Flatly contradicting a Sunday Times report in February that claimed Jonathan Ive was leaving Apple (which I commented on in an article on this blog), the Daily Mail yesterday posted a lengthy profile on the designer, with a very different viewpoint:

It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that he is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false – he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what – or perhaps more accurately who – propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britain the talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age.

And the usual unnamed source weighs in with:

Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a former colleague: “I’m not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My last conversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK.”

Until Ive himself officially makes a statement one way or the other, no-one will know for sure what the designer plans to do, but I still maintain that him leaving Apple seems unlikely, and that, in order to stay at the Cupertino giant, he won’t be moving back to the UK.

If that’s the case, that also means that I’m agreeing with the Daily Mail, which makes me want to scrub my brain clean with a wire brush.

Johnny Davis in the Guardian:

The “i” in iMac was supposed to stand for “internet”, but the first models had no slot drives – users had no way of burning their own CDs or DVDs. Given that almost 30m PCs were sold with this capability during 2000, Apple had missed a trick.

Really? REALLY? Having been woken this morning at 6 a.m. by the army seemingly blowing up the local countryside, I’m pretty fucking tired (and, frankly, more than a little grumpy). But even if I’d not slept all night and had instead spent the night drinking a combination of whisky and more whisky, I’d have not made the error Davis does above. Hell, even a 12-year-old copying bits of Wikipedia would not have made that error, assuming they could read and parse basic information.

This leads me to the following reasoning. Pick one or more from:

• Johnny Davis can write but, sadly, cannot research/read.
• Johnny Davis drinks far too much whisky before writing articles.
• Johnny Davis, like so many people writing about tech these days, doesn’t understand enough about what he’s writing about.
• Johnny Davis frankly doesn’t give a fuck, and the Guardian subs can’t be arsed to do basic fact-checking.
• And the get-out-clause for Johnny Davis (because I’m feeling generous): one of the Guardian’s subs needs beating to death with a trowel and/or a surprisingly weighty 1990s Mac laptop.

Still, I am tired, so maybe I’m misremembering and was totally hallucinating the optical drives in the original iMac (which were tray-based rather than slot-loading, and yes, a lack of burning, but GET YOUR GENERAL FACTS RIGHT IF YOU’RE CONCOCTING AN ARGUMENT), and the fact the only ‘missing’ drive was the dead-in-the-water floppy. Yes, that must be it. After all, someone paid large sums of cash to write for a national newspaper wouldn’t get such utterly basic facts wrong, would they?

Electronista recently went into a fap-fest regarding Samsung’s new OMG IPOD TOUCH KILLER, rattling off facts about its ability to support Flash, expandable storage, lack of sync app requirement, and neatly glossing over the lack of a ship date, price and battery life. Marco Arment expertly rips the piece to shreds on his blog. A highlight, reacting to the Electronista piece’s asertion that Samsung has “presented some of the first significant competition to the iPod touch”:

I’d call it ‘potential competition’—it’s not competition if it doesn’t exist yet. And when it does, it’s not really a competitor if it doesn’t sell very well. It’d be difficult to say, for instance, that the Zune was ever really providing ‘significant competition’ to the iPod.

This should be printed out and stapled to the head of every idiot tech journo who dares to, without irony, use the words ‘iPod touch’ followed by ‘killer’ in any article even mentioning the Galaxy Player.

(For the record, I want there to be loads of challengers to the iPod touch—only then will Apple’s arse be kicked, perhaps encouraging the company to weld a decent stills camera to the thing. For now, though, such a thing simply doesn’t exist.)

The BBC asks Can HMV reinvent itself? The famous entertainment group, founded nearly a century ago, is currently, to put it bluntly, fucked. Its stock-market value is now under £50m and the banks are circling like hungrier, angrier, uglier versions of vultures, waiting for HMV to keel over so that they can strip its corpse for money meat.

The BBC gets one thing very wrong, though, when it argues why HMV’s gotten such a serious kicking of late:

Apple—with its iPod and iPad—is the silent white assassin of HMV, because more and more of us are choosing to download music, games and films, rather than buying those silvery discs. And Waterstone’s is being squeezed as we opt to download books on to so-called tablets.

The real assassin of HMV wasn’t silent and it certainly wasn’t Apple. Instead, it was Amazon, blundering into the UK, setting fire to the concept of ‘profit margins’ and undercutting every high-street retailer to the level that it made no sense to buy in a store. Instead, HMV rapidly became a kind of gigantic shop window, where you’d check out stuff you’d like to buy, before returning home and grabbing it from Amazon.

Where HMV then failed was in creating its own online offering that didn’t respond to Amazon (and also the likes of Play.com) competitively. HMV was comprehensively outmanoeuvred on price, and it for far too long welded hefty postage costs to its products.

The one smart move the group has made is in its 50 per cent purchase of 7digital, which may be dwarfed by iTunes but is nonetheless a highly respected online music store, with lucrative deals with Spotify and BlackBerry. But whether this is enough to convince the banks to hold fire is debatable—and that isn’t down to Apple, but HMV in continually reacting after the event, rather than presciently noting which way markets are heading in.

For the same price as the 32 GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 ($599, 100 bucks above the iPad 2’s entry-level model), Engadget reveals that the Motorola Wi-Fi Xoom will show up on March 27.

Good luck with that.