Judging from the tech press, you’d think the biggest risk to successful companies is competition. But when you examine the history of technology, incumbents usually decline because the world changes and they lose relevance, or because they lose visionary founders and the organization decays.

Which means Apple sold new iPads as fast as they could make them. If you believe this 11.9 million unit sale number deserves to be called “disappointing”, you should be disappointed only by Apple’s inability to manufacture them faster.

Colony’s pessimism is, unlike most Apple bearishness of late, perfectly reasonable. Apple did not fall to pieces when Jobs died, but no one with a clue expected it to. But Tim Cook and the remaining leadership team have yet to prove themselves in the long run. I’m not saying I agree with Colony (I don’t), I’m just saying his argument is reasonable. Apple is untested in these regards.

What’s more interesting to me is the technical story. It’s no wonder Android has struggled to match the smoothness, touch responsiveness, and high-frame-rate graphics of the iPhone, given that this is where they were in 2007. They’ve come remarkably far in five years.

Makes me not want to purchase a Samsung product in all honesty. Just make good shit, sell it, and support it. - JT

Amazon’s Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the country. At second place, the entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup comprised just 15.4 percent of Android slates.

- JT

Will there be a generation that does the majority of their "computing" on tablet devices? I think it may happen. - JT

I spend more time in Coda, software from Panic, than just about any other program. Good for them. - JT

As you’d expect, Google is still trying to spin this, but the court documents don’t lie. In 2010, Google itself projected making $278.1 million off of Android. Of that, $158.9 million was expected to be on ads versus just $3.8 million from app sales. They were making much more off of the iPhone

It’s well known that Mario/Zelda/etc creator Shigeru Miyamoto has no intention of letting this happen — like Apple, he strives to set the entire user experience through hardware and software — but it’s hard to see Nintendo focusing on gaming hardware and continuing on. Maybe they pull and Apple and fully reinvent the company, but there’s a reason why such transformations don’t happen often.

Anyway. On air today, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone’s favorite Harvard grads cum Olympic athletes cum Mark Zuckerberg nemeses about their latest foray into the tech startup space as individuals with significant financial reserves and no apparent engineering credentials. They’re becoming venture capitalists.

These guys just rub me the wrong way. - JT

TSA handles Seattle and it’s a mess. TSA agents are joking around, not paying attention, and get angry quickly. In San Francisco, where they use private security at a much lower cost, things are much more sane and much more professional.

First of all, the lack of a dividend is hardly part of Jobs’s legacy. Jobs’s legacy is that of a single-minded vision of shipping well-designed products that deliver an exceptional user experience and appeal to a broad base of users. Second, while rumors do not a product make, it’s important to point out that Jobs also derided television as something you turn your brain off to watch.

When my son was born, I was amazed. I was amazed at my wife’s strength and at her body (which did some things I don’t know if I should have watched) and I was amazed that this dude that I’d been waiting for for almost a year was suddenly in the room with me (like when you meet your buddy’s girlfriend: “oh, you’re Samantha. Nice to meet you. You look a lot like/vastly different than I expected. Cool.”). I was also afraid. I had no experience being a dad, I had ZERO experience even SEEING a baby this new and I didn’t know how to wipe an ass, feed a kid, hold a kid, anything. I didn’t know what he liked (is he into bunnies? Tigers? Spaceships? Spiderman? Sports? Music? Cuddles? Is he retarded? Is he a genius? Is he just about to die at any second due to some weird defect that I can’t see? Lord knows he looks like absolute shit, but is that normal?)

Olivier Knox is first to publish the complete list of new Secret Service guidelines. I'll focus on the guidelines that recommend agents to behave like high school students taking awesome trips to Europe for Model United Nations.

None of this should come as news, since the failure of austerity policies to deliver as promised has long been obvious. Yet European leaders spent years in denial, insisting that their policies would start working any day now, and celebrating supposed triumphs on the flimsiest of evidence. Notably, the long-suffering (literally) Irish have been hailed as a success story not once but twice, in early 2010 and again in the fall of 2011. Each time the supposed success turned out to be a mirage; three years into its austerity program, Ireland has yet to show any sign of real recovery from a slump that has driven the unemployment rate to almost 15 percent.

... at breeding disconnection and mistrust.

That is to say, if you believe that one thing money buys is time, the non-rich are “consuming” more leisure time than the rich, and that should also factor into our thinking on consumption inequality.

One possibility is that it’s easier to get on food stamps than ever before. The stimulus bill, for instance, allowed able-bodied unemployed adults to receive benefits for longer than three months. That provision expired in 2010, but at least 46 states have received waivers from the federal government to continue this program. (Apart from that tweak, reports USA Today, eligibility standards remain what they were before President Obama took office.)

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, on Wednesday dismissed proposals to escalate the Fed’s economic stimulus campaign as 'reckless,' arguing that the costs would be high and the benefits uncertain.

Disagree with his reasoning. Krugman's response sums up my thoughts. - JT

Europe is in recession...Why should we care? Because a recession in the world’s third-largest economy, combined with the current slowdown in the world’s second-largest (China), spells trouble for the world’s largest...The danger here for the United States is clear, but there’s also a clear lesson. Republicans have become the U.S. party of Angela Merkel, demanding and getting spending cuts at the worst possible time - and ignoring the economic and social consequences.

"An increasing number of the nation’s large banks -- U.S. Bank, Regions Financial and Wells Fargo among them -- are aggressively courting low-income customers like Mr. Wegner with alternative products that can carry high fees. They are rapidly expanding these offerings partly because the products were largely untouched by recent financial regulations, and also to recoup the billions in lost income from recent limits on debit and credit card fees.

Banks increasingly piss me off. - JT

Throughout American history, almost every generation has had substantially more education than that of its parents. That is no longer true. When baby boomers born in 1955 reached age 30, they had about two years more schooling than their parents, according to Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who have calculated the average years of schooling for native-born Americans back to 1876.