Benedict Evans:

Apple designs for the mass market but sells at a premium price. Android designs for geeky configurability but sells to the mass market.

I’m strangely drawn to the System 6-style button in the upper right.

Bloomberg got a general quote from Pegatron’s CEO about how “almost every item” in their consumer electronic products division “is moving in a negative direction” quarter over quarter. Then they ran the headline “Falling iPad Mini Demand to Push Pegatron Electronics Sales Down”.

Because it’s always about Apple.

Well, Apple and SEO.

Congratulations to Jim Dalrymple and the crew at The Loop for launching an accompanying magazine for iOS with original content from a terrific lineup of writers.

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, the launch party for TypeEngine, the platform The Loop magazine is running on, is tomorrow night and Jim will be in attendance. Now, if you go, you should be aware he might just yell suddenly for no apparent reason. It’s OK. It’s just a thing he does. It doesn’t mean he’s angry. I don’t think. I’m not really sure what’s going on. But it’s OK, is what I’m saying. I think.

Uh… anyway, should be fun. I’ll be there.

Robert T. Gonzalez:

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?

(Via Erika Hall.)

Years ago I went to a wine tasting where we were invited to taste wines and then spit them out, lest we get drunk. I drank all of them and wrote jokey reviews on the little cards. Turns out I was not wrong to do so.

Tom Warren for The Verge:

[Microsoft’s Tami] Reller stopped short of confirming the Start button will return, but sources close to Microsoft’s Windows Blue plans have previously revealed the company will include this in the final version.

We’ve been over this a million times but this is another problem with insisting on one “no compromises” operating system. When Apple launched iOS, did anyone complain the Apple menu and the Finder were gone?

A fresh start lets you get rid of old baggage. That’s a lesson Microsoft seems determined not to learn.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole in the ground, you’ve probably heard of this App.net thing that’s so popular with the young people these days. (If you are living in a hole in the ground, you may be a hobbit. Please consult your physician.) As you might have seen from other Internet jerks like me, App.net is doing a staged rollout and the link above has invites to the free tier for the first 100 people to claim them.

If you’re App.net-curious and want to find out more about it before making the huge commitment of signing up for a free account, well, you have issues. But if you have those issues and there’s not getting around them or you’ve scarfed up an invite already and are curious what it’s all about, you can put your ear up to this episode of The New Disruptors where App.net founder Dalton Caldwell talks to Glenn Fleishman about the platform.

I fixed the headline for you.