Sure it's learned behavior, and it's all the same if you're willing to do some math. However, it is often argued that the metric system is superior on the basis that the units are sensible for certain sorts of measurements. I was showing that while metric units have certain correlations to certain measurements, imperial units also correlate to certain measurements. Therefore, we should find another ground to base our decisions about the superiority of some units over others, or else we should admit that different units make different activities easier.
I think you're very right, but lets not forget that it's not just that Jobs has high standards, but that he seems to have a good sense of what standards should be met. In short, he seems to have good taste, and a good sense of what will be useful and what won't. I guess it's sort of like the distinction between a perfectionism and OCD. A perfectionist has a sense of what needs to be better, while someone with OCD just can't deal with anything being less than perfect.
Just as a simple, easy to understand example, take the iPod. Someone with high standards might have complained early on that it didn't have wireless and had less space than a nomad. Some perfectionists might have forced the engineers to stick an FM tuner in it. jobs, however, seemed intent on focusing on making it small, having a simple interface, and making it easy to sync with your computer, and that's why people like it. Sure, in hindsight, it's pretty obvious-- but then you have to remember that no one else did that. It took other companies *years* to recognize that Apple had chosen the right things to focus on.
In my series or movie, the Federation is really a vast imperialist military dictatorship... and Empire that has been slowly and surely conquering the galaxy.
I kind of like this idea, but I think it would be more interesting to piece together a plot that didn't discount the old Trek series/movies. I think you did a good job of picking out some of the uncomfortable issues of the Federation, and there are more. So it'd be neat if someone assumed that everything is as the movies/series portrayed them, but that there was also a dark, ugly side to the Federation. Maybe behind all their councils and democratic rules, there's really a few people pulling strings. Maybe, for all his virtue, Picard is just a pawn in a larger, more sinister system.
Or maybe you just show some other point of view, and show that the Federation, for all the good intentions, isn't always making things better. In my opinion, this is the most interesting approach to take. Show how one of Picard's moral and principled stands had unintended negative consquences. To some extent, it's been done before in the Star Trek series. In Deep Space 9 especially, there was an uncomfortable tension between StarFleet's desire to help Bajorans and StarFleet's own needs. There are instances where the Federation comes across as arrogant and selfish in spite of a general desire to be "good".
See, initially, this was the only thing that made Enterprise interesting to me at all. The original Star Trek brought us centuries forward in time, with all this amazing technology (admittedly, some of it is pretty dated now, but anway...), and it left this big chasm. How did we go from point A (present day) to point B (warp drive and interplanetary travel). If the interesting thing is to watch the technology develop, there was this big vacuum in the middle, and it was interesting in Enterprise for them to try to pick a mid-point.
I like the idea of humans exploring the galaxy without yet being masters of interplanetary travel. In places, the Enterprise in "Enterprise" looked more like a submarine than a Star Trek space ship, and I appreciated that. There were some nods to the idea that humans had no idea what was out there, and that their ship was fragile. If their warp drives got damages, they might be stranded in deep space for the rest of their lives, and there was no federation with Galaxy-class starships to come rescue them. It wasn't that they were ridiculously far away (like in Voyager), but just that the human race hadn't established themselves in space.
To me, it's this sort of thing that has made Star Trek become boring over the years. STTNG makes space travel seem so safe unless some other species decides to attack you, but they generally know what species are out there anyway. It takes such extraordinary circumstances to put Picard's Enterprise in danger and to threaten the entire crew. What's lost is the sense that the endeavor itself, setting out aimlessly into deep space just to see what is there, is dangerous.
It's not because of some magical superiorty science that normal people need either, it's mostly because multiplying by 10 is a lot easier than multiplying by 12 then 16 then 8, or whatever!
It's not easier if we were using a base-16 numbering system!
Ok, but seriously, it is an issue of context. If you're a scientist doing scientific research, by all means, use the metric system. However, for some purposes, the metric system isn't superior.
The easiest example I can think of is temperature. I've been told by lots of people that we (I'm American) should use the Celsius for temperatures. They tell me, "It makes a lot more sense, and it's more elegant. 0 degrees is the temperature that water freezes, and 100 degrees is when it boils. Think of how nice that is. It makes so much sense for cooking and scientific experiments..."
Well, that's fine, and so I support anyone who wants to use Celsius measurements for cooking or science. However, think for a second about the Fahrenheit scale. The range of 0-100 degrees is roughly the temperature in which human being can live. The exact range that's comfortable for people depends on various things, including the specific person, clothing, wind and humidity, etc. However, somewhere 100 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that people need to be careful about heat-stroke, and around 0 degrees is where people are in danger of freezing to death or getting frostbite, even if they're wearing warm clothes.
So while Celsius makes sense for some scientific purposes, I think Fahrenheit is where it's at for talking about weather. Likewise, if I need to estimate the length of the room and I don't have a measuring device, do you know how I do it? I walk, one foot in front of the other, and see how many steps it takes. My feet are each just about 1 foot long, and it works pretty reliably. If you want argue that meters are better for scientific purposes, manufacturing, or even construction, then by all means do so. However, different units are more appropriate for measuring different things, so don't try to tell me that I can't use Imperial units where it makes sense.
The only thing that SSL actually tells you is that the traffic you have is encrypted.
Maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying, but part of the idea of SSL certificates is also to verify that the site you're connecting to is actually the site it's claiming to be. You can use SSL to encrypt the traffic without this feature, and maybe there are ways around SSL anyway, but if you don't want 3rd-party certification of your identity, you don't need to pay for SSL certs anyway.
With training, you still have the problem that some people are utterly and incurably stupid and careless. Security (in general) should be a multi-pronged initiative. You should educate people how to be secure and how to spot potential security issues, but you should also, where feasible, make it difficult for people to do insecure things.
Indeed, it appears less as though Cisco accidently let a valuable trademark lapse, and more like Cisco is attempting to hold onto a trademark they've never used and have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of using it as leverage against Apple. No one has any brand association with the name "iPhone" to any product other than the Apple iPhone anyway.
Well it does seem like a very funny move. One possibility, I suppose, is that someone at Apple messed up, claimed it was worked out, and it wasn't. It may be that Apple decided they really wanted the trademark and they decided to just use it, and work the whole thing out in court.
It seems to me that it's kind of a lost cause for Cisco. People on rumor sites have been calling this thing an "iPhone" for years, even when it was just a rumored R&D project. It has so overwhelmingly been referred to as the "iPhone" during its anticipation that, no matter what Apple called it at release, people would refer to it as "the iPhone". Now it's been officially announced as the iPhone. It's a done deal.
I think Apple should concede to Cisco and call it, instead, "the iPod phone". Go ahead, let Cisco have their victory. People will still call it the iPhone. If Cisco tries to market anything as the iPhone, people will say, "that's not a real iPhone. That's some crap made by some other company."
Ironically, trademarks are meant to prevent brand dilution, and the only company with any brand recognition for the name "iPhone" doesn't own the trademark. Cisco has no brand recognition here to dilute, and never did.
Even if that's the case, I'm willing to buy software when it's good and does what I need. You think someone who is paying $600 for a phone is going to worry that the program he wants will cost him $20?
When I read the slashdot article summary, I was in the same boat as you. I'm a fan of Apple products, and was eager to get an iPhone, throw SSH, VPN, and maybe a TS client on it. The idea that there wouldn't be any 3rd party software definitely gave me pause about buying one.
And then I read the article. The summary quotes Jobs as saying, "These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them". However, lets put it in some context:
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
Ok, so what I take from that is that Apple will permit 3rd party development, but there will be some restriction on loading software on it. Apple will be serving as a sort of gate-keeper, it seems. Now, that still kind of sucks, but it means there might be hope for my SSH client. If I can get a SSH client on it, it'll be good enough.
Perhaps not. But if you were willing to spend $3.99 for a sandwich and $1.99 for a bag of chips during today's lunch, it follows that you might be willing to spend $5.95 on a sandwich/bag of chips combo meal.
I agree that cell phone networks and rates can seem a bit silly, but this, along with everything else, is part of the reason why I'm glad to see Apple entering the market. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the market, Apple doesn't have a lot of vested interest in maintaining the status quo. I think the long-term endpoint we should be shooting for is ubiquitous wireless broadband internet access with wireless VOIP devices (which the iPhone could easily become). Unfortunately, there's little incentive for cell phone carriers or manufacturers to move in that direction.
I own a Motorola Q and I can agree with some of what you're saying. However, I think it also comes down to a matter of whether or not you need their primary offerings: contacts, calender, and email. I know a lot of professionals that are not only not technophiles, they're actually technophobes, who find them utterly indispensable.?
I agree with this. The fact is, depending on your job, it might be that you almost don't have a choice. You *need* a portable device with contacts, calendaring, and e-mail, either in your phone or in a separate PDA, and so you're just going to pick the best thing available. In truth, I'm on the border line of having a job like that (lots of free time to comment on Slashdot, but pretty much on-call 24/7), but I find smartphones and PDAs entirely too frustrating to deal with. I opt instead to carry a laptop with me everywhere, and occasionally one of those Verizon cards for cell phone network internet. I don't like carrying such a heavy device everywhere, but smart phones stress me out.
Yes, honestly, what worries me most about the iPhone is the rumors that it will be closed to third party developers. I can tell you that I really like what I'm seeing as far as the e-mail and web browsing, but what I'd really like is to be able to do some remote administration. If I could get SSH, VPN, and a terminal services client on an iPhone, I would consider it a near-perfect device. The only thing to make it perfect would be if, in a pinch, I could use it to provide internet access for my laptop, but I wouldn't really need that feature if I could get e-mail, VPN, SSH, and TS directly on the phone itself.
I understand being concerned about the lack of a keyboard, but the truth is, I probably wouldn't use my phone to compose e-mails or run any of the remote-admin software very often. Those things, for me, would be the sort of features I might only use once a months, executing a few commands in an emergency, but a couple of those emergencies might be important enough to justify the $500 purchase.
I'm sure we know different people, but most of the people I know have different complaints. Living in New York, coverage is (mostly) decent enough, and I don't hear lots of complaints about prices and contracts. I guess I'm dealing with young professionals who have money and fancy phones and data plans and iPods anyway, but most of them are annoyed by the functionality of the phones.
For example, people want to get e-mail on their phones, but they can never figure out how to use it properly. (being in IT, I'm often the one they ask for help) They also want to use SMS, but with e-mail and SMS, you either have a keyboard which takes up extra space, or you have to deal with hitting your numbers and hoping the predictive text is good. A lot of people here *want* cameras and mp3 players and all that crap built in, but whenever they actually try to use these things on their phones, it doesn't work as they expect. Even if they encode their whole library in mp3, they can't sync things from iTunes. Carriers want them to buy wallpaper, ringtones, and music over the network. the cameras are slow to respond, hard to figure out, and pictures, again, need to be transfered over the network. There are web browsers on the phones, but half the time you can't actually navigate through sites very well because they weren't designed to be read on mobile devices.
Personally, I don't think it's usually a hardware issue, but a problem with software. Blackberries are barely satisfactory for e-mail, but have very little functionality for such big, ugly, expensive devices. Palm is stuck in the stone-age. Windows CE would appear to be a winner, except everyone seems to agree that it's sluggish, and the interface is poorly conceived for the small screens it appears on.
So I'm dealing with the exact sort of people who would buy a smartphone, and would be willing to spend something on the order of $500. The problem has been that these smartphones just don't work very well, and I'm hopeful that Apple will do a better job.
I really doubt that the cell phone components add very much to the price, and removing the 2 year contract drives the price up even more. Even at $600, the product is being subsidized by Cingular. So you'd end up with a product that costs *more* to buy and doesn't have ubiquitous internet access.
No matter what, this isn't going to be a budget-level device. At least not at this point, but maybe in a couple years. However, the nice thing about this is, if we ever get ubiquitous wireless internet access (not through the cell phone carriers), it seems like it'd be trivial for Apple to transparently drop the cell-phone components in favor of VOIP.
That's really the way of pretty much the entire technology market.
New hardware/technology gets released. It's expensive and has some problems.
Early adopters buy the new hardware. Most early adopters know it will be a bit buggy and expensive, but... well, they're early adopters. They specifically want the latest and greatest.
The company making the product has a couple years to work out some of the bugs and lower costs. Competitors and copycats start to spring up. The market forces the price down.
As the new technology becomes more polished and cheap, the market expands.
I mean, really, pick a product or technology. The home computer? CD-ROM drives? Internet access? WiFi? MP3 Players? Everything follows this basic pattern.
On the flip side, they'll get businesses to buy some too. Enterprises will stick with Blackberries because they use Exchange and like the security aspects of the device, but there are plenty of mid-level managers with purchase authority to spend $500-600.
Well, and lots of people are saying this will flop because it doesn't have Exchange support, but the fact is that Exchange supports IMAP and POP3. It's not as though users won't be able to get their business e-mail on this phone. Even when it comes to contacts and calendars, Apple could set the syncing in iTunes to grab that stuff from outlook.
If anything, I could see this influence going in the opposite direction-- instead of the lack of Exchange support hurting the iPhone, I think you might see the lack of iPhone support being counted against Exchange/Windows. I've worked in a few businesses of different sizes and all, and ultimately what gets supported is largely dependent on what technology the executives are infatuated with. A lot of the support for Blackberries within IT isn't because we love the devices, but because we had to support them or the president of the company would flip out. All his friends had Blackberries, and so he wanted one too. And then, once they're using Blackberries, we're locked further into using Windows on the desktop and Exchange in the datacenter, because that's what RIM supports.
Now if the iPhone becomes the hot new phone, and all the executives start demanding them, that's what IT will support. If you get better calendar/contact/e-mail syncing with a Mac on the desktop and an Xserve in the datacenter, this could be yet another boon for Apple.
It's true that it isn't quite the same situation as MP3 players, but there is a similarity in the relative suckiness of the product being sold. Before Apple entered the MP3 market, the players available were all terrible. The technology was ok, more or less, but the user experience of the devices was ridiculously awful. Likewise with the current cell-phone market. The technology is pretty well established and good enough, and everyone I know has a cell phone. But everyone I know *hates* their cell phone. The experience of using them is just terrible.
You say Apple has no expertise in the commodity business, but where they seem to excel is in entering a commodity market, selling high-end products that offer an excellent user experience, and making a killing from being the prestige brand in that otherwise commodity market.
Maybe, but I think it's that the average person is reluctant to spend 500 bucks on a gadget, no matter what it is. You limit yourself primarily to early adopters and gadget freaks. This may also be a big reason the PS3 is having difficulty gaining traction.
Well, let's be honest here: the reason the PS3 isn't getting traction is that there's no compelling reason to buy one. From everything I've seen and hear, XBox 360 has equivalent graphics, more games, and a better online presence. The Wii is actually more fun than either. Most of the people who want a PS3 want is precisely because it's so expensive, and so owning one is a bit of a status symbol. It appears, however, that Sony has simply been beaten outright on every level.
That was my thought exactly. I, for one, have never owned a "smart phone". I can afford to spend $400-$600 on a phone, and in fact my company has offered to buy me a Motorola Q or Blackjack, but I don't want them. I sure would like to get a smart phone, but whenever a new model comes out, someone at my company gets one, and I usually get a chance to play with them. You know what? They stink. Really, they're terrible.
The OS is unresponsive, the email clients have a hard time connecting, and the various applications crash too much. The interface stinks. There are too many buttons and jog wheels and doo-dads. They're all just toys, and pretty much everyone I know spends more time trying to get theirs to do something than they spend time using it.
If someone would just make a cell phone with an e-mail client that wasn't completely frustrating, I might spend $500 on the phone and an extra $20 a month *just for that*. Yes, I've tried Blackberries, and I've even supported Blackberries. I can't stand them.
Also, you have to consider that people have shown a willingness to spend $300 for just an iPod. Let's say Apple made an iPod with a screen as big as the screen on the iPhone. Would people be willing to spend $300 on it? Yes. If you made a smartphone as slick as the iPhone without the iPod components, would people spend $200 on it? Certainly. So why are people saying that no one will pay $500 for the iPhone?
Honestly, I've been wishing someone would provide appropriate hardware for a home server for a long time. Save the price of any sound hardware, an expensive processors or video cards. Give me a cheap but well-made small system with lots of hard drive space. It doesn't need lots of processor or RAM, and it would be fine. Just 500GB-1TB of storage, ethernet, and otherwise just enough hardware to get Linux installed. All I want is a NAS/Apache/E-mail server that I can ssh into, and maybe a serial port that will open to a terminal, just in case.
If all you want is a NAS, why not go with something from Buffalo? I've never used one myself, but it's a simple Linux-based NAS. From what I hear, you can also buy a version of these things that can be heavily modified, including installing debian or gentoo. But if you want something easy, the Buffalo products themselves aren't supposed to require much expertise.
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All of this crap is learned behavior.
Sure it's learned behavior, and it's all the same if you're willing to do some math. However, it is often argued that the metric system is superior on the basis that the units are sensible for certain sorts of measurements. I was showing that while metric units have certain correlations to certain measurements, imperial units also correlate to certain measurements. Therefore, we should find another ground to base our decisions about the superiority of some units over others, or else we should admit that different units make different activities easier.
I think you're very right, but lets not forget that it's not just that Jobs has high standards, but that he seems to have a good sense of what standards should be met. In short, he seems to have good taste, and a good sense of what will be useful and what won't. I guess it's sort of like the distinction between a perfectionism and OCD. A perfectionist has a sense of what needs to be better, while someone with OCD just can't deal with anything being less than perfect.
Just as a simple, easy to understand example, take the iPod. Someone with high standards might have complained early on that it didn't have wireless and had less space than a nomad. Some perfectionists might have forced the engineers to stick an FM tuner in it. jobs, however, seemed intent on focusing on making it small, having a simple interface, and making it easy to sync with your computer, and that's why people like it. Sure, in hindsight, it's pretty obvious-- but then you have to remember that no one else did that. It took other companies *years* to recognize that Apple had chosen the right things to focus on.
In my series or movie, the Federation is really a vast imperialist military dictatorship... and Empire that has been slowly and surely conquering the galaxy.
I kind of like this idea, but I think it would be more interesting to piece together a plot that didn't discount the old Trek series/movies. I think you did a good job of picking out some of the uncomfortable issues of the Federation, and there are more. So it'd be neat if someone assumed that everything is as the movies/series portrayed them, but that there was also a dark, ugly side to the Federation. Maybe behind all their councils and democratic rules, there's really a few people pulling strings. Maybe, for all his virtue, Picard is just a pawn in a larger, more sinister system.
Or maybe you just show some other point of view, and show that the Federation, for all the good intentions, isn't always making things better. In my opinion, this is the most interesting approach to take. Show how one of Picard's moral and principled stands had unintended negative consquences. To some extent, it's been done before in the Star Trek series. In Deep Space 9 especially, there was an uncomfortable tension between StarFleet's desire to help Bajorans and StarFleet's own needs. There are instances where the Federation comes across as arrogant and selfish in spite of a general desire to be "good".
This is why enterprise was uninteresting to me
See, initially, this was the only thing that made Enterprise interesting to me at all. The original Star Trek brought us centuries forward in time, with all this amazing technology (admittedly, some of it is pretty dated now, but anway...), and it left this big chasm. How did we go from point A (present day) to point B (warp drive and interplanetary travel). If the interesting thing is to watch the technology develop, there was this big vacuum in the middle, and it was interesting in Enterprise for them to try to pick a mid-point.
I like the idea of humans exploring the galaxy without yet being masters of interplanetary travel. In places, the Enterprise in "Enterprise" looked more like a submarine than a Star Trek space ship, and I appreciated that. There were some nods to the idea that humans had no idea what was out there, and that their ship was fragile. If their warp drives got damages, they might be stranded in deep space for the rest of their lives, and there was no federation with Galaxy-class starships to come rescue them. It wasn't that they were ridiculously far away (like in Voyager), but just that the human race hadn't established themselves in space.
To me, it's this sort of thing that has made Star Trek become boring over the years. STTNG makes space travel seem so safe unless some other species decides to attack you, but they generally know what species are out there anyway. It takes such extraordinary circumstances to put Picard's Enterprise in danger and to threaten the entire crew. What's lost is the sense that the endeavor itself, setting out aimlessly into deep space just to see what is there, is dangerous.
It's not because of some magical superiorty science that normal people need either, it's mostly because multiplying by 10 is a lot easier than multiplying by 12 then 16 then 8, or whatever!
It's not easier if we were using a base-16 numbering system!
Ok, but seriously, it is an issue of context. If you're a scientist doing scientific research, by all means, use the metric system. However, for some purposes, the metric system isn't superior.
The easiest example I can think of is temperature. I've been told by lots of people that we (I'm American) should use the Celsius for temperatures. They tell me, "It makes a lot more sense, and it's more elegant. 0 degrees is the temperature that water freezes, and 100 degrees is when it boils. Think of how nice that is. It makes so much sense for cooking and scientific experiments..."
Well, that's fine, and so I support anyone who wants to use Celsius measurements for cooking or science. However, think for a second about the Fahrenheit scale. The range of 0-100 degrees is roughly the temperature in which human being can live. The exact range that's comfortable for people depends on various things, including the specific person, clothing, wind and humidity, etc. However, somewhere 100 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that people need to be careful about heat-stroke, and around 0 degrees is where people are in danger of freezing to death or getting frostbite, even if they're wearing warm clothes.
So while Celsius makes sense for some scientific purposes, I think Fahrenheit is where it's at for talking about weather. Likewise, if I need to estimate the length of the room and I don't have a measuring device, do you know how I do it? I walk, one foot in front of the other, and see how many steps it takes. My feet are each just about 1 foot long, and it works pretty reliably. If you want argue that meters are better for scientific purposes, manufacturing, or even construction, then by all means do so. However, different units are more appropriate for measuring different things, so don't try to tell me that I can't use Imperial units where it makes sense.
The only thing that SSL actually tells you is that the traffic you have is encrypted.
Maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying, but part of the idea of SSL certificates is also to verify that the site you're connecting to is actually the site it's claiming to be. You can use SSL to encrypt the traffic without this feature, and maybe there are ways around SSL anyway, but if you don't want 3rd-party certification of your identity, you don't need to pay for SSL certs anyway.
With training, you still have the problem that some people are utterly and incurably stupid and careless. Security (in general) should be a multi-pronged initiative. You should educate people how to be secure and how to spot potential security issues, but you should also, where feasible, make it difficult for people to do insecure things.
Indeed, it appears less as though Cisco accidently let a valuable trademark lapse, and more like Cisco is attempting to hold onto a trademark they've never used and have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of using it as leverage against Apple. No one has any brand association with the name "iPhone" to any product other than the Apple iPhone anyway.
Well it does seem like a very funny move. One possibility, I suppose, is that someone at Apple messed up, claimed it was worked out, and it wasn't. It may be that Apple decided they really wanted the trademark and they decided to just use it, and work the whole thing out in court.
It seems to me that it's kind of a lost cause for Cisco. People on rumor sites have been calling this thing an "iPhone" for years, even when it was just a rumored R&D project. It has so overwhelmingly been referred to as the "iPhone" during its anticipation that, no matter what Apple called it at release, people would refer to it as "the iPhone". Now it's been officially announced as the iPhone. It's a done deal.
I think Apple should concede to Cisco and call it, instead, "the iPod phone". Go ahead, let Cisco have their victory. People will still call it the iPhone. If Cisco tries to market anything as the iPhone, people will say, "that's not a real iPhone. That's some crap made by some other company."
Ironically, trademarks are meant to prevent brand dilution, and the only company with any brand recognition for the name "iPhone" doesn't own the trademark. Cisco has no brand recognition here to dilute, and never did.
Even if that's the case, I'm willing to buy software when it's good and does what I need. You think someone who is paying $600 for a phone is going to worry that the program he wants will cost him $20?
When I read the slashdot article summary, I was in the same boat as you. I'm a fan of Apple products, and was eager to get an iPhone, throw SSH, VPN, and maybe a TS client on it. The idea that there wouldn't be any 3rd party software definitely gave me pause about buying one.
And then I read the article. The summary quotes Jobs as saying, "These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them". However, lets put it in some context:
Ok, so what I take from that is that Apple will permit 3rd party development, but there will be some restriction on loading software on it. Apple will be serving as a sort of gate-keeper, it seems. Now, that still kind of sucks, but it means there might be hope for my SSH client. If I can get a SSH client on it, it'll be good enough.
Perhaps not. But if you were willing to spend $3.99 for a sandwich and $1.99 for a bag of chips during today's lunch, it follows that you might be willing to spend $5.95 on a sandwich/bag of chips combo meal.
I agree that cell phone networks and rates can seem a bit silly, but this, along with everything else, is part of the reason why I'm glad to see Apple entering the market. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the market, Apple doesn't have a lot of vested interest in maintaining the status quo. I think the long-term endpoint we should be shooting for is ubiquitous wireless broadband internet access with wireless VOIP devices (which the iPhone could easily become). Unfortunately, there's little incentive for cell phone carriers or manufacturers to move in that direction.
I own a Motorola Q and I can agree with some of what you're saying. However, I think it also comes down to a matter of whether or not you need their primary offerings: contacts, calender, and email. I know a lot of professionals that are not only not technophiles, they're actually technophobes, who find them utterly indispensable.?
I agree with this. The fact is, depending on your job, it might be that you almost don't have a choice. You *need* a portable device with contacts, calendaring, and e-mail, either in your phone or in a separate PDA, and so you're just going to pick the best thing available. In truth, I'm on the border line of having a job like that (lots of free time to comment on Slashdot, but pretty much on-call 24/7), but I find smartphones and PDAs entirely too frustrating to deal with. I opt instead to carry a laptop with me everywhere, and occasionally one of those Verizon cards for cell phone network internet. I don't like carrying such a heavy device everywhere, but smart phones stress me out.
Yes, honestly, what worries me most about the iPhone is the rumors that it will be closed to third party developers. I can tell you that I really like what I'm seeing as far as the e-mail and web browsing, but what I'd really like is to be able to do some remote administration. If I could get SSH, VPN, and a terminal services client on an iPhone, I would consider it a near-perfect device. The only thing to make it perfect would be if, in a pinch, I could use it to provide internet access for my laptop, but I wouldn't really need that feature if I could get e-mail, VPN, SSH, and TS directly on the phone itself.
I understand being concerned about the lack of a keyboard, but the truth is, I probably wouldn't use my phone to compose e-mails or run any of the remote-admin software very often. Those things, for me, would be the sort of features I might only use once a months, executing a few commands in an emergency, but a couple of those emergencies might be important enough to justify the $500 purchase.
I'm sure we know different people, but most of the people I know have different complaints. Living in New York, coverage is (mostly) decent enough, and I don't hear lots of complaints about prices and contracts. I guess I'm dealing with young professionals who have money and fancy phones and data plans and iPods anyway, but most of them are annoyed by the functionality of the phones.
For example, people want to get e-mail on their phones, but they can never figure out how to use it properly. (being in IT, I'm often the one they ask for help) They also want to use SMS, but with e-mail and SMS, you either have a keyboard which takes up extra space, or you have to deal with hitting your numbers and hoping the predictive text is good. A lot of people here *want* cameras and mp3 players and all that crap built in, but whenever they actually try to use these things on their phones, it doesn't work as they expect. Even if they encode their whole library in mp3, they can't sync things from iTunes. Carriers want them to buy wallpaper, ringtones, and music over the network. the cameras are slow to respond, hard to figure out, and pictures, again, need to be transfered over the network. There are web browsers on the phones, but half the time you can't actually navigate through sites very well because they weren't designed to be read on mobile devices.
Personally, I don't think it's usually a hardware issue, but a problem with software. Blackberries are barely satisfactory for e-mail, but have very little functionality for such big, ugly, expensive devices. Palm is stuck in the stone-age. Windows CE would appear to be a winner, except everyone seems to agree that it's sluggish, and the interface is poorly conceived for the small screens it appears on.
So I'm dealing with the exact sort of people who would buy a smartphone, and would be willing to spend something on the order of $500. The problem has been that these smartphones just don't work very well, and I'm hopeful that Apple will do a better job.
I really doubt that the cell phone components add very much to the price, and removing the 2 year contract drives the price up even more. Even at $600, the product is being subsidized by Cingular. So you'd end up with a product that costs *more* to buy and doesn't have ubiquitous internet access.
No matter what, this isn't going to be a budget-level device. At least not at this point, but maybe in a couple years. However, the nice thing about this is, if we ever get ubiquitous wireless internet access (not through the cell phone carriers), it seems like it'd be trivial for Apple to transparently drop the cell-phone components in favor of VOIP.
I mean, really, pick a product or technology. The home computer? CD-ROM drives? Internet access? WiFi? MP3 Players? Everything follows this basic pattern.
Don't underestimate the loyalty that the Apple brand garners. It's much like Nintendo's. They'll buy whatever is the latest and greatest.
And like Nintendo, the customers are loyal with good reason.
On the flip side, they'll get businesses to buy some too. Enterprises will stick with Blackberries because they use Exchange and like the security aspects of the device, but there are plenty of mid-level managers with purchase authority to spend $500-600.
Well, and lots of people are saying this will flop because it doesn't have Exchange support, but the fact is that Exchange supports IMAP and POP3. It's not as though users won't be able to get their business e-mail on this phone. Even when it comes to contacts and calendars, Apple could set the syncing in iTunes to grab that stuff from outlook.
If anything, I could see this influence going in the opposite direction-- instead of the lack of Exchange support hurting the iPhone, I think you might see the lack of iPhone support being counted against Exchange/Windows. I've worked in a few businesses of different sizes and all, and ultimately what gets supported is largely dependent on what technology the executives are infatuated with. A lot of the support for Blackberries within IT isn't because we love the devices, but because we had to support them or the president of the company would flip out. All his friends had Blackberries, and so he wanted one too. And then, once they're using Blackberries, we're locked further into using Windows on the desktop and Exchange in the datacenter, because that's what RIM supports.
Now if the iPhone becomes the hot new phone, and all the executives start demanding them, that's what IT will support. If you get better calendar/contact/e-mail syncing with a Mac on the desktop and an Xserve in the datacenter, this could be yet another boon for Apple.
It's true that it isn't quite the same situation as MP3 players, but there is a similarity in the relative suckiness of the product being sold. Before Apple entered the MP3 market, the players available were all terrible. The technology was ok, more or less, but the user experience of the devices was ridiculously awful. Likewise with the current cell-phone market. The technology is pretty well established and good enough, and everyone I know has a cell phone. But everyone I know *hates* their cell phone. The experience of using them is just terrible.
You say Apple has no expertise in the commodity business, but where they seem to excel is in entering a commodity market, selling high-end products that offer an excellent user experience, and making a killing from being the prestige brand in that otherwise commodity market.
Well, let's be honest here: the reason the PS3 isn't getting traction is that there's no compelling reason to buy one. From everything I've seen and hear, XBox 360 has equivalent graphics, more games, and a better online presence. The Wii is actually more fun than either. Most of the people who want a PS3 want is precisely because it's so expensive, and so owning one is a bit of a status symbol. It appears, however, that Sony has simply been beaten outright on every level.
The OS is unresponsive, the email clients have a hard time connecting, and the various applications crash too much. The interface stinks. There are too many buttons and jog wheels and doo-dads. They're all just toys, and pretty much everyone I know spends more time trying to get theirs to do something than they spend time using it.
If someone would just make a cell phone with an e-mail client that wasn't completely frustrating, I might spend $500 on the phone and an extra $20 a month *just for that*. Yes, I've tried Blackberries, and I've even supported Blackberries. I can't stand them.
Also, you have to consider that people have shown a willingness to spend $300 for just an iPod. Let's say Apple made an iPod with a screen as big as the screen on the iPhone. Would people be willing to spend $300 on it? Yes. If you made a smartphone as slick as the iPhone without the iPod components, would people spend $200 on it? Certainly. So why are people saying that no one will pay $500 for the iPhone?
Honestly, I've been wishing someone would provide appropriate hardware for a home server for a long time. Save the price of any sound hardware, an expensive processors or video cards. Give me a cheap but well-made small system with lots of hard drive space. It doesn't need lots of processor or RAM, and it would be fine. Just 500GB-1TB of storage, ethernet, and otherwise just enough hardware to get Linux installed. All I want is a NAS/Apache/E-mail server that I can ssh into, and maybe a serial port that will open to a terminal, just in case.
If all you want is a NAS, why not go with something from Buffalo? I've never used one myself, but it's a simple Linux-based NAS. From what I hear, you can also buy a version of these things that can be heavily modified, including installing debian or gentoo. But if you want something easy, the Buffalo products themselves aren't supposed to require much expertise.