Articles filed under Manjoo, Farhad

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The new LED bulbs aren’t worth $50 Nov 11, 2012 12:00 AM
Last year I visited Switch Lighting, a small Silicon Valley company that claimed to have built something revolutionary. Switch's product: a light bulb that produced the same warm, comforting glow that we associate with Edison's enduring incandescent bulb but lasts 20 times longer and uses a fraction of the energy. The Switch bulb was going to cost $20. I was won over. But the company had to go back to the drawing board and the new bulb costs $50. The bad news: It's not worth it.
Why is the Surface so bad? Nov 10, 2012 12:00 AM
There's only one question anyone should ask about Microsoft's Surface tablet: Is it better than the iPad? It didn't take me a week and a half to decide whether the Surface is better than the iPad. At most it took a couple days, and that's being generous. You'd likely arrive at the same conclusion after playing with the Surface for just a few minutes in a Microsoft Store.
On election night, TV trounced Twitter Nov 10, 2012 12:00 AM
Slate: Under Tim Cook, Apple is stronger than ever Oct 27, 2012 12:00 AM
Every fall, Apple holds a big event to show off its holiday lineup of gadgets. This year, it held two big events. That pretty much sums up the most important thing about Apple in 2012. The company has long been obsessively focused on making a few devices really well. Now it's making a lot more than a few devices. Releasing so many new things in a single year marks a major philosophical shift for Apple.
Slate: The iPhone 5 is a miracle Oct 13, 2012 12:00 AM
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 last month, many tech pundits called it “boring.” I was one of them. Now, almost a month later, it’s time for me to get something off my chest: I’ve made a huge mistake. That’s because, in all other ways, the iPhone 5 is the best phone ever to grace the earth. It beats every single rival on just about every metric you can think of, including speed, battery life, and especially beauty and workmanship.
Slate: Hard times in FarmVille for developer Zynga Oct 13, 2012 12:00 AM
Zynga has entered what looks like a death spiral, and nobody is surprised. This week the firm announced that users aren’t flocking to its latest games, and as a result it’s lowering its revenue expectations for the year. The announcement sparked another brutal slide in Zynga’s stock price; shares were recently trading for less than $2.50 each, more than 75 percent less than at Zynga’s IPO. In some ways Zynga’s demise — along with Facebook’s IPO fizzle and investors’ newfound distaste for advertiser-driven consumer sites — is a good sign for the tech industry.
Slate: The world’s best thermostat just got better Oct 6, 2012 12:00 AM
The Nest, which was built by a start-up co-founded by Tony Fadell, the guy who designed the iPod, is not just the most beautiful thermostat in the world. A minimalist orb that resembles HAL, the Nest may well be one of the most beautiful objects you install in your home — it looks like something from the future, if the future were ruled by people with impeccable taste in Scandinavian furniture.
How Square is making it easier to buy stuff Sep 29, 2012 12:00 AM
Will homebrew manufacturing revolutionize the economy? Sep 22, 2012 12:00 AM
If you live in a tech-hipster haven like Berkeley or Brooklyn, there's a good chance you know super-dads like Chris Anderson, or perhaps you're one yourself. To the extent that you've considered the rise of geek dads at all, you probably haven't thought of them as being an especially powerful force in society or the economy. But Anderson argues that he and other makers like him — not just geek dads but the larger community of enthusiasts who go gaga for things like 3-D printers, the open-source hardware platform Arduino, and the Maker Faire — aren't mere weekend hobbyists.
Slate: No, this is not the best iPhone ever Sep 15, 2012 12:00 AM
All over the Web, churls and haters are claiming that Apple didn't unveil anything really innovative or surprising at the company's iPhone launch event in San Francisco today. That's just not true. For one thing, it's the first iPhone to be called the iPhone 5. Indeed, this is the first iPhone whose name includes a number greater than 4. Tell me that's not progress.
The Kindle wants to be free Sep 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Farhad Manjoo wouldn't be surprised if Amazon drops the entry-level Kindle much lower than $55 — all the way down to free, with a catch. The catch is that you'd have to pay for Amazon's Prime membership service, which goes for $79 per year. In addition to free two-day shipping on 15 million products, Prime also gives you free streaming movies and access to a "lending library" of Kindle books. Now if you sign up to Prime, you'd get the Kindle itself free, too.
Web designers should forget the desktop Aug 25, 2012 12:00 AM
Every morning I wake up too early, reach for my iPad, and scan the morning's tech headlines. This is a pathetic enough existence, but the websites I frequent aren't helping. The problem is that much of the Web is just too overcrowded for tablet displays. When you load up a site on your iPad, you're often presented with a crush of text, pictures and videos that are jammed up together.
The thrilling (and welcome?) demise of Groupon Aug 19, 2012 12:00 AM
"Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business," wrote Rakesh Agrawal, an analyst and journalist. He says Groupon made its fortune by giving great deals to customers and horrible ones to businesses. Groupon is a public company now, and its business method may have caught up to it: The firm had horrible second-quarter earnings, with customer growth and amount of money spent per customer slowing.
What the next iPhone will look like Aug 18, 2012 12:00 AM
The new iPhone looks pretty much like the old iPhone. Sure, it's a bit taller, allowing for a display that has one extra row of icons on the Home screen. But the basic design is going to be the same. The iPhone is already near perfect, so Apple won't change much about the next one. Apple doesn't make design changes just for the sake of changing design. Instead, for the most part, Apple evolves its products slowly from one group to the next.
4 steps you should take to avoid getting hacked Aug 11, 2012 12:00 AM
A new version an old-school news site Aug 11, 2012 12:00 AM
The new Digg looks nothing like the old Digg. For one thing, it lacks people. In the old days, the pioneering site attracted a raucous crowd of loyalists who would post and comment on every passing outrage in tech and politics. Reading Digg, which I did just nearly every day from about 2005 to 2009, was like taking the pulse of the Internet's geekiest vanguard.
Beyond meat: The most real faux chicken ever Aug 5, 2012 12:00 AM
The first time a vegetarian tastes Beyond Meat's ersatz animal flesh, he'll feel delighted and queasy at the same time. There's something about the way these fake chicken strips break on your teeth, the way they initially resist and then yield to your chew, the faint fatty residue they leave on your palate and your tongue — something about the whole experience that feels a little too real. "My first reaction was, if I was given this in a restaurant, I'd get the waiter to come over and ask if he'd accidentally given us real chicken," a co-founder of Twitter said.
A new outlook on email and reason to ditch Gmail Aug 4, 2012 12:00 AM
Microsoft is making a clean break with Hotmail. It recently launched a new Web email service that carries a new design, and — Microsoft hopes — a new grown-up, not-so-embarrassing brand image. The new service does have an old name, but one that Microsoft believes elicits far better associations than Hotmail: It's called Outlook, matching Microsoft's widely used corporate desktop email and calendar program. "We want to signal the right thing — that this is fundamentally new," said Brian Hall, who runs Microsoft's Web mail services.
Did the government really invent the Internet? Jul 28, 2012 12:00 AM
Everyone in the tech world knows that the Internet got its start in the 1960s, when a team of computing pioneers at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency designed and deployed ARPANET, the first computer network that used "packet switching" — a communications system that splits up data and sends it across multiple paths toward its destination, which is the basic design of today's Internet. Suddenly, though, the government's role in the Internet's creation is being cast into doubt.
Can Marissa Mayer save Yahoo? Jul 21, 2012 12:00 AM