difference

On the Apple campus, thinking different is worshipped. The company's core aspiration is to deliver startling breakthroughs, not me-too, products. Now Apple is calling upon its rivals to "think different," but for different reasons than creating breakthrough products.

Apple's "Think Different" philosophy was expressed in a series of ads commissioned by Steve Jobs in 1997, a time when Apple was early in its comeback from the brink of bankruptcy. The ads featured Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad … Read more

So important is Microsoft Excel to the world's data that the smallest difference between datasets can have consequences that ripple outward like a stone thrown in a calm pond. DiffEngineX is a powerful tool that identifies the differences between two Excel workbooks or individual worksheets, even thousands at a time. But unlike standard difference analysis, it takes into account any new or blank rows, cells, and columns. It's not something you can just fire up and run, but the payoff for a little prep is accurate identification of actual differences in huge amounts of data in minutes or … Read more

Legend has it that Steve Jobs was so involved in the creation of Apple's "Think Different" campaign that he could have -- maybe did -- write the thing himself.

So along comes an Apple ad writer to tell us all that this legend should end because it has no legs.

Writing for Forbes, Rob Siltanen, one of the creative people involved in winning Apple's business and then developing campaigns from 1997 onward, recounts a very different story of the development of the "Here's to the Crazy Ones" TV ad that launched the campaign.… Read more

After much fanfare, a minor pre-order meltdown, and what was perhaps the largest collection of Apple software updates to go out in a single week, the next iPhone arrives tomorrow.

If it feels like a long time since the iPhone 4 went on sale, you're not mistaken. The iPhone 4S, Apple's follow-up to the iPhone 4, comes a few months later than Apple has typically released previous handsets, and it seems even longer given that leaks led to the world seeing the final design months before it was officially unveiled.

From the looks of it, Apple appears to … Read more

The brains behind the port you'd find on one computer would be similar to the same port on another machine, right? That's not the case when it comes to the Thunderbolt ports on the latest MacBook Airs, which joined Apple's Thunderbolt-equipped club earlier this month.

A report on AnandTech notes that the Thunderbolt controller found on the MacBook Air is a smaller version than the ones found on other Thunderbolt-equipped Macs so far. With other machines, Apple's been using a controller code-named Light Ridge that sports four, bidirectional Thunderbolt channels and two DisplayPort outputs. However the … Read more

If choosing between the 18 different models of the iPad 2 wasn't hard enough, new findings suggest that the hardware differences between the Wi-Fi-only and 3G models of the iPad 2 lead to different audio recording quality, with buyers of the less-expensive Wi-Fi only versions coming out on top.

That claim, made by iLounge as a footnote to its iPad 2 review, centers on how the same microphone is placed in the two different models. On the Wi-Fi-only version, the microphone hole is simply carved out of the larger piece of metal that makes up the back of the … Read more

Last week, I spent a couple of hours at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., which for a small-time collector of tech artifacts is like Charlie getting into the chocolate factory.

The highlight of the visit was a personal tour by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who wandered among the displays and explained how some of the products had influenced his understanding and passion for technology, which culminated in the creation of the first Apple computer. You can see several videos of Wozniak, who was very generous with his time despite nursing a sore throat, here.

My relatively short … Read more

Steve Jobs in a turtleneck and shorts?

What a great bit of history this is, and a nice weekend diversion. In the video embedded below, the Apple CEO introduces the company's 1997 Think Different campaign. A key quote: "[Our new ad campaign] honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not. But the ones that aren't--you know that if they ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac."

And another: "This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world, and we'… Read more

Time Zone Calculator is an extremely basic program that allows you to calculate the time difference between two global locations. There's not much to it, but it performs the task that it's designed for.

The program's interface is extremely basic, consisting of a single screen. There are two drop-down menus from which you select your base location and remote location; there's a long list of locations, which is organized alphabetically. The program allows you to view the time difference between the two locations in three ways; the difference between the current times, the difference when the … Read more