David Pogue on the Kindle Fire:

You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger.

He loves the two new E Ink Kindles, though.

Andy Ihnatko thinks an Apple Television won’t be a full-on TV set, but a significant evolution of the current $99 Apple TV box:

I keep rounding back to simple math: $99 Apple TV + $$ HDTV of the user’s choice from anyplace else > $$$$ Apple HDTV.

But what if it ends up as being both? A $99 Apple TV box a la the Mac mini, and a $1,500 HDTV a la the iMac. Both of them could have the same software and “the simplest user interface you could imagine”, but the HDTV could come with all sorts of hardware perks — such as a built in router with a huge Wi-Fi antenna, a FaceTime camera — and of course it would be the most attractive and high-quality TV set anyone could buy.

Here’s where I’ve stood in line on more than one occasion. (Via MG Siegler.)

A cohesive OS, 8GB of onboard storage, lightweight but plain hardware, a great shopping experience, and long battery life. All in all the Kindle Fire sounds like a pretty good tablet for a very good price.

See also: the Verge’s side-by-side tablet comparison chart.

I just got an email from Amazon letting me know that my Kindle Touch would be arriving early this week instead of next. The Kindle Fire is also shipping this week. If you haven’t pre-ordered yours yet, do so using either of these links and I’ll get a small kickback.

John Gruber, back in 2007, wrote about the pre-orders of Leopard via his Amazon affiliate links and the breakdown between single-license copies and family packs. Nearly a third of the sales John saw of OS X were for the family packs, despite the fact that most DF readers were surely aware that Apple did not require any code activation to install the OS. In short, those who knew they did not need the family pack to install Leopard on multiple machines did the right thing and bought it anyway.

It’s encouraging to see Apple taking the same attitude and trust towards the customer that they used with OS X distribution and applying it to their retail stores with the EasyPay system.

Garrett Murray’s experience of Apple’s new EasyPay system:

Apple is, at least for now, choosing customer convenience over easy security.

It reminds me of the old days when OS X was sold as physical media in a box and the single-license and the family-license boxes had the same disc inside and nobody ever had to enter in a 25-digit activation key. Apple chose customer convenience over theft deterrent security then as well.

This week on The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about the Jawbone UP that I have had since Monday, email management and email bankruptcy, the lack of a logo on Ben’s site, and more.

Seth Godin:

In a world where everything is a click away, and in a world where everyone can have their own YouTube channel, ten blogs and a thousand email accounts… the only thing that’s scarce is attention.

Dan Frommer:

But the reality is that the mobile browser is the future of the web. So anyone who is using Flash today for anything should start working on a plan to eventually stop using it.

This is another reason the ending of Flash is good for the future of the Web experience. Here’s an example: Say you go to a campaign page on Kickstarter from your iPad. The Kickstarter website knows you’re on an iPad and so the campaign video is served up in HTML5. However, say you’re on your Flashless MacBook Air and you go to that Kickstarter campaign page. When you go to watch the video, you instead get an error message prompting you to install Flash.

As I mentioned earlier this morning, I had this same experience with the HP TouchPad. If I disabled Flash, websites wouldn’t serve me HTML5 video, but instead would tell me that I need Flash.

Here’s hoping that the change Adobe is making will have an effect beyond the mobile browser and onto the desktop browser. (Which would be ironic because one of they’re stated goals for ditching mobile Flash is so they can improve Flash on the PC.)

John Gruber:

Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.

This is the proper perspective. Adobe’s ceasing of mobile Flash player development will hopefully be a boost for the continued advancement of mobile browser technology and therefore the enhancement of the mobile experience, no matter the platform or device.

Matt Alexander writing at The Loop on why mobile Flash was never as great as advertised:

Hardware manufacturers continue to tout Mobile Flash’s relevance. Best Buy clerks try to sell you on the advantages of Flash over sans-Flash platforms. Ads flaunt the apparent benefits of a Flash-enabled web on your tablet and phone. Meanwhile, reviewers across the web grapple with its usefulness and buggy implementation. So, the question is, why has there been such prominent exposure of one feature?

Remember six months ago when the HP TouchPad was a new thing and one of its big deals was that you got “the whole web”? When I used the HP TouchPad for a week, my experience was that Flash worked better than I had expected it to, but worse than I’d wanted it to. Or, put another way: it did work, but barely.

What I found especially frustrating about Flash on the TouchPad was that if I disabled it, video sites would simply say I need to install the Flash plugin rather than serve me the HTML5 video. If I were to visit that site on my iPad the site would know I was on an iPad and would serve sans-Flash video. But it seemed they only would sniff for iPad or not. And if not, then I needed Flash.

Hopefully, websites will begin serving HTML5 video whenever it’s supported, falling back to Flash if HTML5 video support is absent.

Speaking of the MacBook Air, Erica Ogg speculates on what possible ways everyone’s favorite laptop can be advanced now that it is already so thin, so fast, and so affordable:

It’s very hard to get much thinner than the Air and still have a traditional notebook form factor. Take away too much and you essentially wind up with the iPad.

So it’s going to have to come with advances in software, in interfaces and new forms of input, like voice and touch, and the continual improvement in battery size, life, and — while we know chips will regularly get faster — how manufacturers deal with heat dissipation and battery life in conjunction with those chips’ advances.

Erica is so close, and yet so far. I think she’s right that we’ll see Siri come to the Mac, and she’s right that if you take much more away from the Air you’ll start to get near to an iPad. But she cites that as something to be avoided. I think that is exactly where things are headed. Not that the Airs will cease to exist, but that the ways in which an iPad can replace a laptop are daily become more prevalent, and the gap between an Air and an iPad is only going to get smaller — and that is all by design.