Retina screens pretty tough to look at. Battery life has a slight edge on the Air, but still solid overall (12 hours for Air VS 9 hours for the MacBook Pro 13″).
While that weight is north of many Ultrabooks, it’s still plenty light (which I acknowledge is an oxymoron). I had no issues with taking it to meetings, throwing it in my bag to take home every night, and flipping it open for some comfy computing on the couch when I got there. The 13-inch MacBook Air, at 2.96 pounds, may be lighter, but its overall footprint is actually larger than the 13-inch Pro’s by about a centimeter in width. The Pro’s thickness is just 0.71 inch, almost the same as the Air at its thickest point (0.69 inch).
A really great deep dive on how the company has grown over the past 20 years (!) and how it embodies the qualities and vision of its founder.
Here’s a solid bit:
“I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong,” he (Jeff Bezons) said. “Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.” That confrontation was
Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.”
And curious about my own Amazon usage, I went and looked at my Amazon account, and found what I think is one of my first orders back in late 1999 (no orders previous to that are shown) – and it’s a Sega Dreamcast game, NFL 2K 🙂
What was also very meta for me was to be reading this book on my Kindle app on my phablet Android Galaxy note 2 – which has proven to be an excellent reading device. And the reason I found out about the book was from highlights posted by Naveen on Twitter:
http://t.co/WgNh4NsnVE Thus did Jeff Bezos become one of the original investors in Google, his company’s future rival, and four year…
After seeing the highlight, it lead me to instantly buy the book from the Kindle app on Android. I can’t imagine a better customer experience than that.
But that’s how I interpretted this awesome interview from Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing podcast (h/t to Peter Slutsky for clueing me in to this awesome podcast many months ago, but that is now sadly being ended).
A couple of choice exchanges.
Here’s one on owning your craft and being involved with every detail:
Jerry Seinfeld: You want to be on the water? How do you want to be on the water? You want to be on a yacht? You want to be on a surfboard? I want to be on a surfboard. I don’t want to deal with a yacht. That’s a yacht.
Alec Baldwin: And you just also thought –
Jerry Seinfeld: Some people want a yacht to say, ‘See my yacht.’
And another exchange on focusing on the work, not the other stuff:
Jerry Seinfeld: Whatever it is. Yeah. Whatever it is. Let me tell you why my TV series in the ’90s was so good besides an inordinate amount of just pure good fortune. In most TV series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality, political, and hierarchical issues of making something.
Alec Baldwin: Mm-hmm.
Jerry Seinfeld: We spent 99 percent of our time writing, me and Larry. The door was closed. Somebody calls, we’re not taking the call.
Alec Baldwin: Right.
Jerry Seinfeld: We’re gonna make this thing funny. That’s why the show was good. I didn’t want to go from that to some H.G. Wells contraption machine –
Alec Baldwin: Right.
Jerry Seinfeld: – of trying to control the weather. That’s what these deals are. That’s what making a movie is. What’s a movie? It’s this giant machine. It’s this giant ship and everybody gets on it and they shove off, and nobody knows where it’s going.
Alec Baldwin: No. They don’t.
Jerry Seinfeld: And the captain is doing – where’s the captain?
Alec Baldwin: Yeah.
Jerry Seinfeld: He’s getting high and sleeping with the first mate.
Alec Baldwin: Yeah. He’s asleep, period.
Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah. So it’s too much time and energy spent on that is not the juice, the really good stuff is a great line.
I highly recommend you listen to the podcast or read the full transcript over on wnyc.org.
So those blurry photos taken by yours truly were apparently against the rules. At seemingly random intervals throughout the night, a security person would ask one of the 50% of concert goers to please stop taking photos w/ their phones (they never asked me). It was very disrupting and everyone seemed confused. All this was happening while the front row attendees were taking live video and Idan Raichel himself would sometimes grab their phones and take the footage himself to the delight of everyone.
I don’t remember ever seeing it this aggressive at previous concerts. I recall in Oakland a couple of summers ago someone was shooting video footage non-stop and got asked to stop.
So what’s going on ? Is taking a bunch of blurry photos and low quality quick video really a threat ? Isn’t it exactly the definition of personal use and not for rebroadcast or resell ?
In a world of Spotify and YouTube, the music and often the music video is readily available. What exactly is the harm of capturing a few moments to share with your friends and family ? For me, it’s mostly a moment to capture to remember years later.
I do get the argument that someone holding up their phone for 2 hours is a distraction to the other concert goers – so I think some common sense rules would be good. Like only take photos at the beginning or end of a song, and step into the aisle to take a longer video clip.
But I’d go even further. Why don’t live concerts have a professional photographer walking around who can take great shots for sale later. And why not offer a live audio or video recording of the concert ?
After the concert all I saw for sale were CDs (!) and t-shirts. What if they had for sale a USB with raw HD video of the show plus high quality MP3s and online access too ? I would be tempted to drop $40-$60 for that.
You can now share content from WordPress to Google+, comment on WordPress using your Google+ account, and Google will display WordPress content across it’s platform with richer info such as the author’s photo:
Linking to your Google+ Profile creates an official connection between your WordPress.com content and your Google+ account. The benefit? It adds a layer of verification, confirming you are the author of your posts, and helps Google understand who created certain pages, which helps to increase the accuracy of search results.
Slightly amazed but not surprised to watch the news coverage of the Hyperloop and seeing it run about 75% negative so far – people calling it “out there” and questioning the cost projections, the safety, and everything else that was detailed.
The skeptics and the talking-heads that are out there mocking it, are frankly representative of a relatively new type of attitude that seems to want to kill big ideas and dreams before they even have a chance.
I spoke to a retired physics professor a few months ago and he said the biggest difference he saw in students in the 60s and 70s VS today was that the moon shot and other big projects gave people the confidence that any idea was possible. And that today there was a quicker instant-default-reaction of cynicism and doubt to anything really big or seemingly “far fetched”.
I personally have no idea if the Hyperloop will ever succeed or even get a green light to be built.
What I do know is that I’m super excited that someone with a pretty amazing track record (PayPal, Tesla, Space X) is tackling transportation and looking to leapfrog the current train system which is dated, expensive, and just not that exciting. And we should give these people a chance to take a few swings and see what they can come up with before every arm-chair expert chimes in on why it’s not possible. From the conference call follow-up that he held, sounds like he may now build a mini-prototype just to show everyone that it can work.
So my humble $.02 is that we need more people thinking like this, not less — and we need more aspirational projects that open people up to the near limitless possibilities of what we can build and solve.
I’m also a big believer that teams in Silicon valley will have a much better chance of tackling these problems than the traditional companies in the transportation industry that have been relatively stagnant for years now, mainly focused on cost reductions. Reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote:
“The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.”
And I always keep this quote in mind:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi
If you haven’t listened to the Elon Musk conference call outlining it all, here is the clip:
Yona is named after the Prophet Jonah, who escaped the prophecy and met the whale. He went into the sea at the precise location of the restaurant, the historic Jaffa port; the oldest functioning port in the world.
An open source restaurant, Yona offers complete transparency to its culinary magic: admire the chefs in action as they turn raw materials into delicious delectables. The food is exceptionally fresh thanks to excellent raw materials; the bread is baked on site, the yogurt and ricotta are homemade, and fresh salmon and meat are smoked in-house.
Cool to see their love of open source, but wished that their website used something like a WP.com Restaurant theme 🙂
“I am not putting an act,” she says, “I was head of the student council in my high school, I commanded over 90 soldiers in the army. You get a lot of experience, and with the experience comes the self-confidence”.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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