Nicely spotted by Charles Arthur at The Guardian. Dell’s new XPS-15 marketing has caught the eye of a lot of websites, which have parroted Dell’s claim, without bothering to investigate it. That claim:

Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*.

Charles Arthur:

Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk?

Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a thickness comparison (front and rear measurements) of other 15″ laptop PCs manufactured by HP, Acer, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, MSI. No comparison made with Apple or other manufacturers not listed.”

Classy stuff, Dell. Still, as we all know, Michael Dell is the best CEO on the planet*

* Based on ignoring quite a few other CEOs who, quite clearly, are better than Dell, but, hey, is that really important anyway? Can’t we all just get along, even if companies are lying through their teeth in making misleading advertising claims that are objective and can therefore be checked against actual facts, rather than sensibly making more subjective statements? Actually, no, because Dell is a pillock.

Business Insider has a great interview with Apple’s first CEO, which offers this gem:

[W]hen IBM decided to get into the PC market they chop-shopped out the hardware to several different groups so you had a mess of hardware, and they’ve been trying to cobble the software on it ever since.

And you still see that in the phones and the iPad or the computers. You have to control both, or you end up with a mess. Android is a good example now, as Google’s learning, if you don’t have a level of discipline, you end up ruining the product.

For all the people complaining about Google increasingly locking things down, that will probably benefit the platform in the long run, because it will be able to control more of the experience. Whether Google has the design and UX know-how to really compete with Apple in this area (and its online apps suggest it doesn’t) remains to be seen. I’ll bet Amazon does though.

Ted Landau offers an article from a US perspective on what it was like before there were Apple Stores:

[Y]our first problem would be finding a retail store that sold Macs. Apple’s fortunes had fallen so low that most people assumed the company would be bankrupt before the millennium arrived. Even the arrival of the iMac in 1998 did not do much to reverse that belief. As such, many retail chains treated Apple products as if the sales staff could get leprosy by touching them.

I can recall my own dismal experience. I walked into the store and was immediately greeted by a dizzying array of computers and peripherals. Only one problem. Everything was Windows-related. Not one Mac or any other Apple product was visible. When I asked a salesperson about Macs, I was directed to the rear corner of the store — back near where they kept empty cartons and other related trash. Here I found a few Macs (never the complete line of products) sitting around in a disordered and unappealing display.

As for the […] salespeople, they varied from Mac-ignorant to Mac-hostile, often both. On several occasions, when I asked a question, the salesperson pretended to know what he was talking about and confidently gave me the entirely wrong answer. Not surprisingly, these same sleazeballs typically tried to steer me away from Macs altogether, suggesting that Apple was only for losers. “If I went with Windows, I could get a better machine, with more third-party software, for less money.”

All this was true in the UK, too, only here you’d pay roughly twice what Americans got charged for the same hardware. I remember the odd PC World selling Macs, but they were inevitably turned off, and customers were hurried away from them by sales staff who said you “can’t run Word on a Mac” and that “Macs might well come to life at night and eat your first-born,” or some other bollocks.

Today, things are much brighter, and I put much of Apple’s resurgence down to these stores. It’s one thing to think you might like a product, but I’ll bet Apple today sells far more kit through people experiencing it first-hand—even if only for a few minutes in one of its stores—than it would if it had it remained an online-only operation. Additionally, it’s clear Apple’s high-street success has increased support elsewhere, too. In the UK, there are more resellers of Macs than I’ve ever known, even including the likes of Argos.

I’ll also add one further comment: on experiencing Apple Stores of all sizes, from the gargantuan and beautiful Covent Garden store, to smaller efforts in the likes of Southampton and Tampa, one thought often crosses my mind: why aren’t more stores this well designed, laid out and accessible?

A great piece from Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman on openness advocates Google now blocking rooted Android devices from its new movie-rental service. You know, those devices people rooted to remove all the crap carriers bundle, to ‘add value’, which is a benefit of Android being ‘open’?

But it serves as yet another example that Android’s openness only extends as far as it benefits Google.

I’m wondering when people will get the hint about this. Everyone whinges about Apple’s walled garden, but it’s pretty clear Google just has a different kind of wall, and one it’s sneakily putting up a brick at a time, hoping no-one’s watching. There is one big difference with Apple, though, as Harry Marks says:

Where’s the outrage? Where are the riots? Where’s the media sensationalisation?

Where indeed? I guess, for some reason that isn’t entirely clear to me, while Apple blocking jailbroken iOS devices from iBooks is evil, Google blocking rooted Android devices from movie rentals is a-OK.

I’ve been banging on of late about Twitter’s boneheaded thinking regarding developers. Short version: Ryan Sarver, who heads up Twitter’s platform team, tells people to stop making Twitter clients, because:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.

Twitter then starts making life difficult for devs by screwing around with how logins work, except for in their own clients, obviously, (which Twitter claims are part of the service, so THAT’S ALL RIGHT, THEN).

Reports are now coming in from all over that Twitter has bought TweetDeck (CNet). I personally can’t stand TweetDeck, but I know a lot of people who use it, and if third-party clients were all shot in the head, TweetDeck’s death would cause the biggest uproar. Therefore, it’s going to be extremely interesting to see what Twitter does next.

Conceivably, it could kill TweetDeck, but that makes no sense. Even if the purchase was made defensively, to stop TweetDeck becoming a client for a rival service, too many Twitter users work with TweetDeck to make the app disappear. Twitter could roll the column and multi-account-post functionality into its own clients, perhaps as an ‘advanced’ option, but that doesn’t sit right with the, frankly, bare-bones nature of Twitter’s official clients.

The only sensible course of action is for Twitter to continue allowing TweetDeck to exist, but then that makes a mockery of Sarver’s statement about consistency (although as Steve Lyb has noted, Twitter’s doing perfectly well on its own in that regard). Still, given the ‘one rule for us, and another for everyone else, which largely involves PUNCHING DEVS IN THE FACE UNTIL THEY GET THE HINT AND BUGGER OFF’ mindset Twitter apparently employs these days, that last option wouldn’t surprise me at all.