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Cliff? What Cliff? I Don’t See Any Cliff.

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Then Co-CEO of BlackBerry-maker RIM, in 2010, responding to Steve Jobs’s claim that the iPhone had passed BlackBerry in sales and he didn’t see them ever catching up:

For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience. We also know that while Apple’s attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of web sites that use Flash. We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple. And by the way, RIM has achieved record shipments for five consecutive quarters and recently shared guidance of 13.8 — 14.4 million BlackBerry smartphones for the current quarter.

This is what happens when a technology company is run by executives who don’t understand the underlying technology. Every single thing Balsillie wrote here was either wrong or shortsighted. Everything. Smaller tablets? Apple came out with the iPad Mini in 2012. Apple wasn’t first but they didn’t have to be. Adobe Flash is now dead on all mobile platforms, and it’s dying on the desktop. And worst of all, equating then-current sales strength with a bright future.

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nrizcalla
2762 days ago
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Haha It was the same with me! Now who's laughing ? :)
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mxm23
2763 days ago
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An interesting exercise is to think about how Apple today is like RIM / Blackberry in 2010. What are they missing? What do they misunderstand or underestimate?
West Coast
2763 days ago
mmmmhm. What about their current success is blinding them to the future?
martinbaum
2763 days ago
Perhaps it'll turn out that Apple's contrast to Google/Facebook/etc's attitude towards harvesting massive amounts of personal data is a bad thing? I hope not, but there are those who think that AI will need to be fed personal data to be relevant at the level of a personal device.
[deleted]
2763 days ago
Classic innovator's dilemma. I'd say what they're missing is all the cheap connected "junk" that's about to take over our lives. They're really already a niche player...they're just not thought of that way. Whatever will win will appear to be a joke right now--cheap and nearly useless. Maybe a Xiaomi fitness tracker or something like that?
gazuga
2762 days ago
It's a great question because they can continue to lap up half or more of the profits in the global phone market for another decade. This success probably hides a bunch of problems. Suppose Apple gets left in the dust on cloud intelligence and remains too stubborn to let Apple hardware play nice with the winners. So by 2021 people might have built up a raft of habitual dependencies on the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, driving them to less beautiful but more capable alternatives Watches and AirPods. The way Apple executives talk about their Siri strategy is like how BlackBerry executives talked about their keyboards. Maybe not that deluded, but close.

When Bluetooth Audio Latency Matters

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Stephen Coyle:

This solution doesn’t work for sounds that start unpredictably, unfortunately. Taps on the screen happen when they happen, and all the system can do is rush the corresponding sounds to the Bluetooth receiver as quickly as possible. With most people used to streaming video and audio, a short delay after pressing play on a video feels acceptable, but when keyboard clicks don’t sync up with your fingers contacting the screen, it’s just unpleasant. […]

This latency is also a significant issue for an app I develop, Tapt. It’s a music game, which relies on tapping rhythms accurately in order to score points. When one needs to coordinate taps on the order of 100-200ms apart, latency is a problem (for any of my bluetooth gear anyway).

Apple has made this better with AirPods. Latency is noticeably better listening to say, keyboard clicks, than with my Beats Powerbeats 2. But it’s still noticeable.

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nrizcalla
2777 days ago
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leonick
2778 days ago
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I mostly listen to podcasts or the audio of videos (because who has keyboard sounds on?) with my bluetooth headset so latency hasn't really been something noticeable for me.

Just for fun though I just enabled the keyboard sounds, I honestly did not perceive any latency (and I compared without headset). Not the cheapest bluetooth headset available but it's below $100.

Can see how maybe it's more noticeable in games though?
Sweden
sirshannon
2778 days ago
Gruber has keyboard sounds on. Of course he does :/
martinbaum
2778 days ago
sirshannon lol!

Dropbox's new magical placeholders save you hard drive space

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Dropbox is previewing a new feature that will make owners of small laptop hard drives very happy. Codenamed Project Infinite, Dropbox is planning to enable desktop placeholders for files stored on the cloud storage service. If you've got 20GB of Dropbox storage then you'd typically sync that all to your desktop to get immediate access to your files, but Project Infinite will just produce shortcuts to your files that don't use up any local storage space.

While files will look like they're still stored locally, a cloud icon indicates they're actually still stored on Dropbox's servers. In a demo, Dropbox notes you can choose to sync specific files and folders to have them stored locally, and any remote files will be fetched immediately as...

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nrizcalla
2920 days ago
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DaftDoki
2920 days ago
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This will be cool.
Seattle
snm77
2917 days ago
I needed this last month when i went from a 750gb hybrid to a 250gb SSD. I had to move DB to a second drive to have enough room...
MHogue
2916 days ago
This was the thing I liked about bitcasa. Awesome.
Ferret
2920 days ago
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Interesting, but I'm glad they left a local-mirror option in place.
Vendy
2920 days ago
This is how OneDrive used to work on Windows 8.