Apple’s designs have become so ubiquitous over the past ten years that’s it hard to remember a time when the company was struggling to find its identity. Early in Apple’s existence, the rising star of the industry brought in outside help to figure out how to make its products stand out. In fact, Frog, a design firm with studios all over the world, is credited with many of the earliest design prototypes for Apple’s future products. Of course, plenty of the designs were changed significantly from their conception (or scrapped entirely), but as Frog founder Hartmut Esslinger illustrates in his latest book, Keep it Simple, Apple might never have drawn so much attention without the assistance of his team. Among the stories, Esslinger includes some fascinating imagery of prototypes that never saw the light of day. We’ve included a few below, but head over the to The Verge to see the rest.

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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts faced some tough questions at Re/code’s big conference on Wednesday, as one audience member actually asked him why his company and potential merger partner Time Warner Cable are the two most hated companies in America. As Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson tells it, Roberts started off by saying that Comcast executives “don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated,” which is a fairly sensible thing to say. Then, however, things got weird.

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You won’t be able to accuse Samsung of copying Apple this time! Per Business Insider, Samsung on Wednesday unveiled a new open platform called Samsung Architecture Multimedia Interactions (SAMI) that’s designed to serve as a bridge between vital sensors that track your fitness activity and other devices such as smartphones and computers. Since the platform will be free to use, Samsung is clearly hoping to get it embedded into as many gadgets and sensors as possible, much as Google did with Android years ago. Apple is widely expected to announce its own fitness platform as part of its iOS 8 announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference next week.

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Google’s next-generation Nexus tablet, which was recently discovered as Volantis/Flounder in Google code and which is believed to be made by HTC, will apparently have a 64-bit processor, Myce says, suggesting that the Nexus 8 will pack a new NVIDIA Tegra system on chip (SoC).

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When it comes to the Internet, your eyeballs are worth more than you know. Online advertising is a massive multi-billion dollar industry and the companies dominating the industry — Google and Facebook, for example — are the companies in possession of the most private data. This data is used to target ads at consumers based on their history and preferences, and the better a company can target ads, the more it can charge advertisers to display those ads.

It looks like the Federal Trade Commission is finally starting to realize that some companies go too far when collecting data and building a profile of Internet users to be sold to marketers, and consumers deserve to have more control over how they are tracked online.

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Following the success of the $199 Micro 3D printer on Kickstarter – the project topped its $50,000 funding goal by $3,351,000 – a new, even more affordable 3D printer project has just started raising money on Indiegogo. Called the New Matter MOD-t, the 3D printer costs just $149 for the first 500 buyers, which is $100 less than its future commercial price, and will ship in April 2015, assuming the company can raise the $375,000 it needs to build it.

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According to the mobile security experts at Lookout, more than 1 in 10 smartphone owners in America have had a handset stolen at some point. Of them, 68% were unable to recover their stolen devices. The issue of smartphone theft is clearly a serious one. In fact, the NYPD recently stated that thefts of Apple’s iPhone and iPad were to blame for the increased crime rate in New York City last year.

Thieves aren’t going to stop stealing smartphones anytime soon, so it’s time to take theft prevention and recovery systems more seriously.

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It seems like the more channels pay TV companies add to their lineups, the harder it is to find something good to watch on TV. The same might be said for Netflix’s digital library of movies and TV shows. Netflix is constantly expanding thanks to new content deals the streaming video giant is always working to secure. But when it comes time to sit down and pick a movie or a new show to watch, however, we often draw a blank.

That’s where Netflix Roulette comes in.

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