A Good Day to Talk About Communication

A Good Day to Talk About Communication

Apple is indeed jettisoning the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 onwards. If you were taking a look at the media this morning, you may however have got the impression that nothing of greater importance was happening on the planet.

Only in the electronic media, of course, as the announcement from Tim Cook and colleagues came too late last night (local German time) for most print media to get something analytical down in black and white in time for the morning press. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to create an advance piece on the topic though, as practically all of the “new details” had long ago seeped or been leaked out. Secrecy is no longer possible as in days gone by, with Apple’s supply chain now encircling the globe.

The iPhone 7 is incidentally available in two new blacks, one of which is reportedly so highly polished that it needs to be protected from scratches in a protective cover. So Jet Black doesn’t really cut it as a swag phone. To be cool, the iPhone 7 Plus has got two cameras. They are needed so that the camera’s four-core processor can generate portrait photos with a soft-focus background, which look like they were taken by a real camera. That’s what they call real progress.

It appears that Apple were nevertheless so thrilled with the product that it couldn’t hold its water on Twitter and leaked details prior to revealing them officially on stage (which also didn’t make much of a difference, because – as mentioned – all the particulars had already been leaked long before anyway).  All was forgiven, however, and no twitter stars have crashed to earth as a result. And to tell the truth with 515,000 followers with 0 (just be clear – that’s zero) tweets we are indeed rather envious. Are you actually already following @retarus?

There is also a new Apple Watch. Its display is so bright that you can now even read it when the sun is shining. Apple is making a couple of the new models in collaboration with Nike. But wait, didn’t they just recently totally ruin their running app for its re-launch? Never mind. At least Apple has removed the decadent, solid gold “edition” for sheikhs and oligarchs from their range and replaced it with a comparatively affordable ceramic version

“Star Trek” is turning 50 today As a child I was reduced to reading about the adventures of the Enterprise and its crew as a photonovel in granny’s TV magazine. My pedagogically correct parents were dead set against TV in general and American series in particular. They didn’t appreciate that Star Trek was actually just creating a sci-fi opus centered on the eternal themes of mankind – and that’s precisely why it is still considered a cult classic after 50 years.

Much of the Star Trek technology is unfortunately still yet to be developed after 50 years>. Who amongst us has never thought how great it would be to beam ourselves into the office in the morning, speed off on our vacation at warp speed or speak to people from foreign countries liberated from language barriers by our communicators? Come to think of it, the Enterprise communicators also never had flat batteries. In any case, in 2016 we are still communicating by email, SMS and fax (and rather less using Excel ;-). That does the job, too.

Especially because they are open standards. And on the topic of open standards: „Historical Pics“ is today reminding the Twittersphere about the three-point seatbelt. It was first patented by engineer Nils Ivar Bohlin in the late 1950s, after which his employer Volvo made the technology available to all other car manufacturers free of charge. This allowed the technology to conquer the world – it was chosen by the German Patent Office in 1985 as one of the eight technologies that has provided the greatest benefit to mankind over the past 100 years.

It makes one wonder which word castles Volvo’s corporate communication might have been able to invent based on this success. We at Retarus hope, at any rate, that we are not swimming in the same, unchanging alphabet soup and communicating your ears off. Rather, we aim to use our digital platform to present you with topics that gain your attention and move you.

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