Category: Thoughts

  • The agony and the irony of Tim Cook

    When Tim Cook took over as permanent CEO of Apple in 2011, he brought his unmatched, incredible decade-long track record as the Mozart of supply chain management. Under Jobs II, Apple got rid of its factories and outsourced all its manufacturing to quicker, cheaper Asian builders. Overhead was slashed, flexibility enhanced. As the iPod business…

  • I know Apple, Apple is a friend of mine. Lenovo, you’re no Apple

    Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing made an interest declaration the other day. He’s going to split their PC business into two units, one that does basic stuff aimed at consumers and businesses and another one that will get the Thinkpad brand and shoot for the higher end. The “Think” brand is needed to better compete with Apple, he said.…

  • Fail Fail Fail iPad

    “If the heap of new products that Microsoft showed here Sunday is any indication of the future of computing, the desktop PC is old news,” or so read the lead story from the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Yeah, desktop sales are tanking. Tablet sales are exploding. Yeah, desktops are old news, right…

  • iPad, Nexus, Kindle Fire – which tablet should I buy?

    What a crazy time to be shopping for a tablet computer. There are so many, many choices. Which tablet should you buy? I have some advice — and please give me your intelligent feedback in the comments section below — on the biggest sellers, all of which I have personally used: Apple’s iPad line, Google’s…

  • Putting a close on a great 2012, blogwise

    As 2012 winds to a close, I’m looking back at another year on Gravitational Pull dot net, my eighth writing this blog. This year, I suspended my experimental commentary blog, The Orange View, in an effort to write fewer and better stories here. Some months worked out better than others — I had no posts…

  • Best apps for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets

    Looking for the best apps for your new Kindle Fire HD tablet? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t give you easy access to the Google Android app store with its hundreds of thousands of offerings. Instead, you get just what is in Amazon’s much more limited store, missing plenty of good stuff especially Google’s own apps. But there…

  • Amazon is discounting ebooks, whenever it’s allowed to, unlike Apple

    Some really silly journalism covering the ebook marketplace today. It starts with this really bad, no good article in the New York Times by David Streitfeld. The headline gets off to a completely wrong start — “Little Sign of predicted E-Book Price War” — and it goes down hill from there, as Streitfeld asserts there…

  • Online storage prices come down slowly — Apple still the max

    Drastic price cutting has hit the online storage space, or so you may read. But, unfortunately, most of the price cutting is for big time corporate users not us little guys. Well, that’s not completely true. There have been some serious price cuts on online storage for us ordinary users since I last wrote about…

  • Great Google Voice apps for Android and freedom from cell phone plan tyranny

    Are you a big user of Google Voice like I am? Here’s my best advice about apps and some cool tips to use Google Voice with an Android phone. You can also use these apps to make calls from an Android tablet. One of the most important reasons I switched from an iPhone to Android…

  • A longtime Mac user’s first impressions of the Thinkpad X1 Carbon

    Well, as I’d been threatening for a while, I ended my decade plus using a Mac as my main computer this month and jumped to the Windows side, lured by the all-black, super-lightweight Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. I’ve had the laptop for about three weeks and here are some of my first impressions. Feel free…