"Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,"
Apple will not play protected WMA. It converts normal WMA to AAC. So what? It plays everything but ogg and wma; a great wealth of formats, including Apple Lossless.
On the other hand, the Zune will not play anything but protected WMA. It does play AAC. And mp3. And WAVEs, I suppose. So what? It plays the standard formats. WMA is a proprietary format. They're under no obligation to play it.
The labels are moving away from copy protection. When they've finished with the transition, you'll have any number of compatible places to buy the same tracks, not just iTunes. Right now, Amazon provides the model, selling 256k unprotected mp3s. I've bought many of these tracks, and the iPod plays them quite well, thank you.
This lawsuit is straight FUD, maybe financed by Gates personally.
The moral is clear: you tech nerds need some training in basic literature, Aristotelian logic, and rhetoric. Otherwise, you're going to be suckered in by FSJ again and again. And worse, by false prophets. It's really important to be aware of parody, satire and irony. At his best, FSJ uses irony. He always tips you off about the fake with a tipoff like "Tony Clifton." The substance of the satire: it's to watch the reasons why so many here immediately thought it was true! Because they hate the RSJ! They hate Apple! Apple's finally as stupid as Microsoft! It confirms your prejudices, so it must be true, see? That's the trap door. Then, slowly, it dawns on you that you just may have been had. So what do you do? You still hate Steve Jobs, so it must be true! Okay, so this isn't true, but they'd do that! They're much worse that Microsoft! They're all evil corporations! Linus forever! This is not critical thinking, boys. When you hear a declaration of any kind, it should make you think: is that true? Do I know enough to say that's true? When it's an involved thing, like a story about Apple, lawyers, a columnist, the law, you really have to get down into the story and check it out. Of course, once you're in on the joke, it's perfectly clear how fraudulent, and how funny, the whole thing is. But like most good satire, the real subject is how and why people get "put on." The sadistic part is watching people running around here like chickens with their head chopped off. But it should be a warning to all you headless chickens. Learn how to make quick assessments of whether something's likely true or not, and how to figure out why you fell for the con. Because if you can get conned so easily, all your technical knowledge is nothing.
Not only that, but Apple can beat any woman in the world in the wrestling ring! Feminists aren't so tough! They're small, with puny bodies. Any man can beat them, even a guy like Andy Kaufmann!
I have to admit, I got fooled a bit. But it seemed crazier and crazier. And then when I saw his "lawyer" was Tony Clifton, I, well, got it. But then I got annoyed. Why would he pull such a hoax? Then I read the Slashtards and realized what a funny prank it was.
I think that some people here have used the opportunity given to us by the usual Apple-bashing rumormongers -- is Steve Jobs REALLY acting in a way to make profits for Apple, Inc.? The bastard! -- to consider what should become of video releases of movies in the digital age. Right now, if you want a DVD, you buy a DVD. It is copy-protected. You can download a Windows-only DRMed version, but why bother? You're not buying the DVD. Instead, how about this model? An H.264 "low-def" file to play on your device, or your computer, or streaming from your computer to your TV. What if you could then upgrade that copy to DVD resolution, with extras and so on, for $4.00, and then legally burn that overnight download to your DVD? Not a bad model, possibly.
If you start at the other end, of course, and buy a full-priced DVD, then I believe you should have the same right to rip and transcode that you have with a CD. If I was a smart studio head, and I'm not sure there are any of those, I'd sell my DVDs with a pre-ripped, optimized h.264 version right on the disk, saving the consumer the time of doing it himself.
Well, it doesn't represent a big problem. I love the straw man you guys all work up; that Macs are supposed to be perfect. Nothing is perfect.
There are a large number of non-Apple things that work fine on my old G5, and on my Intel Mac mini. The new system actually installed very easily, using the "update" procedure (I already had a clone, ready to work in case I needed an erase and install, and a reimport of all my apps and settings from the clone. I had some small problems until 10.5.1 came out. I needed things like Toast 8.03, and a couple of other updates of existing software. Boot Camp works better than before, so my Windows XP works fine.
All these stories of massive problems are cooked up, as far as I can tell, by those who want Apple to wear the same shit crown as Microsoft. Not even close.
Well, there were 10 upgrades to 10.4 before this. They worked mostly fine. Fine for me, but I understand that a small percent had trouble now and again. I'd call that routine.
And I just upgraded to Leopard. I had a backup all set aside. My plan was to Erase and Install, and then suck all the data and programs off my backup. A friend said, "No. Just try the upgrade. Then, if it doesn't work, you can erase and install." Half and hour later, I booted into Leopard, and everything... just... worked.
Let's see. Grab a good book. They're not scarce. Borrow a copy from a friend who's raving about some book. Go to the libary and take it out. Take a few days to read, right? In most people's lives, you read 10-50 pages and then have to do something else. Open it a few hours later and there's the bookmark, right where you left it. Lose it, buy a new one for a few bucks. Finish it, put it on your shelf, loan it to a friend, start a fire with it if it stinks. What exactly is wrong with this? I can read a bit on the train, and before I go to sleep, and in that nice chair on the porch, and-- you get the idea.
What would be better? If I could buy something that cost 10 books, say, but gave me access to everything from Beowulf to about 1927. Call it, "The New York Public Library," and there would be an annual membership fee, subsidized, to pay for servers and those great heroes of civilization, Librarians. No battery. Works on solar, stores a charge. Bright and readable in all lighting conditions. Reads to you if you're blind or you've just gone to bed and want to hear a little Shakespeare as you go to sleep. It could tell when you went to sleep, and start up again at that point. Then you might think, "This is an improvement on the book!"
Then, and only then, could you also buy the latest and greatest from Amazon or Barnes or whoever. No copy protection. What are you, nuts? Haven't you learned anything from music? The medium that brought us human progress beyond belief from the fact that it is completely portable and instantly available to anyone who has learned how to read, and that it compresses almost all information far better than anything else -- this, you want to copy protect to protect the profits of Random House/News Corp. Inc.? No sir.
Love the music store, Jeff. Take the Kindle and stuff it.
Who needs it?
Here's my "dream" device: it automatically loads whatever you want from the world's libraries for free. It has the Dewey Decimal System encoded in it, and anything available for Inter-Library Loan can be downloaded in seconds. It looks a lot less dorky than this hideous design -- who did it, the guy who designed the '60s Paper-Mate pen? -- and it costs what three or four hard-cover books cost. Then I might be interested. Until then, haw haw, it's Kindling.
Lose a book in an airport, you're out $10-$30. Lose this, and Jeff Bezos gets another $400. No.
Let's see. Get all the cookies off your computers, and "don't accept cookies" on your browser, and watch the functionality go down. Throw off all scripting languages, too, because they can be hacked. Don't connect to the Internet. Put on a tinfoil hat so the rays won't get you. And live in a Faraday cage. Safe!
I read some places that the upgrade procedure would be good, so I tried it, after backing up. It went like a charm. The only problem I've had is Toast not recognizing my DVD burner, under certain conditions which I haven't figured out. A conflict? The OS needs 10.5.1? Dunno, but I'm very happy so far, since it was a couple of weeks getting Tiger up.
You kind of want some official response to a story like the Greenpeace boondoggle, but it only fans the flames. As it is, Apple's "no comment" makes the rumor sites go wild.
But has any "issue" with the iPhone ever been overplayed as much? Let's see: if you have a baby with an iPhone, don't let them chew on the earphones. Well, they don't have iPhones. And if they chew on the earphones, they might get a spanking. Plus, not having your earphones burst into flame along with the battery seems more important in this instance. As for the rest, well, there "might be" more bad chemicals. Which will remain inside the iPhone until it doesn't work anymore, at which time you will of course give it in for recycling, right?
It doesn't suprise me that Greenpeace acts this way. They have been an irresponsible organization for a generation, with a totally inflated reputation. In terms of the overall environmental activists, the NRDC is the New York Times and they're the Enquirer. They demagogue ruthlessly, they're sloppy with facts and light on research-- yuck.
I think, according to many rumors, that Apple had an SDK planned for a long time. But what's true about this announcement, I think, is that they got a lot of bad publicity from 1.1.1, and it was time to staunch the bleeding.
I think, too, that with the release of 3rd-party apps, they're also going to HAVE to bow to the law, and either sell unlocked iPhones in the US or at least allow unlocking while continuing to update its other features. I don't think they actually buried the first batch of apps on purpose, but that they had to patch holes that the hackers had exposed, because unauthorized access is unauthorized access. I've read that at least one of the 1.1.1 hacks depends on creating a buffer overflow with a "malformed TIFF." Well, excuse me, that means a flaw was discovered that Apple HAS to fix.
Anyway, very good news that they're allowing what should have been allowed -- or at least announced -- a month or so ago.
If their hack depends on a "specially-crafted" TIFF, then that's a bug, and Apple is under an obligation to close that hole. How would you like it if a "specially-crafted TIFF" was used to steal all your personal information?
Open the SDK, Apple. Allow the legal unlocking, and make it easy for people to write apps and then sell them for them on iTunes. Stop being jerks. You make money to the extent that you're not jerks.
But hacking is hacking, and I don't want any vulnerabilities on my iPhone, even if it's just "good guys" who are using them.
That, aside from a change of laws, was the only thing that could have made her fate any different. I wouldn't trust in jury nullification, either. I want the laws to change.
Why should Apple spend money fixing a hacked phone? Why should it be covered as part of the warranty? Now, maybe if they charged $50 to put it back to good -- oh, but you'd be complaining about that.
I hope, eventually, that they bring out an SDK, and work with developers. I thought they'd do it quickly, but now I wonder.
Well, at least there's no handwriting doohickey in the iPhone, which aside from price, points up seems to me the fatal flaw of devices smaller than your laptop: what do you do about a keyboard? At the moment, folks, there's no completely successful way to input text into a small device. You can put a small keyboard underneath the screen, but that limits the size of the screen. You can have a slide-out keyboard, but that makes the device much bigger and unwieldy, but it's still not full-size. Then you can virtualize the keyboard, like Apple has. But that's not physical. However, it leaves you with the whole front surface being a screen. I'm not a fast typer, but I can do 70 wpm in spurts on a keyboard. Not on any portable device, of course.
So that leaves the touch interface. Good for doing a limited number of things, but not for running general applications.
Second question: who wants to do Excel spreadsheets on a portable device? Nobody who isn't a masochist/nerd. How about ripping a DVD? Nope. Transcoding video? God, no. The point is, aside from games for amusement on buses and trains and planes, who wants a portable device too small for a viable keyboard to possess any serious computing power? My answer is, nobody. You want to do some serious stuff, take your laptop. You want to phone, catch you e-mail, watch short videos and so on, it's an iPhone.
Sure, there's an appeal. It's the nerd's answer to the Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio. "On my wrist, you foolish musclebound athlete, is enough computing power to vaporize you!" Make something remotely like that, and you've got the 2% nerd market. Too small. Way too expensive to make a to-do list. Ever heard of a notepad?
To really go anywhere as a computer, a mini-device would need to be a complete network device. The network would have to be very high speed and totally pervasive, and it could control a remote computer in the cloud to compensate for its anemic processor, or have either handwriting or speech recognition flawlessly implemented so you can control it easily with no keyboard -- good look with that -- or it would have to slowly develop, step-by-step, into a unique device that would be a phone, an e-mail reader, web and news browser, and ultimately, maybe a real Dick-Tracy device: a two-way wrist television. Sounds like the iPhone II.
Anybody remember the price of an Apple II? In Canada, they were over $2000. $1,200 in the States. Maybe Apple should have kept the price right there, and charged about $5,000 for the original Mac. Wait, that's almost what they were in Canada.
They especially hurt people in forums like/., most of whom spend their time ridiculing Apple. I'd like to see an actual poll of early adopters. I'd bet that the few elite, named users are upset, and no one else. Oh, tech writers who like to bash the company also are vewy, vewy angwy.
I use a crappy old Razr, which I bought -- sigh -- for looks. When it came out, it was $400. Look at the interface, it's worth about $25. It's about seven key presses away from doing something like turning on Bluetooth, and to sync it you've got to use this crappy little USB cable.
I paid $100 for it, and I can't wait to get a new one when my contract is up. iPhone maybe? If the price for the original model hits about $250. I'd love to be an early adopter, but my financial advisers laugh at the idea.
Woz made a big deal of standing in line for an iPhone -- but he gave himself tickets 1 through 9, even though lot of people arrived before him.
Woz is, or was, a brilliant engineer, and a lot of fun at a party. But I think his understanding of pricing and business is not his strong suit.
And what the sudden price drop was a sign of was a VERY successful launch. Why the hell should Apple apologize for a successful launch? Shut up, rich fanboys, and pocket your $100 credit. You know you're going to spend it, you do. Leopard's coming out soon. Don't you want Leopard for $29? You know you do. Why, the Dock is 3-D, and it's got blue folders. It's 64-bit, through and through. And the menu bar takes on the color of the desktop. Cool! Jobs gave you money, to apologize to you that you're a bunch of rich spoiled brats who got to sit out front of the Apple store with all your rich buddies!
"B-But Steve must have known he was bilking us!" Well, he hoped he was. He hoped that he would have a very successful launch and be able to drop the price substantially by Christmas, and thanks to your wallets, he could! And thanks to the still-growing sales, he could offer you $100 in credit. This is supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy. You have a place in the Apple community. You are our shock troops. Steve makes something, you buy! Okay, some of you get whatever glitch there is in the early software. Some of you find yourselves in possession of bad phones, and a new one is given to you. This is your function within the Apple community. You spend money for our sins, and we are saved. Did Jesus start whining, "Ow! Those nails really hurt!"
Slashdot Mirror
"Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format," Apple will not play protected WMA. It converts normal WMA to AAC. So what? It plays everything but ogg and wma; a great wealth of formats, including Apple Lossless. On the other hand, the Zune will not play anything but protected WMA. It does play AAC. And mp3. And WAVEs, I suppose. So what? It plays the standard formats. WMA is a proprietary format. They're under no obligation to play it. The labels are moving away from copy protection. When they've finished with the transition, you'll have any number of compatible places to buy the same tracks, not just iTunes. Right now, Amazon provides the model, selling 256k unprotected mp3s. I've bought many of these tracks, and the iPod plays them quite well, thank you. This lawsuit is straight FUD, maybe financed by Gates personally.
I have no iPhone, but my 5G iPod with Video is keeping perfect track of time and date. Does that mean it's Linux?
The moral is clear: you tech nerds need some training in basic literature, Aristotelian logic, and rhetoric. Otherwise, you're going to be suckered in by FSJ again and again. And worse, by false prophets. It's really important to be aware of parody, satire and irony. At his best, FSJ uses irony. He always tips you off about the fake with a tipoff like "Tony Clifton." The substance of the satire: it's to watch the reasons why so many here immediately thought it was true! Because they hate the RSJ! They hate Apple! Apple's finally as stupid as Microsoft! It confirms your prejudices, so it must be true, see? That's the trap door.
Then, slowly, it dawns on you that you just may have been had. So what do you do? You still hate Steve Jobs, so it must be true! Okay, so this isn't true, but they'd do that! They're much worse that Microsoft! They're all evil corporations! Linus forever!
This is not critical thinking, boys. When you hear a declaration of any kind, it should make you think: is that true? Do I know enough to say that's true? When it's an involved thing, like a story about Apple, lawyers, a columnist, the law, you really have to get down into the story and check it out. Of course, once you're in on the joke, it's perfectly clear how fraudulent, and how funny, the whole thing is. But like most good satire, the real subject is how and why people get "put on." The sadistic part is watching people running around here like chickens with their head chopped off. But it should be a warning to all you headless chickens. Learn how to make quick assessments of whether something's likely true or not, and how to figure out why you fell for the con. Because if you can get conned so easily, all your technical knowledge is nothing.
Not only that, but Apple can beat any woman in the world in the wrestling ring! Feminists aren't so tough! They're small, with puny bodies. Any man can beat them, even a guy like Andy Kaufmann! I have to admit, I got fooled a bit. But it seemed crazier and crazier. And then when I saw his "lawyer" was Tony Clifton, I, well, got it. But then I got annoyed. Why would he pull such a hoax? Then I read the Slashtards and realized what a funny prank it was.
George Ou.
I think that some people here have used the opportunity given to us by the usual Apple-bashing rumormongers -- is Steve Jobs REALLY acting in a way to make profits for Apple, Inc.? The bastard! -- to consider what should become of video releases of movies in the digital age. Right now, if you want a DVD, you buy a DVD. It is copy-protected. You can download a Windows-only DRMed version, but why bother? You're not buying the DVD. Instead, how about this model? An H.264 "low-def" file to play on your device, or your computer, or streaming from your computer to your TV. What if you could then upgrade that copy to DVD resolution, with extras and so on, for $4.00, and then legally burn that overnight download to your DVD? Not a bad model, possibly.
If you start at the other end, of course, and buy a full-priced DVD, then I believe you should have the same right to rip and transcode that you have with a CD. If I was a smart studio head, and I'm not sure there are any of those, I'd sell my DVDs with a pre-ripped, optimized h.264 version right on the disk, saving the consumer the time of doing it himself.
Well, it doesn't represent a big problem. I love the straw man you guys all work up; that Macs are supposed to be perfect. Nothing is perfect. There are a large number of non-Apple things that work fine on my old G5, and on my Intel Mac mini. The new system actually installed very easily, using the "update" procedure (I already had a clone, ready to work in case I needed an erase and install, and a reimport of all my apps and settings from the clone. I had some small problems until 10.5.1 came out. I needed things like Toast 8.03, and a couple of other updates of existing software. Boot Camp works better than before, so my Windows XP works fine. All these stories of massive problems are cooked up, as far as I can tell, by those who want Apple to wear the same shit crown as Microsoft. Not even close.
Well, there were 10 upgrades to 10.4 before this. They worked mostly fine. Fine for me, but I understand that a small percent had trouble now and again. I'd call that routine. And I just upgraded to Leopard. I had a backup all set aside. My plan was to Erase and Install, and then suck all the data and programs off my backup. A friend said, "No. Just try the upgrade. Then, if it doesn't work, you can erase and install." Half and hour later, I booted into Leopard, and everything... just... worked.
Let's see. Grab a good book. They're not scarce. Borrow a copy from a friend who's raving about some book. Go to the libary and take it out. Take a few days to read, right? In most people's lives, you read 10-50 pages and then have to do something else. Open it a few hours later and there's the bookmark, right where you left it. Lose it, buy a new one for a few bucks. Finish it, put it on your shelf, loan it to a friend, start a fire with it if it stinks. What exactly is wrong with this? I can read a bit on the train, and before I go to sleep, and in that nice chair on the porch, and-- you get the idea. What would be better? If I could buy something that cost 10 books, say, but gave me access to everything from Beowulf to about 1927. Call it, "The New York Public Library," and there would be an annual membership fee, subsidized, to pay for servers and those great heroes of civilization, Librarians. No battery. Works on solar, stores a charge. Bright and readable in all lighting conditions. Reads to you if you're blind or you've just gone to bed and want to hear a little Shakespeare as you go to sleep. It could tell when you went to sleep, and start up again at that point. Then you might think, "This is an improvement on the book!" Then, and only then, could you also buy the latest and greatest from Amazon or Barnes or whoever. No copy protection. What are you, nuts? Haven't you learned anything from music? The medium that brought us human progress beyond belief from the fact that it is completely portable and instantly available to anyone who has learned how to read, and that it compresses almost all information far better than anything else -- this, you want to copy protect to protect the profits of Random House/News Corp. Inc.? No sir. Love the music store, Jeff. Take the Kindle and stuff it.
Who needs it? Here's my "dream" device: it automatically loads whatever you want from the world's libraries for free. It has the Dewey Decimal System encoded in it, and anything available for Inter-Library Loan can be downloaded in seconds. It looks a lot less dorky than this hideous design -- who did it, the guy who designed the '60s Paper-Mate pen? -- and it costs what three or four hard-cover books cost. Then I might be interested. Until then, haw haw, it's Kindling. Lose a book in an airport, you're out $10-$30. Lose this, and Jeff Bezos gets another $400. No.
Yeah, and who cares about that totalitarianism stuff. At least your iPhone is free!
Let's see. Get all the cookies off your computers, and "don't accept cookies" on your browser, and watch the functionality go down. Throw off all scripting languages, too, because they can be hacked. Don't connect to the Internet. Put on a tinfoil hat so the rays won't get you. And live in a Faraday cage. Safe!
I read some places that the upgrade procedure would be good, so I tried it, after backing up. It went like a charm. The only problem I've had is Toast not recognizing my DVD burner, under certain conditions which I haven't figured out. A conflict? The OS needs 10.5.1? Dunno, but I'm very happy so far, since it was a couple of weeks getting Tiger up.
You kind of want some official response to a story like the Greenpeace boondoggle, but it only fans the flames. As it is, Apple's "no comment" makes the rumor sites go wild.
But has any "issue" with the iPhone ever been overplayed as much? Let's see: if you have a baby with an iPhone, don't let them chew on the earphones. Well, they don't have iPhones. And if they chew on the earphones, they might get a spanking. Plus, not having your earphones burst into flame along with the battery seems more important in this instance. As for the rest, well, there "might be" more bad chemicals. Which will remain inside the iPhone until it doesn't work anymore, at which time you will of course give it in for recycling, right?
It doesn't suprise me that Greenpeace acts this way. They have been an irresponsible organization for a generation, with a totally inflated reputation. In terms of the overall environmental activists, the NRDC is the New York Times and they're the Enquirer. They demagogue ruthlessly, they're sloppy with facts and light on research-- yuck.
I think, according to many rumors, that Apple had an SDK planned for a long time. But what's true about this announcement, I think, is that they got a lot of bad publicity from 1.1.1, and it was time to staunch the bleeding. I think, too, that with the release of 3rd-party apps, they're also going to HAVE to bow to the law, and either sell unlocked iPhones in the US or at least allow unlocking while continuing to update its other features. I don't think they actually buried the first batch of apps on purpose, but that they had to patch holes that the hackers had exposed, because unauthorized access is unauthorized access. I've read that at least one of the 1.1.1 hacks depends on creating a buffer overflow with a "malformed TIFF." Well, excuse me, that means a flaw was discovered that Apple HAS to fix. Anyway, very good news that they're allowing what should have been allowed -- or at least announced -- a month or so ago.
If their hack depends on a "specially-crafted" TIFF, then that's a bug, and Apple is under an obligation to close that hole. How would you like it if a "specially-crafted TIFF" was used to steal all your personal information?
Open the SDK, Apple. Allow the legal unlocking, and make it easy for people to write apps and then sell them for them on iTunes. Stop being jerks. You make money to the extent that you're not jerks.
But hacking is hacking, and I don't want any vulnerabilities on my iPhone, even if it's just "good guys" who are using them.
That, aside from a change of laws, was the only thing that could have made her fate any different. I wouldn't trust in jury nullification, either. I want the laws to change.
Still should be common carriers. The old Roosevelt-era law was the wise one.
Why should Apple spend money fixing a hacked phone? Why should it be covered as part of the warranty? Now, maybe if they charged $50 to put it back to good -- oh, but you'd be complaining about that.
I hope, eventually, that they bring out an SDK, and work with developers. I thought they'd do it quickly, but now I wonder.
Well, at least there's no handwriting doohickey in the iPhone, which aside from price, points up seems to me the fatal flaw of devices smaller than your laptop: what do you do about a keyboard? At the moment, folks, there's no completely successful way to input text into a small device. You can put a small keyboard underneath the screen, but that limits the size of the screen. You can have a slide-out keyboard, but that makes the device much bigger and unwieldy, but it's still not full-size. Then you can virtualize the keyboard, like Apple has. But that's not physical. However, it leaves you with the whole front surface being a screen. I'm not a fast typer, but I can do 70 wpm in spurts on a keyboard. Not on any portable device, of course.
So that leaves the touch interface. Good for doing a limited number of things, but not for running general applications.
Second question: who wants to do Excel spreadsheets on a portable device? Nobody who isn't a masochist/nerd. How about ripping a DVD? Nope. Transcoding video? God, no. The point is, aside from games for amusement on buses and trains and planes, who wants a portable device too small for a viable keyboard to possess any serious computing power? My answer is, nobody. You want to do some serious stuff, take your laptop. You want to phone, catch you e-mail, watch short videos and so on, it's an iPhone.
Sure, there's an appeal. It's the nerd's answer to the Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio. "On my wrist, you foolish musclebound athlete, is enough computing power to vaporize you!" Make something remotely like that, and you've got the 2% nerd market. Too small. Way too expensive to make a to-do list. Ever heard of a notepad?
To really go anywhere as a computer, a mini-device would need to be a complete network device. The network would have to be very high speed and totally pervasive, and it could control a remote computer in the cloud to compensate for its anemic processor, or have either handwriting or speech recognition flawlessly implemented so you can control it easily with no keyboard -- good look with that -- or it would have to slowly develop, step-by-step, into a unique device that would be a phone, an e-mail reader, web and news browser, and ultimately, maybe a real Dick-Tracy device: a two-way wrist television. Sounds like the iPhone II.
Apparently, he wants a "Start" menu on the bottom left, at which point computing began.
Anybody remember the price of an Apple II? In Canada, they were over $2000. $1,200 in the States. Maybe Apple should have kept the price right there, and charged about $5,000 for the original Mac. Wait, that's almost what they were in Canada.
They especially hurt people in forums like /., most of whom spend their time ridiculing Apple. I'd like to see an actual poll of early adopters. I'd bet that the few elite, named users are upset, and no one else. Oh, tech writers who like to bash the company also are vewy, vewy angwy.
I use a crappy old Razr, which I bought -- sigh -- for looks. When it came out, it was $400. Look at the interface, it's worth about $25. It's about seven key presses away from doing something like turning on Bluetooth, and to sync it you've got to use this crappy little USB cable.
I paid $100 for it, and I can't wait to get a new one when my contract is up. iPhone maybe? If the price for the original model hits about $250. I'd love to be an early adopter, but my financial advisers laugh at the idea.
"I didn't buy one and I thought it was a kick in the gut." Just not in YOUR gut.
Woz made a big deal of standing in line for an iPhone -- but he gave himself tickets 1 through 9, even though lot of people arrived before him. Woz is, or was, a brilliant engineer, and a lot of fun at a party. But I think his understanding of pricing and business is not his strong suit. And what the sudden price drop was a sign of was a VERY successful launch. Why the hell should Apple apologize for a successful launch? Shut up, rich fanboys, and pocket your $100 credit. You know you're going to spend it, you do. Leopard's coming out soon. Don't you want Leopard for $29? You know you do. Why, the Dock is 3-D, and it's got blue folders. It's 64-bit, through and through. And the menu bar takes on the color of the desktop. Cool! Jobs gave you money, to apologize to you that you're a bunch of rich spoiled brats who got to sit out front of the Apple store with all your rich buddies! "B-But Steve must have known he was bilking us!" Well, he hoped he was. He hoped that he would have a very successful launch and be able to drop the price substantially by Christmas, and thanks to your wallets, he could! And thanks to the still-growing sales, he could offer you $100 in credit. This is supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy. You have a place in the Apple community. You are our shock troops. Steve makes something, you buy! Okay, some of you get whatever glitch there is in the early software. Some of you find yourselves in possession of bad phones, and a new one is given to you. This is your function within the Apple community. You spend money for our sins, and we are saved. Did Jesus start whining, "Ow! Those nails really hurt!"