all that we fought for in the early part of the last century (unions and fairness in work) is circling the drain. erosion, year by year, of our rights is the direction we are headed in.
I have used an iPhone 3gs and an iPhone 5 (currently). I tried an SII and hated it. I have not seen an SIII so I have no basis for comparison.
I COMPLETELY agree that Apple's iPhone/iOS development has stagnated. It's a very nice phone, but the interface is virtually unchanged in almost 5 years now (copy/paste, multitasking, notification center, siri, are the big changes). There are some nice features that I use daily--Siri and Find my Friends most notably--but not a huge different appearance-wise.
But, my question is: how is Samsung innovating? I ask this question out of ignorance. What are the killer features of the SIII that mark it as a more innovative phone than, e.g., the iPhone5.
It's not like Apple doesn't also list the tech specs. They list both inch measurements, resolution, and PPI. See, e.g., http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
I would put it differently. People are panicky sheep. Traders are gamblers. Nothing more. Traders are gambling on how other people are going to respond.
In the absence of dividends, what's a stock?
Of course this is somewhat less than true now with all of the algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading that goes on. Nonetheless, at its core, the market is about emotion. Traders make--and lose--money based on emotions, not facts and fundamentals.
If the articles are to be trusted (which I have no idea of), the claim was that Google would not allow Apple access to turn-by-turn voice nav without also both enabling Google Latitude (i.e., Google tracking) and increasing branding. Don't pretend it was JUST a branding issue.
Look, I get it, you're complaining about getting modded down (those stupid mean Apple people!!). Like I said, it's slashdot, get used to it, move along, next play. The moderation system being (ab)used to suppress or promote content based on your opinions is an integral part of the history and being of slashdot.
There's really no reason to get worked into a lather about it! Make your posts more interesting and somebody might mark them as such next time.
Wait, what? I did not have a 3g (I got a 3gs in 2009 that I still have is still getting iOS updates including iOS 6), but as far as I know the 3g--released in 2008--could run iOS 2 (stock), iOS 3 (2009), and iOS 4 (2010-11). Even if you bought an iPhone 3G the DAY before the 3gs was released, Apple still issued over a year and some change of software updates.
Do Android phones released in 2008 really do better in terms of running newer Android releases or getting updates? IMHO there are plenty of reasons to go with Android, but I don't think vendor operating system support is one of them!
Am I the only one who thinks that Android is going to basically overtake the traditional Linux distros as the most popular face of Linux not only on the Phone and Tablets but eventually on laptops and desktops?
There are a lot of advantages to Android over basic Linux. Easy to install apps. Commercially supported apps -- like Netflix. Easy market for businesses to monetize with software sales, etc. Games. Commercial backing by one entity.
Seems to me Mozilla is rather missing the point, or perhaps, is struggling against a perceived future of irrelevance.
... Prolonged and intense programming over a period of days or weeks can result in epic logic failures in their daily life -- "Hey hun, can you go to the store and if they have bread, pick up some eggs?" Programmer comes home with just eggs....
This sounds like a loose paraphrase of a passage from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. I can't remember the exact passage but it was about some early hackers who got so into "computer mode" that they interpreted English literally. IIRC the example give was (roughly):
Wife: "Would you like to help me unload the groceries?" Man: "No" Wife: "JERK!" Man: "What? You asked if I wanted to, and I don't. I will help unload the groceries."
Nice, thanks for the link. Bit of a PITA to fix a lion deficiency, though. My experience with OSX upgrades is that every point release generally reverts these type of changes. Still might be worthwhile...
I guess I can see a position for the Apple store offering to do this for say $100 labor. You do have a point there, given that they haven't updated the MacPro they should probably throw you all a bone on this one.
It's frustrating. I will do the Chameleon thing and hope for the best. With years without updates, deprecated models, no more server OS (almost understandable) and no more Xserve--not to mention the debacle with the video tools--it's just really apparent that Apple is one of first old school computer companies to jump headfirst into the post-PC, post-Power User world. As a user who always liked that OSX was UNIX--and a really slick system--etc, it just seems a sad thing to me.
More cynical slashdotters would say I was fool for ever thinking Apple cared one cent about my ilk!
The graphics system on Lion allows for KEXTs (32 bit extensions) in drivers. There is an actual code wrapper that goes between the graphics card and the driver on Mountain Lion which is 64 bit hence no KEXT support.
That's exactly what you are talking about. Supporting 32 bit only hardware. If Apple had a 64 bit driver for your card it would run Mountain Lion. In fact it wouldn't shock me if a 64 bit Linux driver gets ported over and then ML does run.
No, I don't think you're right about this. As you say, the ATI x1900xt (the card in my Mac Pro) has windows 64-bit drivers. I've run one under Vista 64! Secondly, if what you are claiming as a major graphics change would be true, I could swap in a $50 graphic card into my Mac Pro and be fine to install ML. But I can't...It's more arbitrary than that.
Because you would be running the full featured samba and not the reduced functionality. Lion moved from Samba 2 to Apple's Samba clone. Ports has Samba 3.
You're claiming installing the Mac Port replaces the builtin smb functionality?
No its specs in terms of driver support are not inferior and that's where you are getting snagged.
EXACTLY. The keyword from your reply is: "support." This is where Apple is not willing to put in the effort. The hardware itself is fine. Apple is just not willing to do the support. Again, this situation is very different from 68k to PPC, or PPC to Intel. Deprecating old architectures makes sense. Deprecating powerful workstations -- while supporting inferior laptops -- just because you don't want to port a 64-bit driver that already exists for every other OS does not make sense. Blocking ML on a computer even if it has a fully upgraded, brand spanking new 2012 graphics card does not make sense.
So what are the differences in the "graphics subsystems" that you're talking about?
Oh, to add to my laundry list -- The Preview.app in Lion is a useless slow, crashing, clusterfuck. I deleted it and copied Preview from a SL install. That actually made me enjoy Lion slightly more.
You are an unusual case of someone who upgraded, didn't downgrade immediately, uses a MacPro (which is unusual), doesn't care about 10.8 features and doesn't want to get things like Samba from Macports. You are cutting against the grain too much.
Yes, Mac Pro users are a minority of mac users. So what? Support effort would be minimal. We're not talking about supporting a parallel architecture or even outdated hardware! I didn't downgrade immediately--how many people actually downgrade when it's harder to do that? How many people make a snap decision in a day or even a week? I would hardly say that by NOT downgrading I am unusual! I have to support newer Macs, so I eat the dogfood, so to speak. Unfortunately in this case, the release was dogfood (imho of course). I'm not sure how getting samba from ports is supposed to solve Finder browse issues or Finder samba access problems on Lion workstations?
Basically, the only way I am cutting against the grain is by not faithfully upgrading my computer every 4 years. My MBP is almost the same age (and runs better than new thanks to memory and an SSD), yet it supports Mountain Lion? Its specs are inferior in every way to the vastly more expensive (and expandable and upgradeable) Mac Pro.
Look, you can justify this however you want. Apple will do the same. The bottom-line is, for a lot of users, it's a kick in the face, and yet another symptom of an Apple that increasingly cares about nothing but iOS and iOSification of OSX. It's sad for me.
4) And your list is a perfectly good example of how personal it is. Dropping PPC kept me on 10.6 all last year. And there was no good reason Apple had to drop Rosetta they could have kept it for a decade. But I signed up for a fast moving platform, and I got bit on that one. OTOH when they dropped classic I was ready.
Don't get me wrong, PPC is still a feature we use. In fact, I still have one computer at work running 10.4 (Dual g4 1.25ghz) for one server application that would require a $10,000 upgrade to run on Intel. We used Classic mode for years. What I meant with my statement was, I'm ok with Apple dropping PPC support roughly 7 years after a major hardware transition. It affected several programs we do use, so we had to phase them out on new purchases and keep older computers on older operating systems. Mostly iMacs. I don't think this is analogous.
Let me put my overall complaint like this. How hard would it be for Apple to code their own Chameleon equivalent? Or to buy Chameleon's technology? What kind of investment? 100k? 500k? A million? Pocket change for Apple, and they would have made a lot of Mac Pro owners (who are ALREADY not happy about upgrade paths) happy, and increased sales of Mountain Lion. Yes, this is amplified by the fact that I'm stuck on Lion unless I want to spend a lot of time migrating back to a prevision Snow Leopard install. This is the first OSX upgrade (Lion) that I felt has been a regression. There's not one feature I miss on my Snow Leopard computers. MacPro1,1's aren't going to be driving Retina displays, but neither are the earlier 64-bit macbooks and imacs that ARE supported. That's entirely a red herring.
*I* wasn't talking about anything. The post you just replied to was my first post in this thread.
I do, however, agree with the OP. My MacPro 1,1 is quite a snappy computer. I dare say it's faster than many of the 2-year-old iMacs or Mac Minis we have at our office for daily use. I think it's ludicrous that Apple isn't extending support. The Mac Pros have barely been upgraded in what -- 2-3 years? Saying "well, just wait another year" seems the epitome of the uncritical (indeed ANTI-criticism) Apple Boy.
Realistically, given the 3rd party solutions (that I will probably try) to get ML running on a MP1,1 Apple could have easily done the same. Apple could have bought out the project even. Instead they focus on twitter integration, facebook integration, gamecenter, and so forth. It's been a very good ~10 years of Apple computers. I'm afraid the software quality is on a downward spiral, however.
Dropping classic? No problem. Dropping PPC? No problem. Dropping support for perfectly good, fast, powerful hardware? Not good in my book.
Why didn't you just roll it back if you didn't like Lion?
I don't believe you can restore from a Lion Time Machine backup to Snow Leopard. Do you know?
Anyway, 10.8 mission control is pretty much the same. They aren't "fixing" that.
Except for the ungroup application windows option! I'm glad this is one of the instances where Apple listened to a groundswell of disappointment over the removal of a feature. Spaces is also improved (ie, returned more to the way it was)?
As for Samba, I doubt it. But "sudo port install samba3" and you are off to the races with samba.
In terms of the built-in samba/smb integration. We have had some persistent browse / connection issues with multiple Lion workstations on our office network. I've read reports that Mountain Lion seems to work better in mixed environments.
Stability / memory I'm not sure what you mean.
If you read the forums where people are talking about their Mountain Lion experiences, even with the beta many people are reporting decreased memory usage and greater stability in ML than in Lion. With my one computer running Lion, I have had more freezes or situations where the system gets into a weird state (my computer got locked into Mission Control a week ago. In the miniature windows I could type, press buttons, etc, but Mission Control would not dismiss. Very bizarre. Had to hold down the power button) than any other OSX revision I've used. That's what I mean by stability and memory usage.
Wow, I've been called an Apple Fanboy on Slashdot before, but you're really taking things to new level. You even make ME hate Apple users (and I'm on a MBP, use a Mac Pro, have an iPhone and 2 iPads, etc).
Have a stable non-crappy operating system. Can't do that with Lion...
I kept my home systems on 10.6. I upgraded my work MacPro 1,1 to Lion. I wish I hadn't. It sounds like Mountain Lion fixes a lot of the stupidest annoyances of Lion: restores Exposé functionality, restore Spaces functionality, more save Save/Save As/Versions/Duplicate semantics and functionality, stability fixes, samba fixes, memory handling fixes, etc.
I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one are part of the reason why), but it's what most people at work use on Windows. Mac users primarily use OSX mail.app. I also find the searching majorly FUBAR.
So now that Thunderbird is getting fewer resources, are there any other options? What other clients are people using on windows?
The word meteor comes to us from ancient Greek, with some kind of meaning of lifting up. Obviously the original etymological meaning is irrelevant to users of the modern phrase, but it's perhaps ironic that the meaning fits.
The phrase "meteoric rise" has been used at least since the 1860s in print, and probably earlier than that in speech. Today we may know that meteors are drifting chunks of rock that burn up in the atmosphere or crash to the ground, but what about 200 years ago? What did (at least most) people know about meteors? They knew what they saw. Remember that night skies looked very different 200 years ago. Meteors were flashes of light that appeared out of nowhere, raced across the sky, and were gone. Inexplicable.
Thus the phrase "meteoric rise" traditionally (I would say "always" but I think you might argue this point? it certainly in common usage implies all these things) had insinuations of the rise being ephemeral. A "meteoric rise" is unexpected, fast, and ephemeral. Two out of three ain't bad for describing the iPhone; we'll have to see about the ephemeral part!
So no, your assumption is basically completely wrong. What did you mean by "it's almost as if people are being tested to see how stupid they are"? I'm really not sure what you're saying,
Slashdot Mirror
all that we fought for in the early part of the last century (unions and fairness in work) is circling the drain. erosion, year by year, of our rights is the direction we are headed in.
What union are you a part of?
I have used an iPhone 3gs and an iPhone 5 (currently). I tried an SII and hated it. I have not seen an SIII so I have no basis for comparison.
I COMPLETELY agree that Apple's iPhone/iOS development has stagnated. It's a very nice phone, but the interface is virtually unchanged in almost 5 years now (copy/paste, multitasking, notification center, siri, are the big changes). There are some nice features that I use daily--Siri and Find my Friends most notably--but not a huge different appearance-wise.
But, my question is: how is Samsung innovating? I ask this question out of ignorance. What are the killer features of the SIII that mark it as a more innovative phone than, e.g., the iPhone5.
Well, lucky for you, Apple has always published the iPad screen's specifications. http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
It's not like Apple doesn't also list the tech specs. They list both inch measurements, resolution, and PPI. See, e.g., http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
Traders are panicky sheep.
I would put it differently. People are panicky sheep. Traders are gamblers. Nothing more. Traders are gambling on how other people are going to respond.
In the absence of dividends, what's a stock?
Of course this is somewhat less than true now with all of the algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading that goes on. Nonetheless, at its core, the market is about emotion. Traders make--and lose--money based on emotions, not facts and fundamentals.
If the articles are to be trusted (which I have no idea of), the claim was that Google would not allow Apple access to turn-by-turn voice nav without also both enabling Google Latitude (i.e., Google tracking) and increasing branding. Don't pretend it was JUST a branding issue.
Look, I get it, you're complaining about getting modded down (those stupid mean Apple people!!). Like I said, it's slashdot, get used to it, move along, next play. The moderation system being (ab)used to suppress or promote content based on your opinions is an integral part of the history and being of slashdot.
There's really no reason to get worked into a lather about it! Make your posts more interesting and somebody might mark them as such next time.
You got an over-rated moderation and your feelings are hurt? You must be new here :-p
Wait, what? I did not have a 3g (I got a 3gs in 2009 that I still have is still getting iOS updates including iOS 6), but as far as I know the 3g--released in 2008--could run iOS 2 (stock), iOS 3 (2009), and iOS 4 (2010-11). Even if you bought an iPhone 3G the DAY before the 3gs was released, Apple still issued over a year and some change of software updates.
Do Android phones released in 2008 really do better in terms of running newer Android releases or getting updates? IMHO there are plenty of reasons to go with Android, but I don't think vendor operating system support is one of them!
This is the reason I still read slashdot. Awesome link, thanks for posting.
Do you really live in fear of NRA members and (or) people who disagree with you politically?
Only diversity of skin color and sexuality, not diversity of beliefs!
Am I the only one who thinks that Android is going to basically overtake the traditional Linux distros as the most popular face of Linux not only on the Phone and Tablets but eventually on laptops and desktops?
There are a lot of advantages to Android over basic Linux. Easy to install apps. Commercially supported apps -- like Netflix. Easy market for businesses to monetize with software sales, etc. Games. Commercial backing by one entity.
Seems to me Mozilla is rather missing the point, or perhaps, is struggling against a perceived future of irrelevance.
... Prolonged and intense programming over a period of days or weeks can result in epic logic failures in their daily life -- "Hey hun, can you go to the store and if they have bread, pick up some eggs?" Programmer comes home with just eggs. ...
This sounds like a loose paraphrase of a passage from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. I can't remember the exact passage but it was about some early hackers who got so into "computer mode" that they interpreted English literally. IIRC the example give was (roughly):
Wife: "Would you like to help me unload the groceries?"
Man: "No"
Wife: "JERK!"
Man: "What? You asked if I wanted to, and I don't. I will help unload the groceries."
Why not? Here are instructions: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120401160655922 [macworld.com]
XNU is modular SMB is just a module you can replace it.
Nice, thanks for the link. Bit of a PITA to fix a lion deficiency, though. My experience with OSX upgrades is that every point release generally reverts these type of changes. Still might be worthwhile...
I guess I can see a position for the Apple store offering to do this for say $100 labor. You do have a point there, given that they haven't updated the MacPro they should probably throw you all a bone on this one.
It's frustrating. I will do the Chameleon thing and hope for the best. With years without updates, deprecated models, no more server OS (almost understandable) and no more Xserve--not to mention the debacle with the video tools--it's just really apparent that Apple is one of first old school computer companies to jump headfirst into the post-PC, post-Power User world. As a user who always liked that OSX was UNIX--and a really slick system--etc, it just seems a sad thing to me.
More cynical slashdotters would say I was fool for ever thinking Apple cared one cent about my ilk!
The graphics system on Lion allows for KEXTs (32 bit extensions) in drivers. There is an actual code wrapper that goes between the graphics card and the driver on Mountain Lion which is 64 bit hence no KEXT support.
That's exactly what you are talking about. Supporting 32 bit only hardware. If Apple had a 64 bit driver for your card it would run Mountain Lion. In fact it wouldn't shock me if a 64 bit Linux driver gets ported over and then ML does run.
No, I don't think you're right about this. As you say, the ATI x1900xt (the card in my Mac Pro) has windows 64-bit drivers. I've run one under Vista 64! Secondly, if what you are claiming as a major graphics change would be true, I could swap in a $50 graphic card into my Mac Pro and be fine to install ML. But I can't...It's more arbitrary than that.
Because you would be running the full featured samba and not the reduced functionality. Lion moved from Samba 2 to Apple's Samba clone. Ports has Samba 3.
You're claiming installing the Mac Port replaces the builtin smb functionality?
No its specs in terms of driver support are not inferior and that's where you are getting snagged.
EXACTLY. The keyword from your reply is: "support." This is where Apple is not willing to put in the effort. The hardware itself is fine. Apple is just not willing to do the support. Again, this situation is very different from 68k to PPC, or PPC to Intel. Deprecating old architectures makes sense. Deprecating powerful workstations -- while supporting inferior laptops -- just because you don't want to port a 64-bit driver that already exists for every other OS does not make sense. Blocking ML on a computer even if it has a fully upgraded, brand spanking new 2012 graphics card does not make sense.
So what are the differences in the "graphics subsystems" that you're talking about?
Oh, to add to my laundry list -- The Preview.app in Lion is a useless slow, crashing, clusterfuck. I deleted it and copied Preview from a SL install. That actually made me enjoy Lion slightly more.
You are an unusual case of someone who upgraded, didn't downgrade immediately, uses a MacPro (which is unusual), doesn't care about 10.8 features and doesn't want to get things like Samba from Macports. You are cutting against the grain too much.
Yes, Mac Pro users are a minority of mac users. So what? Support effort would be minimal. We're not talking about supporting a parallel architecture or even outdated hardware! I didn't downgrade immediately--how many people actually downgrade when it's harder to do that? How many people make a snap decision in a day or even a week? I would hardly say that by NOT downgrading I am unusual! I have to support newer Macs, so I eat the dogfood, so to speak. Unfortunately in this case, the release was dogfood (imho of course). I'm not sure how getting samba from ports is supposed to solve Finder browse issues or Finder samba access problems on Lion workstations?
Basically, the only way I am cutting against the grain is by not faithfully upgrading my computer every 4 years. My MBP is almost the same age (and runs better than new thanks to memory and an SSD), yet it supports Mountain Lion? Its specs are inferior in every way to the vastly more expensive (and expandable and upgradeable) Mac Pro.
Look, you can justify this however you want. Apple will do the same. The bottom-line is, for a lot of users, it's a kick in the face, and yet another symptom of an Apple that increasingly cares about nothing but iOS and iOSification of OSX. It's sad for me.
Expose now has the option to "ungroup application windows". I had read somewhere of some spaces improvement, but I am not sure about this.
4) And your list is a perfectly good example of how personal it is. Dropping PPC kept me on 10.6 all last year. And there was no good reason Apple had to drop Rosetta they could have kept it for a decade. But I signed up for a fast moving platform, and I got bit on that one. OTOH when they dropped classic I was ready.
Don't get me wrong, PPC is still a feature we use. In fact, I still have one computer at work running 10.4 (Dual g4 1.25ghz) for one server application that would require a $10,000 upgrade to run on Intel. We used Classic mode for years. What I meant with my statement was, I'm ok with Apple dropping PPC support roughly 7 years after a major hardware transition. It affected several programs we do use, so we had to phase them out on new purchases and keep older computers on older operating systems. Mostly iMacs. I don't think this is analogous.
Let me put my overall complaint like this. How hard would it be for Apple to code their own Chameleon equivalent? Or to buy Chameleon's technology? What kind of investment? 100k? 500k? A million? Pocket change for Apple, and they would have made a lot of Mac Pro owners (who are ALREADY not happy about upgrade paths) happy, and increased sales of Mountain Lion. Yes, this is amplified by the fact that I'm stuck on Lion unless I want to spend a lot of time migrating back to a prevision Snow Leopard install. This is the first OSX upgrade (Lion) that I felt has been a regression. There's not one feature I miss on my Snow Leopard computers. MacPro1,1's aren't going to be driving Retina displays, but neither are the earlier 64-bit macbooks and imacs that ARE supported. That's entirely a red herring.
*I* wasn't talking about anything. The post you just replied to was my first post in this thread.
I do, however, agree with the OP. My MacPro 1,1 is quite a snappy computer. I dare say it's faster than many of the 2-year-old iMacs or Mac Minis we have at our office for daily use. I think it's ludicrous that Apple isn't extending support. The Mac Pros have barely been upgraded in what -- 2-3 years? Saying "well, just wait another year" seems the epitome of the uncritical (indeed ANTI-criticism) Apple Boy.
Realistically, given the 3rd party solutions (that I will probably try) to get ML running on a MP1,1 Apple could have easily done the same. Apple could have bought out the project even. Instead they focus on twitter integration, facebook integration, gamecenter, and so forth. It's been a very good ~10 years of Apple computers. I'm afraid the software quality is on a downward spiral, however.
Dropping classic? No problem.
Dropping PPC? No problem.
Dropping support for perfectly good, fast, powerful hardware? Not good in my book.
Why didn't you just roll it back if you didn't like Lion?
I don't believe you can restore from a Lion Time Machine backup to Snow Leopard. Do you know?
Anyway, 10.8 mission control is pretty much the same. They aren't "fixing" that.
Except for the ungroup application windows option! I'm glad this is one of the instances where Apple listened to a groundswell of disappointment over the removal of a feature. Spaces is also improved (ie, returned more to the way it was)?
As for Samba, I doubt it. But "sudo port install samba3" and you are off to the races with samba.
In terms of the built-in samba/smb integration. We have had some persistent browse / connection issues with multiple Lion workstations on our office network. I've read reports that Mountain Lion seems to work better in mixed environments.
Stability / memory I'm not sure what you mean.
If you read the forums where people are talking about their Mountain Lion experiences, even with the beta many people are reporting decreased memory usage and greater stability in ML than in Lion. With my one computer running Lion, I have had more freezes or situations where the system gets into a weird state (my computer got locked into Mission Control a week ago. In the miniature windows I could type, press buttons, etc, but Mission Control would not dismiss. Very bizarre. Had to hold down the power button) than any other OSX revision I've used. That's what I mean by stability and memory usage.
Wow, I've been called an Apple Fanboy on Slashdot before, but you're really taking things to new level. You even make ME hate Apple users (and I'm on a MBP, use a Mac Pro, have an iPhone and 2 iPads, etc).
Have a stable non-crappy operating system. Can't do that with Lion...
I kept my home systems on 10.6. I upgraded my work MacPro 1,1 to Lion. I wish I hadn't. It sounds like Mountain Lion fixes a lot of the stupidest annoyances of Lion: restores Exposé functionality, restore Spaces functionality, more save Save/Save As/Versions/Duplicate semantics and functionality, stability fixes, samba fixes, memory handling fixes, etc.
I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one are part of the reason why), but it's what most people at work use on Windows. Mac users primarily use OSX mail.app. I also find the searching majorly FUBAR.
So now that Thunderbird is getting fewer resources, are there any other options? What other clients are people using on windows?
The word meteor comes to us from ancient Greek, with some kind of meaning of lifting up. Obviously the original etymological meaning is irrelevant to users of the modern phrase, but it's perhaps ironic that the meaning fits.
The phrase "meteoric rise" has been used at least since the 1860s in print, and probably earlier than that in speech. Today we may know that meteors are drifting chunks of rock that burn up in the atmosphere or crash to the ground, but what about 200 years ago? What did (at least most) people know about meteors? They knew what they saw. Remember that night skies looked very different 200 years ago. Meteors were flashes of light that appeared out of nowhere, raced across the sky, and were gone. Inexplicable.
Thus the phrase "meteoric rise" traditionally (I would say "always" but I think you might argue this point? it certainly in common usage implies all these things) had insinuations of the rise being ephemeral. A "meteoric rise" is unexpected, fast, and ephemeral. Two out of three ain't bad for describing the iPhone; we'll have to see about the ephemeral part!
So no, your assumption is basically completely wrong. What did you mean by "it's almost as if people are being tested to see how stupid they are"? I'm really not sure what you're saying,