Humor

Apple has been advertising the iPhone 4S with cameos by famous people. John Malkovich is the latest celebrity to star in one of Apple’s commercials, but it was pretty lame. All of the commercials have been rather boring, but luckily jokesters have taken the videos and improved them.

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Apple released a couple new videos yesterday featuring John Malkovich and Siri. As much as I like the fellow, his commercial isn’t nearly as entertaining as the many parodies that have been made.

Take, for example, the following video, which was created by Jest. It makes fun of Chris Brown. Okay, it’s more insulting than funny, but he makes an excellent punching bag. The conversation in the video is NSFW so I am putting it after the break. Read more

The blogosphere was amused last week when Siri, Apple’s sophisticated virtual assistant, told everyone that the best smartphone was the Lumia 900, which is made by Apple’s rival Nokia.

This was really not much of a story, as funny as it might be. But today it gets a little better. Someone had the bright idea to ask the Nokia Lumia 800 to name the best smartphone, and it’s response was:

While Siri’s answer was based on a search via Wolfram Alpha, the Lumia jound its answer using Microsoft’s TellMe service in combination with Bing – the first result you will get is this Business Insider article with the following headline. Again, this doesn’t mean anything, but it is amusing nonetheless.

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It looks like Apple’s virtual assistant is a little too smart for her own good. The Next Web was testing Siri on their iPhone 4S and just for the sake of curiosity they asked Siri to name the best smartphone.

This being Apple’s own smartphone, you’d think that Siri would recommend it, but no. According to Siri, the best smartphone is the Nokia Lumia 900. Funny, no?

While that is funny, there’s a good reason for the answer:

Hopefully needless to say, the reason why Siri is making the above recommendation isn’t because Apple thinks the iPhone 4S is subpar (as if). It’s simply because Siri bases its answer to that particular question on results from Wolfram Alpha, which itself draws from users reviews Web-wide.

User satisfaction for the Lumia 900 in the United States happens to be very high, hence why WA will tell you that it’s the ‘best smartphone ever’.

The Next Web

The following video has just been released from the personal archive of Craig Elliot, a former Apple employee. It’s a hoot.

The video dates to 1985. It was originally made for Apple’s sales team to encourage them to sell more Macs and beat IBM, who was so big at the time that it had single departments who were worth more than Apple.

In what is perhaps the best mashup ever, the satirists at slackstory have brought together Samuel L. Jackson in one of his more foul mouthed characters with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant app for the iPhone 4s. It was created in response to the official commercial that this actor made for Apple, and like most satire it is both funnier and more effective.

At this point I’m sure everyone has seen Google’s concept video for Project Glass, their innovative heads up display. But did you notice what was missing?

Google’s video lacked the ads which, if you’ve you’ve any of Google’s services, you know will be there. So one helpful humorist helped Google out by adding the advertisements.

Google showed off a new tech concept yesterday, and this morning the parody videos started hitting the web.

The idea behind Google Glasses is that it would move all your browsing, email, IM, etc from your smartphone to a Heads Up display based on Google’s tech. It’s a great concept, but as this video shows it probably won’t work out well.

Amazon had a minor technical snafu in the Kindle Store yesterday, much to the amusement of many.

A friend’s tweet inspired me to look on Youtube and see if anyone has made a Downfall parody video about yesterday’s troubles. I couldn’t find one that referenced yesterday, but I did find an older video that made fun of publishing.

As you probably know, the Downfall parody videos are based around a particular clip from the movie Downfall. There’s one scene were Hitler is ranting in his bunker. Since the movie was in German, it also had subtitles. Replacing those subtitles with other rants used to be a very common and sometimes very funny internet meme.

I unfortunately cannot embed this video, but it is still worth watching. It makes fun of publishing, tech companies, and is quite clever. “It broke his hear when Terry Gross turned him down.”

Youtube

I have a music video for your Wednesday viewing pleasure. It’s a parody of Jay Z and Kanye West’s N*ggas in Paris.

I know, I know, it’s not at all related to ebooks. But that’s okay. This is an example of why paper books will stick around, even if everyone goes digital. This video wouldn’t be half as interesting if the books were replaced by eReaders.