Real tech stories. Really shaky analysis.
Give me five minutes and I’ll give you the week in tech, without the annoying facts or common sense.
For the week of September 7 – September 11, 2015
We start, of course, with news from the Apple Press Event…
You Can’t Spell Tablet Without Table
Apple is expanding their tablet line with the iPad Pro, which, despite being nearly twice the size of the iPad Air, actually conserves space in your home by converting, with the optional fold-out legs, into a dining room table.
Hard Core Star Wars Fans Rebel Against Force Touch
An angry mob of Star Wars fans gathered outside this week’s Apple event to protest the company’s Force Touch feature, claiming it was intentionally deceptive. “They have shown with the Apple Watch that Force Touch does not mean you can control your device with your mind,” said Tommy McCourty, raising and shaking his left arm, where a space black stainless steel Apple Watch rattled against the gold plastic of his C-3PO costume. “And just try to return it because of that. I’m pretty sure…” He turned to face the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where Apple executives were, after eight hours, guiding the press event toward its halfway point, “…YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LAUGH AT CUSTOMERS!
“And now they want to claim the iPhone will have Force Touch? Enough is enough.”
Just then, word reached the crowd that Apple was not, in fact, using the term Force Touch for iPhone interaction, but rather 3-D Touch. There was a momentary silence, and then a 250-pound man wearing a Princess Leia slave costume shouted, “We won!” and the air was filled with jubilant droid screams and Wookie bellows.
At last report, the vigilant crusaders were headed for the Glad company to demand the dismissal and possible execution of the creator of the ForceFlex garbage bags, which, it turns out, have to be tied by hand.
A Rose Gold By Any Other Name…
Of course, Apple’s most anticipated announcement came when Tim Cook unveiled this year’s wacky, made-up color option for devices. The winner, as we all know now, was “Rose Gold,” which, according to insiders, narrowly edged out “Chrysanthemum Platinum” and “Fuchsia.”
And, in non-Apple news…
Whisky-A-No-No
In one of mankind’s most vital experiments, a Scottish distillery sent whisky to the International Space Station for three years to find out what effect microgravity would have on flavor. The control sample kept on Earth had hints of raisins, toffee, vanilla, and creamy fudge, while tasters found the “space whisky” to have aromas and flavors of smoke, violet perfume, and antiseptic lozenges, a combination classified by whiskey aficionados as “My Grandmother’s Purse.”
Say Cheese
Canon is introducing a 247-megapixel image sensor that they say can make out the lettering on a plane eleven miles away. If my calculations are correct–try and follow my logic here–that means someone on a plane eleven miles away could capture images on the ground. Which is bad news for our neighbors, Ed and Judy. They just dropped five grand on a community-mandated eight-foot privacy fence after a dozen seven-year-olds at Tina Nelson’s birthday party paused festivities (according to reports, this was a spirited game of Who Can Wear the Most Cake Frosting?) to watch Ed, Judy, and their Labor Day picnic guests playing a spirited game of their own–Nude Bocce. “It’s the way God intended bocce to be played,” Judy told them, just before the kids’ horrified parents yanked them into the Nelson’s house, a process that took longer than expected, because frosting is slippery.
It seems Ed and Judy, following their recent retirement, had pledged to avoid “growing old” by living life “unconventionally,” or, “in a creepy and obscene manner” as the Neighborhood Association put it in the complaint filed with the city.
“Now what, does this camera mean we have to put up a dome because some kid in a window seat on his way to Disney World might snap a photo of our backyard on badminton night? I’m telling you, Thoreau had the right idea; if we could find a nice, secluded, away-from-uptight-humanity spot in the woods we would go full-on Walden Pond, right now. I mean, if it got at least twelve meg internet access. Jude and I have to have our Netflix. Catching up on True Blood, you know.” He nudged me and said, “We watch an episode, then play act it. Getting me some Sookie nookie, right?”
There is no fence tall enough to keep that image from my mind. Thanks, Canon.
Say, I’ve Been Looking for a New Way to Look Like an Idiot in Public
Nintendo is preparing to release Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game for smartphones that has you chasing the game’s characters in the real world. It looks interesting, but the promotional video’s scene of Pokemon characters running through Times Square is nothing new. If you don’t see a sprinting Pikachu carrying an Elmo head and being chased by a cop (and the rest of Elmo) on a Thursday afternoon, you’re not paying attention.
That’s Exactly What He Wants Us to Think
The latest car hack comes from a scientist who claims that, using a low power laser and pulse generator, he can make a self-driving car think there is an obstacle present when there isn’t.
Or is there?
Did anybody stop to think that maybe this guy is an evil genius who has developed an Invisible Obstacle-inator which is placing all too real hazards in the car’s path, and the car is correctly identifying them? Huh? As usual, nobody is going to believe the poor car, the Haley Joel Osment of the vehicle world, that sees things nobody else does. “Just another run-of-the-mill car hack,” the media says. And nobody questions it, because these days, apparently, anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a garage door opener can hack a car. So the mad scientist gets to test his dastardly invention without anyone catching on. Then, when it’s too late, he takes over the world by–
Hey, here’s a question: is it possible to take too much cough syrup?
Thanks again for stopping by the Weekly Tech Views Blog. If you enjoyed it, feel free to send a friend or five this way. If you weren’t so crazy about it, we’ll just pretend this never happened.
Mike Range
@MovieLeagueMike
Weekly Tech Views Blog by Mike Range is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Microsoft has new hardware coming, Google’s getting serious about cars and Nintendo has a new President. Plus, Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt talk with +Kevin Purdy about the best Android-compatible watches.