I have always been a fan of Josh Topolosky’s tech writing from his days at Engadget, so when he announced the creation of The Verge, I looked forward to adding another quality site to my RSS feed. The site itself did not disappoint. In addition to offering timely news and prescient insight on the tech beat, the site itself offers some cool features like real-time comment updating and tables of contents for speedy navigation of reviews. I now find myself clicking on their feeds more often than any other.

The Verge also has a cool feature that I first saw on Lifehacker (recently RIP due to my “no Gawker” policy): What’s in Your Bag? Because I’m a closet productivity nut, I’m always looking to see what other people in tech carry around with them daily to do their jobs. When I saw Jordan Oplinger’s entry today, I noticed he was packing a MacBook Pro. Curious about the rest of the entries in What’s in Your Bag?, I did a little digging and discovered a pretty distinct theme:

Adi Robertson

Chris Grant

Chris Welch

Dante D'Orazio

Jeff Blagdon

Joanna Stern (the PCs are review units, natch)

Jordan Oplinger

Joshua Topolsky

Nilay Patel

Sam Byford

Thomas Houston

Of the 11 writers interviewed, 10 of them used Apple laptops. Even for an unapologetic fanboy, I found this resounding endorsement a little surprising.

If you’re wondering what your next laptop should be, looking at what people who are exposed to the entire tech universe use is a pretty decent guide. These people could use – hell they could probably be given – any PC they wanted. The tech pros at The Verge use Macs. You probably should too.

As a recent xkcd comic points out, Apple is running out of popular cat names for its versioning of OS X. If Apple wanted to be obtuse, there’s a bunch of cool cat names that don’t make the rounds in your kid’s alphabet book, such as the Serval, Caracal and Margay, but that would just reenforce the perception of Apple as a brand that’s too smart for you.

OS X 10.9: Serval

My prediction is simple: Apple will just pursue 10.x versioning sans cat. Just like there’s no iPad 3 or MacBook Air Extreme, Apple will limit its post-Mountain Lion OS to “the next version”. No more Caturday releases for Cupertino.

The Verge has reported via the Wall Street Journal (paywalled, natch) that Google has decided to ditch its “most favored OEM” policy and will release its next flagship Nexus device through multiple OEMs in the U.S. and abroad. The logic is explained thusly:

…it seems that Google’s trying to get hardware OEMs to differentiate from each other based purely on the hardware and not on the various custom Android skins that cause major delays in updating the OS (and reduce functionality, in many cases).

And OEMs would do this…why? Do you really think Samsung and HTC are going undercut phones featuring their own OS grafts and compete with each other on hardware? The whole point of TouchWiz and Sense was for these OEMs to be able to differentiate their phones from the rest of the 1,000 other Android shartphones. If Google thinks it has any leverage in this relationship, they’re deluded. That train’s left the station. Sorry, Andy.

I’ll tell you exactly what will happen, if this rumor actually pans out: the manufacturers that take the bait from Google will do so because their access to 5.0 will be somehow tied to it. These devices will be released quietly with barely any marketing flourish – no killer robots, no barista-bashing – and they’ll end up selling as well as every other Nexus device has – or hasn’t. If Google gets too pushy, don’t be surprised if one of the major players pulls an Amazon and forks Android themselves. It’s an extension of the same logic they’re using now to justify the crapification of stock Android with their bloat. They honestly believe they’re adding value, so what’s to stop them from cutting the cord altogether and just rolling their own?

Designers get really feisty when you call their work “derivative”. I once saw an architect flip a table in a restaurant when one of his peers used the “D-word” to describe his firm’s work. But the fact remains that companies draw heavily from the design languages created by Apple. To claim otherwise not only makes the utterer come off as defensive, it basically confirms what is being alleged.

Take HP as a recent example. At an HP event discussing product design in Shanghai, Stacy Wolff, vice president of Industrial Design at Hewlett-Packard got a little prickly when asked if HP was worried about Apple suing it over the design of some of its Ultrabooks.

I would go back to the TC1000 [Tablet PC] from about 10 years, and that’s a tablet. I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities.

Ah, yes. In that big bucket of things we call “life”, similarities are bound to happen. Purely by coincidence.

Crazy happenstance. Such is life.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s call something what it is, shall we? Apple provided the inspiration for the Ultrabook lineup. Take a look at Intel’s Ultrabook landing page:

Let's dispense with the charade, shall we?

For the benefit of all those continuing to knock off Apple’s design of the Air, I’ve created a little sound byte that gives credit where its due, but also allows a rationale to “borrow” from Apple. Free of charge. Just click on an ad if you’re going to use it.

We recognize that Apple has been a leader in laptop design and in the MacBook Air, they created one of the most successful marriages of design and performance in the “ultra-portable” class of laptops – the category we now call Ultrabooks. At Company X, we wanted to build on some of the successes that made the Air one of the most popular Ultrabooks, while also addressing a market that Apple by definition excludes: the majority of users that choose Windows in the workplace and at home. We also wanted to build products with features the Air lacks, such as larger screens, HDMI connectivity and a variety of powerful Intel processors. In short, we wanted to provide users with a choice. We feel that the design language inspired by the MacBook Air to be an excellent starting point for an entire category of laptops that are thin and light, but also powerful. With our Ultrabooks, users not only have a choice of operating system, they can choose from among a vast menu of hardware features and price points that suit their particular needs.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

The first thing I thought when I saw the news about the jury’s “partial verdict” from the copyright portion of the Oracle v. Google trial was “Didn’t they get suspicious when they saw that shipment of water for the deliberation room came from Mountain View?”

Yesterday, the jury ruled that Google did infringe on the “sequence, structure and organization” of 37 Java APIs owned by Oracle, but couldn’t decide whether or not this stealing ”redistribution” constituted a violation of “fair use”. If one assumes the jury understood from testimony the amount of work that went into crafting each of those APIs, one has to assume the jurors believed this work was put in for the betterment of mankind without any kind of financial motivation. In other words, how Google perceives the work that goes into the stuff they steal – for their financial gain. So in the jury’s view, it’s possible for a company to abscond intellectual property created by another company in a way that doesn’t constitute theft.

Both parties heralded the verdict as a victory. Oracle said “The overwhelming evidence demonstrated that Google knew it needed a license and that its unauthorized fork of Java in Android shattered Java’s central write once run anywhere principle.” Google replied “We appreciate the jury’s efforts, and know that fair use and infringement are two sides of the same coin.” whatever the fuck that means. It is expected that the fair use question as it applies to copyright will be resolved by Judge William Alsup as a “ judgment as a matter of law” (JMOL). It could also be the subject of a new trial, but that alternative would probably favor Oracle.

The verdict represents the first stage of trial. The trial will now move to its second phase, where it will tackle the more substantiative issue of Google’s alleged infringement on Oracle’s Java patents.