Search Results for: Apple

Johnny Appleseed and the Golden Days of Hard Cider

Up until Prohibition, Michael Pollan wrote in The Botany of Desire, in rural areas “cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.” It’s easy to see why: Until the 1900s, most water was contaminated with bacteria. Beyond issues of sanitation, cider was America’s homegrown answer to wine — our native grapes weren’t sweet enough to ferment. And just like European wines, American ciders could be incredibly complex, even nuanced — that’s why Thomas Jefferson grew cider apples at Monticello, where Hewes Crabs are kept to this day.

Cider, not snacking, was the real reason John Chapman — better known as Johnny Appleseed — was flinging seeds and setting up nurseries through the Ohio Valley and the Midwest in the early 1800s. Growing apples is easy, but cultivating a tree that bears palatable fruit is rare. Most of the chance seedlings that germinated in Chapman’s wake weren’t fit for his tin-pot hat — but they were plenty suited for a decent quaff, or even a nip of applejack. In fact, Chapman couldn’t possibly have known what he was growing. Apples are extremely heterozygous, meaning each seed contains the genetic makeup for a completely new and different type of apple tree. If you were to plant a seed from a McIntosh apple, the one thing you could be sure of is that the sapling it produced wouldn’t be a McIntosh tree.

Christopher Hughes writing for Boston Magazine about America’s early history of hard cider, and the search for the next great apple.

The Hunt for the Tinmouth Apple

Longreads Pick

A story about America’s early history of hard cider, and the search for the next great apple.

Source: Boston Magazine
Published: Oct 1, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,176 words)

How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Longreads Pick

Few are excited about the Apple Watch—its burdens are too easily imagined. And yet we treat it as an inevitability. How did this happen?

Author: Ian Bogost
Published: Apr 1, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,539 words)

How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Wreckage of the Zeppelin LZ4 after the crash in Echterdingen. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”

***

Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.

What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.

Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.

The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox. Read more…

Why Microsoft, Google, and Apple Are Working With Science Fiction Writers

Science fiction writer Eileen Gunn recently wrote in Smithsonian magazine about how the science fiction genre informs the way we think about the real world. Here, Gunn writes that big tech companies like Microsoft have hired science fiction writers to do “design fiction”—coming up with new technology ideas through imaginative works:

Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.

“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

Read the story

Photo: Arthur Cugun

Inside Apple’s Plans for Its Futuristic, $5 Billion Headquarters

Longreads Pick

Steve Jobs had grand plans for Apple’s new headquarters, but now there are questions over whether the company should be going through with them:

“Apple hasn’t announced any major changes to Jobs’s vision, so some of the sought-after $1 billion savings will likely come by rolling back his sky-high requirements for fit and finish. Rather than cement floors, Jobs wanted to use a stone-infused alternative such as terrazzo, buffed to a sheen normally reserved for museums and high-end residences. Jobs insisted that the tiny gaps where walls and other surfaces come together be no more than 1/32 of an inch across, vs. the typical ⅛ inch in most U.S. construction. Rather than a lightweight, sound-absorbing acoustical tile, Jobs even wanted the ceilings to be polished concrete. Contractors would typically erect molds with crude scaffolds to pour the cement in place, but that leaves unsightly ruts where the scaffolding puts extra pressure on the surfaces. According to two people who’ve seen the plans, Apple will instead cast the ceilings in molds on the floor and lift them into place, a far more expensive approach that left one person involved in the project speechless.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Apr 4, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,750 words)

Tim Cook’s Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks

Longreads Pick

Cook reflects on his early days with Apple, how the company has changed in the past year, and what Steve Jobs told him before he died:

“So we started talking about what it meant. Again, this is when I am thinking, and I’m certain he’s thinking, that this is going to go on for a long, long period where he’s the chairman and I am CEO. So I’m trying to understand—how does he see this working? He had obviously thought very deeply about it.

“And as a part of this, I asked him about different scenarios to understand how he wanted to be involved as chairman. He said, ‘I want to make this clear. I saw what happened when Walt Disney passed away. People looked around, and they kept asking what Walt would have done.’ He goes, ‘The business was paralyzed, and people just sat around in meetings and talked about what Walt would have done.’ He goes, ‘I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what’s right.’ He was very clear.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 33 minutes (8,482 words)

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

Longreads Pick

A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts:

“Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

“Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

“But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.”

Author: Mat Honan
Source: Wired
Published: Aug 6, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,573 words)