That was pretty much my point. If I unlock the iPhone here in the US, my options are T-Mobile (with a tiny footprint and hardly any 3G presence, and what there is for 3G isn't iPhone compatible) and a handful of small rural carriers. That's it. If I want an iPhone in the US AT&T is pretty much the only way to go.
Taking that phone overseas, though, becomes useful with an unlocked phone. I can pay local rates for phone calls instead of roaming rates of $1-$2 per minute. I'd lose my phone number for the duration doing that but at least I'd have a choice.
In the LTE world (once the technology settles down) I should be able to take an unlocked phone and use it with any provider. Might be a while, but that's the best hope - and it's also what AT&T and Verizon have both announced they are using. There is hope...
As much as I want my iPhone carrier-unlocked, what other US carrier with GSM/HSDPA and a nationwide footprint do I have access to?
Point being, what am I supposed to do with my newly unlocked iPhone - go to T-Mobile? Not really, at least not in this country. The use I can see for an unlocked US iPhone is simply that were I to travel overseas I could use a local SIM over there and use it with a native carrier instead of getting violated with international roaming fees.
Not having left the States in seven years, I'm not worrying about it too much so far.
When the day eventually comes that LTE is everywhere, then it's worth worrying more about unlocking the iPhone for me. Because then I'll be free to shop between AT&T, Verizon, or whomever else is on LTE by then. Until then, unlocking an iPhone is mainly for the international traveler. And in many other countries, you can buy your unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone there and bring it back with you. Which sounds like the way to go at this point.
So Apple came out with a ridiculously high-res LCD to put in the iPhone 4, and then they came up with a slick name for it in marketing to make it sound even better.
And the point of this nitpick article is what?
Newsflash: color E-6 film has better resolution than CCDs in digital cameras. That doesn't stop camera companies from comparing their sensors favorably to film, and people don't write articles that are Slashdot link-worthy about it. But it's the iPhone, so it's news.
Let's just put it like this: The new iPhone has a frickin' gorgeous screen. It's way higher-res than anything else for the moment. Apple even came up with a catchy name for it. We good with that?
Already available now with iPhone 3. Funny post, though.
More seriously, Apple lets you write your own wrapper for WebKit if you want on the iPhone OS. A few 3rd parties are doing it now, adding features like ad blocking, side-by-side display, and so on. What Apple won't let you do is create your own rendering engine (Opera does it by rendering web pages on Opera's own servers and just sending down the optimized display) or add plugins to MobileSafari itself (not only will they not allow that, but they also don't have any frameworks to do it).
So if you want to write a WebKit wrapper that handles ad blocking, go for it. But you've already got competition out there.
Plus iAds isn't a framework for inserting ads on websites. It's a framework to allow app developers to distribute ad-supported software, using a pretty transparent revenue model. There's a bunch of third parties (AdMob, the Deck, etc.) providing that right now for developers, and iAds is joining them.
The "intent" of the eBays and Craigslists of the world is supposedly to let people sell things they don't want around (more or less). If I buy something with my income, and pay sales taxes on it, then sell it later on then so be it. If I'm lucky enough to make a little money on the arrangement (like if it turns out to be collectible), that's splendid. But it's not a business. Taxes due at each step of a transaction are a VAT, and we don't do that here.
If I'm buying goods wholesale or as an investment and I'm trying to sell them at a profit as my means of earning a living, though - well, that's taxable in this country and that's just all there is to it.
I run a services business (as an S Corp), and I could probably pay a little less tax if I weaseled appropriately and just buried all my income as "expenses". I don't. The business pays what are real, legitimate expenses (I don't buy an iPod for my kid and call it "computing equipment" or any of that kind of shady stuff). I keep my business and personal money separate and I pay myself and my employees a salary. I could probably make a few more bucks being really aggressive about things, but I know I'm doing the Right Thing and I'm not in line for an eventual trip to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison.
In other words, if you're trying to live free of the IRS by doing a cash business on eBay, screw you. Pay up.
True. And you're free to buy any competing product, or nothing at all.
What a lot of folks are missing is that this is not a monopoly. Apple owns the iTunes App Store, and they produce the devices that can use it and approve the content. When you choose to buy an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you are making a consumer statement that you like that model and you accept Apple's system. But you don't have to. Other devices run apps, there are other touchscreen phones, other tablets, and other media players.
For better or worse, Apple made a value judgement that they won't sell software for the iPhone OS that is built with any but Apple Xcode tools. And they won't let you run any software that's not signed. They don't have to justify it to anyone.
Open is good, but not required. And the average consumer couldn't care less. They want apps, nice-looking web pages, and an easy-to-use gadget that looks nice and has a really long battery life.
You're right. They don't need your business. They've got plenty of people who like that model.
Not a shocker. According to an antivirus company, most spam comes from a place where people use Windows and are clueless about preventing infections. The zombie Windows machines are a big part of the problem, but the command & control systems seem to mainly be overseas. As are a lot of the products/scams being pitched.
What this says is that in the US users need to do a better job of securing their computers. And all around the world spammers need to be killed.
PCs are still popular for MMO games, but outside of that the consoles make more sense to target. They are optimized for gaming (even the relatively low-end Wii), simpler to manage, and more importantly there are many more consoles sold to gamers than there are high-end gaming systems.
Also a factor is that you know what the hardware specs are for a particular console device. If you make it for PCs you have to ensure that it performs adequately no matter what - the user may have a crappy virus-infested PC but if the game he bought doesn't perform the way it does on his buddy's Xbox 360 then the game publisher sucks. If it doesn't run great on Windows 7 (but OK on XP) the publisher sucks. If it has issues with Norton (and what doesn't) then the game sucks.
If you publish for a console you've got less than cutting-edge hardware, but you know what you're in for there. And you can be pretty sure that if it works on your dev console it'll work for the end-user, too.
The PC game may not be dead, but it's not what it used to be and I think fewer and fewer games will target PCs (and I may be a Mac guy, but they'll have even fewer games there). The future of gaming at this point is consoles and handhelds.
Bingo - and this is also a huge reason why the cellphone-using masses flock to iPhones and not to all the more "open" devices out there in the market.
Users don't care if the garden is walled or not. They don't care if their video is served with an ideologically pure codec, either.
All users want is a phone that works well with plenty of conveient apps and a polished user experience. And they want their video to play in their browser of choice, and they want it to not make their computer's fans whine like crazy or suck down the battery meter on their handheld device. The combination of hardware acceleration support for H.264 on virtually every platform and H.264 support built into the Webkit browser family along with support going into IE9 is the finisher. Pure though Theora may be, this has become a Beta/VHS war and if Firefox doesn't add H.264 support it'll ultimately cost them market share.
The war is over. Firefox needs to have H.264 support if they want to remain relevant. If content providers decide they like Theora better, then you'll see the other browser makers add support for it but that's pretty unlikely.
It's not that they won't answer, it's that they pretty much already have, and really don't need to waste their time re-stating things that are obvious.
Save and transfer? Yes. For sure. The mechanism for transfer isn't specified yet, but there wouldn't be iWork for the device if you couldn't get things off it.
Exchange? Yep, the iPhone supports it, Apple is an ActiveSync licensee, so there's no reason why it wouldn't be in there.
VPN and config management? Yep, same as iPhone.
Media services other than iTunes? It'll be very limited, but probably some will work. Just like the iPhone (noticing a trend here?)
Videoconferencing? Sure, just use the built-in camera - wait, never mind.
Upgradable? Nope. Sealed box for a reason. Name one phone-type device that is (and SD cards don't count - I'm talking system memory).
Multiple apps? Not now. Maybe in some limited fashion down the road, if they build it into the iPhone OS underlying the iPad. Just like the iPhone.
iPhone is one series of phones (basically one phone with three current models) from one manufacturer offered on one carrier in the US.
Android is a platform that's offered by multiple manufacturers on multiple carriers. There is no "Android phone" (even factoring in the Nexus One), there's Droid, Droid Eris, Moment, HTC Hero, G1, myTouch, Cliq, and Behold. As of right now. And that's on 3 of the 4 major US carriers, excepting AT&T for the moment.
Needless to say, I think Android as a whole will ultimately be the major "alternative platform" for those who want a phone that's not an iPhone or Blackberry. But as a whole, that will merely replace Windows Mobile and Symbian as alternatives, not eat the marketshare/mindshare of Apple and RIM.
Android will be the "OS you get on your phone when you don't ask for an iPhone or a Blackberry by name". And that's probably fine and dandy, it should increase margins for the handset makers, make money for Google, and eventually result in another useful app platform for developers.
At least here in metro Boston (and Eastern new England in general) I've had pretty good luck with AT&T since the latter part of 2008 - about six months after the iPhone 3G came out my service improved a lot. Most of my old dead spots are gone now, and there are places where my iPhone 3GS works well (like the client in Gloucester I was at today) and my colleague's Verizon Blackberry dies. Data speeds are very good anywhere I get 2 or more bars of service, and though there are still dead spots (eastbound on 128 through Manchester, for instance, anytime after dark) or Devereux Beach in Marblehead) they are far fewer than they ever were before.
On the other hand, my sister and her husband both went to iPhones this year in southern CT and they were much happier with Verizon's service. I don't visit them too often but I haven't noticed any issues when I've been there - I think it really depends on how much you use it and rely on it in a place.
Overall, using an iPhone's been a much better experience than my old Verizon Treo 700p provided - not only is it far more useful as a device, but I don't have to reboot it several times daily. The AT&T experience outside the coasts and major metro areas may be different, but mine's not bad. And the few times I've needed to call customer service they've been helpful.
Poor Fox - they think their content is important enough to change the behavior of the entire web surfing public. Newsflash - it's not.
I wonder if Rupert Murdoch has ever used Google for anything. When I do a Google News search, I get the beginnings of articles that link right to the newspaper site to read them. All I get from Google is an aggregation showing me what articles are available on a topic. Even if you put the content itself behind a paywall (the last great idea that didn't pan out for the news industry) I'd still just see that teaser paragraph. I still don't understand where the "theft" thing comes from.
Now if the entire news industry rose up in unison to lock out search engines it might have a small impact on the habits of users, but as long as there are some holdouts and/or wire feeds online one or two providers dropping out will have no real impact.
Except for Fox's losing some eyeballs as a result of this I don't see how it works out for anyone. Sure, they get some money that Microsoft is willing to waste, but still - the loss of eyeballs will drive their ad rates down and it'll all probably wash out.
Being only able to buy the iPhone here in the US as a carrier-locked phone - that's wrong and sucks. But sadly that's the rule here because of the deal Apple has with AT&T. May it expire soon, even though the only other national GSM carrier is T-Mobile and they have an even smaller footprint. It'd be nice to take an iPhone out of the country and get a local SIM without having to use your AT&T account.
Of course, that carrier lock is also why the iPhone costs $200 instead of about $600 or so - the carrier subsidy that AT&T pays Apple for it keeps you from having to pay all the money up front.
Jailbreaking, though, is a different story. Anyone who wants to jailbreak their iPhone should feel free to do so and run whatever they want. But if you go to the trouble to bypass Apple's application security model you get what you get. Not Apple's fault.
But things like this worm make me understand that much more why Apple works to plug the holes that jailbreak tools keep exploiting. We may not all like that we're restricted to getting apps from the App Store, but on the other hand the iPhone isn't sold as a tool for personal freedom. It's sold as a phone that runs apps that you get from Apple. Period.
There's other phones that are marketed as "freedom phones". If people want that above all else, they should buy a phone with the appropriate OS and not an iPhone.
Ultimately, I hope Apple opens up the App Store further and simply reviews apps to answer just a couple of questions:
1 - Does the app do anything that expressly isn't allowed by carrier contracts?
2 - Does it break the published development rules?
If it doesn't, then it ought to be published, period. For instance, now that AT&T stated that VoIP would now be allowed on their network, all the Google Voice apps and Skype should immediately be approved and put out for 3G usage. Because those apps don't break guidelines and are now allowed by the carrier.
But even if they eliminated all restrictions short of that, the App Store will never be the free market that jailbreakers want to have. So get another phone. I hear you can run anything you want on Windows Mobile.
eee k. thank you, mr. apple spokesman who posts on/. with his real name in his sig. brilliant!!!11
I like my real name and my online persona. They're one and the same. I prefer that to "l33td00d1" or Anonymous Coward. If you don't mind saying what you actually think, there's no reason to be an AC here, and handles have never really been my thing either. Been around long enough to not give a damn, either - as my UID here might point out.
And I'm not an Apple anything, though in my consulting business I and my employees work about half on Macs and half on Windows. I'm Apple-certified because that's a requirement to be in their consultant program. I'm registered with Microsoft and Novell, too.
Most importantly, I like Apple stuff. I've got quite a bit of it. And an iPhone. I like it, too. It'd be nice if I could run any unsigned app on my iPhone without jailbreaking it, but I'm OK with it as-is. I've got a bunch of PCs, too. And an eee901. And lots of other gear. I like it, too.
But I still don't care if you can't run Snow Leopard on your netbook. Suck it up.
Apple doesn't make an Atom-based Mac. Nor did they in the past. They explicitly sell and license Mac OS X to run only on Macs. If you want to try and get it to work on a non-Mac with a different CPU and/or chipset than what Apple supports, you're on your own, good luck to you.
Apple isn't going to send an army of lawyers to your house to stop you from trying to build a hackintosh. They will if you figure it out and then start selling them - see Psystar for details. But they won't do anything to make it easy for you to build a hackintosh, and if it breaks - oh well, sucks to be you, next time buy a Mac or stick to a supported OS on your hackintosh.
Me, I stick to Windows 7 Pro on my eee901 for now, but I may switch to eeebuntu soon. I like it. I'll keep Mac OS on my Macs.
This simplifies things a lot for AT&T (who still hasn't introduced tethering for the iPhone): All they have to do to get back on the high horse is come up with a better pricing plan than Verizon's and have the service available in the next couple of months. Even AT&T can potentially pull that off.
As for the Exchange data plan - both Verizon and AT&T already do this on paper for smartphones, but that's the "corporate" data plan. On all the phones I've seen (for both networks) it doesn't actually matter - if your phone supports ActiveSync and you have a personal account it still works fine.
You have to use the external USB DVD drive to install it. That's also the supported way to load software on the new Mac mini server as well (which also has no built-in drive - they put a second 500GB HD in the space the DVD would normally use).
Look, Apple doesn't use the Atom in any products. Ergo, there's no guarantee that a shipping version of Mac OS X will support it. Since Atom is basically just a stripped-down x86, it probably will continue to run but no promises.
Just to remind everyone, Apple builds Macs. Macs are not available in every possible x86/chipset combo. Just a handful. That's one of the reasons why Macs are typically pretty reliable, but also why the average frankencomputer can't run OS X reliably.
Yes, Mac OS X is licensed in such a way that you don't have the legal right to run it on anything but an Apple-made Mac. Yes, they won't come after you with lawyers if you make a hackintosh. Yes, they will come after you if you then try to sell them (like Psystar). And yes, licenses like Apple's are restrictive.
But no, they aren't under any obligation at all to provide support for any computer other than what they expressly state on the box to be compatible and licensed. Which, in the case of Snow Leopard, is:
- Mac computer with an Intel processor - 1GB of memory - 5GB of available disk space - DVD drive for installation
If your computer doesn't fit that description, you're SOL. Period. If Snow Leopard runs now on your Atom-based netbook and 10.6.2 winds up killing it, suck it up or stick to 10.6.1. So it goes.
Last time I looked, Apple didn't make any computers that use the Atom processor. They only write OS X for computers with supported processors - if they don't support the Atom that's really no big deal unless they came out with a computer that used it.
Yes, I know the Hackintosh community is in an uproar about it - but Apple never promised you could use it, nor does their license allow you to use it. If it works, great. If not, suck it up and use eeebuntu, some other distro, or Windows.
Me, I'm running Windows 7 Pro on my eee 901, and I save Mac OS X for my Macs. My only Ubuntu machine is a VM on the Macbook.
The Storm may be a great Blackberry, but that doesn't make it the smartphone to beat. That remains the iPhone until proven otherwise.
Individual phones may have great features (The Pre has its relatively unrestricted development environment and multitasking, Blackberries have the BES for corporate management, etc., and Android has whatever the hell Android has), but until you take the full ecosystem that Apple's spawned and replicate most of it elsewhere they're still the king of the hill.
It's not that Apple invented the smartphone per se (I still remember my old Treo 650 that usually worked, for instance, and my 1st generation Blackberry I used at my old job), but the current popular definition of a smartphone is pretty much "has a touchscreen, runs bajillions of apps, is shiny and pretty, and can be my media center".
AKA iPhone. They created the definition that the average person is using nowadays, they were the first mover, and their app store has created a huge platform lock-in.
Just about all the PalmOS users still out there use Missing Sync anyways. It's the only Intel-native sync to begin with, since Palm themselves never bothered releasing an Intel version of their Desktop for Mac.
If Palm doesn't care enough to support it, why should Apple? There's not exactly a lot of PalmOS left out in the market nowadays - the Pre is the only Palm-branded phone that sells at all and even it's a virtual pimple on the body of iPhones and Blackberries.
(Blackberries that, by the way, are about to have their own native Intel-compatible Mac sync released)
I own a company that does outsourced IT support. Were it us, I wouldn't insist on being able to do remote support - but you'd pay so much for on-demand on-site support you'd be better off hiring someone in-house to do the job instead. The reality is that (were it us) we'd be coming in to your office periodically (depending on your size, from maybe once a month to as much as a couple of times a week. And most of the routine requests you will make we'd take care of by logging in remotely to deal with them for you. In most cases, we can log in and handle it a lot faster than we can free up enough time in someone's day to get them over to your office.
That's the reality of outsourced IT. You can get very good coverage that way, and any good company will give you face time with whomever is handling your account. I've got a lot of clients that trust my employees (and me) with their keys, passwords, and all the lot. I've got professional liability insurance, and a reputation that's even more important to me. If we were the company doing your support, I'd gladly sign an appropriate document guaranteeing we'd keep your data private.
I'm not pimping for my company (you're probably nowhere near where I work - else I would likely have been contacted as one of the firms bidding) but most companies like mine work that way. That's how we can do good work and still be affordable. But the reality a lot of these posters have pointed out stands: if you can't trust an IT company to handle things for you, then hire an admin in-house.
I'm in my forties. I've had a pretty good career to date, working as a tech, in management, and nowadays having my own company. I haven't used cursive since I was in grade school. Never really bothered mastering it, and today I don't use it beyond scrawling a signature.
What was much more useful was learning to type. I picked up enough speed at typing to get things done, and switched to a computer right when I went to college. Never looked back!
I've got a white 32GB iPhone 3GS, and no problems that severe. If I'm in extended use of the GPS/compass it does get warmer to the touch, as it will also do on lengthy phone calls (15 minutes plus or so). It also gets warmer when (surprise) playing games for an extended period. It hasn't gotten uncomfortably hot, nor has there been any discoloration so far.
As far as software issues, the only major one I've seen so far is that the Jawbone Prime headset I'd been using as my main headset has been having trouble with this phone - it disassociates sometimes and the button sequence to turn off the headset LED doesn't work anymore. My other headset (a Jabra 530) works fine so I've been using it.
Battery life has been pretty good so far - from my unscientific study it seems a little better than the 3G I had before that my wife now uses. Game playing drops it faster than voice or data, and web surfing does use more juice on 3G than on wifi.
There were a lot of BT and power management issues in the initial release of 2.0 last year. It took Apple a couple of releases over the first month or two to get things all the way right, and I suspect we'll have a couple of fast releases now as well.
The Apple trend with every new OS release (Mac or iPhone) is basically this:
- Limited public testing if any. Code freeze about a month before shipping.
- Initial bugfix release (.01) 2-4 weeks after the product shipped, with all the glaring bugs that they found after freeze addressed. This rarely has any problems found in initial public release addressed unless they're super-critical.
- About 2 months after release we get a.02 version that covers the main issues found after they got the product into public release. By this time the software is pretty solid - subsequent point releases during the product lifetime will add occasional minor features but mainly fix performance issues and/or security holes. Almost all the releases afterwards will be in the first 6-8 months when it's an iPhone OS - roughly 4 months before the next year's new OS version Apple will abandon the current one and concentrate on the announcements for the coming year.
So next February or so Apple will stop fixing 3.0 in preparation for 4.0 which will be announced around March and ship around June.
They basically do the same thing with the desktop OS - just the overall life cycle is longer. but the initial freeze/release/patch1/patch2 cycle applies there as well and on roughly the same timing.
So basically what I'm saying is that the problems that some 3GS users are having (but not me) are assuredly legit, and will likely be addressed in one of the first two bug-fix software releases for the phone. The first release will probably come in the next week or two and may address it - and within 1-2 months it will almost certainly be taken care of through power management. Not to mention that I'm sure my Bluetooth issue will be fixed as well. You get used to this. At least modern phones (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre) can and do now regularly get software updates to address issues.
I remember an era BI (before iPhone) where the carriers controlled software tightly, and the cell companies rarely or never released patches. There's no real good reason why Windows Mobile phones virtually never get OS updates for the installed base, or why the PalmOS Treos would take over a year to fix minor issues. Now that's properly in the hands of the vendors, where it belongs.
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That was pretty much my point. If I unlock the iPhone here in the US, my options are T-Mobile (with a tiny footprint and hardly any 3G presence, and what there is for 3G isn't iPhone compatible) and a handful of small rural carriers. That's it. If I want an iPhone in the US AT&T is pretty much the only way to go.
Taking that phone overseas, though, becomes useful with an unlocked phone. I can pay local rates for phone calls instead of roaming rates of $1-$2 per minute. I'd lose my phone number for the duration doing that but at least I'd have a choice.
In the LTE world (once the technology settles down) I should be able to take an unlocked phone and use it with any provider. Might be a while, but that's the best hope - and it's also what AT&T and Verizon have both announced they are using. There is hope...
As much as I want my iPhone carrier-unlocked, what other US carrier with GSM/HSDPA and a nationwide footprint do I have access to?
Point being, what am I supposed to do with my newly unlocked iPhone - go to T-Mobile? Not really, at least not in this country. The use I can see for an unlocked US iPhone is simply that were I to travel overseas I could use a local SIM over there and use it with a native carrier instead of getting violated with international roaming fees.
Not having left the States in seven years, I'm not worrying about it too much so far.
When the day eventually comes that LTE is everywhere, then it's worth worrying more about unlocking the iPhone for me. Because then I'll be free to shop between AT&T, Verizon, or whomever else is on LTE by then. Until then, unlocking an iPhone is mainly for the international traveler. And in many other countries, you can buy your unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone there and bring it back with you. Which sounds like the way to go at this point.
So Apple came out with a ridiculously high-res LCD to put in the iPhone 4, and then they came up with a slick name for it in marketing to make it sound even better.
And the point of this nitpick article is what?
Newsflash: color E-6 film has better resolution than CCDs in digital cameras. That doesn't stop camera companies from comparing their sensors favorably to film, and people don't write articles that are Slashdot link-worthy about it. But it's the iPhone, so it's news.
Let's just put it like this: The new iPhone has a frickin' gorgeous screen. It's way higher-res than anything else for the moment. Apple even came up with a catchy name for it. We good with that?
Already available now with iPhone 3. Funny post, though.
More seriously, Apple lets you write your own wrapper for WebKit if you want on the iPhone OS. A few 3rd parties are doing it now, adding features like ad blocking, side-by-side display, and so on. What Apple won't let you do is create your own rendering engine (Opera does it by rendering web pages on Opera's own servers and just sending down the optimized display) or add plugins to MobileSafari itself (not only will they not allow that, but they also don't have any frameworks to do it).
So if you want to write a WebKit wrapper that handles ad blocking, go for it. But you've already got competition out there.
Plus iAds isn't a framework for inserting ads on websites. It's a framework to allow app developers to distribute ad-supported software, using a pretty transparent revenue model. There's a bunch of third parties (AdMob, the Deck, etc.) providing that right now for developers, and iAds is joining them.
The "intent" of the eBays and Craigslists of the world is supposedly to let people sell things they don't want around (more or less). If I buy something with my income, and pay sales taxes on it, then sell it later on then so be it. If I'm lucky enough to make a little money on the arrangement (like if it turns out to be collectible), that's splendid. But it's not a business. Taxes due at each step of a transaction are a VAT, and we don't do that here.
If I'm buying goods wholesale or as an investment and I'm trying to sell them at a profit as my means of earning a living, though - well, that's taxable in this country and that's just all there is to it.
I run a services business (as an S Corp), and I could probably pay a little less tax if I weaseled appropriately and just buried all my income as "expenses". I don't. The business pays what are real, legitimate expenses (I don't buy an iPod for my kid and call it "computing equipment" or any of that kind of shady stuff). I keep my business and personal money separate and I pay myself and my employees a salary. I could probably make a few more bucks being really aggressive about things, but I know I'm doing the Right Thing and I'm not in line for an eventual trip to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison.
In other words, if you're trying to live free of the IRS by doing a cash business on eBay, screw you. Pay up.
True. And you're free to buy any competing product, or nothing at all.
What a lot of folks are missing is that this is not a monopoly. Apple owns the iTunes App Store, and they produce the devices that can use it and approve the content. When you choose to buy an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you are making a consumer statement that you like that model and you accept Apple's system. But you don't have to. Other devices run apps, there are other touchscreen phones, other tablets, and other media players.
For better or worse, Apple made a value judgement that they won't sell software for the iPhone OS that is built with any but Apple Xcode tools. And they won't let you run any software that's not signed. They don't have to justify it to anyone.
Open is good, but not required. And the average consumer couldn't care less. They want apps, nice-looking web pages, and an easy-to-use gadget that looks nice and has a really long battery life.
You're right. They don't need your business. They've got plenty of people who like that model.
Not a shocker. According to an antivirus company, most spam comes from a place where people use Windows and are clueless about preventing infections. The zombie Windows machines are a big part of the problem, but the command & control systems seem to mainly be overseas. As are a lot of the products/scams being pitched.
What this says is that in the US users need to do a better job of securing their computers. And all around the world spammers need to be killed.
PCs are still popular for MMO games, but outside of that the consoles make more sense to target. They are optimized for gaming (even the relatively low-end Wii), simpler to manage, and more importantly there are many more consoles sold to gamers than there are high-end gaming systems.
Also a factor is that you know what the hardware specs are for a particular console device. If you make it for PCs you have to ensure that it performs adequately no matter what - the user may have a crappy virus-infested PC but if the game he bought doesn't perform the way it does on his buddy's Xbox 360 then the game publisher sucks. If it doesn't run great on Windows 7 (but OK on XP) the publisher sucks. If it has issues with Norton (and what doesn't) then the game sucks.
If you publish for a console you've got less than cutting-edge hardware, but you know what you're in for there. And you can be pretty sure that if it works on your dev console it'll work for the end-user, too.
The PC game may not be dead, but it's not what it used to be and I think fewer and fewer games will target PCs (and I may be a Mac guy, but they'll have even fewer games there). The future of gaming at this point is consoles and handhelds.
Bingo - and this is also a huge reason why the cellphone-using masses flock to iPhones and not to all the more "open" devices out there in the market.
Users don't care if the garden is walled or not. They don't care if their video is served with an ideologically pure codec, either.
All users want is a phone that works well with plenty of conveient apps and a polished user experience. And they want their video to play in their browser of choice, and they want it to not make their computer's fans whine like crazy or suck down the battery meter on their handheld device. The combination of hardware acceleration support for H.264 on virtually every platform and H.264 support built into the Webkit browser family along with support going into IE9 is the finisher. Pure though Theora may be, this has become a Beta/VHS war and if Firefox doesn't add H.264 support it'll ultimately cost them market share.
The war is over. Firefox needs to have H.264 support if they want to remain relevant. If content providers decide they like Theora better, then you'll see the other browser makers add support for it but that's pretty unlikely.
It's not that they won't answer, it's that they pretty much already have, and really don't need to waste their time re-stating things that are obvious.
Save and transfer? Yes. For sure. The mechanism for transfer isn't specified yet, but there wouldn't be iWork for the device if you couldn't get things off it.
Exchange? Yep, the iPhone supports it, Apple is an ActiveSync licensee, so there's no reason why it wouldn't be in there.
VPN and config management? Yep, same as iPhone.
Media services other than iTunes? It'll be very limited, but probably some will work. Just like the iPhone (noticing a trend here?)
Videoconferencing? Sure, just use the built-in camera - wait, never mind.
Upgradable? Nope. Sealed box for a reason. Name one phone-type device that is (and SD cards don't count - I'm talking system memory).
Multiple apps? Not now. Maybe in some limited fashion down the road, if they build it into the iPhone OS underlying the iPad. Just like the iPhone.
Flash? No way. Not going to happen.
See? Easy to answer.
iPhone is one series of phones (basically one phone with three current models) from one manufacturer offered on one carrier in the US.
Android is a platform that's offered by multiple manufacturers on multiple carriers. There is no "Android phone" (even factoring in the Nexus One), there's Droid, Droid Eris, Moment, HTC Hero, G1, myTouch, Cliq, and Behold. As of right now. And that's on 3 of the 4 major US carriers, excepting AT&T for the moment.
Needless to say, I think Android as a whole will ultimately be the major "alternative platform" for those who want a phone that's not an iPhone or Blackberry. But as a whole, that will merely replace Windows Mobile and Symbian as alternatives, not eat the marketshare/mindshare of Apple and RIM.
Android will be the "OS you get on your phone when you don't ask for an iPhone or a Blackberry by name". And that's probably fine and dandy, it should increase margins for the handset makers, make money for Google, and eventually result in another useful app platform for developers.
At least here in metro Boston (and Eastern new England in general) I've had pretty good luck with AT&T since the latter part of 2008 - about six months after the iPhone 3G came out my service improved a lot. Most of my old dead spots are gone now, and there are places where my iPhone 3GS works well (like the client in Gloucester I was at today) and my colleague's Verizon Blackberry dies. Data speeds are very good anywhere I get 2 or more bars of service, and though there are still dead spots (eastbound on 128 through Manchester, for instance, anytime after dark) or Devereux Beach in Marblehead) they are far fewer than they ever were before.
On the other hand, my sister and her husband both went to iPhones this year in southern CT and they were much happier with Verizon's service. I don't visit them too often but I haven't noticed any issues when I've been there - I think it really depends on how much you use it and rely on it in a place.
Overall, using an iPhone's been a much better experience than my old Verizon Treo 700p provided - not only is it far more useful as a device, but I don't have to reboot it several times daily. The AT&T experience outside the coasts and major metro areas may be different, but mine's not bad. And the few times I've needed to call customer service they've been helpful.
Odd, but I'm not complaining!
Poor Fox - they think their content is important enough to change the behavior of the entire web surfing public. Newsflash - it's not.
I wonder if Rupert Murdoch has ever used Google for anything. When I do a Google News search, I get the beginnings of articles that link right to the newspaper site to read them. All I get from Google is an aggregation showing me what articles are available on a topic. Even if you put the content itself behind a paywall (the last great idea that didn't pan out for the news industry) I'd still just see that teaser paragraph. I still don't understand where the "theft" thing comes from.
Now if the entire news industry rose up in unison to lock out search engines it might have a small impact on the habits of users, but as long as there are some holdouts and/or wire feeds online one or two providers dropping out will have no real impact.
Except for Fox's losing some eyeballs as a result of this I don't see how it works out for anyone. Sure, they get some money that Microsoft is willing to waste, but still - the loss of eyeballs will drive their ad rates down and it'll all probably wash out.
Being only able to buy the iPhone here in the US as a carrier-locked phone - that's wrong and sucks. But sadly that's the rule here because of the deal Apple has with AT&T. May it expire soon, even though the only other national GSM carrier is T-Mobile and they have an even smaller footprint. It'd be nice to take an iPhone out of the country and get a local SIM without having to use your AT&T account.
Of course, that carrier lock is also why the iPhone costs $200 instead of about $600 or so - the carrier subsidy that AT&T pays Apple for it keeps you from having to pay all the money up front.
Jailbreaking, though, is a different story. Anyone who wants to jailbreak their iPhone should feel free to do so and run whatever they want. But if you go to the trouble to bypass Apple's application security model you get what you get. Not Apple's fault.
But things like this worm make me understand that much more why Apple works to plug the holes that jailbreak tools keep exploiting. We may not all like that we're restricted to getting apps from the App Store, but on the other hand the iPhone isn't sold as a tool for personal freedom. It's sold as a phone that runs apps that you get from Apple. Period.
There's other phones that are marketed as "freedom phones". If people want that above all else, they should buy a phone with the appropriate OS and not an iPhone.
Ultimately, I hope Apple opens up the App Store further and simply reviews apps to answer just a couple of questions:
1 - Does the app do anything that expressly isn't allowed by carrier contracts?
2 - Does it break the published development rules?
If it doesn't, then it ought to be published, period. For instance, now that AT&T stated that VoIP would now be allowed on their network, all the Google Voice apps and Skype should immediately be approved and put out for 3G usage. Because those apps don't break guidelines and are now allowed by the carrier.
But even if they eliminated all restrictions short of that, the App Store will never be the free market that jailbreakers want to have. So get another phone. I hear you can run anything you want on Windows Mobile.
(why you'd want to may be another story...)
eee k. thank you, mr. apple spokesman who posts on /. with his real name in his sig. brilliant!!!11
I like my real name and my online persona. They're one and the same. I prefer that to "l33td00d1" or Anonymous Coward. If you don't mind saying what you actually think, there's no reason to be an AC here, and handles have never really been my thing either. Been around long enough to not give a damn, either - as my UID here might point out.
And I'm not an Apple anything, though in my consulting business I and my employees work about half on Macs and half on Windows. I'm Apple-certified because that's a requirement to be in their consultant program. I'm registered with Microsoft and Novell, too.
Most importantly, I like Apple stuff. I've got quite a bit of it. And an iPhone. I like it, too. It'd be nice if I could run any unsigned app on my iPhone without jailbreaking it, but I'm OK with it as-is. I've got a bunch of PCs, too. And an eee901. And lots of other gear. I like it, too.
But I still don't care if you can't run Snow Leopard on your netbook. Suck it up.
Apple doesn't make an Atom-based Mac. Nor did they in the past. They explicitly sell and license Mac OS X to run only on Macs. If you want to try and get it to work on a non-Mac with a different CPU and/or chipset than what Apple supports, you're on your own, good luck to you.
Apple isn't going to send an army of lawyers to your house to stop you from trying to build a hackintosh. They will if you figure it out and then start selling them - see Psystar for details. But they won't do anything to make it easy for you to build a hackintosh, and if it breaks - oh well, sucks to be you, next time buy a Mac or stick to a supported OS on your hackintosh.
Me, I stick to Windows 7 Pro on my eee901 for now, but I may switch to eeebuntu soon. I like it. I'll keep Mac OS on my Macs.
This simplifies things a lot for AT&T (who still hasn't introduced tethering for the iPhone): All they have to do to get back on the high horse is come up with a better pricing plan than Verizon's and have the service available in the next couple of months. Even AT&T can potentially pull that off.
As for the Exchange data plan - both Verizon and AT&T already do this on paper for smartphones, but that's the "corporate" data plan. On all the phones I've seen (for both networks) it doesn't actually matter - if your phone supports ActiveSync and you have a personal account it still works fine.
You have to use the external USB DVD drive to install it. That's also the supported way to load software on the new Mac mini server as well (which also has no built-in drive - they put a second 500GB HD in the space the DVD would normally use).
Look, Apple doesn't use the Atom in any products. Ergo, there's no guarantee that a shipping version of Mac OS X will support it. Since Atom is basically just a stripped-down x86, it probably will continue to run but no promises.
Just to remind everyone, Apple builds Macs. Macs are not available in every possible x86/chipset combo. Just a handful. That's one of the reasons why Macs are typically pretty reliable, but also why the average frankencomputer can't run OS X reliably.
Yes, Mac OS X is licensed in such a way that you don't have the legal right to run it on anything but an Apple-made Mac. Yes, they won't come after you with lawyers if you make a hackintosh. Yes, they will come after you if you then try to sell them (like Psystar). And yes, licenses like Apple's are restrictive.
But no, they aren't under any obligation at all to provide support for any computer other than what they expressly state on the box to be compatible and licensed. Which, in the case of Snow Leopard, is:
- Mac computer with an Intel processor
- 1GB of memory
- 5GB of available disk space
- DVD drive for installation
And all the other specs are on:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html
If your computer doesn't fit that description, you're SOL. Period. If Snow Leopard runs now on your Atom-based netbook and 10.6.2 winds up killing it, suck it up or stick to 10.6.1. So it goes.
Last time I looked, Apple didn't make any computers that use the Atom processor. They only write OS X for computers with supported processors - if they don't support the Atom that's really no big deal unless they came out with a computer that used it.
Yes, I know the Hackintosh community is in an uproar about it - but Apple never promised you could use it, nor does their license allow you to use it. If it works, great. If not, suck it up and use eeebuntu, some other distro, or Windows.
Me, I'm running Windows 7 Pro on my eee 901, and I save Mac OS X for my Macs. My only Ubuntu machine is a VM on the Macbook.
The Storm may be a great Blackberry, but that doesn't make it the smartphone to beat. That remains the iPhone until proven otherwise.
Individual phones may have great features (The Pre has its relatively unrestricted development environment and multitasking, Blackberries have the BES for corporate management, etc., and Android has whatever the hell Android has), but until you take the full ecosystem that Apple's spawned and replicate most of it elsewhere they're still the king of the hill.
It's not that Apple invented the smartphone per se (I still remember my old Treo 650 that usually worked, for instance, and my 1st generation Blackberry I used at my old job), but the current popular definition of a smartphone is pretty much "has a touchscreen, runs bajillions of apps, is shiny and pretty, and can be my media center".
AKA iPhone. They created the definition that the average person is using nowadays, they were the first mover, and their app store has created a huge platform lock-in.
Just about all the PalmOS users still out there use Missing Sync anyways. It's the only Intel-native sync to begin with, since Palm themselves never bothered releasing an Intel version of their Desktop for Mac.
If Palm doesn't care enough to support it, why should Apple? There's not exactly a lot of PalmOS left out in the market nowadays - the Pre is the only Palm-branded phone that sells at all and even it's a virtual pimple on the body of iPhones and Blackberries.
(Blackberries that, by the way, are about to have their own native Intel-compatible Mac sync released)
I own a company that does outsourced IT support. Were it us, I wouldn't insist on being able to do remote support - but you'd pay so much for on-demand on-site support you'd be better off hiring someone in-house to do the job instead. The reality is that (were it us) we'd be coming in to your office periodically (depending on your size, from maybe once a month to as much as a couple of times a week. And most of the routine requests you will make we'd take care of by logging in remotely to deal with them for you. In most cases, we can log in and handle it a lot faster than we can free up enough time in someone's day to get them over to your office.
That's the reality of outsourced IT. You can get very good coverage that way, and any good company will give you face time with whomever is handling your account. I've got a lot of clients that trust my employees (and me) with their keys, passwords, and all the lot. I've got professional liability insurance, and a reputation that's even more important to me. If we were the company doing your support, I'd gladly sign an appropriate document guaranteeing we'd keep your data private.
I'm not pimping for my company (you're probably nowhere near where I work - else I would likely have been contacted as one of the firms bidding) but most companies like mine work that way. That's how we can do good work and still be affordable. But the reality a lot of these posters have pointed out stands: if you can't trust an IT company to handle things for you, then hire an admin in-house.
I'm in my forties. I've had a pretty good career to date, working as a tech, in management, and nowadays having my own company. I haven't used cursive since I was in grade school. Never really bothered mastering it, and today I don't use it beyond scrawling a signature.
What was much more useful was learning to type. I picked up enough speed at typing to get things done, and switched to a computer right when I went to college. Never looked back!
I've got a white 32GB iPhone 3GS, and no problems that severe. If I'm in extended use of the GPS/compass it does get warmer to the touch, as it will also do on lengthy phone calls (15 minutes plus or so). It also gets warmer when (surprise) playing games for an extended period. It hasn't gotten uncomfortably hot, nor has there been any discoloration so far.
As far as software issues, the only major one I've seen so far is that the Jawbone Prime headset I'd been using as my main headset has been having trouble with this phone - it disassociates sometimes and the button sequence to turn off the headset LED doesn't work anymore. My other headset (a Jabra 530) works fine so I've been using it.
Battery life has been pretty good so far - from my unscientific study it seems a little better than the 3G I had before that my wife now uses. Game playing drops it faster than voice or data, and web surfing does use more juice on 3G than on wifi.
There were a lot of BT and power management issues in the initial release of 2.0 last year. It took Apple a couple of releases over the first month or two to get things all the way right, and I suspect we'll have a couple of fast releases now as well.
The Apple trend with every new OS release (Mac or iPhone) is basically this:
- Limited public testing if any. Code freeze about a month before shipping.
- Initial bugfix release (.01) 2-4 weeks after the product shipped, with all the glaring bugs that they found after freeze addressed. This rarely has any problems found in initial public release addressed unless they're super-critical.
- About 2 months after release we get a .02 version that covers the main issues found after they got the product into public release. By this time the software is pretty solid - subsequent point releases during the product lifetime will add occasional minor features but mainly fix performance issues and/or security holes. Almost all the releases afterwards will be in the first 6-8 months when it's an iPhone OS - roughly 4 months before the next year's new OS version Apple will abandon the current one and concentrate on the announcements for the coming year.
So next February or so Apple will stop fixing 3.0 in preparation for 4.0 which will be announced around March and ship around June.
They basically do the same thing with the desktop OS - just the overall life cycle is longer. but the initial freeze/release/patch1/patch2 cycle applies there as well and on roughly the same timing.
So basically what I'm saying is that the problems that some 3GS users are having (but not me) are assuredly legit, and will likely be addressed in one of the first two bug-fix software releases for the phone. The first release will probably come in the next week or two and may address it - and within 1-2 months it will almost certainly be taken care of through power management. Not to mention that I'm sure my Bluetooth issue will be fixed as well. You get used to this. At least modern phones (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre) can and do now regularly get software updates to address issues.
I remember an era BI (before iPhone) where the carriers controlled software tightly, and the cell companies rarely or never released patches. There's no real good reason why Windows Mobile phones virtually never get OS updates for the installed base, or why the PalmOS Treos would take over a year to fix minor issues. Now that's properly in the hands of the vendors, where it belongs.