> it's because the statistical center among Americans is somewhat to the right of what liberals perceive as the center.
No, you have it backwards. Americans are much more liberal than they are perceived to be. They are much, much more liberal. Most Americans agree with Michael Moore about everything, whether they know that or not. That's why his movies are so popular and so respected by people who know about the topics he covers and who know about movie making.
Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly gained popularity because they were retro, that is all. Just retro. Rush Limbaugh's father was in broadcasting in the 1940's, Limbaugh has a throwback delivery that people who are old right now remember as the voice of authority when they were kids. When you look at their audience's demographic, it is all old people. All across the country, others are trying to replicate their success by adopting their cartoon politics but it is just a retro thing. The audience for radio is fossilized. You can't draw any kind of conclusion about the general public from radio numbers, it is mostly owned by one Microsoft-like company also (Clear Channel).
What you're missing is that most Americans are not even involved in politics because both Democratic and Republican parties are both way too far to the right. What you think of as politics right now is missing the left wing entirely, they are not involved, they are not voting. Even so, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. Conservative Americans are like 25% of the country.
Here in San Francisco we have two parties: Greens on the left, Democrats on the right, and there is always one Republican floating around on the extreme right but they don't even say "Republican" they say their own name and that they want to "lower taxes" that's all. Still don't get elected, because they are clearly humanoid robots. This trend is going nationwide right now, say good-bye to your far-right guys they are quaint at this point. Ain't a one of them that can survive one YouTube encounter.
> This would definitely not pass wikipedia's NPOV test
Neither do many parts of Wikipedia.
Roughly Drafted is a blog. It's an opinion journal, it's one person's story. You don't ask "is it unbiased?" you ask "is it honest?" That is the standard. There is a whole Internet of the "other side."
> AT&T really has the power to make or break the iPhone. If the network doesn't support fast enough connections to enable > fast safari apps the device is sunk. But I like the articles brief coverage of the other non-issues that the iPhone haters are using.
AT&T is completely irrelevant. In the first place, in January the iPhone will launch in Europe with the same number initially shipped and no AT&T. In the second place, within 2 years there will probably be another US carrier, and within 5 years we will celebrate 5 years of iPhone and I bet AT&T is hardly mentioned if at all. In the third place, iPhone has Wi-Fi "n", it is by far the fasted networking of any phone ever offered. I'm within Wi-Fi whenever I'm indoors and outdoors in the downtown core of the two cities I work in. The AT&T network is going to be used for calls and for quick look-ups of a Google Map while on the go. In a coffee shop you are going to be on Wi-Fi, at work and home, on Wi-Fi.
You can think of AT&T like FireWire in the original iPod. It was considered to be an outrageous decision, too Mac-oriented, no USB1 for PC's. Who even remembers that now? There is no FireWire in today's iPod because it no longer needs it, the rest of the world caught up and all PC's have a fast serial connector now. In a few years Wi-Fi will be everywhere, adoption helped no doubt by fleets of iPhone users. AT&T and EDGE are a stepping stone.
Similarly, people used to complain about the iPod's monochrome screen but only 10% of iPods sold had monochrome screens. They have sold so many in the past couple of years that the original models are almost completely forgotten.
Not to mention that somebody is bound to make a dock connector that gets iPhones onto other networks.
> given that it's [iPod] technically inferior to products from rivals
Nobody says that. Even Apple's staunchest detractors (see Paul Thurrott for example) admit the iPod is technically better than its rivals. When the iPod came in, all other players hooked onto your 10 kbit/s keyboard port and could hold 0.5 to 1 CD's worth of music. The iPod hooked on to 400 kbit/s serial and could hold 1000 songs. That was a massive technical improvement in music players.
Also, it is not only easy to put music from multiple sources onto an iPod (CD, Podcast, iTunes Store, MP3/MP4 downloads from any source), once the music is on there, iPod plays 100% of the time. Compare to all other players (PlaysForSure/Zune) they are much harder to put audio onto, they don't support Podcasts, and what's worse: they fail to play 25% of their own Windows Media tracks. Since it is called PlaysForSure this is very embarrassing.
So if you know what you are talking about, you don't compare the other players to an iPod and come out saying anything else is technically better.
You can do the same with iPhone or Mac, they are both technically better than the competition as well as more hip and stylish because traditional consumer electronics companies and traditional I-T companies are way fucking behind the curve. Apple, Google, and Mozilla are almost the only companies that even know what time it is right now.
> Apple went straight for the enterprise with OS X servers.
No, you are completely fucking wrong.
Apple's servers have always, always, always been add-on enhancements for their desktop and notebook machines. They are sold ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY to existing Mac customers. For example, one of the main reasons you would buy an Xserve over a competing Sun product is to get HFS+J on there so you can backup Mac workstations in their native disk format. The fact that QuickTime Streaming Server is already on there ready to go is a feature but only if you know what the fuck QuickTime is (98% of I-T pros do not, for example, they think it is a movie player, that is like saying Unix is a text reader.) That you can boot a Mac from an Xserve over the network is a popular feature of Xserve that means nada to you if you don't have Macs. The idea is to give you Mac extras without causing you to lose the benefits of the Unix foundation, it's the same server as everyone else but with Mac-specific extras. Of course Mac people buy them. The extra features make sense to us.
If you can find the video of the original Xserve introduction, Steve Jobs makes a little speech about the server market and the enterprise and expresses great humility for Apple's position in both. He said basically that this is Apple's first "real" server (not just a server OS on a high-end Mac workstation as previously) and that they will learn as they go, they don't expect I-T to suddenly start demanding Xserves.
> As far as "triumphalism", the first anyone heard of the Mac supercomputer was when it made the top 10 Supercomputer list > - and those were DESKTOPS!
You're talking about Virginia Tech. In the first place, that supercomputer was designed and built and already running BEFORE the Xserve was made available. It has nothing to do with the Xserve. However, since the Xserve came out, Virginia Tech replaced all the nodes with Xserves.
> So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood > and Digital Restrictions Management?
Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood. There are waiters in Hollywood who have forgotten more about movies than anyone at Microsoft will ever know. Even the accountants use Macs here in California.
Microsoft does not even make a movie player that plays the standard format. Calling Windows Media Player or Zune a movie player is like saying Microsoft Word is a Web browser because it can also display text and images. That is a very unsophisticated view that you can't sell to someone who actually knows how the Web works. Well, in Hollywood, they know how movies work. MPEG-4 was coming for many years, then it was standardized, then it became the format in iTunes+iPod, then the iPod took off. MPEG-4 is also HD DVD and Blu-Ray and AppleTV and iPhone and PSP. MPEG-4 is also the standardization of the QuickTime format which all the content creation tools are built around, even those like Avid that compete with Apple, so it arrived already having mature development tools. One day there was a QuickTime update and all of my tools could now generate MPEG-4 H.264 as if they had always known what it was. Further there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax. Finally, most of all, MPEG-4 has no "content tax" while Microsoft's Windows Media business model depends on a content tax and everybody in both music and movie industry already knows better than that. All this happened already with sheet music and player pianos 100 years ago. Nobody is going to use an encoder that spits out a file which you can't copy or share without paying a tax to Microsoft, because everybody wants their movie or album to sell 100 million copies (even if it actually has no chance) so when Microsoft says aw it's only a penny per copy, people do the math and say no you are raping me with that, I can buy an MPEG-4 encoder for $20 and use it to make all the copies I want and not owe anybody anything why don't I just do that? And MPEG-4 just happens to already be integrated into all my tools and integrated into the hardware of consumer video playback so there was never any there there with Microsoft and movies. Even if they built a technically sound system or one that had a cost advantage, they would have to overcome the fact that nobody wants to work with the evil typewriter company.
All you are seeing here is another way that Windows sucks. Core computing functionality that customers use and want and even need to stabilize their Windows software on a real operating system is falling victim to Microsoft's lack of focus and hopeless star fucking. Why isn't Windows ready to be a good typewriter today? Because of its magic DRM.
> In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive > task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
You will need thousands of migrant I-T workers to be out in the fields servicing the robots. No American I-T worker is going to do that.
Also, more seriously, the reason "migrant workers" and "harvests" go together is the harvest migrates also. You're not talking about teams of robots that stay on one farm, you're talking about a complete robot road show, going north as you work, setting up and tearing down again and again and again.
The best thing this project could do is teach farm owners in California to pay higher wages to their workers and fight for their human rights. Even if they pay them more they are way cheaper than robots.
Pimp XP with a virtualizer running on an OS
on
Pimp Your XP
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· Score: 1
You can add a real core operating system to XP as long as that operating system has a PC virtualizer. The cost of doing this is less than an anti-virus package. As a bonus you can move your browsing outside of Windows and reduce the fragility of the XP environment even further.
- same XP - - new virtualizer - - new OS - - same PC -
Spending any time or money in any other way is a complete waste of time. You are not going to fix Microsoft's technical problems for them. Face the fact that they failed "OS level security" and now make one great big app called Windows that has many third-party plug-ins. If it crashes, it's an app. Put it in a window and recover that PC.
> Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."
The menu bar obviously needs a control of some kind in Preferences, that enables you to set the amount of the new effect, even to zero. There is already a third-party app that fixes this for the developer preview, they can make it a non-issue entirely with a single check box or slider.
The new Dock is awesome, though. It is not 3D eye candy, it actually is 3D. Instead of a strip of flypaper with 2D photos stuck on it, now you have a shelf with 3D objects sitting on it. Some objects are behind other objects. In a single position you can have a "stack" of documents where one is clearly in the front and many more behind, and you can leaf through them with a gesture. The Dock's look has not even changed, it just has an extra dimension.
It's like when you're taking a group photo and you get too many people for one row you have to make a second row and then a third. The Dock has a way to do this now. We have more stuff than ever. Vastly improved.
Windows Media is fine for fucking around in the den on the weekend, if you like that kind of thing. It is not suitable for professional video applications. Whoever suggested BBC use this should be fired and encouraged to switch careers entirely, go run Excel somewhere.
The language of TV's -- TV's not PC's -- is H.264/AAC, if you are making video and you don't speak it, you're not saying anything. You are showing snow on your TV station. This is the replacement for both DVD and VHF.
Blu-Ray, HD DVD, iPod+iTunes, iPhone, PSP, AppleTV, and many other devices can only play H.264, it is in their hardware, they don't have a big general purpose CPU upon which you can run multiple software codecs. Google is transcoding YouTube from H.263 to H.264 for this reason and because that is the standard in professional video.
There are more TV's and phones than PC's and that will always be the case. AppleTV is a next-generation DVD player same as Blu-Ray or HD DVD except the optical drive has been replaced by a Wi-Fi "n" connection and iPhone is the same thing in your pocket, there is no going back now.
By the way, the server software for MPEG-4 streaming is free, open source, very mature, and runs on any Unix or Windows server. MPEG-4 is the standardization of QuickTime so the tools are mature. There is no content tax, there is no streaming tax, the only thing anybody pays for is the encoder and it is dirt cheap. If you're paying Microsoft so that you can not use H.264 then it boggles the mind. Especially when you consider there are more iTunes users than Windows Media Player.
This stuff was standardized in like 2002, BBC should have heard about it by now, there is this thing called the Internet. It's grim to see organizations embarrassing themselves like this, BBC should know what's going on in TV.
> The reason your comment is ridiculous and not mine is that it is clear that the iPhone is a fairly powerful platform. > They couldn't even do a smooth image rescale without some decent hardware in the box!
Yes, that is such a big job it may take the whole CPU and leave nothing left for other stuff. The iPhone is all menu... it enables you to choose various network services: Web, Google Maps, YouTube over Wi-Fi, your iTunes collection over USB, phone over cell. The UI is a core feature that a good part of the device is dedicated to. Music and movies are decoded by a separate chip.
> has a 500 MHz processor in it
That means exactly nothing. In the first place the MHz don't translate across CPU's, but in the second place, a device might require 400 MHz of its 500 MHz for its own regular always-on system functions. It doesn't tell you if you have juice for anything else.
> Also, it's highly unlikely that OSX can be stripped down anywhere near as much as Linux. > As you may recall, earlier in Linux's life it ran on just one processor; the i386
Both parents of Mac OS X started on Motorola 32-bit CPU's in the 1980's, a decade before your i386.
> OSX likely has none of this. It requires a microkernel AND a BSD kernel.
No, the kernel is called "xnu" and it is not a microkernel.
From what I understand, the iPhone is running LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) which emulates some PC features on an ARM chip, so that Mac OS X could run without being extensively modified. There is 500 MB of OS X in there according to Steve Jobs, which is about 1/4 of the size of the Mac version, or what you would expect a minimalist version to be once you take out Java and the big Welcome movie and Carbon and 28 window styles and many other things that are in Mac OS X that you don't need on iPhone.
> While we don't know the actual hardware specifications of the iPhone, I would be extremely surprised if it were less powerful than, say, a first-gen iMac.
The first-gen iMac is 10 years old, and it had a good look and all, but it was not revolutionary hardware, it was actually last year's PowerBook circuit board in there. But the most important difference is batteries and heat dissipation. If you start a video encoding job on a modern iMac pretty soon you will hear the fan kick in and then pretty soon after that it will go up a notch. The iPhone doesn't have a fan, and it will hardly ever be running while plugged into AC. There are so many differences.
Comparing the iPhone to a PC is just fundamentally flawed. It's not a PC. Apple could have waited a year or so and done a slightly bigger iPhone with an Intel chip in there and it would really be a PC, but in this case they did to smart phones what they did to the PC lately with the Mac: adopt the exact same commodity parts, same CPU as other phones, same supplier problems, same prices, same limitations, and now they are competing in that market fair and square. They did a lot of extra work to get swoopy animations and a full Web browser in there but I think you have to take what they give you over and above the phone, what PC features they bring you, and not ask for the missing PC features. If you want those, get a PC for $800.
The reason Google Maps escaped the browser on iPhone is so that it can use the faux-GPS that cell phones provide to know your location. That is not available to the browser. If you use Google Maps in the iPhone Safari browser, you will have to tell it where you are at all times as you go around. If you drive down to Silicon Valley you have to tell it you did that before you ask for calamari locations or it will recommend a place in San Francisco.
The reason YouTube escaped the browser on iPhone is because Apple is running "YouTube 2.0", the MPEG-4 H.264 "universal" version of YouTube, not the YouTube that is currently online at YouTube.com, which is Flash H.263 video that only runs on Macs and PC's and that's it. Like many devices, iPhone has an H.264 decoder chip, it does not have enough general purpose CPU power to decode Flash video. If you use iPhone's Safari browser to go to YouTube.com you won't see any movies.
Both of these apps are also highly graphical, so a custom interface enabled Apple to make the map and video stream more useful within the unusual interface of iPhone, so you don't have to zoom around as much in both cases, but that is just an extra. Without these widgets, when you move from PC to iPhone your maps don't know where you are and your video doesn't play.
Notice how in both cases the reason is technical. I don't know why you wouldn't expect that in the first place.
> But Google apps for iPhone (YouTube and Google Maps) are also written in Cocoa.... by Apple. Apple wrote the YouTube and GoogleMaps widgets for iPhone. Not Google. Steve Jobs said so at the iPhone introduction and at D5 and if you don't believe him notice that the widgets on the iPhone don't look like ass. Therefore, not done by Google, who have like one artist in their whole company of 10,000 Ph.D engineers. They're almost as bad as Microsoft in that way.
What people are missing is that the iPhone only runs one app and it's called iPhone. It's all ring zero in there. Any "third party app" that you would install would automatically own the whole phone. That is why Jobs said a third-party app could crash the phone or even affect network services, the inside of the phone is "backstage" for the phone, not "onstage" for third-party coders. The onstage part of the iPhone is where Apple's innovative UI enables the user to access network services. There are a hundred million billion third-party network services, there are probably as many music and movies also, all by third parties, all thoroughly supported. That is what users want much more than another application platform to manage so that they can install a different calculator app.
The low-end Windows exists to lock other software out of the PC. It's almost free compared to retail Windows, you Microsoft works very hard to make sure you can't get a PC without it.
However, if it can be virtualized legally, then a Unix operating system installer can be prepared which runs on a stock Windows PC and when it's done your PC is running Unix, Firefox, and a PC virtualizer with your original Windows inside there, running without compromises. Since people don't understand what the hell and OS is and don't want to, you can sell it as a security upgrade, which it is. On an 8-way CPU you could give Unix 4 CPU's and Windows 4 CPU's and it may be much more efficient also while software catches up with multicore, each may still be as fast as if it had all 8 CPU's to itself.
Nobody wanted to kill Mac OS 9 more than Apple, and they still had to virtualize and it still took them forever. It is obviously the only way forward because an application platform doesn't come into being overnight. However with the maturity of today's PC virtualizers and Firefox you can actually make the transitional period better than what people are going through now with Windows Vista. If you run a Vista installer on an XP system you can end up without sound or with some apps not working. If you run the theoretical Unix installer from above you end up with the same Windows features as before as well as additional enhancements.
If John Lilley doesn't know at this point that Internet Explorer is not coming along for Web 2.0 then the Mozilla executive has not been paying attention to the technology of the Web and should be fired. It isn't that Apple is gunning for OSS that is bullshit, it's that OSS is all the competition there is. Microsoft is not in this game at all, they are like last year's Miss America when it comes to Web 2.0.
I know there is a myth of Microsoft invincibility and everything but it is a well known fact that Internet Explorer is merely a zombie, it was dead for 5 full years, no development team even. The beta of Safari on Windows is twice as fast as IE, do you think MS can decouple IE Windows from Windows and port it to a phone and get anything like reasonable performance? Can they get that done by 2005?
I am so tired of PC people: "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft." That is all they fucking know. Everything is somebody trying to cut off somebody else's air supply. Everything is a race to the bottom, a contest to see who can kill themselves slowest and thus be the last man standing. That king of the hill business only works if there is just ONE device, like the PC. Those days are over, huh?
I mean imagine John Lilley's delusion: Steve Jobs, lying awake at night "how can I take some of Mozilla's 50 million dollars per year non-profit budget while damaging the partnership between the Gecko and WebKit development teams and as a bonus make Billg happy?" Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Like Apple needs Mozilla's lunch money. C'mon.
Safari and Firefox are the Coke and Pepsi of Web 2.0 (Konqueror is the Dr. Pepper), which for some people is just starting but really we are years into it already. Microsoft is irrelevant because they are so far behind already they cannot catch up. While they were snickering at Firefox and Safari the two open source projects have marshaled pretty much every human being on the planet who can make Web code (DEVELOPERS!) and gave us what we always wanted, two independent open source Web rendering engines that are so standards-compliant that for the most part you can write for one and it just works in the other. You would think Monkey Boy would have thought about Web developers but he looks down on us because we are not real coders like Billg ha ha.
Before the iPhone announcement, the only browser I was ever asked to be specifically compatible with was Explorer. Since the iPhone announcement, executives want to know if my stuff runs on iPhone. That is the end user kick-off for Web 2.0 in the same way that Firefox v1 was the kick-off for developers.
Another interesting future end user Web 2.0 event will be the first hit Web app that doesn't run in Explorer (either a new app or a Flickr 2.0 or similar) and people will finally have a reason to download Firefox, same as we all downloaded Netscape 3 to see rollovers. Similarly, someone may create a Web 2.0 version of the rollover, some interface thing that is a must-have and every site owner wants but doesn't run in IE.
Within 5 years, phones will make up more than half the Web. The personal computer is going to recede back into the den and the office and the studio from where it came. If Explorer stays at 75% of the PC it will still be a minority browser. It has way, way, way too many broken and non-standard features to survive in that position. The Web is just going to look more and more broken in there as time goes on and Web developers stop working around all the bugs.
> it looks like mobile phone makers have been moving to VGA (higher than the iphone) since well before the iPhone was announced. > HTC announced a VGA phone almost two years before the iPhone. Are you sure Apple is one step ahead? Looks like they're half a > step behind on the resolution front.
That is not a phone, it's too big. I'm sorry, it is just too fucking big to be a phone. Here is the first paragraph from the first hit on your Google search:
> As a phone, I think the the HTC Magician VGA Pocket PC phone is a giant YIKES waiting to happen! > Cool looking, yes. But wow is that huge! While it has features galore and a nice, easy to use keyboard. > I can't imagine using this as a mobile phone!
Yay for HTC, they made the cell phone BIGGER. They welded it to a sub notebook.
If you think HTC bent the laws of space and time and reasonable engineering, Google "eMate" that is the corresponding Apple product. A clunky PDA with stylus and as many computer features as you can pack in. If Apple could put half a VGA into a handheld in 1995 then it is no wonder that HTC can put the whole VGA in there 10 years later. The advances in display technology are outrageous since then.
The iPhone screen is as big as it can be in inches and still fit on a phone that still fits in your hand, it is the biggest reasonable phone in the same way the iPod is the biggest reasonable music player. At 160 dpi, the iPhone screen has more pixels per inch than almost all of the displays on the planet, you cannot reasonably ask for more this year. So complaining about the iPhone screen either means you want an impossibly big phone or an impossibly higher resolution screen.
The iPhone display is also resolution independent. Make a little "director's square" with your hands and hold it up to your computer screen and move it around the whole computer screen, that is the iPhone. Inside the phone's memory you have a huge screen, but you can only see it through a little 3.5 inch window. In your mind, though, you remember where everything is outside of the window, it's like reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. It will feel much bigger, especially because you can move the screen around by pinching and tapping, directly sliding the material around.
The sophistication of the iPhone screen is not due to simply adding more inches or adding more pixels. That is the kind of unimaginative thinking that Apple leaves to the I-T industry. What Apple did is figure out a way to browse today's Web on a screen that can fit in the palm of your hand. They accomplished that. They put the Web on handhelds first, they obsoleted the whole art of "handheld" style sheets, that is done. WML? Done. WBMP? Over. Replaced by Web 2.0. So handhelds just leap-frogged PC's which are stuck on Web 1.0 for a while due to IE market share. They just ported MySpace and Flickr and so on to the new mobile Web, zero developer hours required for those sites.
But that's not as exciting as an elephantine Windows Mobile (0.6% of the market after 10 years) PDA with phone built in. Sure it's not.
Phones outnumber PC's 4:1 right now, in 5 years it will be 8:1 and over 75% of Web browsers will be in phones. Adjust your perception of what time it is outside of Microsoft World where everything old is new again.
> My phone RUNS TomTom, something you don't have an option with on the iPhone, even if you coupled it with an external GPS > unit since you can't run software on it.
iPhone already has 500 MB of software on it, and they update that through iTunes. If a "GPS navigation" interface is required to enable third parties to make GPS iPod dock accessories then Apple will be able to build that just like they make the UI for voice recorders, Nike iPod Sport Kit, and other dock accessories on the iPod. The advantage of this is that all iPhones will be prepared to host GPS at any time, even if you are in the woods and your friend drops his iPhone and smashes it and has to plug off the GPS from it and you plug it on your iPhone. You can also borrow or buy second-hand any dock accessory and it just works without driver disc or software download. You can buy a dock accessory on eBay and when you get it just plug it on it will work.
Arguing against this system is arguing against the success of the iPod. There are more Nike iPod Sport Kits in the world than Blackberries. I have a friend who can't wait to get an iPhone and he has never ever installed software on his Mac even. He bought a Nike iPod Sport Kit, though. Hardware that just works, no "software" required (as far as the user knows) is not only usable by everyday people, they are willing, even happy to pay for it. Compare to trying to get money out of someone for software.
> Obviously this won't apply to the iPhone, but TomTom* can be installed onto PDA phones.
Do you think the geniuses at TomTom can hack the iPhone's dock connector? Because then you can plug on a real GPS hardware instead of installing a faux-GPS app.
I can't believe people are stressing about "what can't be added" to an iPhone when it has a dock connector. The great iPhone third party app dilemma of early 2007 is going to go down in history with the famous Slashdot first impression of iPod.
> So does any PDA with a media player. My ancient Windows Mobile 5 device does this remarkably well, using an SD card > for storage (my music collection isn't that big).
That is the kind of excuse-making that perpetuates consumer mistrust of all things technological.
Yes, you played music on your PDA with an SD card. OK. Great. Are you going to go to my brother's house and set up his PDA for him so he can play movies or should I tell him to just buy an iPhone? Are you going to go from house to house setting up people's PDA's as shitty music players?
> syncs with iTunes,
We are talking about you plug in one cable, and automatically all of your Podcasts go over, as well as MOVIES, full-length, H.264/AAC modern movies, that can then be played for 7 hours on battery. You are basically arguing that the iPod was unsuccessful and unnecessary.
> supports third-party development,
You are being an ass, you should think before just saying what everybody else said. The iPhone has a dock connector on it. It already has over 3000 third party apps. The Nike iPod Sport Kit (which won't run on iPhone, it is nano only) is the most popular handheld app ever. More Nike iPod Sport Kits were sold than Blackberries. There is a huge community of third-party developers making these, the components are cheap, they are easy to make. There will be a GPS for iPhone within six months, if that. There are also 3-day batteries and many other useful items, and none of these are actually for the iPhone specifically yet, those are to come.
But even if we were to ignore the iPod dock and it's thousands of third-party developers, and only focus on next-generation Web apps, then there is already at least one honest-to-goodness, developed-for-the-iPhone Web app already running and nobody has their iPhones yet. How many apps did these other phones have one week before launch?
Finally, I have to say, I have a friend who is 19, her favorite "apps" are MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, that kind of thing. Those are the third-party apps she wants to run. I have another friend who is a nurse, he has a Mac and doesn't install software on it. It already has too much stuff on it for him to ever explore when you factor in he is on the Web most of the time.
>> on a huge 3.7" screen.
> Now I know you're joking. 3.7" isn't huge.
Go to your dictionary and look this up: "context". Then look at the sizes of screens in handheld devices which by definition, have to fit in your hand. They are almost all 2.5". Therefore a 3.5" screen is "HUGE". Also, the iPhone screen is 160 dpi which is at the very high end.
> It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPhone offers practically nothing that competing devices hasn't had > for years, except the "Apple feel" which frankly will only win over people who don't need anything but a shiny toy > anyway.
You are in some kind of denial, possibly brought on by iPhone lust.
The iPhone is the first phone with:
- a real Web browser (HTML4, CSS3, JS, Ajax, SVG, MPEG-4 audio video) - a resolution independent UI (the actual screen size is much larger, you use the screen like a magnifying glass to move around it and zoom in and out) - Unix - Wi-Fi "n" - multi-touch screen with interactive 3D animations (true 3D, not cut-scenes) - computer-level storage, 4-8 GB storage built-in, with 500 MB system software - wireless video streaming to other devices - world-class audio video (MPEG-4 H.264/AAC like on Blu-Ray and HD DVD, right out of your iTunes no configuration)
That is just off the top of my head.
If these other phones all have these features in such abundance, why are they so unpopular?
No other handheld even has a real Web browser yet. They are not good enough to criticize. The Web is almost 20 years old, it's not a fucking fad. Wi-Fi is almost 10 years old, get with it.
It doesn't seem weird to me that Apple made a list of features they thought were very desirable at some point and then they not only built a phone with those features, they also tell people about those features on their Web site. That just doesn't seem weird to me at all.
What would be weird is if Steve announces the iPhone features and then Apple PR does an exposé on GPS and third-party crapware development on pocket calculators. That would surprise me.
> Supports third party development? Are you kidding? Sure, you can make web apps, but palm, symbian and even windows mobile kinda blow > it out of the water on that front.
Have you looked at the software that is available for those platforms? I mean, really looked? It is like the worst of shareware 1992. Because you live in the year 2007 it may be hard for you to imagine just how bad the third-party apps for those platforms are. You can do better than a lot of it in Web 1.0, never mind with Ajax, CSS 3, MPEG-4 audio video, SVG, Google Gears.
You can also make dock accessories for iPhone. It already runs over 3000 of them. Are there 3000 apps total on those other platforms, even taken together? The Nike iPod Sport Kit is the most popular third-party handheld app ever. Nobody ever sold on a handheld like Nike. People bought iPod nanos just to run it, no pun intended.
There is even a sex toy you can plug into the iPhone dock connector and it vibrates to the beat of the music and gives you a very tactile ring when calls come in.
So yes the fucking iPhone supports third-party development.
People are crazy over the iPhone because it has the features that it has. How do other phones compare to the features of the iPhone? That is what is answered here. It isn't a comprehensive journalistic look at all of the various features of all phones. It's from Apple PR, not Consumer Reports.
If Apple thought this feature set was important enough and desired enough to make a whole phone around them, surely Apple PR thinks they are important enough to compare to the rest of the industry? Same feature set applied once by Apple designers and engineers and then now by Apple PR.
No, they don't compare Java compatibility or GPS, those are pocket calculator features that require glasses just to use.
You should be picking on these other phones for still sucking so much. Try and defend them in 3-5 years. Wi-Fi is coming up on 10 years old and these phones don't have it yet? Oh yeah, they don't have real Web browsers either. Pick on that. That is a shame, to have that much computing power and connectivity not be Web-compatible. BSD and Firefox are FREE. It's not rocket science.
As far as width and height goes, they fit in your hand, and you can compare that in the photos. What you can't see in the photos is thickness, can it fit in your pocket? I would bet the iPhone's width and height were basically a constant during the whole production, based on the screen size, but they worked to make it thinner and thinner, they almost got it down to a centimeter. Unless you make the screen smaller how do you suggest that the iPhone could reasonably be smaller? There are phones with half the features that are thicker.
If Jobs were going to get annoyed at people buying Macs and running Camino or Firefox on them, surely Apple wouldn't have shipped Boot Camp with Windows drivers so you can run Windows on your Mac.
I think the primary motivation behind Safari for Windows is to get Windows users hooked on Safari. Most people spend 80% of their computing time in the browser and the rest in iTunes. If your favorite browser is Safari and you spend the rest of the time in iTunes, then what was the reason you couldn't switch to a Mac again?
I'm waiting for xnu for Windows, that should only be a few years away now.
> There are only two competitors in the web browser market: Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers.
I agree, both Firefox and Safari make each other better, having two open source rendering engines that embody the Web standards is much better than either one alone.
However, I think within 5 years Firefox and Safari will be the two direct competitors. I don't see any other browser doing anything to get ready for Web 2.0. Certainly not IE.
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> it's because the statistical center among Americans is somewhat to the right of what liberals perceive as the center.
No, you have it backwards. Americans are much more liberal than they are perceived to be. They are much, much more liberal. Most Americans agree with Michael Moore about everything, whether they know that or not. That's why his movies are so popular and so respected by people who know about the topics he covers and who know about movie making.
Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly gained popularity because they were retro, that is all. Just retro. Rush Limbaugh's father was in broadcasting in the 1940's, Limbaugh has a throwback delivery that people who are old right now remember as the voice of authority when they were kids. When you look at their audience's demographic, it is all old people. All across the country, others are trying to replicate their success by adopting their cartoon politics but it is just a retro thing. The audience for radio is fossilized. You can't draw any kind of conclusion about the general public from radio numbers, it is mostly owned by one Microsoft-like company also (Clear Channel).
What you're missing is that most Americans are not even involved in politics because both Democratic and Republican parties are both way too far to the right. What you think of as politics right now is missing the left wing entirely, they are not involved, they are not voting. Even so, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. Conservative Americans are like 25% of the country.
Here in San Francisco we have two parties: Greens on the left, Democrats on the right, and there is always one Republican floating around on the extreme right but they don't even say "Republican" they say their own name and that they want to "lower taxes" that's all. Still don't get elected, because they are clearly humanoid robots. This trend is going nationwide right now, say good-bye to your far-right guys they are quaint at this point. Ain't a one of them that can survive one YouTube encounter.
> This would definitely not pass wikipedia's NPOV test
Neither do many parts of Wikipedia.
Roughly Drafted is a blog. It's an opinion journal, it's one person's story. You don't ask "is it unbiased?" you ask "is it honest?" That is the standard. There is a whole Internet of the "other side."
> AT&T really has the power to make or break the iPhone. If the network doesn't support fast enough connections to enable
> fast safari apps the device is sunk. But I like the articles brief coverage of the other non-issues that the iPhone haters are using.
AT&T is completely irrelevant. In the first place, in January the iPhone will launch in Europe with the same number initially shipped and no AT&T. In the second place, within 2 years there will probably be another US carrier, and within 5 years we will celebrate 5 years of iPhone and I bet AT&T is hardly mentioned if at all. In the third place, iPhone has Wi-Fi "n", it is by far the fasted networking of any phone ever offered. I'm within Wi-Fi whenever I'm indoors and outdoors in the downtown core of the two cities I work in. The AT&T network is going to be used for calls and for quick look-ups of a Google Map while on the go. In a coffee shop you are going to be on Wi-Fi, at work and home, on Wi-Fi.
You can think of AT&T like FireWire in the original iPod. It was considered to be an outrageous decision, too Mac-oriented, no USB1 for PC's. Who even remembers that now? There is no FireWire in today's iPod because it no longer needs it, the rest of the world caught up and all PC's have a fast serial connector now. In a few years Wi-Fi will be everywhere, adoption helped no doubt by fleets of iPhone users. AT&T and EDGE are a stepping stone.
Similarly, people used to complain about the iPod's monochrome screen but only 10% of iPods sold had monochrome screens. They have sold so many in the past couple of years that the original models are almost completely forgotten.
Not to mention that somebody is bound to make a dock connector that gets iPhones onto other networks.
> given that it's [iPod] technically inferior to products from rivals
Nobody says that. Even Apple's staunchest detractors (see Paul Thurrott for example) admit the iPod is technically better than its rivals. When the iPod came in, all other players hooked onto your 10 kbit/s keyboard port and could hold 0.5 to 1 CD's worth of music. The iPod hooked on to 400 kbit/s serial and could hold 1000 songs. That was a massive technical improvement in music players.
Also, it is not only easy to put music from multiple sources onto an iPod (CD, Podcast, iTunes Store, MP3/MP4 downloads from any source), once the music is on there, iPod plays 100% of the time. Compare to all other players (PlaysForSure/Zune) they are much harder to put audio onto, they don't support Podcasts, and what's worse: they fail to play 25% of their own Windows Media tracks. Since it is called PlaysForSure this is very embarrassing.
So if you know what you are talking about, you don't compare the other players to an iPod and come out saying anything else is technically better.
You can do the same with iPhone or Mac, they are both technically better than the competition as well as more hip and stylish because traditional consumer electronics companies and traditional I-T companies are way fucking behind the curve. Apple, Google, and Mozilla are almost the only companies that even know what time it is right now.
> Apple went straight for the enterprise with OS X servers.
No, you are completely fucking wrong.
Apple's servers have always, always, always been add-on enhancements for their desktop and notebook machines. They are sold ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY to existing Mac customers. For example, one of the main reasons you would buy an Xserve over a competing Sun product is to get HFS+J on there so you can backup Mac workstations in their native disk format. The fact that QuickTime Streaming Server is already on there ready to go is a feature but only if you know what the fuck QuickTime is (98% of I-T pros do not, for example, they think it is a movie player, that is like saying Unix is a text reader.) That you can boot a Mac from an Xserve over the network is a popular feature of Xserve that means nada to you if you don't have Macs. The idea is to give you Mac extras without causing you to lose the benefits of the Unix foundation, it's the same server as everyone else but with Mac-specific extras. Of course Mac people buy them. The extra features make sense to us.
If you can find the video of the original Xserve introduction, Steve Jobs makes a little speech about the server market and the enterprise and expresses great humility for Apple's position in both. He said basically that this is Apple's first "real" server (not just a server OS on a high-end Mac workstation as previously) and that they will learn as they go, they don't expect I-T to suddenly start demanding Xserves.
> As far as "triumphalism", the first anyone heard of the Mac supercomputer was when it made the top 10 Supercomputer list
> - and those were DESKTOPS!
You're talking about Virginia Tech. In the first place, that supercomputer was designed and built and already running BEFORE the Xserve was made available. It has nothing to do with the Xserve. However, since the Xserve came out, Virginia Tech replaced all the nodes with Xserves.
> So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood
> and Digital Restrictions Management?
Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood. There are waiters in Hollywood who have forgotten more about movies than anyone at Microsoft will ever know. Even the accountants use Macs here in California.
Microsoft does not even make a movie player that plays the standard format. Calling Windows Media Player or Zune a movie player is like saying Microsoft Word is a Web browser because it can also display text and images. That is a very unsophisticated view that you can't sell to someone who actually knows how the Web works. Well, in Hollywood, they know how movies work. MPEG-4 was coming for many years, then it was standardized, then it became the format in iTunes+iPod, then the iPod took off. MPEG-4 is also HD DVD and Blu-Ray and AppleTV and iPhone and PSP. MPEG-4 is also the standardization of the QuickTime format which all the content creation tools are built around, even those like Avid that compete with Apple, so it arrived already having mature development tools. One day there was a QuickTime update and all of my tools could now generate MPEG-4 H.264 as if they had always known what it was. Further there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax. Finally, most of all, MPEG-4 has no "content tax" while Microsoft's Windows Media business model depends on a content tax and everybody in both music and movie industry already knows better than that. All this happened already with sheet music and player pianos 100 years ago. Nobody is going to use an encoder that spits out a file which you can't copy or share without paying a tax to Microsoft, because everybody wants their movie or album to sell 100 million copies (even if it actually has no chance) so when Microsoft says aw it's only a penny per copy, people do the math and say no you are raping me with that, I can buy an MPEG-4 encoder for $20 and use it to make all the copies I want and not owe anybody anything why don't I just do that? And MPEG-4 just happens to already be integrated into all my tools and integrated into the hardware of consumer video playback so there was never any there there with Microsoft and movies. Even if they built a technically sound system or one that had a cost advantage, they would have to overcome the fact that nobody wants to work with the evil typewriter company.
All you are seeing here is another way that Windows sucks. Core computing functionality that customers use and want and even need to stabilize their Windows software on a real operating system is falling victim to Microsoft's lack of focus and hopeless star fucking. Why isn't Windows ready to be a good typewriter today? Because of its magic DRM.
> In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive
> task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.
You will need thousands of migrant I-T workers to be out in the fields servicing the robots. No American I-T worker is going to do that.
Also, more seriously, the reason "migrant workers" and "harvests" go together is the harvest migrates also. You're not talking about teams of robots that stay on one farm, you're talking about a complete robot road show, going north as you work, setting up and tearing down again and again and again.
The best thing this project could do is teach farm owners in California to pay higher wages to their workers and fight for their human rights. Even if they pay them more they are way cheaper than robots.
You can add a real core operating system to XP as long as that operating system has a PC virtualizer. The cost of doing this is less than an anti-virus package. As a bonus you can move your browsing outside of Windows and reduce the fragility of the XP environment even further.
- same XP -
- new virtualizer -
- new OS -
- same PC -
Spending any time or money in any other way is a complete waste of time. You are not going to fix Microsoft's technical problems for them. Face the fact that they failed "OS level security" and now make one great big app called Windows that has many third-party plug-ins. If it crashes, it's an app. Put it in a window and recover that PC.
> Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."
The menu bar obviously needs a control of some kind in Preferences, that enables you to set the amount of the new effect, even to zero. There is already a third-party app that fixes this for the developer preview, they can make it a non-issue entirely with a single check box or slider.
The new Dock is awesome, though. It is not 3D eye candy, it actually is 3D. Instead of a strip of flypaper with 2D photos stuck on it, now you have a shelf with 3D objects sitting on it. Some objects are behind other objects. In a single position you can have a "stack" of documents where one is clearly in the front and many more behind, and you can leaf through them with a gesture. The Dock's look has not even changed, it just has an extra dimension.
It's like when you're taking a group photo and you get too many people for one row you have to make a second row and then a third. The Dock has a way to do this now. We have more stuff than ever. Vastly improved.
Windows Media is fine for fucking around in the den on the weekend, if you like that kind of thing. It is not suitable for professional video applications. Whoever suggested BBC use this should be fired and encouraged to switch careers entirely, go run Excel somewhere.
The language of TV's -- TV's not PC's -- is H.264/AAC, if you are making video and you don't speak it, you're not saying anything. You are showing snow on your TV station. This is the replacement for both DVD and VHF.
Blu-Ray, HD DVD, iPod+iTunes, iPhone, PSP, AppleTV, and many other devices can only play H.264, it is in their hardware, they don't have a big general purpose CPU upon which you can run multiple software codecs. Google is transcoding YouTube from H.263 to H.264 for this reason and because that is the standard in professional video.
There are more TV's and phones than PC's and that will always be the case. AppleTV is a next-generation DVD player same as Blu-Ray or HD DVD except the optical drive has been replaced by a Wi-Fi "n" connection and iPhone is the same thing in your pocket, there is no going back now.
By the way, the server software for MPEG-4 streaming is free, open source, very mature, and runs on any Unix or Windows server. MPEG-4 is the standardization of QuickTime so the tools are mature. There is no content tax, there is no streaming tax, the only thing anybody pays for is the encoder and it is dirt cheap. If you're paying Microsoft so that you can not use H.264 then it boggles the mind. Especially when you consider there are more iTunes users than Windows Media Player.
This stuff was standardized in like 2002, BBC should have heard about it by now, there is this thing called the Internet. It's grim to see organizations embarrassing themselves like this, BBC should know what's going on in TV.
> The reason your comment is ridiculous and not mine is that it is clear that the iPhone is a fairly powerful platform.
... it enables you to choose various network services: Web, Google Maps, YouTube over Wi-Fi, your iTunes collection over USB, phone over cell. The UI is a core feature that a good part of the device is dedicated to. Music and movies are decoded by a separate chip.
> They couldn't even do a smooth image rescale without some decent hardware in the box!
Yes, that is such a big job it may take the whole CPU and leave nothing left for other stuff. The iPhone is all menu
> has a 500 MHz processor in it
That means exactly nothing. In the first place the MHz don't translate across CPU's, but in the second place, a device might require 400 MHz of its 500 MHz for its own regular always-on system functions. It doesn't tell you if you have juice for anything else.
> Also, it's highly unlikely that OSX can be stripped down anywhere near as much as Linux.
> As you may recall, earlier in Linux's life it ran on just one processor; the i386
Both parents of Mac OS X started on Motorola 32-bit CPU's in the 1980's, a decade before your i386.
> OSX likely has none of this. It requires a microkernel AND a BSD kernel.
No, the kernel is called "xnu" and it is not a microkernel.
From what I understand, the iPhone is running LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) which emulates some PC features on an ARM chip, so that Mac OS X could run without being extensively modified. There is 500 MB of OS X in there according to Steve Jobs, which is about 1/4 of the size of the Mac version, or what you would expect a minimalist version to be once you take out Java and the big Welcome movie and Carbon and 28 window styles and many other things that are in Mac OS X that you don't need on iPhone.
> While we don't know the actual hardware specifications of the iPhone, I would be extremely surprised if it were less powerful than, say, a first-gen iMac.
The first-gen iMac is 10 years old, and it had a good look and all, but it was not revolutionary hardware, it was actually last year's PowerBook circuit board in there. But the most important difference is batteries and heat dissipation. If you start a video encoding job on a modern iMac pretty soon you will hear the fan kick in and then pretty soon after that it will go up a notch. The iPhone doesn't have a fan, and it will hardly ever be running while plugged into AC. There are so many differences.
Comparing the iPhone to a PC is just fundamentally flawed. It's not a PC. Apple could have waited a year or so and done a slightly bigger iPhone with an Intel chip in there and it would really be a PC, but in this case they did to smart phones what they did to the PC lately with the Mac: adopt the exact same commodity parts, same CPU as other phones, same supplier problems, same prices, same limitations, and now they are competing in that market fair and square. They did a lot of extra work to get swoopy animations and a full Web browser in there but I think you have to take what they give you over and above the phone, what PC features they bring you, and not ask for the missing PC features. If you want those, get a PC for $800.
The reason Google Maps escaped the browser on iPhone is so that it can use the faux-GPS that cell phones provide to know your location. That is not available to the browser. If you use Google Maps in the iPhone Safari browser, you will have to tell it where you are at all times as you go around. If you drive down to Silicon Valley you have to tell it you did that before you ask for calamari locations or it will recommend a place in San Francisco.
The reason YouTube escaped the browser on iPhone is because Apple is running "YouTube 2.0", the MPEG-4 H.264 "universal" version of YouTube, not the YouTube that is currently online at YouTube.com, which is Flash H.263 video that only runs on Macs and PC's and that's it. Like many devices, iPhone has an H.264 decoder chip, it does not have enough general purpose CPU power to decode Flash video. If you use iPhone's Safari browser to go to YouTube.com you won't see any movies.
Both of these apps are also highly graphical, so a custom interface enabled Apple to make the map and video stream more useful within the unusual interface of iPhone, so you don't have to zoom around as much in both cases, but that is just an extra. Without these widgets, when you move from PC to iPhone your maps don't know where you are and your video doesn't play.
Notice how in both cases the reason is technical. I don't know why you wouldn't expect that in the first place.
> But Google apps for iPhone (YouTube and Google Maps) are also written in Cocoa. ... by Apple. Apple wrote the YouTube and GoogleMaps widgets for iPhone. Not Google. Steve Jobs said so at the iPhone introduction and at D5 and if you don't believe him notice that the widgets on the iPhone don't look like ass. Therefore, not done by Google, who have like one artist in their whole company of 10,000 Ph.D engineers. They're almost as bad as Microsoft in that way.
What people are missing is that the iPhone only runs one app and it's called iPhone. It's all ring zero in there. Any "third party app" that you would install would automatically own the whole phone. That is why Jobs said a third-party app could crash the phone or even affect network services, the inside of the phone is "backstage" for the phone, not "onstage" for third-party coders. The onstage part of the iPhone is where Apple's innovative UI enables the user to access network services. There are a hundred million billion third-party network services, there are probably as many music and movies also, all by third parties, all thoroughly supported. That is what users want much more than another application platform to manage so that they can install a different calculator app.
The low-end Windows exists to lock other software out of the PC. It's almost free compared to retail Windows, you Microsoft works very hard to make sure you can't get a PC without it.
However, if it can be virtualized legally, then a Unix operating system installer can be prepared which runs on a stock Windows PC and when it's done your PC is running Unix, Firefox, and a PC virtualizer with your original Windows inside there, running without compromises. Since people don't understand what the hell and OS is and don't want to, you can sell it as a security upgrade, which it is. On an 8-way CPU you could give Unix 4 CPU's and Windows 4 CPU's and it may be much more efficient also while software catches up with multicore, each may still be as fast as if it had all 8 CPU's to itself.
Nobody wanted to kill Mac OS 9 more than Apple, and they still had to virtualize and it still took them forever. It is obviously the only way forward because an application platform doesn't come into being overnight. However with the maturity of today's PC virtualizers and Firefox you can actually make the transitional period better than what people are going through now with Windows Vista. If you run a Vista installer on an XP system you can end up without sound or with some apps not working. If you run the theoretical Unix installer from above you end up with the same Windows features as before as well as additional enhancements.
If John Lilley doesn't know at this point that Internet Explorer is not coming along for Web 2.0 then the Mozilla executive has not been paying attention to the technology of the Web and should be fired. It isn't that Apple is gunning for OSS that is bullshit, it's that OSS is all the competition there is. Microsoft is not in this game at all, they are like last year's Miss America when it comes to Web 2.0.
I know there is a myth of Microsoft invincibility and everything but it is a well known fact that Internet Explorer is merely a zombie, it was dead for 5 full years, no development team even. The beta of Safari on Windows is twice as fast as IE, do you think MS can decouple IE Windows from Windows and port it to a phone and get anything like reasonable performance? Can they get that done by 2005?
I am so tired of PC people: "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft." That is all they fucking know. Everything is somebody trying to cut off somebody else's air supply. Everything is a race to the bottom, a contest to see who can kill themselves slowest and thus be the last man standing. That king of the hill business only works if there is just ONE device, like the PC. Those days are over, huh?
I mean imagine John Lilley's delusion: Steve Jobs, lying awake at night "how can I take some of Mozilla's 50 million dollars per year non-profit budget while damaging the partnership between the Gecko and WebKit development teams and as a bonus make Billg happy?" Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Like Apple needs Mozilla's lunch money. C'mon.
Safari and Firefox are the Coke and Pepsi of Web 2.0 (Konqueror is the Dr. Pepper), which for some people is just starting but really we are years into it already. Microsoft is irrelevant because they are so far behind already they cannot catch up. While they were snickering at Firefox and Safari the two open source projects have marshaled pretty much every human being on the planet who can make Web code (DEVELOPERS!) and gave us what we always wanted, two independent open source Web rendering engines that are so standards-compliant that for the most part you can write for one and it just works in the other. You would think Monkey Boy would have thought about Web developers but he looks down on us because we are not real coders like Billg ha ha.
Before the iPhone announcement, the only browser I was ever asked to be specifically compatible with was Explorer. Since the iPhone announcement, executives want to know if my stuff runs on iPhone. That is the end user kick-off for Web 2.0 in the same way that Firefox v1 was the kick-off for developers.
Another interesting future end user Web 2.0 event will be the first hit Web app that doesn't run in Explorer (either a new app or a Flickr 2.0 or similar) and people will finally have a reason to download Firefox, same as we all downloaded Netscape 3 to see rollovers. Similarly, someone may create a Web 2.0 version of the rollover, some interface thing that is a must-have and every site owner wants but doesn't run in IE.
Within 5 years, phones will make up more than half the Web. The personal computer is going to recede back into the den and the office and the studio from where it came. If Explorer stays at 75% of the PC it will still be a minority browser. It has way, way, way too many broken and non-standard features to survive in that position. The Web is just going to look more and more broken in there as time goes on and Web developers stop working around all the bugs.
> it looks like mobile phone makers have been moving to VGA (higher than the iphone) since well before the iPhone was announced.
> HTC announced a VGA phone almost two years before the iPhone. Are you sure Apple is one step ahead? Looks like they're half a
> step behind on the resolution front.
That is not a phone, it's too big. I'm sorry, it is just too fucking big to be a phone. Here is the first paragraph from the first hit on your Google search:
> As a phone, I think the the HTC Magician VGA Pocket PC phone is a giant YIKES waiting to happen!
> Cool looking, yes. But wow is that huge! While it has features galore and a nice, easy to use keyboard.
> I can't imagine using this as a mobile phone!
Yay for HTC, they made the cell phone BIGGER. They welded it to a sub notebook.
If you think HTC bent the laws of space and time and reasonable engineering, Google "eMate" that is the corresponding Apple product. A clunky PDA with stylus and as many computer features as you can pack in. If Apple could put half a VGA into a handheld in 1995 then it is no wonder that HTC can put the whole VGA in there 10 years later. The advances in display technology are outrageous since then.
The iPhone screen is as big as it can be in inches and still fit on a phone that still fits in your hand, it is the biggest reasonable phone in the same way the iPod is the biggest reasonable music player. At 160 dpi, the iPhone screen has more pixels per inch than almost all of the displays on the planet, you cannot reasonably ask for more this year. So complaining about the iPhone screen either means you want an impossibly big phone or an impossibly higher resolution screen.
The iPhone display is also resolution independent. Make a little "director's square" with your hands and hold it up to your computer screen and move it around the whole computer screen, that is the iPhone. Inside the phone's memory you have a huge screen, but you can only see it through a little 3.5 inch window. In your mind, though, you remember where everything is outside of the window, it's like reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. It will feel much bigger, especially because you can move the screen around by pinching and tapping, directly sliding the material around.
The sophistication of the iPhone screen is not due to simply adding more inches or adding more pixels. That is the kind of unimaginative thinking that Apple leaves to the I-T industry. What Apple did is figure out a way to browse today's Web on a screen that can fit in the palm of your hand. They accomplished that. They put the Web on handhelds first, they obsoleted the whole art of "handheld" style sheets, that is done. WML? Done. WBMP? Over. Replaced by Web 2.0. So handhelds just leap-frogged PC's which are stuck on Web 1.0 for a while due to IE market share. They just ported MySpace and Flickr and so on to the new mobile Web, zero developer hours required for those sites.
But that's not as exciting as an elephantine Windows Mobile (0.6% of the market after 10 years) PDA with phone built in. Sure it's not.
Phones outnumber PC's 4:1 right now, in 5 years it will be 8:1 and over 75% of Web browsers will be in phones. Adjust your perception of what time it is outside of Microsoft World where everything old is new again.
> My phone RUNS TomTom, something you don't have an option with on the iPhone, even if you coupled it with an external GPS
> unit since you can't run software on it.
iPhone already has 500 MB of software on it, and they update that through iTunes. If a "GPS navigation" interface is required to enable third parties to make GPS iPod dock accessories then Apple will be able to build that just like they make the UI for voice recorders, Nike iPod Sport Kit, and other dock accessories on the iPod. The advantage of this is that all iPhones will be prepared to host GPS at any time, even if you are in the woods and your friend drops his iPhone and smashes it and has to plug off the GPS from it and you plug it on your iPhone. You can also borrow or buy second-hand any dock accessory and it just works without driver disc or software download. You can buy a dock accessory on eBay and when you get it just plug it on it will work.
Arguing against this system is arguing against the success of the iPod. There are more Nike iPod Sport Kits in the world than Blackberries. I have a friend who can't wait to get an iPhone and he has never ever installed software on his Mac even. He bought a Nike iPod Sport Kit, though. Hardware that just works, no "software" required (as far as the user knows) is not only usable by everyday people, they are willing, even happy to pay for it. Compare to trying to get money out of someone for software.
> Obviously this won't apply to the iPhone, but TomTom* can be installed onto PDA phones.
Do you think the geniuses at TomTom can hack the iPhone's dock connector? Because then you can plug on a real GPS hardware instead of installing a faux-GPS app.
I can't believe people are stressing about "what can't be added" to an iPhone when it has a dock connector. The great iPhone third party app dilemma of early 2007 is going to go down in history with the famous Slashdot first impression of iPod.
The iPhone has a dock connector. If you want GPS, you can plug it on. Probably be out in less than six months. Might ship first day.
>> Plays TV shows, movies, music,
> So does any PDA with a media player. My ancient Windows Mobile 5 device does this remarkably well, using an SD card
> for storage (my music collection isn't that big).
That is the kind of excuse-making that perpetuates consumer mistrust of all things technological.
Yes, you played music on your PDA with an SD card. OK. Great. Are you going to go to my brother's house and set up his PDA for him so he can play movies or should I tell him to just buy an iPhone? Are you going to go from house to house setting up people's PDA's as shitty music players?
> syncs with iTunes,
We are talking about you plug in one cable, and automatically all of your Podcasts go over, as well as MOVIES, full-length, H.264/AAC modern movies, that can then be played for 7 hours on battery. You are basically arguing that the iPod was unsuccessful and unnecessary.
> supports third-party development,
You are being an ass, you should think before just saying what everybody else said. The iPhone has a dock connector on it. It already has over 3000 third party apps. The Nike iPod Sport Kit (which won't run on iPhone, it is nano only) is the most popular handheld app ever. More Nike iPod Sport Kits were sold than Blackberries. There is a huge community of third-party developers making these, the components are cheap, they are easy to make. There will be a GPS for iPhone within six months, if that. There are also 3-day batteries and many other useful items, and none of these are actually for the iPhone specifically yet, those are to come.
But even if we were to ignore the iPod dock and it's thousands of third-party developers, and only focus on next-generation Web apps, then there is already at least one honest-to-goodness, developed-for-the-iPhone Web app already running and nobody has their iPhones yet. How many apps did these other phones have one week before launch?
Finally, I have to say, I have a friend who is 19, her favorite "apps" are MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, that kind of thing. Those are the third-party apps she wants to run. I have another friend who is a nurse, he has a Mac and doesn't install software on it. It already has too much stuff on it for him to ever explore when you factor in he is on the Web most of the time.
>> on a huge 3.7" screen.
> Now I know you're joking. 3.7" isn't huge.
Go to your dictionary and look this up: "context". Then look at the sizes of screens in handheld devices which by definition, have to fit in your hand. They are almost all 2.5". Therefore a 3.5" screen is "HUGE". Also, the iPhone screen is 160 dpi which is at the very high end.
> It's failing because despite all the hype, the iPhone offers practically nothing that competing devices hasn't had
> for years, except the "Apple feel" which frankly will only win over people who don't need anything but a shiny toy
> anyway.
You are in some kind of denial, possibly brought on by iPhone lust.
The iPhone is the first phone with:
- a real Web browser (HTML4, CSS3, JS, Ajax, SVG, MPEG-4 audio video)
- a resolution independent UI (the actual screen size is much larger, you use the screen like a magnifying glass to move around it and zoom in and out)
- Unix
- Wi-Fi "n"
- multi-touch screen with interactive 3D animations (true 3D, not cut-scenes)
- computer-level storage, 4-8 GB storage built-in, with 500 MB system software
- wireless video streaming to other devices
- world-class audio video (MPEG-4 H.264/AAC like on Blu-Ray and HD DVD, right out of your iTunes no configuration)
That is just off the top of my head.
If these other phones all have these features in such abundance, why are they so unpopular?
No other handheld even has a real Web browser yet. They are not good enough to criticize. The Web is almost 20 years old, it's not a fucking fad. Wi-Fi is almost 10 years old, get with it.
It doesn't seem weird to me that Apple made a list of features they thought were very desirable at some point and then they not only built a phone with those features, they also tell people about those features on their Web site. That just doesn't seem weird to me at all.
What would be weird is if Steve announces the iPhone features and then Apple PR does an exposé on GPS and third-party crapware development on pocket calculators. That would surprise me.
> Supports third party development? Are you kidding? Sure, you can make web apps, but palm, symbian and even windows mobile kinda blow
> it out of the water on that front.
Have you looked at the software that is available for those platforms? I mean, really looked? It is like the worst of shareware 1992. Because you live in the year 2007 it may be hard for you to imagine just how bad the third-party apps for those platforms are. You can do better than a lot of it in Web 1.0, never mind with Ajax, CSS 3, MPEG-4 audio video, SVG, Google Gears.
You can also make dock accessories for iPhone. It already runs over 3000 of them. Are there 3000 apps total on those other platforms, even taken together? The Nike iPod Sport Kit is the most popular third-party handheld app ever. Nobody ever sold on a handheld like Nike. People bought iPod nanos just to run it, no pun intended.
There is even a sex toy you can plug into the iPhone dock connector and it vibrates to the beat of the music and gives you a very tactile ring when calls come in.
So yes the fucking iPhone supports third-party development.
People are crazy over the iPhone because it has the features that it has. How do other phones compare to the features of the iPhone? That is what is answered here. It isn't a comprehensive journalistic look at all of the various features of all phones. It's from Apple PR, not Consumer Reports.
If Apple thought this feature set was important enough and desired enough to make a whole phone around them, surely Apple PR thinks they are important enough to compare to the rest of the industry? Same feature set applied once by Apple designers and engineers and then now by Apple PR.
No, they don't compare Java compatibility or GPS, those are pocket calculator features that require glasses just to use.
You should be picking on these other phones for still sucking so much. Try and defend them in 3-5 years. Wi-Fi is coming up on 10 years old and these phones don't have it yet? Oh yeah, they don't have real Web browsers either. Pick on that. That is a shame, to have that much computing power and connectivity not be Web-compatible. BSD and Firefox are FREE. It's not rocket science.
As far as width and height goes, they fit in your hand, and you can compare that in the photos. What you can't see in the photos is thickness, can it fit in your pocket? I would bet the iPhone's width and height were basically a constant during the whole production, based on the screen size, but they worked to make it thinner and thinner, they almost got it down to a centimeter. Unless you make the screen smaller how do you suggest that the iPhone could reasonably be smaller? There are phones with half the features that are thicker.
If Jobs were going to get annoyed at people buying Macs and running Camino or Firefox on them, surely Apple wouldn't have shipped Boot Camp with Windows drivers so you can run Windows on your Mac.
I think the primary motivation behind Safari for Windows is to get Windows users hooked on Safari. Most people spend 80% of their computing time in the browser and the rest in iTunes. If your favorite browser is Safari and you spend the rest of the time in iTunes, then what was the reason you couldn't switch to a Mac again?
I'm waiting for xnu for Windows, that should only be a few years away now.
> There are only two competitors in the web browser market: Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers.
I agree, both Firefox and Safari make each other better, having two open source rendering engines that embody the Web standards is much better than either one alone.
However, I think within 5 years Firefox and Safari will be the two direct competitors. I don't see any other browser doing anything to get ready for Web 2.0. Certainly not IE.