Hanging Out Wednesday’s Wash

* So it looks like Glenn Greenwald is going into business for himself, aided by eBay founder money.  This could be yet another attempt at building an alternative media outlet a la Huffington or Grantland, or it could be striking while the iron is hot to maximize the career leverage (and profit) afforded by being the sole conduit of the great Snowden revelations, which are trickling out in a manner that suggests nothing so much as the endless stream of surprise contracts Mick Foley just happened to have signed before being fired as WWF General Manager on Monday Night RAW back in the day.  It will certainly do nothing to dissuade the many people who are convinced that this entire affair is about maximizing the attention and tangible rewards afforded to Greenwald, which once again drives home the point that what should be a huge story is instead being turned into the meta-story, and largely by those claiming to push the story in the first place.

* The saga of the banjo-playing donkey is over: the iPhone 5 is again performing within acceptable parameters.  Now starts the experimentation: restore work MDM, disable a few features to see if we eke out a little more juice, maybe try running something like Dark Sky or Saga and see if it has a major impact, and – most of all – try throwing the T-Mobile SIM in there and see what happens. But the more I look at the new iPhones, the more I keep thinking that my next phone ought to either be the Moto X or a notional iPhone 6 that is more like the X.  I want the slightly larger screen and the larger battery that goes with it, and I definitely want the specialized co-processors for power-sipping ambient monitoring.  For the first time since 2007, somebody’s legitimately stolen a march on Apple in the phone-innovation space, and 64-bit alone isn’t yet demonstrably enough to make up the difference.

* Worth noting: there is no 64-GB iPhone 5S to be had in America, not even for ready money. I did an availability search around Silicon Valley.  Then Nashville.  Then Birmingham, then DC, then New York City, and in a broad swath all the way from Connecticut to Louisiana, there simply exists not one single 64 GB iPhone 5S of any color available for same-day pickup.  Meanwhile, the 5C can be had anywhere, including for half off with contract at the likes of Walmart or Target or Best Buy.   I’d be curious to see how the numbers for the 5C stack up against the numbers this time last year for the 4S, because the 5C is merely supposed to be the iPhone 5 with a candy shell and a bigger profit margin.  And at this point – given that the battery life is even better than the 5S and that my employer doesn’t permit fingerprint-unlocking in the security MDM – I’d as soon have a white 5C as a gold 5S.

* People keep trumpeting market share for Android phones, but iOS still rules the roost as far as actual web traffic goes. From the look of things, the bulk of Android’s market share is coming in the free-with-contract space, and going in large part to people who have a smartphone simply because the smartphone is now the default for “phone.”  The Moto X is the first Android phone to seriously eschew competing on “look how big” and “look how many gimmicks” and “look at this spec sheet” and instead compete on user experience…and it’s going to work.  Hell, it’s working on me, ain’t it?

* It’s diet time again. I’m trying to go back to the simple rules from March: no vending machine food, no extra sweeteners, no bottled soda, no empty starch calories.  We’ll see how well it works out; I already carved out one exemption for some caffeine-free Coke Zero last night and will probably have a few cocktails Thursday night (happy birthday surrogate-sister-in-law!) so I may not be as hardcore this time.  Then again, I made myself kind of miserable last time, and making sure I don’t resent doing it is going to be a big part of making sure I stick with it.

* The city council in Cupertino signed off on Campus 2 last night.  Before Christmas, they’ll be starting construction near my old office, bulldozing a huge old HP property to build something literally the size of the Pentagon.  Call it the mausoleum of Steve if you like…but one thing that stuck out is that in discussing the thing, Jobs specifically mentioned that it would have an apricot orchard. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley,” he told his biographer.

And that led me to go back and look…and sure enough, of the big-ticket CEOs currently running things in Silicon Valley, none of them is actually from here.  Most of them came through Stanford, or else got pulled in via some other company.  But Steve and Woz?  They were from here.  They grew up in the orchards.  They bought components cheap at Halted Specialties, they ate pineapple pizza at Frankie Johnny and Luigi’s, they called Bill Hewlett up by finding his phone number in the Palo Alto white pages.  They grew up with the Valley.  They were part of what I think of as the “Wagon Wheel” era, when military and high-tech collided and kicked out the semiconductor industry and set the Bay Area on its way to becoming what it is today.

Steve lived that history, and he thought it was important enough to respect.  Important enough to make sure there were orchards.  I don’t know exactly what that says about him, but I know it’s nothing that comes up when you talk about the Googleplex or SoMa or Facebook’s forthcoming gated community.  And it’s why a hundred wannabe entrepreneurs who think all you need is a signature shirt and a shitty attitude have completely missed the boat on what made Steve Steve.

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