The smartphone camera is one of those underappreciated technologies where each incremental innovation seems boring…until one day all the bases are finally loaded and someone hits a grand slam.

Seeing sketchy rumors that iPhone 8 may have an iris scanner like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. I'm still having a hard time seeing how that it better than a fingerprint scanner under the touch screen.

But to Samsung's credit, the most interesting part of having both a fingerprint scanner and an iris scanner is the software aspect — two tiers of security and authentication. Works great for parents who need to protect access to certain data while giving their kids freedom to play games.

A more Apple solution would be to simply let different fingerprints unlock different things instead.

Killing net neutrality to "eliminate unnecessary and burdensome rules" is like Android staying completely open — it enables big greedy corporations to abuse the openness to lock it down, control consumers, and maximize profits.

Haven't heard anything on Apple iBeacons or indoor mapping in a while, but those would be powerful building blocks for AR in the real world.

When I talk to people about upcoming ideas that have serious potential, I'm often met with the same skepticism.

Andrew Chen explains why your personal use cases and opinion are a shitty predictor of a product’s future success:

• If it looks like a toy, what happens if it’s successful with its initial audience and then starts to add a lot more features?
• If it looks like a luxury, what happens if it becomes much cheaper? Or much better, at the same price?
• If it’s a marketplace that doesn’t sell anything you’d buy, what happens when it starts stocking products and services you find valuable?
• If none of your friends use a social product, what happens when they win a niche and ultimately all your friends are using it too?

I've always believed three things:

• Technology always gets better and cheaper over time.
• Consumers vote with their wallets.
• Don't ever underestimate the power of convenience.

Once a technology that provides convenience matures enough and gets cheap enough, that's what the world adopts it.

Twitter makes the assumption that when you follow a person, you want to follow all of their posts. But I don't think that's a good assumption — I follow a person because I want to follow a particular interest they post about.

How many of you guys are techies who just love to see your favorite tech personalities blow up your feeds with TV shows or football or politics that you don't care about?

I've always loved the way Pinterest was set up — the main focus is you follow a person's interests in the form of Pinterest Boards, not the person.

If micro.blog is truly meant for microblogging as opposed to being a traditional social network, then we should make it easy to follow an person's interests (i.e. an account's categories).

One possible solution is presenting interests/categories like this: @username/channel

So some examples would be:

• @theverge/apple
• @gruber/baseball
• @parislemon/football
• @amc/TheWalkingDead_EST
• @amc/TheWalkingDead_PST
• @espn/nba_highlights
• @espn/warriors_news
• @samsung/usa
• @samsung/korea

Granted, most of those examples are with real-time live-tweeting in mind, but you get the idea.

Of course, the simplest alternative solution is to say, "just create another account", but keeping all categories under the same roof strengthens the main account. Plus, nobody likes to rebuild a following for a new account from scratch.

The idea is not to just "be better than Twitter"; I'm trying to solve the problem that following specific interests should be much more efficient than what is currently out there.

I'm embracing the idea that microblogging does not equal tweeting. And I'd argue that if microblogging is really about sharing content instead of having conversations, we should have more efficient ways of organizing what we share and how we follow it.

Jason Kottke, just after the original iPhone was announced in January 2007:

I guess we know why iPod development has seemed a little sluggish lately. When the Zune came out two months ago, it was thought that maybe Apple was falling behind, coasting on the fumes of an aging product line, and not innovating in the portable music player space anymore. I think the iPhone puts this discussion on the back burner for now. And the Zune? The supposed iPod-killer’s bullet ricocheted off of the iPhone’s smooth buttonless interface and is heading back in the wrong direction.

Sounds just like today, critics preaching a similar narrative: "The iPhone is boring, Apple can't innovate anymore."

Sam Gerstenzang talks about Apple's underrated release of mini computers, like the Pencil, AirPods, Apple Watch, and Touch Bar:

Apple is quietly getting very good at shipping very small computers that charge very rapidly, and thus can be unanchored ––unlike Google Home or Amazon Echo. Over time, as power and size requirements decrease, a direct internet connection might add value. But for now, Bluetooth allows a connection to your phone (which is still quite obviously and self-consciously a computer) and that’s enough. […]

Apple is unleashing its fourth revolution in typical Apple fashion but it is atypically quiet about it. Like with the Apple I, the Mac, and the iPhone, Apple has started with shipping a great product by creating technological innovation in service of a better product, and an entire industry learns.

Apple’s very small computers will unlock a supply chain revolution that will enable a whole wave of others to create their own very small computers, too. It won’t be called the Internet of Things. Just very small computers making very great Things.

Because Apple owns all of the important technologies in its products, Apple has a huge advantage over its competitors when it comes to the miniaturization of computers.

My favorite analysts are split on the idea of Apple buying Netflix. Here is one compelling case by Ben Thompson why Apple should pull the trigger:

The problem Apple has in premium video — and given that the company has been trying and failing to secure video content on its terms for years now, it definitely has a problem — is that its executives seem to have forgotten just how important the piracy leverage was to the iTunes Music Store’s success. This Wall Street Journal story from this past summer is one of many similar stories over the years detailing Apple’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to premium video content:

[Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services Eddy] Cue is also known for a hard-nosed negotiating style. One cable-industry executive sums up Mr. Cue’s strategy as saying: “We’re Apple”…TV-channel owners “kept looking at the Apple guys like: ‘Do you have any idea how this industry works?’” one former Time Warner Cable executive says…Mr. Cue has said the TV industry overly complicated talks. “Time is on my side,” he has told some media executives.

Time may be on Apple’s side, but the bigger issue for Cue and Apple is that leverage is not; that belongs to the company that is actually threatening premium content makers: Netflix. Netflix is the “piracy” of video content, but unfortunately for Apple they are a real company capable of using the leverage they have acquired.

Ben's argument is all about leverage:

[…] Apple’s desire to be “the one place to access all of your television” implies the disintermediation of Netflix to just another content provider, right alongside its rival HBO and the far more desperate networks who lack any sort of customer relationship at all. It is directly counter to the strategy that has gotten Netflix this far — owning the customer relationship by delivering a superior customer experience — and while Apple may wish to pursue the same strategy, the company has no leverage to do so. Not only is the Apple TV just another black box that connects to your TV (that is also the most expensive), it also, conveniently for Netflix, has a (relatively) open app platform: Netflix can deliver their content on their terms on Apple’s hardware, and there isn’t much Apple can do about it.

The truth is that Apple’s executives seem stuck in the iPod/iTunes era, where selling 70% of all music players led to leverage over the music labels; with streaming content is available on any device at any time, which means that selling hardware isn’t a point of leverage. If Apple wants its usual ownership of end users it needs to buy its way in, and that means buying Netflix.

Since the iPod/iTunes era, Apple has always been about hardware-software-content to out-integrate its competitors. Netflix has always become a dominant player in video streaming and with Amazon touting its own hardware and streaming video content, Apple now has serious threats to its TV ambitions with no leverage.

As Ben argues, the only way Apple can compete is to buy leverage. And that means buying Netflix.

At the Jamf Nation User Conference, IBM shared their findings with deploying Macs vs. PCs:

In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.

But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings. [Emphasis mine]