I have wondered since the first leaked shots of the new iPad's rear shell hit the web what the purpose of increasing the taper on the back was for. Typically Apple does not make design changes just for changes sake, they make a change for a reason. After seeing this tweet it hit me.

Apple staff says ALL ipad2 cases work with iPad (v3) !!!!

— Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb) March 16, 2012

Apple needed more battery capacity to compensate for the extra power consumption of the retina display and the LTE chip set. Apple had to increase the thickness of the iPad to accommodate this larger battery. I believe that Apples intention was to keep the design identical. In order to allow all¹ iPad 2 cases to fit the updated model they added extra taper.

Any loose fitting case would not be an issue but tight rear shells would need some extra room to stretch and compensate for the extra 0.03" of thickness on the new iPad. The added taper gives tight case the room they need to stretch and still fit the new iPad. I love Apple's attention to detail.

^{1. I am sure some very stiff tight form fitting cases still will not fit. However the design decision Apple made will accommodate most of the available iPad 2 cases on the market.↩}

Watching the video of Chris Pirillo's Dad using Mac OS X for the first time is pretty eye opening. It shows that Apple's process of bringing some of the lessons they learned with iOS back to the Mac is paying off. Keeping power user features around but shrouding them in an easy to use and recognizable iOS like presentation is a delicate balance but one that Apple seems to be doing quite well in, well at least better than Microsoft

Ben Brooks via The Brooks Review

The problem is endemic of the industry as a whole. You can say all you want about my opinions — whether I am right or wrong — what you can’t say is that I don’t have one. I will take you disagreeing with me all day long over being a bland yes man.

This is a rather long winded way of saying exactly what MG Siegler said above: take a stance.

To me reviewing anything is all about qualifying the trade offs of the service or device. When I read a review written by an experienced reviewer I expect them to tell me, for example, if the reduction in battery life due to LTE is worth the additional data speed. Its just like with the original iPhone. Is the lack of third party applications and 3G data worth the revolutionary user experience? Answering these questions is tough because they are opinion questions. It’s easy to regurgitate facts because they are impossible to refute, however its hard and a little scary to put your opinion out there.

You either see it or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool, enjoy your Nexus. But I think the reason Apple Stores are so crowded, and getting so big, is that there are an awful lot of people who do see it.

I think what Gruber was saying is that more and more people are preferring the Apple side of these trade offs as opposed to traditional hardware and software vendors. If you see and appreciate how a MacBook Air is different than a PC ultrabook then the MacBook Air is the machine for you. If you see the Air as just a shiny, thin, overpriced package of last years technology then maybe an Lenovo or Asus ultrabook is right for you. I read Daring Fireball, The Brooks Review, and Marco.org because they “see it” and so do I.

I wanted to comment on my brief experience with the new flagship Android device (15 min tethered to the Verizon display). The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android device I have ever played with and most reviews agree. That being said, if this phone existed in a vacuum it wouldn’t be all that impressive.

What makes this phone so great is the leap it takes from the previous flagship Android devices in terms of software; however, the hardware in this phone is nothing to get excited about. It is still made out of crappy feeling plastic. I don’t get why more robust and high end materials aren’t being used in a $300 flagship phone. The phone is also way too big. I respect Samsung for getting a 4.65" screen in a device that is comparable in size to most phones with 4.3" screens, but it is still too big. The screen is still AMOLED, which to me is a horrible screen technology. I know it has advantages over a traditional LCD in terms of thickness due to a lack of a back light and power consumption, but the color saturation just kills me. For example the Super LCD screen on the HTC Rezound is much better in terms of color accuracy and overall clarity.

Ice Cream Sandwich is so much better than whatever dessert named operating system came before it. I actually really like the software only button approach. I still think the way they change to dots in some applications would confuse many new users but it proved to me that a physical button is not required. I also love the way multitasking is handled. I still think Apple and Microsoft’s approach to multitasking is better than Android’s but I like a dedicated button to bring the multitasking tray up. The OS finally has polish. The robotic TRON like style is not my favorite but that is just a style preference. The attention to detail that Duarte put into ICS is very apparent. The one issue Google really needs to iron out with Android as a whole is touch responsiveness. It is better, but still no where near Windows Phone 7 and iOS.

Overall I think the launch of the Galaxy Nexus or more importantly ICS is Android’s Windows 7 moment. I think every Android phone prior to the Galaxy was like a Windows XP laptop, while the Galaxy Nexus is more similar to a Windows 7 laptop. It’s still made out of crappy materials but the improvements in the OS make it much more tolerable. However as good as Android and Windows no are I still prefer OS X just like I still prefer iOS.

I had a thought today during my lunch break that I couldn't fit into a tweet. Two coworkers just bought their first iPhone, the iPhone 4S on sprint. Both of them over the last few years have asked many times when the iPhone would finally be on sprint so when it was announced they jumped on the opportunity to buy one. Both previously had Android phones because that was the best available on the carrier they wanted to use until now. What is interesting to me is not that they moved from an android device to an iPhone, but how much influence using the iPhone had on them.

From 2007 to early this year AT&T was their only choice and they didn't want to go through the trouble or expense of switching carriers. The addition of Verizon this February also had no impact on their decision. They routinely quipped how they would deal with an inferior device to keep their cheaper monthly bill.

After less than a week with the phone both longtime sprint customers returned their iPhone 4Ss to sprint and canceled their contract to move to AT&T. The slower data performance on the Sprint network never bothered them on their Android smart phones but, in only a week the same network impacted their usage of the iPhone so much that made a decision they refused to do for two or three years. That's the power of the iPhone.

In the process of writing a WWDC recap post that is admittedly a little late to the party, I kept expanding the paragraph on iTunes match. I found myself adding clarification based on the information presented in the keynote and made available on Apples iTunes match page in order to clear up some of the confusion presented on many of the popular Apple podcasts and blogs. I decided to scrap that entire post and expand that single paragraph into an entire article trying to answer some of these recurring questions about iTunes in the cloud.

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Back in the summer of 2009 Apple introduced spotlight search in iOS 3.0. This was a feature that many people were very excited about, it allowed the user to search for apps, email messages, calendar events, items in the devices iPod library, contacts, and notes. In iOS 4.0 Apple added the ability to search SMS messages, the web (using your default search engine), and Wikipedia right from your home screen. As useful as spotlight seemed I never really used it in fact I turned it off to improve performance. The in application search (i.e. Mail, messages, and iPod) always seemed more useful to me plus the system side spotlight search always seemed slow.

If all the above is true then why am I making a case for spotlight?

Two weeks ago I had some wifi issues on my iPhone. For some reason it refused to connect to a known working network. I tried renewing the DHCP lease, forgetting the network, and several reboots but nothing worked. My next go to solution was to reset the network settings on the entire device and start over. I accidentally tapped to reset the home screen layout and inadvertently un organized all the applications on my phone. Because I was in the middle of a work day and didn’t have the hours I needed to rearrange all my apps into their required location I turned to spotlight to find and launch apps. I still am launching apps that way today.I really have grown to love using spotlight on my ios devices as an app launcher in the same manner I use launchbar on my Mac.

Most people’s complaints about spotlight echo mine from the first paragraph, either it was too slow or just didn’t seem useful. From my experience it gets faster the more you use it. It seems that the initial search for something may take a few seconds but after it has been made subsequent searches for that same item seem to be almost instant.

Overall I recommend you give spotlight a second try. Be sure to dig into the settings for spotlight and turn off things you don’t need searched. For example, I have no need to search SMS messages or calendar events so I have those turned off. Additionally I also recommend reordering the way the items appear in the search results. I prefer to have applications first then contacts and email respectively after that.

The more I think about Apple's new subscription model for content in iTunes, the more I like and agree with it. Apple's primary concern is to deliver the best user experience to its customers and to make money. Most objections lie around Apple requiring app developers, that have an application that delivers content via a subscription, to offer it as an in app subscription with Apple receiving 30% of the sale. These developers can offer users access to the same content delivered via iTunes with a sign up on their own website. In this case the content provider would give Apple 0% of the sale.

Additionally there is a discrepancy in my mind between subscriptions, memberships, and third party stores. Netflix and Rhapsody have membership services where you pay a monthly fee to access a library of content. Third party stores like Amazon Kindle and Zinio allow you to view content purchased outside the application. The Daily and Popular Science are subscriptions where you pay a monthly fee to access newly created content that is then pushed to your device. It is unclear if then new subscription policy will apply to all of the aforementioned scenarios or only some of them

Lets examine three examples of how services, users, and applications could interact with these new policies after the Apple imposed June 30th deadline.

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As you all know I am the resident Apple fanboy of The Love of Tech Podcast and The Gadget Gurus Network as Zack Egolf pointed out in last weeks guest editorial. With swirling rumors of the pending launch of the Mac app store I wondered if the Mac app store would have as large of an impact on desktop apps as the iOS app store did for mobile apps.

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