Staff / From the minds of Ars   Knowing is half the battle.  If
you only knew the power of the dark side  Lest you think seeing
the world through these eyes is some kind of curse, let me move
a bit closer to the point of this heartwarming bout of navel-
gazing. Yes, it's true that a critic's eye is useless without an
artist's hand. But an artist without a critical eye is even more
ineffectual.  So how has Apple done it? How has it overcome the
lack of a healthy ecosystem of hardware and software criticism
(in the artistic sense) to produce products that succeed despite
glaring deficits in nearly all empirical measures? Well, it
cheated.  I'm using the terms "artist" and "critic" broadly
here; this applies to any endeavor undertaken by any group of
people. This opens the door for the artist and the critic to be
separate people—as they most often are. The movie critic is
likely incapable of making a better movie than one he's
reviewing, but his criticism, at its best, can help others think
in new ways about what