Simon Willison’s Weblog

The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

— Ian Hickson # 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

— Steve Jobs # 17th October 2007, 6:04 pm

I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

— Mark Pilgrim # 5th October 2007, 4:32 pm

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

— John Gruber # 14th September 2007, 8:15 am

The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn’t try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done *something* in this release as a sort of “shot across the bow” but they didn’t, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.

— Russell Beattie # 22nd August 2007, 10:08 pm

I heard that Foxconn—the place that makes the iPods and iPhones—consumes 3,000 pigs a day.

— Bunnie Huang # 14th July 2007, 12:59 pm

The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution.

— Fake Steve Jobs # 5th July 2007, 12:03 pm

We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.

— Maciej Stachowiak, Apple # 12th April 2007, 3:08 pm

Please, fanboys, don’t send me dumb notes averring that Apple’s failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That’s a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they’ll have a healthy college fund.

— Cory Doctorow # 12th February 2007, 2:05 pm

If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

— Steve Jobs # 7th February 2007, 2:26 am

Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.

— John Gruber # 12th January 2007, 10:29 am

Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.

— Mark Pilgrim # 12th January 2007, 9:51 am

If your average iPod weighs five ounces with packaging, then Apple has moved about 21,875,000 pounds of them, equivalent in weight to 1,325 full-grown male African elephants, 35 times as many as Hannibal’s force.

— Paul Ford # 8th January 2007, 1:46 pm