CNet’s Jason Hiner in a 3,000-plus-word piece (that I linked to in April) about Webtop, Motorola’s technology for docking an Android device and making it a desktop computer:

…as Google nears finalizing its acquisition of Motorola, the tide may be turning on sales of Webtop devices, and that could set up a huge opportunity for Google and Android to use Webtop to launch a full frontal attack on Apple and Microsoft.

The Verge’s Amar Toor today:

Motorola on Friday confirmed that it has abandoned development of Webtop — software that enabled smartphones to power laptops via the Lapdock accessory. The company explained the decision in a statement provided to CNET, bluntly attributing the move to a lack of consumer adoption.

Oopsies!

Google/Motorola has also withdrawn its second ITC complaint against Apple. Although the reasons are unknown, I guess we can’t use that to beat them over the head on hypocrisy anymore, but if they didn’t acquire Motorola to battle Apple on the patent front and they didn’t acquire it for Android-related technologies and they certainly didn’t acquire it for the profit it’s making, why the heck did they acquire it?

Oh, well! It’s just $12.5 billion. Its not like it was a lot of money or something.

As a side note, I wonder if consumers not wanting one device that “does it all” (crappily) has any implications for the Microsoft Surface?

Probably not. Nah.

Added: A couple of people have complained about drawing parallels to Windows 8 which is obviously a full-fledged operating system. My point is that I have yet to see anyone prove that you can get one device to do it all by either scaling up from a mobile operating system or down from a desktop operating system.

Today marks the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. But I’m not going to talk about Jobs. Because Steve Jobs wouldn’t have wanted you worrying about what Steve Jobs would have wanted.

Wait, then does that mean not worrying about what he wanted is worrying about what he wanted?

Uh, I’m just going to assume it’s not.

Instead of talking about Jobs, I want to talk a little about the last year. Despite the insistence by a number of pundits that Apple would quickly crash and burn without Jobs, the company seems to be chugging along as well as it ever has at its own pace.

But what is the company’s real pace? Some people seem confused about that.

Many have complained…

Well, hang on. I hate the “many have said” construction. Frequently it’s used to take exception with an idea without naming names but I want to be clear who I’m talking about. Dan Lyons, for one. Rebecca Greenfield. Practically anyone writing for Forbes.

That’s just a few. I don’t have all day to devote to this.

The complaint by these people is that Apple hasn’t introduced a truly new design since Jobs died and, the thinking goes, that shows the company has lost its innovative spark. It’s true that the iPhone 5 and the 4S before it are evolutionary not revolutionary improvements on the iPhone. As was the new iPad and the Retina MacBook Pro.

So, they say, because Apple hasn’t introduced a new product line in the last 12 months that is destined to remake an entire market, innovation in Cupertino must have died with Steve Jobs.

This kind of commentary reflects a startling lack of knowledge of Apple history and an infantile level of patience.

Contrary to conventional belief, Apple has never churned out ground-breaking products on a yearly basis. When Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he remarked on how it was the third time Apple was reinventing an existing product category, having previously reinvented the personal computer with the Mac in 1984 and the digital music player with the iPod in 2001.

The iPad was much less of a reinventing since the tablet market prior to 2010 consisted of a few sweaty factory floor foremen and a few even sweatier Microsoft fanboys.

Think about that. Not the sweaty part, try not to think about that at all, but the size of the tablet market just two and a half years ago compared to it now.

The fact that Apple was able to reinvent two product categories and jump-start another in a span of nine years is nothing short of astounding. To expect them to do it again in the year since Jobs’ passing is unrealistic at best, self-indulgent claptrap at worst.

It’s possible, if incredibly unlikely, that Apple is done innovating, that we’ll never see it reinvent another product category. But you’d have to wait a few years to make that assessment credibly and these pundits don’t want to wait that long. They want to be first to have called Apple’s decline and why not when there’s a remarkable lack of consequence for being wrong?

Speaking of suffering consequences for being wrong, throw my name onto this bonfire of vanities. Why? In 2006 I was interviewed for the documentary Welcome to Macintosh and when asked to speculate about a post-Jobs Apple I said:

I don’t see Apple being able to continue at the pace that it’s going right now.

It’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. There’s a lot stiffer competition for the title than that. Just ask my wife. But my lack of faith in a pre-iPhone world looks silly in retrospect. And here we are a year after Jobs and Apple is going at the same pace it was going at under Jobs which is a hell of a lot brisker than it was in 2006.

So, hey! I was kind of right! In that Obi-Wan Kenobi “point of view” kind of way. Which is to say “wrong”.

Apple has spoiled people. Like Veruca Salt (the character, not the band of the same name), they want a golden goose and they want it now.

The company knows, though, that if you want to do something right, it takes time. I don’t know what Apple might have waiting in the wings that might surprise and delight us, or even if they have anything planned at all. I do know that 12 months is not enough time to judge their ability to deliver something amazing.

“We are the music makers…and we are the dreamers of dreams…” – Willy Wonka

It’s more than a week since we all got our iPhone 5s and I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here.

First of all, we’re agreed that Steve Jobs never would have shipped anything so flawed as iOS 6 (except for all the flawed things that he did ship). Second, because Apple hasn’t shipped a startling new product in the year since Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO, innovation is clearly dead at Apple and all they’ll ever do is ship incremental upgrades from here on out unless Tim Cook is fired. And, finally, smartphones that scratch or show signs of wear are unacceptable and should probably be recalled.

Did I miss anything?

Matt Alexander on the insistence on the part of some to try to tear down the iPhone 5.

Weve made a gross over-estimation of our entitlement in the world.

I — and I’m sure Matt feels the same way — don’t think any company or product is above criticism. And Apple, the biggest company ev-ah, can certainly handle the heat. But what a collection of crap we’ve been treated to in the last week.

In a rare instance, Apple shipped a kinda lousy product with the new Maps app. Maybe that’s what makes it newsworthy? For example, do you think “Scuffgate” or “Scratchgate” or whatever we ended up calling it would have ever in a million years have happened to Samsung? I mean, there is no conceivable way that Samsung is shipping 100 percent of its phones without blemishes and with build quality that is completely immune to scratches.

The perspective here is entirely skewed.

On the latest edition of The Talk Show, John Gruber says

I feel like every single one of these incidents — these “-gates” — is always about trade-offs. And the people wanting to blow it up refuse to acknowledge that it’s a tradeoff.

That’s galling. But the most galling thing is having the biggest collection of power tools this side of the Home Depot trying to lecture us on how “This would never have happened under Steve Jobs”. David Chartier points out what a load that is.

Michael Gartenberg, meanwhile, gets the meta point:

amazing how many people that never met Steve Jobs let alone counseled him know exactly what he would have done under every circumstance

Apple made a rare mistake and everyone lost their shit. We, as Apple fans, focus on how it’s rare and try to understand it. So many of these Apple critics, however, are just reveling in the mistake.