Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2010

iOS4 doesn’t play quite as nicely with older iPhones

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:41

adamburtle: “The first iPhone captivated the world because the interface was so well done, so snappy, so interactive; it was like nothing before it. Of course it was, it was an Apple product. That, right there, is why I buy Apple products. And I didn’t even mind that it was missing “copy and paste,” MMS, ringtones, etc — because I knew Apple would eventually get to these through software updates. And eventually they did. Unfortunately they kept coming out with new phones. With faster processors. And they wrote all their software updates for these phones, with little attention to deprecated models. I don’t really use third party software on my phones, I honestly don’t even use ringtones. I just my phone for SMS, web, maps, and occasionally as an actual phone, so the 3G model was more than I ever needed.

“Except over time, it’s fulfilled my needs less and less. And it’s not because my needs have grown. It’s not because I’ve installed a bunch of laggy software. It’s because Apple’s firmware has become bloated, with respect to the processing power of the 3G iPhone. I just installed iOS 4 two weeks ago, and at this point, I’d be happy to roll back to the first firmware I ever had, just to have that original speed again; forget about the copy and paste, I don’t need it that badly. “

H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke for the most graphical example of why you don’t always want to be the first one to install new software.

July 8, 2010

How Apple created and maintains a “shiny tech” reputation

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

Trevor Pott manages to deter a newly evangelized Apple fan:

The event sticks out for me because the user was not impressed by the iPhone because it was Apple, or the phone was hip. Rather it was because at a tradeshow they caught a colleague watching the Canucks getting beat on an iPhone. The concept of being able to stream video on a cellular network had never occurred to them before this. They saw it first on an Apple, it was evangelised by an ardent fan, and thus Apple “invented” it.

In this way Apple has “invented” everything of use in mainstream computing. From being the only computer for design, to inventing the MP3 player, smartphone, tablet computer, video conferencing and now, apparently, 3G streaming. When introduced to non-Apple alternatives, the people crying loudly for Apple gear seem shocked that it already existed in a previous form. The lesson I took from this is that users don’t care about the technology. With the exception of a few loudmouths on the internet, nobody cares that this was made by Apple, Sony, Microsoft or anyone else.

Users care about what a product can do. They care about how easily that product can do it. Users care about looks, but not as much as ease of use, good documentation, presentation of features and fantastic marketing. What’s more, good businessmen care about these things too; this is what makes their company tick, and what makes them money.

There’s a reason why a lot of successful technology folks try to sell “solutions” rather than products: it’s a much better way of addressing the users’ actual needs (even if it means you don’t recommend the glitzy, whizzy, shiny new Apple iThing). If you can de-mesmerize them long enough to actually address their needs instead of their wants, you’ll be doing them a much better service.

July 7, 2010

QotD: The essence of the iPhone experience

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:59

Using an iPhone is like taking a holiday to some corrupt country: It may be beautiful and offer simple pleasures, but you’re going to pay bribes to people who shamelessly charge you for what’s free elsewhere.

Mike Elgan, “5 Big iPhone Rip-Offs”, PC World, 2010-07-06

June 28, 2010

Marketing secrets revealed

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

An absolutely brilliant post at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs tells you all about the reality of marketing:

It’s a pretty safe assumption that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve seen “The Matrix.” And you may or may not remember the scene where a kid explains to Neo that the trick to bending a spoon with your mind is simply to remember that, “There is no spoon.”

So it is with marketing. One thing I learned very early in life, thanks to intentional overuse of psychedelic drugs, is that there is no reality. As a guy at the commune once put it: “The reality is, there is no reality.”

So some guy says his iPhone 4 is having reception issues. I say there is no reception issue. Now it’s his reality against my reality. Which one of us is living in the real reality?

There’s a two-part answer: 1, there is no real reality, and 2, it doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is which reality our customers will choose to adopt as their own.

[. . .]

What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.

So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.

It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.

H/T to Chris Anderson for the link.

June 25, 2010

Apple’s latest iPhone gets approval of key “Suicide Girls” market

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Lester Haines reports that the Apple iPhone 4 has received top marks from the discerning folks at Suicide Girls:

In an absolutely shameless piece of bandwagon-jumping self promotion, the internet’s leading repository of female tattoos and body piercing has taken the latest manifestation of the Jesus Phone out for a spin (link NSFW).

Screen grab from iPhone 4 showing young lady with exposed breastSuicide Girls has put the iPhone’s 4’s imaging capabilities to the test as is the local custom — by photographing women with their tops off.

The snap seen here apparently demonstrates an “unexpected feature”, in that “when you point it at Rambo her boob pops out”. We’re pretty sure someone has indeed written an app for that, but are surprised it got past the Apple Titfinder General.

Image at El Reg is probably NSFW for workplaces in North America . . . images at Suicide Girls are even more so. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

June 24, 2010

Apple’s latest media circus

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

I’ve been accused of being an Apple fanboy because I have an iPhone 3G (that which was shiny and new barely two years ago is already considered steam-powered and antique). Stephen Fry has a review up on his site, which starts with this summary not of the iPhone 4, but of the reaction to the release:

The hooplah that surrounds the release of a new Apple product is enough to make many otherwise calm and balanced adults froth and jigger. That some froth with excited happiness and others with outraged contempt is almost irrelevant, it is the intensity of the response that is so fascinating. For the angry frothers all are fair game for their fury — the newspapers, the blogosphere, the BBC and most certainly people like me for acting, in their eyes, as slavish Apple PR operatives. Why should these iPads and iPhones be front page news when, the frothers froth, there are plenty of other manufacturers out there making products that are as good, if not better, for less money? And isn’t there something creepy about Apple’s cultiness and the closed ecosystem of their apps and stores? The anti-Applers see pretension and folly everywhere and they want the world to know it. The enthusiastic frothers don’t really mind, they just want to get their hands on what they perceive as hugely desirable objects that make them happy. The two sides will never agree, the whole thing has become an ideological stand-off: the anti-Apple side has too much pride invested in their point of view to be able to unbend, while Apple lovers have too much money invested in their toys to back down. It is an absorbing phenomenon and one which seems to get hotter every week.

The iPhone 4 isn’t available in Canada yet, and I suspect won’t be taken up with quite the same vigour displayed in its US debut: unlike American customers who signed up for two years with AT&T, Canadian customers of Rogers had to take a three-year contract. None of them will be at their end-of-contract when the new iPhone is released here. It will take some of the demand away, compared to the US market . . . but certainly not enough to make the release a flop.

June 16, 2010

The irritating part of “mobile computing”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow just got back from a book tour, but unlike all the other ones, he found this tour was both pleasant and productive, thanks to mobile computing:

I “rooted” my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily “tether” it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn’t have to root my wife’s matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there’s actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort’s car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop — this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author’s most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours’ worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights.

So all is sweetness and light with modern mobile computing, yes? Not quite:

. . . the fundamental paradox of mobile — so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don’t go anywhere.

One of the more frustrating parts of travelling with my iPhone has been that I have to basically lobotomize it before crossing the border, reducing it from really powerful smart phone to a PDA with a phone line: the data and “roaming” charges are so high that it’s not economical to use them for anything other than an emergency. Just when being able to get driving directions or hotel or restaurant recommendations would be most useful — on the road or in an unfamiliar city — the cost is usually too high to justify turning on the damned feature.

Yes, you can hunt down wifi connections (and I did, on my last few trips to the US), but it hardly counts as convenient. The phone companies still assume anyone travelling with a smart phone is going to be spending their employers’ money and therefore won’t notice or care about the up-front costs.

June 11, 2010

It’s not really about market share: that’s just keeping score

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

Eric Raymond thinks a lot of people are missing the point on the ongoing iPhone-Android battle:

It’s not about whether or not Apple will be crushed. It’s not about who makes the “best” products, where “best” is measured by some interaction between the product and the speaker’s evaluation of the relative importance of various features and costs. It’s about what the next generation of personal computing platforms will be. Down one fork they’ll be open, hackable, and user-controlled. Down the other they’ll be closed, locked down, and vendor-controlled. Though there are others on each side of this struggle, in 2010 it comes down to whether Apple or Android wins the race to over 50% smartphone market share; after that point, network effects will become self-reinforcing until the next technology disruption.

If he’s right — and he very well might be — then Apple’s moderately disappointing upgrades in the newly announced iPhone 4 may have handed the long-term advantage to Google. This may be bad news for Apple shareholders, but it’ll be a long-term positive for mobile computing.

May 28, 2010

The copyright issue in Canadian law

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

I’ve always understood that under Canadian copyright law, as long as you bought the original CD, you were allowed to rip the tracks to play on iPods and other MP3 players. I was wrong — that sort of thing breaks Canadian copyright law:

Industry Minister Tony Clement has an admission to make: He built his impressive music library on his iPod in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law.

Mr. Clement, stickhandling the copyright file for the Conservative government along with Heritage Minister James Moore, is poised to introduce new copyright legislation within days. But until the law is updated to permit Canadians to transfer music onto MP3 players from CDs they have purchased, Mr. Clement stands on the wrong side of Canada’s copyright law.

“Well you see, you know I think I have to admit it probably runs afoul of the current law because the current law does not allow you to shift formats. So the fact of the matter is I have compact discs that I’ve transferred, I have compact discs from my children or my wife that I’ve transferred onto my iPod. None of that is allowable under the current regime,” Mr. Clement, a music buff who also legally purchases songs from iTunes to build a digital database that now stands at 10,452 songs.

If the guy in charge of the relevant ministry admits that he’s breaking the law, are the media providers going to slap him with a lawsuit, claiming their traditional multi-millions per track in damages? If not, why not?

Update: Amusingly, the first piece of spam that someone attempted to post on this article said “The compilation of all content on this site is the exclusive property of WaySpa and protected by Canadian and international copyright laws.” So I guess now we know who to blame . . .

May 21, 2010

Your iPod is even more valuable than you think

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

Sing along with the RIAA:


Full image here

May 11, 2010

Android alert!

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Apple fanboi faithful must be having mass cases of the vapours with the news that Android sales are eating everyone’s lunch:

I’ve written before that I think Google has been running a long game aimed against the telecomms carriers’ preferred strategy of customer lock-in, and executing on that game very well. Against the iPhone, its strategy has been a classic example of what the economist Clayton Christensen called “disruption from below” in his classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. With the G-1, Google initially competed on price, winning customers who didn’t want to pay Apple/AT&T’s premium and were willing to trade away Apple’s perceived superiority in “user experience” for a better price. Just as importantly, Android offered a near-irresistible deal to the carriers: months, even years slashed off time-to-market for a state-of-the-art cellphone; a huge advantage in licensing costs; and the illusion (now disintegrating) that said carriers would be able to retain enough control of Android-powered devices to practice their habitual screw-the-customer tactics.

In Christensen’s model, a market being disrupted from below features two products, sustaining and disrupter, both improving over time but with the disruptor at a lower price point and lesser capabilities. Typically, the sustaining company will be focused on control of its customers and business partners to extract maximum margins; on the other hand, the disruptor will be playing a ubiquity game, sacrificing margin to gain share. The sustaining company will gold-plate its product in order to chase high-end price-insenstive customers; the disruptor will seek out price-sensitive low-end customers.

I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming . . . I thought Google was mistaken to put so much development effort into the mobile phone market. I was clearly wrong about that.

In the smartphone market I have been expecting a disruptive break that would body-slam Apple’s market share, but I expected it to be several quarters in the future and with a really fast drop-off when it happened. Instead, it looks like Apple took a bruising in 4Q 2009 and has failed to regain share in 1Q 2010 while Android sales continued to rocket. Android hammered market-leader Blackberry just as badly, a fact which has gooten far less play than it probably should because the trade-press loves the drama of the Apple-vs.-Google catfight so much.

What actually seems to be going on here is that Android is successfully disrupting both Apple and Blackberry from below; together they’ve lost about 25% of market share, not enough to put Android on top but close enough that another quarter like the last will certainly do that.

I’ve heard several comments from folks that Apple’s iPhone sales are probably lower because of the widespread interest in the “next” iPhone model, which is likely to be announced in the next few weeks. Apple has followed this pattern since introducing the original iPhone, but there’s no rule saying they can’t break the pattern.

I’ll be interested in the announcement, as I’ll have a year left in my Rogers contract, so if the next iPhone isn’t a block-buster, I’ll be considering other options for when I’m out of contract.

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

April 27, 2010

That lost iPhone prototype

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

As re-interpreted by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

Two questions I am often asked:
1. How far in advance do you work?
2. How quickly can you publish a comic on a current event?

Today I will indirectly answer both questions by talking about something else entirely. I assume you’ve all been following the story of the Apple engineer who left a prototype 4G iPhone at a beer garden. I found this story too delicious to resist, but I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I’ve never tested it.

I drew two comics while considering my options. In the end, I thought it wasn’t worth the extra friction to push them to the front of the line. And it would be June 18th before they ran in their normal position, which seemed too far in the future. So here now, exclusively for you blog readers, the totally unfinished first drafts of those comics. You will never see these in newspapers.

April 22, 2010

The iPad is “the ultimate Steve Jobs device”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:05

I’m still quite happy with my iPhone, although I’ll pay attention when the next annual hardware refresh is released. I don’t quite “get” the attraction of the iPad, but perhaps it’s because I’m not typically swayed by glamour. Eric Raymond is amazed, but not at the device itself. He’s amazed at how closesly it approaches the Platonic ideal of a Steve Jobs device:

The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device — so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it’s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It’s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It’s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty — you know you’ve been played by the marketing and design but you don’t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.

This has to be Steve Jobs’s last hurrah. I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can’t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness. And it’s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.

Sorta related, from BoingBoing:

April 20, 2010

Apple officially asks for their missing iPhone back

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

I guess Gizmodo did get their hands on something genuine, as Apple has sent a letter formally asking for the device to be returned to them:

Gizmodo says it has now received a letter from Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel Bruce Sewell:

“It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is currently in possession of a device that belongs to Apple. This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let us know where to pick up the unit.”

Gizmodo says the iPhone 4G/iPhone HD — take your pick — was left in a German beer garden (we like those details) called Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood. Speculate what you will about this: how convenient this kind of intense interest is for Apple, whether this is a fake, the various ways in which infamously secretive Apple might retaliate against the hapless prototype phone-loser Gray Powell — or, as the well-connected John Gruber says, why Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the phone which was stolen from Apple.

Given that almost any device Apple introduces is greeted with hosannas and hallelujahs from the fanboy crowd, it does seem unlikely that this is a deliberate attempt by Apple to create or increase public interest in their next iPhone release.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress