May 25 2024 - Apple Dumps Apple's Greatest

 

"Greatest albums of all time" - that's an interesting idea for Apple to be the arbiter of great music and for it to be "albums." The music streaming giant announced their 100 greatest albums of all time with Lauryn Hill’s 1998 “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” claiming the top spot. This is considered the album that "helped redefine hip-hop and R&B."       I've been listening to young people on the CBC talk about it all week.  Good thing I listen to the CBC as I wouldn't know about Hill's work otherwise, not being in the hip-hop generation. Hill’s album won over other classic records from Beyoncé, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar, Amy Winehouse, Frank Ocean and Nirvana."  My guess is that "Of all time" would mean within Apple Inc's "relative" lifetime. That's April 1, 1976 in Los Altos California.  So if the company was started then, Wozniak and Jobs would have been born in the 1950s, so the decade or so earlier would be included.  And that's where the past comes in.  The reviews say things like Apple Music has repeated the past approach - of Rolling Stone, Time, and others in trying to define the top and the best of something.  Even calling it an album or LP is an idea of the 20th century  - the 1950s when the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys elevated the album.  My own list of the greatest music has Bach and Beethoven - I am so far back in the time machine that I haven't caught up to albums.  MSNBC's conclusion to this list:  "But albums themselves are no longer a juggernaut, as music is now mostly streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music, where algorithms, user-created playlists and professionally curated "Essentials" are the most common listening experience. Ironically, Apple wrote that its list was meant to be "a modern love letter to the records that have shaped the world we live and listen in today," but it may be closer to a eulogy for a lost era of music, given by one of its killers." Our list seems like this endless, narrow hall - very elegant - and probably a great view from all those windows.

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Aug 22 2023 - Work from Home

 

I am still thinking about the $500,000 cubicle in Switzerland.   Couldn't they build a live/work community and the workers living space at the campus would allow them to work from home? Wouldn't that be perfect?  But somehow, employees still have to commute every day from their homes to the work place. Could this be a corporate behaviour where the gap between living and working realities must be "hammered in" every day?  Alternately, the executives want to have their palace and what the employees do in between time is their own worry. Let's take Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.  It has an estimate of around 12,000 employees at an estimated cost of $5 billion.  That's $417,000 per employee with 2,3000 square feet each. I return to the notion that this turns out to be a house a person.  That includes research and development facilities as well as office space, so perhaps reduce it a bit for real laboratory work that has to happen vs all those meetings and presentations, etc. What else is there in that 2,8 million square feet of space? A "Main Atrium", 1,000 seat underground auditorium, fitness and wellness centre (how would you get to it give you might be over a million square feet away), cafes and an organic farm, green roof, rainwater harvesting systems, visitor centre, the Steve Jobs Theatre.  They don't mention it, but there is a picture of the Aqua Park.  On site is a hair salon and dry cleaning service.  Many things for every day living, just not the living quarters. And the conclusion?  From its website: "Apple’s massive $5 billion “spaceship” headquarters is a truly impressive building, designed with innovation, sustainability, and employee well-being in mind. With its beautiful architecture, landscaping, and state-of-the-art facilities, it is a fitting home for one of the world’s most innovative companies." So it is a "home for the company" and not what makes up the company - its employees.  The questions on Quora and Redditt are about where Apple employees live while working at the Cupertino facility?  Here's some advice for a person who has just got a job at the Cupertino location:  "Buy a good home in Cupertino. The interest rates are low. You can get a decent house for $2M" We'll be in Denver next week for the railroad convention.  Here's an example of a layout in the competition from a few years ago.

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June 20 2020 - Apple Time

I think of both the Beatles music company and the computer brand name of Apple as deeply disruptive, as in the Garden of Eden apple and the fall from grace.   Steve Jobs has never referred to this.  What was revealed in 2011 is that it was named during one of his fruitarian diets, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs says: On the naming of Apple, he said he was “on one of my fruitarian diets.” He said he had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating... plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book." There have been no associations with Eden and Apple Records either.  Apple Records was named Apple Corp as in apple core - a pun. It replaced the earlier company Beatles Ltd. This is Paul McCartney's story of the Apple name: In my garden at Cavendish Avenue, which was a 100-year-old house I’d bought, Robert was a frequent visitor. One day he got hold of a Magritte he thought I’d love. Being Robert, he would just get it and bring it. I was out in the garden with some friends. I think I was filming Mary Hopkin with a film crew, just getting her to sing live in the garden, with bees and flies buzzing around, high summer. We were in the long grass, very beautiful, very country-like. We were out in the garden and Robert didn’t want to interrupt, so when we went back in the big door from the garden to the living room, there on the table he’d just propped up this little Magritte. It was of a green apple. That became the basis of the Apple logo. Across the painting Magritte had written in that beautiful handwriting of his ‘Au revoir’. And Robert had split. I thought that was the coolest thing anyone’s ever done with me". Apple Records came first, followed by Apple Computers.  Two creation narratives for their stories.   The significant legal wrangling that went on over the name seems like two snakes fighting over the apple.  Was that before or after it was given to Adam and Eve? Here's my Montana clematis.  The background is the fantastic Tri-colour beech tree in the garden.  It is brilliant pink.  I've used the flexibly filter to turn it into a globe.

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