however, july 17th still can’t some soon enough!

the following comments are from newsvine and the source of the original (ridiculous) article and pretty much sum up how all this whining about it is completely absurd:

At the moment Apple isn’t being sued – it is more likely this is just a fanboy venting a little steam. Not to mention a lawsuit wouldn’t work anyway. Apple has no responsibility to make sure that hacks and unauthorized programs work with their updates.

Apple’s problem is this is the sort of thing expected from other companies but not Apple. Although Apple has never supported open systems, lock down their devices with DRM and has never worried about backwords compatibility they have this perception of being some enlightened, benevolent, company that can do no wrong.

Missteps like the price cut and updates that brick the phone are beginning to reveal Apple has feet of clay. Finding out your idol isn’t made of gold stings a bit.

More useless speculation. I suppose we really ought to be allowed to use toasters in the bathtub, drive cars on the grass. After all, you bought the toaster and the car – you should be able to use it wherever you want. OK – examples are not exactly the same but the argument is. If any cellphone maker makes the phone to operate in a certain way, and within certain parameters – and you change that functionality – you have every chance of bricking a device – either due to ineptness or due to the company – via updates changing settings that result in a bricked device. Witness Microsoft’s problems with Genuine Advantage, the various game system manufacturers, and so forth.

This happens with most vendors…it seems to me the fact that it is Apple has the MS waterboys frothing at the mouth. Read your Xbox EULA. Read you Windows Vista EULA.
Why was there no outrage from the tech press & MS waterboys when MS screwed their hardware partners & the people that bought a plays for sure MP3 player? What about Verizon & the LG chocolate? No one has pulled the wool over anyone eyes here. All the limitations were stated upfront. The carrier was stated upfront. You signed a contract. You made all of those decisions. Yet, Apple is supposed to support the very small percentage of people that broke the license agreement & used various hacks on the phone. How, EXACTLY do you propose that they do that? Look at the pricing structure of Vista. What a frickin’ joke. I guess you & some of your readership don’t understand what getting screwed means. Don’t like the EULA don’t buy the product. Simple. Brake the EULA you’re on your own, just like with any other product on the planet. If you don’t own the phone why would you be here whining about it? Time to grow up.

Really this issue is absurd. Apple is right and there is no claim for a lawsuit. All cell phones are linked to a certain carrier! And all iphones were bought knowing they only worked on AT&T, you cannot complain that it only works on AT&T when you knew before you bought it “hey, this only works on AT&T.” It was Apple’s choice to make deals with other companies, in this case AT&T to help them develop and carry the product. That is what they did, without that relationship the iPhone would not exist. When you buy a product that is linked to a service you use that product for that service, it is like a cable box or any other cell phone. And also when you make modifications to any product whether it be a car or a cell phone it will void your warranty, and rightfully so. Why should apple be responsible for a phone that was loaded with a program that was created by some 15 year old kid to hack it, when that program may possibly destroy the OS of the iphone, apple’s only responsibility to warranty is to their product the way they manufactured it, once you take the risk of killing it thats pn you. You are all stupid, selfish and clueless. You want apple to cater to your needs. I want an iPhone, but since I don’t have AT&T or want to switch right now, I didn’t buy an iPhone, hey that’s common sense. In a year or two hopefully apple will expand it’s carriers and then I will buy one. You bought something with full knowledge of what it does and what service carries it, you messed with it’s software and now want apple to cover warranty issues. Apple is a corporation, their goal is to make money, as a shareholder I like that goal, they recieved help making the iPhone from cingular / At&T and in return gave them exclusive rights to it for now, it’s business. This kind of thing happens all the time so stop attacking apple. It’s like buying a bumper for a mustang and then suing ford cause you can’t use it on your civic. The product was made for one use, they never misled you any other way. Use it for that use.

they also announced a major price cut for the iphone, from $600 down to $400, and doing away with the 4gb iphone. of course the price cut of one-third has pissed off some early adopters of the iphone who paid the $600 for it when it was first released. according to a nytimes article from this morning, some people have threatened to end their relationship with apple because of it. as a result of the childish outcries from those early adopters, steve jobs released an open letter stating that such customers will receive a $100 in-store credit as a result. awesome and very smart PR from his part… the $100 will most likely lead the customer to buy something more expensive in the apple store which will ultimately put apple above where they were prior to the credit offer.

my problem is with those now bitching about the drastic price drop. true it’s a price drop of one-third after the iphone has been out for only two and a half months, but face it…that’s how the technology industry is. these people seriously need to stop whining and crying over it and just deal with it. that’s the risk you take for adopting any technology when it is first released. if you were willing to pay $600 for the iphone when it was first released, then apparently money was not an issue for you at the time, so why is it now? the nytimes article points out that:

Motorola, for instance, introduced the ultrathin Razr phone for $499 with a two-year service contract in early 2005. Six months later, Motorola realized it had a hit on its hands and dropped the price to $199 in an effort to aim at more mainstream buyers. By the end of 2005, the price was $99.

so did motorola offer any sort of refund or credit after the price dropped by more than half only after 6 months? of course not…many companies wouldn’t which is why the credit offer from apple is a smart move. just suck it up and deal with your loss already, and if you want to end your relationship with apple over something as stupid as this then please do so as we don’t want you to be associated with the apple community!

ah, i await when apple releases the new mac osx this year… leopard!

capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iphone has been announced today. yeah, i said it: “iphone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in stevie j’s eye (comments, cisco?). sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4gb or 8gb of storage, bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OSX with support for widgets, google maps, and safari, and itunes (of course) with coverflow out of the gate. a partnership with yahoo will allow all iphone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode — no word on standby time yet. in a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we’re almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we’re going to have an opportunity to run this picture? the 4gb iphone will go out the door in the US as a cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8gb for $599. ships stateside in june, europe in fourth quarter, asia in 2008.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

“Writing is catharsis, writing is catharsis, writing is catharsis…

This morning I’m reminded of a post to FoRK I made in February 2001 quoting a Wired magazine interview of Steve Jobs by Gary Wolf in February 1996:”

Steve Jobs: We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.Gary Wolf: The problem is television?

Steve Jobs: When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

Gary Wolf: So Steve Jobs is telling us things are going to continue to get worse.

Steve Jobs: They are getting worse! Everybody knows that they’re getting worse! Don’t you think they’re getting worse?

Gary Wolf: I do, but I was hoping I could come here and find out how they were going to get better. Do you really believe that the world is getting worse? Or do you have a feeling that the things you’re involved with are making the world better?

Steve Jobs: No. The world’s getting worse. It has gotten worse for the last 15 years or so. Definitely. For two reasons. On a global scale, the population is increasing dramatically and all our structures, from ecological to economic to political, just cannot deal with it. And in this country, we seem to have fewer smart people in government, and people don’t seem to be paying as much attention to the important decisions we have to make.

Gary Wolf: But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.

I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it’s not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be?

…

There’s a phrase in Buddhism,”Beginner’s mind.” It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

…

We live in an information economy. The problem is that information’s usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.

…

Gary Wolf: You have a reputation for making well-designed products. Why aren’t more products made with the aesthetics of great design?

Steve Jobs: Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

“This in turn reminds me of what Steve Jobs said to Robert X. Cringely in Triumph of the Nerds:”

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas ehm and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world….

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is – I don’t mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product and you say why is that important. Well, you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books; that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products and so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success – I have no problem with their success, they’ve earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

“If I apply the principles of remix culture, and creatively remix Steve Jobs’ words from those two interviews, I get:”

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want… information’s usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time… To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that… Ultimately it comes down to taste… they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is – I don’t mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product… they just make really third rate products.

“And that pretty much sums up the product philosophy for Things Created By Corporations. We get the technology that most people want. We get the music and movies and television that most people want. We get the government that most people want.On that last point, in America 2004, most people want government that represents their views on God, Guns, and Gays (more than their views on other things such as fiscal responsibility, jobs, healthcare, environment, education, and America’s relationship with the rest of the world, though certainly some people want government that represents their views on those things, too).

“Steve Jobs has said (in a Fortune interview) that “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” What’s important to note post-election is that we’ve gotten the government we have by design.

“Ultimately it comes down to the Taste Of The Majority, which in its purest form boils down to the principles of the Median Voter Theorem (“If preferences are single-peaked, then the median voter determines the outcome in a majority vote.”) and The Politics Of Small Differences:”

The secret of Bill Clinton’s campaigns and of George W. Bush’s election in 2000 was the much-maligned politics of small differences: Find the smallest possible majority (well, of electoral votes, for both men) that gets you to the White House. In political science, something called the “median voter theorem” dictates that in a two-party system, both parties will rush to the center looking for that lone voter—the median voter—who has 50.1 percent of the public to the right (or left) of him. Win that person’s vote, and you’ve won the election.

“The two-sided coin of “Moral Values” and “War On Terrorism” seems to have convinced that median voter, who as Nicholas Kristof writes in the NYT, lives poor but votes rich:”

[John Kerry's supporters] should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates.One of the Republican Party’s major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires. Democrats are still effective on bread-and-butter issues like health care, but they come across in much of America as arrogant and out of touch the moment the discussion shifts to values… Democrats peddle issues, and Republicans sell values.

…

“The Republicans are smarter,” mused Oregon’s governor, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat. “They’ve created … these social issues to get the public to stop looking at what’s happening to them economically. What we once thought – that people would vote in their economic self-interest – is not true, and we Democrats haven’t figured out how to deal with that.”

“As it turned out, the CEO of Diebold delivered on his promise of “helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president“, despite what the exit polls might have suggested.George W. Bush did not run as a “uniter not a divider” this time, and he need not worry about re-election. He’s ready (and now has a mandate) to spend all of his time through 2008 giving America the government that most people want.

“Steve Jobs said it best: “Ultimately it comes down to taste.” That line will echo in my head for years to come…”
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