When it start's correctly changing my use of who/whom, I'll know the robots have won.
This morning, everyone linked to the latest Apple copy from HP. They certainly aren't the first – Acer, Samsung, Dell, and so many others have copied Apple one degree or another. If I recall correctly, phones were first. Laptops followed. Desktops were next. In the PC space, things looked familiar but, in my opinion, not an exact copy. But clearly that's no longer the case.
Everyone has recreated the MacBook Air and iMac hardware by now. HP has gone several steps further by recreating Apple's keyboard and Magic TrackPad. If it weren't for the USB ports on the side of the base, it might be hard for someone outside of the tech industry to know what they were looking at wasn't an Apple Cinema Display. It's probably harder to tell the difference between some laptops and Airs.
Apple fans might look at this as a blatant ripoff. That was my first reaction, too. It sill has left a sour feeling knowing that years of iterative design that culminated in the unique brand Apple created was wiped away by knockoffs. But as I thought about it more, I'm less bothered by it.
First, no one – especially Apple fans – should believe that their beloved company will be on top forever. I love their products and I know it's inevitable. Accept that and move on.
Second, Apple knows this. They know their products are going to be copied. They know imitators are everywhere and they can't litigate against everyone. They know they need to disrupt themselves and others to stay ahead. So far, they've been doing a great job at it.
Third, no one should want Apple to have a monopoly on hardware design forever. Sure, a nice lead would be good for us fans. But Apple – like all companies – would slow down their innovation and we'd all lose. We'd be stuck with the same unibody hardware from 2008. My late 2008 MBP would still be the body current models use if Apple wasn't forced (by market pressures or themselves) to make such a thin and light weight retina laptop. They need to be ahead of the industry – lead it. And Apple fans will continue to benefit from their innovation so long as they can keep it up.
But truth be told, HP and Samsung cannot catch up to Apple. Regardless of what their hardware looks like – even if it has useful features to some like the USB ports on the base – they won't have the OS. They won't have the ecosystem. They won't have the wow factor. They won't have customer service. And they won't have all the other smaller details that, when added up, make all the difference.
When I moved from a PC to a Mac, I didn't do it for the looks. I did it for the OS. I stayed because things worked and I learned to appreciate Apple's soft and hard design. People who buy the HP 'whatever' think they're getting a cool computer when they're getting a wolf in sheep's clothing. They will still be frustrated with it in a few months. Perhaps, they'll become accelerated Apple users when they get the design but don't get the rest of what Apple offers.
And, perhaps, it's in Apple's favor to let knockoffs help get PC users used to good design and let Apple take their business when they realize the only get half of the value proposition.
Samsung isn't the only company "inspired" by Apple. HP seems to love their MagicPad.
Scientific American writing about how the types of food, the method of cooking (or lack thereof), the microbes in out bodies, the immune system, and the type and processing of certain foods might affect the amount of calories in a given food:
For one, our bodies seem to expend different quantities of energy to deal with different kinds of food (the energy expended produces heat and so is referred to by scientists as "diet-induced thermogensis"); some foods require us to do more work than others. Proteins can require ten to twenty times as much heat-energy to digest as fats, but the loss of calories as heat energy is not accounted for at all on packaging.
For another, foods differ in how and where they are digested in our guts. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is really not even put to good use. They are absorbed in our small intestines; game mostly over. More complex foods, on the other hand, such as cassava or almonds, have to travel to the colon where they meet up with the largest concentrations of our little friends, the microbes. Digestion continues with the help of our trillions of microbes but nutrients are shared between us and them. The microbes help to break down many compounds our own bodies cannot and in doing so go on to produce a mix of more microbes, gases (such as methane) and then fatty acids. The accounting associated with this process of sharing with the microbes is not considered in calorie counting.
In most cases, raw foods were lower in calories when cooked.
Food for thought.
The more I see crabs and other crustaceans up close, the more they freak me out. Seeing this is making be rethink ordering lobster from a menu ever again.
via The Loop