Farhad Manjoo for The New York Times:

The S6 phones are made out of aluminum and glass rather than the plastic in Samsung’s older phones. Both the S6 and S6 Edge strongly resemble Apple’s iPhone. The S6 in particular looks like Apple’s brother from another mother. Samsung has also co-opted many of the design ideas for which its fans have long criticized Apple. The new Galaxys no longer offer a removable battery, for example, or a slot for add-on storage cards, and unlike the Galaxy S5, the S6es aren’t waterproof.

And

But if the new phones are beautiful and functional, they are still something of a pain to use. The S6 and S6 Edge run Samsung’s modified version of Google’s Android operating system. Despite Samsung’s engineers’ efforts to clean up the software, the phone’s interface is a hodgepodge of odd design decisions and overly complicated functions.

CBC:

Usually a “mean tweets” video ends in laughter, but this one ends in tears.

A new campaign by the non-profit organization Raising the Roof features people dealing with homelessness reading the mean things people have said about them on social media aloud.

The goal? To get people to see that those who have nowhere to live are human beings too.

Having been homeless myself for a period of time, I felt the pain these people went through as they read these cruel and pointless tweets. If you can help, please do. If you can’t, leave these people alone.

For almost two years, Apple Inc. ’s efforts to go green have been the responsibility of Lisa Jackson, who was hired to oversee the company’s sustainability initiatives after she stepped down as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

She sat down with Jeffrey Ball, contributing editor at The Wall Street Journal and scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, to discuss Apple’s commitment to renewable energy and why a recently announced solar deal is a good one for shareholders.

Apple is one of the few companies that is transparent about its environmental commitment. Sadly, this is the reason that the press goes after Apple more than other companies—Apple makes all the information available, while the others hide it.

Joanna Stern:

A better camera, sharper display and faster charging put Samsung’s new flagship phones ahead in the smartphone race.

Since the dawn of the smartphone wars, there have been basic truths about Samsungs: They’re made of flimsy plastic, their cameras can’t keep up with the iPhone’s, and their modified Android software is ugly and intolerably cluttered.

With the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which arrive at U.S. carriers on April 10, none of that is true anymore. I am not afraid to say it: I love Samsung’s new phones, maybe even more than my own iPhone 6. Like a child who just found out that Santa isn’t real, I have spent the past week questioning everything I know.

I like Joanna and respect her opinion a lot. I still don’t like the way Samsung does business though.

Autoweek:

This unbelievable Fiat S76, the so-called Beast of Turin, is the one surviving example of a pair of speed-record contenders the Italian automaker built before WWI. Its gargantuan 28.5-liter inline-four was capable of providing an impressive 300 hp — enough to propel the car to 116 mph, and a one-mile land speed record, in 1911.

Plus, it spits hellfire and sounds meaner than anything an army of 10,000 Carlo Abarths could have ever dreamed up.

Watch the video above if you don’t believe us.

First of all, turn your volume down.

I posted about this back in December when they had first restored this fire breathing monster. Now they’ve actually got it out on public roads, scaring humans and livestock alike. Thanks again to Glenn Ramsey for the link.

Michael deAgonia takes the new entry level MacBook Pro for a spin in this ComputerWorld review. What I found most interesting was the hands-on with the new Force Touch trackpad.

Superficially, the new trackpad feels like any other Apple trackpad. It is still coated in a layer of glass (which provides an excellent tracking surface), still takes up a third of the area available for palm rests and still supports multitouch actions and gestures. But longtime users will notice a different feel to the clicks when they’re pressing on it.

And:

A hard press on an icon’s text in the Finder allows you to edit its name, while a hard press on the icon itself brings up a window with a preview of the picture, video, or document, information about the file, and the option to open the file in the appropriate app. Another example: In the QuickTime app, the speed at which a video clip rewinds or fast-forwards depends on how hard you press on the trackpad.

Safari also supports Force Touch: Pressing down on the trackpad while the mouse pointer hovers over a word will display that word’s definition and thesaurus entries, while pressing down on a link will display a preview of that page in a pop-up window. You can scroll through the page or add it to your Reading List for later; clicking the preview page will open it in the browser.

Force Touch is a whole new piece of hardware, much like the Apple Watch. Both of these technologies will yield a rich vein of new user experiences. Yup, Apple is doomed.

Peter Kirn takes the new “Hifi” streaming service for a test.

A new live album with Dave and Eddie playing Van Halen’s greatest.

The new York Times:

For one week in March, this glittering watch and jewelry show (which ran March 19 to 26), attracts 150,000 industry insiders, collectors and fans, emerging from the digital mists of the 21st century like Brigadoon. It is a village unto itself with its own language, values and celebrities.

And a curious village it is. In an iPhone-toting era, where millions go out in public every day flaunting naked wrists, this is one corner of the globe where the wristwatch — that centuries-old feat of micro-engineering once considered as obsolete as the rotary phone — is the only personal productivity device, status symbol and idea on earth that seems to matter.

Interesting how an article about watches can be written this day without ever mentioning the Apple Watch by name. The reporter must have had to twist himself into knots to not get a single relevant quote from any of the assembled “150,000 industry insiders”.

SnapPower’s Charger — the power outlet cover plate that your home should’ve been built with. A no-hassle, wire-free install that takes just seconds. A flush, 1-amp USB charging port for smartphones, phablets, and tablets. An unbridled sense of joy from never having to hunt for a wall wart ever again. Available now on Kickstarter.

Ars Technica:

If you have AT&T’s gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here’s the reason—AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door.

In a few select areas including Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri—places where AT&T competes against the $70-per-month Google Fiber—Ma Bell offers its own $70-per-month “GigaPower” fiber-to-the-home Internet access. But signing up for the deal also opts customers in to AT&T’s “Internet Preferences” program, which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in exchange for a price that matches Google’s.

If users don’t push back on this AT&T “service”, you better believe every other ISP that has the capability will do the same “deep packet inspection”. The worse part of it is the surcharge to opt-out of this service. It will disproportionately affect those who can’t afford to protect themselves from AT&T’s snooping.

The Washington Post:

Jobs himself didn’t often weigh in on political issues, and rarely had Apple do so as a company. Cook has stepped up Apple’s philanthropic efforts (he’s also said he’s going to give a majority of his wealth to charity after his death, but hasn’t said to which charities.) But, generally speaking, Cook hasn’t deviated much from the Jobs playbook — and has received harsh criticism when he has.

That makes the timing of this op-ed all the more interesting.

While I agree to a certain extent with the premise of the article, I don’t think there’s anything to be read into the timing. The writer conflates this issue with the release of the Apple Watch:

To be willing to stir the pot even a little bit and risk distracting from that focus shows that this means a lot to Cook and that he’s fairly confident that Apple, the world’s most valuable company, can weather whatever controversy his view might throw its way.

I can be fairly certain in saying Cook isn’t worried about weathering a storm. He’s doing what he feels is right for Apple and damn the consequences. If you don’t want to buy Apple products because Tim Cook is standing up for what he believes in, he has no problem with that.

When the wave of Apple Car discussion made its way around the blogosphere, Jean-Louis Gassée was pure skeptic:

In the first place, I wrote, a long history of eating and drinking at the best restaurants on the planet doesn’t qualify you to become a successful restaurateur. More important, Jony Ive’s justly renowned prowess in coming up with exquisitely polished objects misses the point of car manufacture where the focus isn’t on the object itself, but on the machine that excretes the cars in high volume, high quality, and well-managed cost. It’s the Industrial in Industrial Design that matters.

On the weight of these two points I concluded that while the idea of an Apple Car is attractive, Apple shouldn’t confuse its love of cars and its high regard for beautiful swage lines with an ability to become a successful car maker.

Jean-Louis then encountered Greg Koenig’s fantastic Atomic Delights’ piece How Apple Makes the Watch, which contained this gem:

“Apple is the world’s foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as “consumer goods” or “electronic goods,” but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787’s weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours. When we add the rest of the product line to the mix, it becomes clear that Apple’s supply chain is one of the largest scale production organizations in the world.”

To clarify, that’s the weight of an unladen Boeing 787, balanced on a scale with an equal weight of iPhones. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of manufactured and shipping product, requiring an incredibly nimble and complex supply chain.

Of course, I’m looking at the putative Apple Car in terms of the car as we know it today, just as we all initially looked at the iPod and the iPhone using existing products as the frame of reference. Perhaps Apple has something more imaginative, more in keeping with its Think Different mantra than a mere derivation of existing designs. But whatever it intends, I no longer believe that Apple can’t design a machine to make cars.

Apple’s has certainly demonstrated their supply chain expertise. But the Apple Watch design and manufacturing advances and subtleties explored in the Atomic Delights post bring home the point that Apple, should they so choose, would raise the science and economies involved in building a car (or, for Gene Munster’s benefit, a fictional Apple television) or any other product to new levels.

Over the weekend, Tim Cook wrote an editorial for the Washington Post laying out his feelings on Indiana’s recent passage of their Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Shawn posted a link to the editorial on Sunday. I just wanted to add a link to the original text of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Like you, we were very excited about the event. However, Ozzy is having surgery, scheduled for May, following his South American tour. He requires at least four weeks of recovery time. We are very disappointed that we need to cancel.

I hope Ozzy is okay.

Tidal, the high-definition music streaming service acquired by rapper and music mogul Jay-Z, is gearing up for its official relaunch under new ownership later today, and it will be doing so by reportedly making a move to snag new releases by some of the biggest musicians of the moment including Kanye West, Madonna and Daft Punk, ahead of rival services like Spotify and Beats.

The streaming business is getting pretty crowded. Apple is late to the game, but they could still make its mark in the industry with a redesigned Beats.

Handpicked Pros. Upfront Prices. Happiness Guarantee

This is a really interesting move by Amazon. They invite pros to be part of the network and vet them for you. Amazon has a great brand, so this has a lot of potential for them.

Elon Musk tweeted this morning that a major new product line was coming, but it is not a car. I can’t wait to see what it is.

Huffington Post:

A four-month contest to reward Canada’s most dedicated hockey players could only end in a place like this.

The lucky winners of Molson Canadian’s #AnythingForHockey campaign were flown by helicopter this month to a professionally built rink on a glacial B.C. lake to play an epic game of shinny.

These ads have been all over Canadian TV for months and, while you couldn’t pay me to drink Molson Canadian, their ad campaigns have always been wonderful examples of what it can mean to be Canadian and what hockey means to us. Now, excuse me. After watching that video, I’ve got some dust in my eyes I need to get a tissue to wipe out.

The Next Web:

The desire of so many to just bang the drum for these companies without asking too many questions. Technology writers shouldn’t be carnival barkers for startups and their VC backers. They shouldn’t be so easily seduced by a nicely designed interface and the opportunity to indulge their narcissism.

Periscope and Meerkat have flooded our social streams with hours of awful new content, just like Snapchat and Vine before them. Very few people stop to think whether their thoughts are worth sharing. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

I have been doing live streaming video for over ten years. The only thing new about Periscope, Meerkat and others is the app – the tech has been around for the average person for years – and it has never really caught on for the masses. I don’t believe this latest round of hype for these apps will change that.

Washington Post:

America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges.

Another example of Tim Cook making Apple a company in his own image. And that’s a good thing.

How far would you have to travel to reach the Earth’s core? And what would you see along the way? Discover what lies beneath…

The BBC did a great job with this.

Michael Mulvey on Samsung’s decision to price its Galaxy S6 higher than the iPhone 6 in the UK:

Premium pricing only works if your brand is perceived at premium and this perception is controlled by people who buy your products, not the company making them.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts. Does anyone see Samsung as anything other than a bunch of copying bastards?