Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: Marco Arment

  • Marco Arment on feeding the sensational bullshit monster

    Marco Arment’s post about Apple losing “the functional high ground” spun out of control, and became fodder for the sensational bullshit fire. That wasn’t the intention, and now Arment’s less than happy about the outcome.

    If there’s any flaw, it’s an unstoppable nightmare of embarrassment and guilt. Most people, myself included, aren’t accustomed to that level of scrutiny. Those who are usually have PR training, editors, and handlers to protect them from publishing flippant blog posts before they go to bed.

    Fair enough, but this isn’t the first time Arment’s commented something and it’s been blown out of proportion. Arment even admits this in his post, so although I feel for him, I also find it naive to think that what he writes will always stay in his quiet corner of the web. Lesson learned again, I guess.

    The original post that sparked everything is here.

  • Don't hold your breath for Apple to release Thunderbolt displays

    Marco Arment explains why there’s no Thunderbolt displays on the horizon.

    Pushing this many pixels requires more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.2 offers, which is what Thunderbolt 2 ports use for outputting video signals. (I wrote about this a few times.) Doing it right will require waiting until DisplayPort 1.3 in Thunderbolt 3 on Broadwell’s successor, Skylake, which isn’t supposed to come out for at least another year — and Intel is even worse at estimating ship dates than I am, so it’s likely to be longer.

    It may be possible to use two Thunderbolt 2 cables to power a 5K display, but only if the GPU could treat each port as its own full-bandwidth DisplayPort 1.2 channel, the sum of which represented one logical display, and had the panel using something like MST to combine the two at the other end. But the only Mac with more than one Thunderbolt bus (not port) is the current Mac Pro, and I can’t see today’s Apple shipping an external display that none of their laptops can use.

    There is no way Apple will launch proper 5K retina Thunderbolt displays, on par with the new retina iMac, anytime soon. I based my predictions on the matter on the same basis.

  • The Magazine shuts down with hardcover anthology

    The Magazine, originally created by Marco Arment but nowadays run by the excellent Glenn Fleishman, is shutting down. It’s no big surprise, iOS magazines are said to be struggling all the time (and I wonder how The Loop Magazine is doing), but a shame nonetheless. The final issue will be out on December 17 this year.

    Glenn explains:

    So we lasted as long as we could while turning a buck so that I could make an increasingly smaller portion of my living from it, while enjoying the heck out of working with so many great writers and publishing stories about so many people and things, historical and present, geeky and sweet, sad and hilarious. It’s been great.

    There’ll be a new hardcover anthology, raising money on Kickstarter, and Glenn says he “may produce some ebooks or special projects” after shutting down the actual magazine.

  • The Magazine And What Marco Arment Got Wrong

    Marco Arment, of Instapaper, and more recently The Magazine, fame has written a post on the future of publishing. He says that several parties have contacted him about licensing The Magazine’s platform, a business he is reluctant to be in. He also says this:

    The last thing I’d want is for a bunch of The Magazine lookalikes to flood the App Store with mediocre articles that haven’t passed through an editor and should just be (or already are) someone’s mediocre blog posts, just so they can easily charge for a subscription.

    Well, too bad. Success will be copied, and The Magazine is not only successful, it is successful within a niche where people are starving for a solution, any solution really. I’ve already explained why that is, so let’s all take a moment to remember, shall we?

    Marco Arment then says this:

    If the App Store gets spammed with hundreds of bad clones, The Magazine itself will lose credibility and potential subscribers as people make incorrect assumptions about its article quality.

    I disagree. With that reasoning there could not be any blogs with credibility, since there are so many “bad clones” out there. Still there is, and still there is quality writing, bloggers with fanbases large enough to launch niche tablet magazines even…

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  • The Daily And Tablet Magazines

    Rupert Murdoch shuttered The Daily yesterday, the iPad only newspaper with a staff of a 100 or something like that. Quite an operation, quite a project, and quite a project propelled by the dreams of an old media publisher and their hopes of doing the same old thing on a new media format such as an iPad. No wonder it failed, right?

    The iPad magazine business, if we can call it that, is in an interesting spot right now. To understand this, it is important to remember where it all started, with bloated versions of paper magazines, more or less behaving like an interactive PDF really. Not only did the format, with its “tap to view video” and similar, not engage readers as much as magazine makers might’ve thought, it also meant huge file sizes for every issue. The weight issue has been handled somewhat, but magazines clock in at over 150 MB more often than not.

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