Yesterday I tweeted about Samsung’s Chromebox being remarkably similar in design to Apple’s Mac Mini. Today, Dustin Curtis had the same thought.

You can see what we’re talking about when you look at the bottom of the Mac Mini:

And the bottom of the Chromebox:

But I think it’s even worse than that. In an earlier tweet, I made this observation:

Also, why does Chromebox need vents on back cl.ly/1m2x1t3v2h1p2d…Even after it copied the Mac Mini’s bottom venting?cl.ly/0y2G2J1F2k3y1q…

— Matthew Panzarino (@mpanzarino) May 29, 2012

See, I don’t think that the bottom vent on the Chromebox is even functional as a vent like it is on the Mac Mini. There are already vents on the back for expelling heat, the slits on the bottom seem to be some sort of dead-stick auxiliary vent of some sort, maybe just for intake. They’re even blocked in places by bits of internals.

So, in the end...

John Gruber weighs in Apple upping the iPhone’s screen to 4".

His thoughts closely mirror the ones I put down yesterday about how and why this might happen. I’m especially in agreement with the fact that—if this does go down—Apple won’t be reserving a portion of those extra pixels for itself.

The first episode of The Talk Show, with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, is up at The Mule Radio Syndicate. This is the new podcast network from Mike Monteiro’s Muledesign.

This appears to mean that the show has moved away from the 5by5 network, which has been its home for some 90+ episodes. The Talk Show has been absent for the past two weeks on 5by5, I guess this is why.

I quite liked the rapport that Gruber had with 5by5 host Dan Benjamin, so this makes me a tad sad. But the first episode is co-hosted by John Moltz, who runs the smart and incredibly funny Very Nice Website, so that’s a good start.

Here’s the official announcement on Daring Fireball.

Mule Radio has a nice app as well, if you’d like to listen.

My buddy Casey Liss has some great tips for WWDC, especially if you’re a first-timer this year. All worthwhile pieces of advice, but the bit about bringing an iPhone battery pack is a biggy. Seriously, don’t come without one.

My favorite at the moment, and I’ve tried a lot, is the Mophie Juice Pack Plus.

Last Macworld, the Olloclip lens accessory for iPhone also got a big workout. Ben Brooks was passing his around the group because we forgot ours. It’s definitely a good buy, especially for those tight indoor shots and should be a big hit this WWDC.

One day, when I was about 9 or so, my cousin gave me a mixtape. It was black, with dirty white labels on both faces.

The contents were scrawled on the labels in ball-point pen, with the text crowding into the corners and folding back on itself to stay in the lines. On one side of the tape was written “Doolittle - Pixies, Bloodletting - Concrete Blonde”.

The label on the other side was dedicated completely to one album. It read “Beastie Boys - License to Ill.”

I wore that thing out playing it on repeat in my Sony Walkman on the bus to school, the smell of vinyl and unwashed kids heavy in the air.

That tape would end up defining my musical life for a decade and ended up forming the backbone of the music I love today. I haven’t talked to him in years but I owe him for introducing me to the ‘Boys.

Today, MCA, Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, died from that piece of crap, cancer. Thanks...

As I conjectured a few weeks ago, Apple switching to a 32nm process in a tweaked version of the A5 processor in the ‘old’ iPad, (called iPad 2,4) has resulted in better battery life. Anandtech ran some tests and the difference is hefty, clocking in at close to 16% more life on the same battery.

This bodes well for a 32nm LTE iPhone this fall, as it should show up alongside a 28nm Qualcomm chip and a slightly improved battery, retaining current iPhone 4S usage times, even with LTE.

In addition, the 32nm die being smaller decreases the fail-rate of their manufacture, driving down costs slightly and increasing the margins on the most important iPad Apple sells.

This also allows Apple to test the 32nm part in a ‘stealthy’ way, rolling it out in a subset of older iPad 2s in order to give them time to suss out the issues that could arise.

I think ‘making it cheaper to manufacture’ is...

Clever idea for physical interface mockups from Juan Sanchez. The image below demonstrates an interesting point about 1:1 interaction with digital interfaces though.

Notice how the interface element hasn’t been completely revealed and the thumb is already ‘off screen’. Concessions have to be made when a physical interface is translated over. Perhaps a threshold beyond which an action is automatically completed, or an accelerated rate of movement that breaks the 1:1 ‘sticky finger’ interaction model.

How those concessions are made, and how they are communicated to the user are important.

A nice, well-balanced take by Ben Kuchera at The PA Report. Backing anything, but games and complex industrial products especially, on Kickstarter is risky. Think like a mini-VC and you should be ok: business plan, talented and established team with a track record, business people involved.

As a side note, if you’re interested in great game writing and a curated list of ‘must-reads’ in that arena, Ben is doing great work over there.

Fortune’s Philip-Elmer Dewitt on why the heck Apple needs to make a full-on TV at all.

One more thing. No one has championed the idea of an Apple-branded TV set longer or more enthusiastically than Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, who has been writing about it since 2009. But what set him going down this path?

The answer came in a Munster profile published last Friday in Bloomberg Businessweek:

“Somebody close to Apple said we needed to be doing more work on the television and that started it all,” Munster says. “You start with these crumb trails, then it turns into a dirt road, and now it’s a paved road.”
Indeed it is. But what if Munster’s tipster was trying to lead him to Apple TV, the set-top box, and not some still-mythical TV set?

Update: What I’ve heard—second hand—is that the tip Munster got about the Apple ‘television’ was actually about the 27" iMac and Munster just wouldn’t...

In an article today at Business Insider, Nicholas Carlson says that Google wants to ‘attack the iPhone’ with Motorola.

Was this ever really in doubt? It seemed completely obvious back in September that Google wanted more from Motorola than a few iffy patents.

The long and short of it is that Apple’s way was right. Google knows it, and now it has to piss off a bunch of people by going back on its word to make it happen.