the subscription plan of iPhone is relatively so cheap (unlimited internet access)
My current plan (Sprint SERO) gives me 500 prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, unlimited texts, unlimited data, and unlimited roaming. Total cost for voice+data? $30/month. And I get, regularly, 1.5Mbps/800Kbps up/down (it's rated for 3/1.5 Mbps but I rarely see that). I've run hours of person-to-person video calls over the connection with no drop-out. Plus I can tether my phone and use it for internet access. As a result, I rarely have to switch on its built-in Wifi (which sucks more battery compared with 3G).
I've looked at AT&T's plans and they are pretty expensive. Add up the total amount of data in AT&T's "unlimited, but slow" data plan and it's even less of a bargain.
Apple has betrayed the utter lameness and anti-consumer stance of companies that have had more than 15 years to do something forward looking in the realm of cellular phones
How is it, by producing a "smart" phone that makes it heroically difficult for me to do the simplest things (like add ringtones or voice commands, plug it into my PC or use bluetooth to hit it as a simple USB mass storage disk, download/install/run native or Java programs, change the UI to suit my taste, send multimedia messages/videos with a single click, grab any push email, run emulators, swap out the bleeding battery quickly and easily, or switch carriers) that Apple is NOT lame and anti-consumer?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but apple's phone without serious hacking doesn't support USB Mass Storage and doesn't allow owners to access that 8GB as storage, right? So, what good it is to me? By comparison, my Mogul (HTC Hermes) cost around $120 after activation rebates, has WiFi b/g, bluetooth, mem slot with support for *multiple* 8GB cards, wide touchscreen, slide out tactile kb, widescreen, 3/1 Mbps up/down, browser with flash and streaming video, IMs, Java, IRda, voice interface, and push email. Also, I can run, as an option, a "touch" interface that is pretty, and looks cool, but basically is less efficient for complex tasks than a multi-modal, goal/macro interface.
I'm still not entirely sure why you are dead set on comparing the iphone, a $600/$400 phone, with a $100 phone. If anything, you are making the iphone seem overpriced for what you get, or the $100 phones underpriced. You should compare the iphone with high-end phones such as the LG Prada, the Tosh G900, the HTC Kaiser or Athena, or the Nokia N95. Against those, it's a little anemic and aggressively hostile to owner customisation.
Having to use your web browser to get your freaking voicemail is just insane.
Almost as insane as claiming that the browser should constitute the entirety of a handheld's "SDK" and implement all of its applications?
I was thinking about how many clicks it took for me to get voicemail, and I realised that 2 was one too many. So I quickly recorded a voice tag ("Visual!"), assigned it to a button and made it open m.grandcentral.com. So now I just push the assigned button to activate my phone's voice interface, say "Visual", and away it goes. Get back to me when Apple implements a voice interface. If you're ever going to use your handheld properly in multiple environments, you're going to need to have a variety of interfaces available. When you are driving, you most certainly do not want to be futzing around with an exclusively visual screen that takes many wipes to accomplish anything. Likewise, if you are in a meeting, you may want to be surreptitious about using your device and so sight-unseen button pushing is key here. But like you, when I can use my screen, I like being able to do everything with just the touch interface, even though it often takes longer to accomplish many tasks than a more goal-directed, macro approach.
If by "difficult", you mean bookmarking "http://m.grandcentral.com" and simply opening a single page to see all your voicemails immediately, or alternatively by reading your SMS message list where each voicemail generates a simple text message with the caller ID details and a single click will play each message then, yes, that seems quite difficult... if you're retarded.
I mean, it takes fully *two* clicks to initialise and play any single text message. My god, when will the horrors of obscure UIs end? Tell me again how many hand waves it takes to send an email to a specific person under Apple's implementation of a touch UI on the iphone?
You certainly don't find many devices with the iPhone's feature set in the $0-$100 after contract price range.
Really? No GPS, no tethering, no mem card, no IRda, no real bluetooth PAN, no MMS, no OTA pda syncing, no useful push email, no IM, no tactile feedback. I'm having trouble finding some features, can you point them out?
lets not go getting all hyped up by the fact that the iPhone has a screen with 4.8% more pixels 36 months later, it's not overly revolutionary.
Agreed. Toshiba's G900 WM6 phone packs in 800x400 pixels into the same size screen as the iphone. Also, some of the (Korean-only) Samsung touchscreen models have haptic feedback for the touch UI. For $600, sorry, $400, I'd expect a little more.
That is 4 carries that you have to make Visual Voicemail work on.
Visual voicemail works fine on any phone with a web browser through Google/Grand Central. I get a voicemail on that system, I can choose to get a call and/or a text, or all the voicemails are listed, visually, on m.grandcentral.com. Doesn't seem too difficult.
The Mogul is a later, thinner version of the HTC Hermes model, the platform on which the earlier, older Tytn was also based. The Mogul is 18mm thick, and that includes a slide-out full qwerty keyboard, a flash-enabled camera, a voice recorder, IrDA, a jogwheel, single-button voice interface access, USB, a memory card slot, and a battery that can be swapped out within 30s. For an extra 4.5mm, I can live with that.
It should also be noted that the Hermes platform itself is from the middle of last year and positively ancient. For me, the fact that it cost under $120 with rebates, runs basically every ebook SW known, costs $30/month including unlimited data, and can emulate all my old consoles was a no-brainer. Were I to splurge iphone levels of cash, I'd probably get the Nokia N95 or the Toshiba G900 (with an 800x400 display delivering twice the pixel density of the iphone).
the iPhone is also supposed to be a phone and a video iPod
Unless you have 3G, you're probably not used to thinking of your phone as an always-potentially-on high-speed conduit, so you're probably misunderstanding what I mean when I say "data". I can spend several hours a day streaming video and music from my server over either 3G or WiFi using Orb to to the server-side transcoding (I know other people prefer custom hardware, like SlingBox). So basically, I am "carrying" around a TB of data that I can access anytime. To be honest though, there are very few occasions where I need to turn on WiFi (usually, basements) because 3G is plenty fast enough to stream video. And when I use the phone as a modem hooked to a PC, it's fast enough to stream SD DIVX at full framerates for easy viewing.
battery life under 3G would appear to be a "bit" of an issue...
My Mogul (CDMA version of HTC Hermes/Tytn) can run a good six hours or so on full web mode (1.5 Mbps/800K up/down) or running the (native) Google Maps. If I use it intermittently, it lasts the whole day, alternating between text, data, and PDA. On certain days, in weak signal areas, I have noticed that the battery will drain much faster (like, within six hours or so), and even faster if I have turned on bluetooth, WiFI, or IR beams. But you know what? From the home screen, or using a button on the side, I can turn on and off any or all of the radio emitters using single pushes or clicks. If I want, I can reduce the device's functions down to basically a PDA and, in that condition, the battery seems to last a couple of days.
It was not deliberately crippled. The current chips uses too much power and would make the battery life unacceptable. Google for more info and Jobs' comments on the subject.
The Reality Distortion Field is in full effect then I see.
You're right, it's 15% (unless you're in the lowest bracket, when it's 10%). The rate's going up to 20% within a few years (barring legislative action).
Jobs underpays himself in income for the very same reason that the honchos at Google and other similar companies lowball their income. Were they to receive significant income, they would pay a progressive tax rate that topped out in the mid-30% range. By "settling" for tiny salaries but massive option grants and holding on to their purchased equities for more than a year, they pay only a non-progressive 10% long-term capital gains assessment. If they incorporate in a tax-dodge country like Ireland and receive income in respect of patents and copyrights owned by them and assigned to their companies, then they manage to pay virtually no tax at all. And the "$1" salary of course makes for great PR. Make no mistake though, Apple's shareholders have "paid" Jobs and others several hundred million dollars in terms of a dilution outstanding equity through repeated option granting. When these options have been back-timed to conincide with price drops, Apple shareholders have paid out even more.
My all-time record was early this year, when I managed a smidgen under 600GB in one month on Optimum. I was careful to limit my upload to a fraction of that and avoided getting throttled. I'm sure glad I wasn't on Comcast!
In the meantime, that ol' Apple sandbox is looking pretty sweet.
A prison with velvet bars is still a prison.
This was from several years ago - not surprisingly prices have dropped! Intel's Clovertown/Kentsfield 4-core/CPU kludge was out last year! 2006-10. It's just a shame that Apple has hitched to the rather underwhelming Intel approach rather than the forthcoming AMD 8-core product that's fully integrated.
Let's see, if I had to build an 8-core right now: 2x L5320 Xeon @ 1.9 GHz. Bensley/Woodcrest MB, say, SuperMicro X7DA8 slots up to 32GB of RAM but I'd settle for 8GB. Case, PSU, Disk, gfx.
8-Core Opteron. First hit on Google. The point is, I think, is that outside of the Apple Walled Sandpit, there are plenty of off-the-shelf choices or, more importantly for those that like to roll their own, that is, "hackers", you want an 8-core machine, you can drop by Fry's and buy the damn parts yourself. Intel's "Nehalem" chipset is, I think, a ready to run 8-core chipset for the Intels. You think *Apple* went out and invented its own 8-core Intel chipset? I don't think so.
Old PSUs are sometimes amazingly inefficient, especially at lower loads, that you might be lucky to get 50% efficiency. So you're got to double your (conservative) estimates for real-world usage. Don't go by the numbers - the only way is to use a kill-a-watt or equivalent and measure typical usage over a few days, then normalise.
Skip the expensive NIC and make use of that old PC.
And how much does that PC cost annually to power? Let's say it's consuming a conservative 200W. It'll take 5 hours to consume a kilowatt. Let's say you pay 12 cents/kilowatt-hour. Leave it on 24/7, multiply the daily cost out annually, and you see that that this "old PC" is a most expensive folly for something this simple. You're much better off getting a low-watt (10-20W) router, upgrading the firmware, and running your QoS there.
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the subscription plan of iPhone is relatively so cheap (unlimited internet access)
My current plan (Sprint SERO) gives me 500 prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, unlimited texts, unlimited data, and unlimited roaming. Total cost for voice+data? $30/month. And I get, regularly, 1.5Mbps/800Kbps up/down (it's rated for 3/1.5 Mbps but I rarely see that). I've run hours of person-to-person video calls over the connection with no drop-out. Plus I can tether my phone and use it for internet access. As a result, I rarely have to switch on its built-in Wifi (which sucks more battery compared with 3G).
I've looked at AT&T's plans and they are pretty expensive. Add up the total amount of data in AT&T's "unlimited, but slow" data plan and it's even less of a bargain.
Apple has betrayed the utter lameness and anti-consumer stance of companies that have had more than 15 years to do something forward looking in the realm of cellular phones
How is it, by producing a "smart" phone that makes it heroically difficult for me to do the simplest things (like add ringtones or voice commands, plug it into my PC or use bluetooth to hit it as a simple USB mass storage disk, download/install/run native or Java programs, change the UI to suit my taste, send multimedia messages/videos with a single click, grab any push email, run emulators, swap out the bleeding battery quickly and easily, or switch carriers) that Apple is NOT lame and anti-consumer?
an 8GB flash drive
Correct me if I'm wrong, but apple's phone without serious hacking doesn't support USB Mass Storage and doesn't allow owners to access that 8GB as storage, right? So, what good it is to me? By comparison, my Mogul (HTC Hermes) cost around $120 after activation rebates, has WiFi b/g, bluetooth, mem slot with support for *multiple* 8GB cards, wide touchscreen, slide out tactile kb, widescreen, 3/1 Mbps up/down, browser with flash and streaming video, IMs, Java, IRda, voice interface, and push email. Also, I can run, as an option, a "touch" interface that is pretty, and looks cool, but basically is less efficient for complex tasks than a multi-modal, goal/macro interface.
I'm still not entirely sure why you are dead set on comparing the iphone, a $600/$400 phone, with a $100 phone. If anything, you are making the iphone seem overpriced for what you get, or the $100 phones underpriced. You should compare the iphone with high-end phones such as the LG Prada, the Tosh G900, the HTC Kaiser or Athena, or the Nokia N95. Against those, it's a little anemic and aggressively hostile to owner customisation.
Having to use your web browser to get your freaking voicemail is just insane.
Almost as insane as claiming that the browser should constitute the entirety of a handheld's "SDK" and implement all of its applications?
I was thinking about how many clicks it took for me to get voicemail, and I realised that 2 was one too many. So I quickly recorded a voice tag ("Visual!"), assigned it to a button and made it open m.grandcentral.com. So now I just push the assigned button to activate my phone's voice interface, say "Visual", and away it goes. Get back to me when Apple implements a voice interface. If you're ever going to use your handheld properly in multiple environments, you're going to need to have a variety of interfaces available. When you are driving, you most certainly do not want to be futzing around with an exclusively visual screen that takes many wipes to accomplish anything. Likewise, if you are in a meeting, you may want to be surreptitious about using your device and so sight-unseen button pushing is key here. But like you, when I can use my screen, I like being able to do everything with just the touch interface, even though it often takes longer to accomplish many tasks than a more goal-directed, macro approach.
Doesn't seem that difficult for a geek you mean.
If by "difficult", you mean bookmarking "http://m.grandcentral.com" and simply opening a single page to see all your voicemails immediately, or alternatively by reading your SMS message list where each voicemail generates a simple text message with the caller ID details and a single click will play each message then, yes, that seems quite difficult... if you're retarded.
I mean, it takes fully *two* clicks to initialise and play any single text message. My god, when will the horrors of obscure UIs end? Tell me again how many hand waves it takes to send an email to a specific person under Apple's implementation of a touch UI on the iphone?
You certainly don't find many devices with the iPhone's feature set in the $0-$100 after contract price range.
Really? No GPS, no tethering, no mem card, no IRda, no real bluetooth PAN, no MMS, no OTA pda syncing, no useful push email, no IM, no tactile feedback. I'm having trouble finding some features, can you point them out?
lets not go getting all hyped up by the fact that the iPhone has a screen with 4.8% more pixels 36 months later, it's not overly revolutionary.
Agreed. Toshiba's G900 WM6 phone packs in 800x400 pixels into the same size screen as the iphone. Also, some of the (Korean-only) Samsung touchscreen models have haptic feedback for the touch UI. For $600, sorry, $400, I'd expect a little more.
That is 4 carries that you have to make Visual Voicemail work on.
Visual voicemail works fine on any phone with a web browser through Google/Grand Central. I get a voicemail on that system, I can choose to get a call and/or a text, or all the voicemails are listed, visually, on m.grandcentral.com. Doesn't seem too difficult.
take your TyTN and shave off a 13.5mm wafer
The Mogul is a later, thinner version of the HTC Hermes model, the platform on which the earlier, older Tytn was also based. The Mogul is 18mm thick, and that includes a slide-out full qwerty keyboard, a flash-enabled camera, a voice recorder, IrDA, a jogwheel, single-button voice interface access, USB, a memory card slot, and a battery that can be swapped out within 30s. For an extra 4.5mm, I can live with that.
It should also be noted that the Hermes platform itself is from the middle of last year and positively ancient. For me, the fact that it cost under $120 with rebates, runs basically every ebook SW known, costs $30/month including unlimited data, and can emulate all my old consoles was a no-brainer. Were I to splurge iphone levels of cash, I'd probably get the Nokia N95 or the Toshiba G900 (with an 800x400 display delivering twice the pixel density of the iphone).
the iPhone is also supposed to be a phone and a video iPod
Unless you have 3G, you're probably not used to thinking of your phone as an always-potentially-on high-speed conduit, so you're probably misunderstanding what I mean when I say "data". I can spend several hours a day streaming video and music from my server over either 3G or WiFi using Orb to to the server-side transcoding (I know other people prefer custom hardware, like SlingBox). So basically, I am "carrying" around a TB of data that I can access anytime. To be honest though, there are very few occasions where I need to turn on WiFi (usually, basements) because 3G is plenty fast enough to stream video. And when I use the phone as a modem hooked to a PC, it's fast enough to stream SD DIVX at full framerates for easy viewing.
battery life under 3G would appear to be a "bit" of an issue...
My Mogul (CDMA version of HTC Hermes/Tytn) can run a good six hours or so on full web mode (1.5 Mbps/800K up/down) or running the (native) Google Maps. If I use it intermittently, it lasts the whole day, alternating between text, data, and PDA. On certain days, in weak signal areas, I have noticed that the battery will drain much faster (like, within six hours or so), and even faster if I have turned on bluetooth, WiFI, or IR beams. But you know what? From the home screen, or using a button on the side, I can turn on and off any or all of the radio emitters using single pushes or clicks. If I want, I can reduce the device's functions down to basically a PDA and, in that condition, the battery seems to last a couple of days.
It was not deliberately crippled. The current chips uses too much power and would make the battery life unacceptable. Google for more info and Jobs' comments on the subject.
The Reality Distortion Field is in full effect then I see.
You're right, it's 15% (unless you're in the lowest bracket, when it's 10%). The rate's going up to 20% within a few years (barring legislative action).
Steve's Salary: $1 ...
Jobs underpays himself in income for the very same reason that the honchos at Google and other similar companies lowball their income. Were they to receive significant income, they would pay a progressive tax rate that topped out in the mid-30% range. By "settling" for tiny salaries but massive option grants and holding on to their purchased equities for more than a year, they pay only a non-progressive 10% long-term capital gains assessment. If they incorporate in a tax-dodge country like Ireland and receive income in respect of patents and copyrights owned by them and assigned to their companies, then they manage to pay virtually no tax at all. And the "$1" salary of course makes for great PR. Make no mistake though, Apple's shareholders have "paid" Jobs and others several hundred million dollars in terms of a dilution outstanding equity through repeated option granting. When these options have been back-timed to conincide with price drops, Apple shareholders have paid out even more.
My all-time record was early this year, when I managed a smidgen under 600GB in one month on Optimum. I was careful to limit my upload to a fraction of that and avoided getting throttled. I'm sure glad I wasn't on Comcast!
Like Skype for Windows Mobile? Works great.
sounds like someone needs an Apple TV.
yes, you're right Apple's TV thingy doesn't put DRM onto shows it records... BECAUSE IT CAN'T RECORD.
Jeez.
Apple Network Server. It ran AIX, how much more corporate can you get?
Apple doesn't target large business/enterprise markets. They never have.
XServe
Lisa
LaserWriter
Claris
Mac II
Mac Portable
Newton
Taligent
WebObjects
I could go on. Apple wants the business market, but it has never figured out how to meaningfully get it back since it fucked up the Apple ][ lock.
In the meantime, that ol' Apple sandbox is looking pretty sweet.
A prison with velvet bars is still a prison.
This was from several years ago - not surprisingly prices have dropped! Intel's Clovertown/Kentsfield 4-core/CPU kludge was out last year! 2006-10. It's just a shame that Apple has hitched to the rather underwhelming Intel approach rather than the forthcoming AMD 8-core product that's fully integrated.
Let's see, if I had to build an 8-core right now:
2x L5320 Xeon @ 1.9 GHz.
Bensley/Woodcrest MB, say, SuperMicro X7DA8
slots up to 32GB of RAM but I'd settle for 8GB.
Case, PSU, Disk, gfx.
Still squeaking under $3000.
Seriously, Newegg is your friend.
8-Core Opteron. First hit on Google. The point is, I think, is that outside of the Apple Walled Sandpit, there are plenty of off-the-shelf choices or, more importantly for those that like to roll their own, that is, "hackers", you want an 8-core machine, you can drop by Fry's and buy the damn parts yourself. Intel's "Nehalem" chipset is, I think, a ready to run 8-core chipset for the Intels. You think *Apple* went out and invented its own 8-core Intel chipset? I don't think so.
the über-geek entrepreneurial technical elite who set the direction of computing 10 years out
If this elite really set standards then we'd all be running p-code on Lisp machines by now and programming APL in our spare time.
Old PSUs are sometimes amazingly inefficient, especially at lower loads, that you might be lucky to get 50% efficiency. So you're got to double your (conservative) estimates for real-world usage. Don't go by the numbers - the only way is to use a kill-a-watt or equivalent and measure typical usage over a few days, then normalise.
Skip the expensive NIC and make use of that old PC.
And how much does that PC cost annually to power? Let's say it's consuming a conservative 200W. It'll take 5 hours to consume a kilowatt. Let's say you pay 12 cents/kilowatt-hour. Leave it on 24/7, multiply the daily cost out annually, and you see that that this "old PC" is a most expensive folly for something this simple. You're much better off getting a low-watt (10-20W) router, upgrading the firmware, and running your QoS there.