When Phil Schiller introduced the new MacBook Pro with Retina display at WWDC, he said it was most beautiful computer Apple had ever made. In the promo video, Jony Ive said “it’s without doubt, the very best computer we’ve ever built.”

But I mean, they have to say that, right?

No. I think they get to say it.

When Apple compliments their products with such high praise as “this is the very best and most beautiful computer we’ve ever made” they mean it. I have yet to read a review of the Retina MacBook Pro that didn’t say something along the lines of this is the best computer ever.

When Apple says something that sounds like marketing hype, it’s usually not hype or exaggeration. Apple’s products now tend to live up to the claims Apple puts on them — if they don’t surpass those claims.

Certainly an improvement to the London Olympics logo. (Via The Verge.)

Michael Mace:

This is my biggest concern about the Facebook phone idea.  The company could easily produce a phone that is just good enough to scare away its other phone partners, without being good enough to dominate the smartphone market.  The Facebook phone could call into being the exact industry structure that Facebook wants to avoid.  That’s why I see it as hideously high risk, a bet-the-company move that should be taken only when there’s no other chance to survive.

It seems to me that Facebook would be better off trying to negotiate deeper integration into iOS and Android, as well as building killer native apps. But, as Mace points out, that’s not easily monetized.

A good in-depth look at the new suite of Things apps, the Cloud Sync, and what has changed.

If you’re on the fence between Things and OmniFocus, I’d say give Things a shot. People who need OmniFocus usually know they need it. But if you’re just trying to find a simple task manager that’s in sync, why not use Simplenote and store your to-do list as a plain text document?

Jim Dalrymple:

A 7-inch iPad will put Apple in some very unfamiliar territory in the tablet market — it’s an area currently dominated by Android-based devices. However, Apple’s entry into that segment will also present some seemingly insurmountable challenges to those same companies.

Android tablet makers will no longer be able to compete by differentiating on price or form factor.

A 43F oldie and a goodie (h/t Bill Nalen), this is Merlin writing about Neal Stephenson’s decision to be a poor correspondent so he can make time to be a good novelist:

As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), “I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.”

Like it or hate it, Neal Stephenson’s position is clear and well-articulated. If a bit pitched, it’s a stance I admire, and frankly I think it’s an only slightly more extreme version of a position every maker needs to define if he or she expects to create the time to keep making anything.

Myke Hurley and I talked about this topic last week while I was a guest on his new show, CMD+SPACE. I shared about why choosing to be poor at email correspondence has been one of the most painful decisions I’ve had to make in my career as a full-time writer for this website.

Greg McKeown:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.

Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.

Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.

Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

And, per the aforelinked E.B. White example, Phase 2 above should also include that when we have public success, it leads to more external demands on our time and attention (though perhaps that’s what is meant by “more options”).

(Via Kottke.)

Letters of Note:

In March of 1961, nine years after the publication of Charlotte’s Web, author E. B. White received a letter from a young fan named Cathy Durham who wanted to know when, if ever, his next children’s book would see the light of day.

Little did Cathy know that White hadn’t written another book yet because the fan mail he was getting after writing Charlotte’s Web had been taking up most of his time and creative energy.

Click through for the letter White wrote to Cathy as well as the letter he sent to Cathy’s librarian.

Klint Finley tries to break down Amazon Glacier’s convoluted and mysterious pricing for data retrieval.

Who knows where they came up with that name, but Glacier is a new, extremely low-cost data storage service from Amazon. The reason it’s so cheap is because it’s meant for archiving and long-term storage of data that you don’t expect to access very often.

Storage costs are just $0.01/GB. That’s 9.3x cheaper than Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage and 12.5x cheaper than their Standard Storage. And Glacier gives you get the same data durability and reliability of the Standard Storage (99.999999999% durability).

The first thing I thought when reading about Glacier was, Hellooooo Arq. I already use Arq to backup my most important files to Amazon S3, but it’d be stellar if I could use it backup my entire MacBook Air while also reducing my S3 bill. A complete backup of my Air to Amazon’s rock-solid, encrypted, redundant data centers would only cost me $2.50/month. That’s crazy!

I got in touch with Stefan Reitshamer, the developer behind Arq, to ask about Arq’s future support of Glacier. He’s done more reading than I have about just exactly how Glacier works, and it won’t be as simple as it may sound.

There are a few factors that make the storing and retrieving of data on Glacier not as straightforward as it is on S3. The biggest factor being the retrieval cost. There’s a discussion on Hacker News about it and it’s not quite clear just how much it would cost to retrieve all your data, but it looks like it wouldn’t be cheap.