Steve Jobs’ visionary products changed our culture. But I think his philosophy of life, work, and death have meant event more to me.
It’s fitting that his own words about death are the ones that help me put his death in perspective, but also my own life:
Namaste, Steve.
Having watched the iPhone 4S announcement, it’s clear to me that Apple is unmatched in overall phone quality for most people: designing everything from the processor silicon, to the camera lens, to the app ecosystem puts them in a class of their own.
The only hope for competitors to make a better phone is to concentrate on niche markets: Geeks who want full control of their phones have the Google Nexus line. Some will swear by their physical keyboards, integration with proprietary cloud apps, or their enterprise-secured OS.
But if your needs are like those of most of us, no matter your budget, there is nothing out there that, on a whole, beats an iPhone.
(Before anyone accuses me of fanboy bias: this post was written from an Android phone, and I have no idea what I will buy next. I’m in that geek niche where there is still a heated competition.)
For years, virus makers have been tricking people into installing trojans under the disguise of a program intended to actually remove trojans that weren’t there. They usually did so by disguising themselves as part of Windows XP – which was an obvious fake for anyone using any other operating system.
But today my boss ran into this and asked me to take a look:
(click image for full-size version)
Look at that imitation of the OS X Finder. Not perfect, but it’s pretty dang good! I wouldn’t expect everyone to be able to tell that it’s fake.
News of legitimate Mac trojans recently cropped up again, but it looks like they’ve gotten even more sophisticated with some pretty convincing fake Finder interfaces. People used to assume that Macs aren’t targeted for viruses for their lower market share, but it looks like that’s an even more unsafe assumption now. If you use a Mac, you aren’t exempt from being safe with your computer: don’t give it your Administrator password when you aren’t trying to install or update software. Any other time, it’s a trap!
2011 is my upgrade year for the “main machine.” I had been spending a while trying to figure out the best fit between performance and portability, and had settled on the $2,199 15″ MacBook Pro. But I ended up going with the $700 cheaper 13″ model and investing less than half the savings in some great custom additions:
At the end of the day, I have:
I came in almost $300 under my originally planned purchase, and got the added benefits of a more portable system and a blazing-fast SSD. I simply cannot believe how much of a difference the SSD makes; I’d guess that many people would feel like their old computers were brand-new if they installed an SSD. My system boots in mere seconds, and almost all applications load instantaneously. (Big ones like Photoshop take a couple of seconds.) I was really happy that I could get rid of the DVD drive and keep my capacious media drive with me with the MCE OptiBay (though it has pretty bad shock protection and a couple of big screws that hopefully aren’t digging into the unibody’s lid.)
The only hard part is getting used to the glass-covered 1280×800 screen. There is no matte option for the 13.3″, and it’s sheer marketing evil that Apple offers better resolution on the 13.3″ MacBook Air while forcing Pro buyers up a price notch to the 15.4″ to benefit from a high-res display. The glass covering the display is… interesting. Yes, it has more vibrant colors, but it also has terrible glare, and is also a major fingerprint magnet to boot.
So I’m pretty happy with it, all things considered. I’m very surprised with just how much performance can be squeezed into a 13.3″ package- except for the requisite screen size difference, this is a no-compromise high-performance device suited to be my only PC, and it’s under 5 pounds and an inch thick. I feel like instead of paying more for a V8 BMW, I bought a cheap little Honda Civic and gave it a killer turbo while keeping the weight low.
For others looking for a new computer, I recommend:
Hungary’s constitution is being drafted on an iPad. “It’s a consumption device” trolls: it’s time to consume your hats.
Like many, I reacted very negatively to Apple’s new policy: any paid content inside iOS apps be available through Apple’s subscription system, must be available at the lowest price, and must give Apple a 30% cut of that price.
John Gruber has written a very thorough analysis of the popular arguments against this new policy, and attempts to divine Apple’s reasoning for implementing it:
Apple doesn’t give a damn about companies with business models that can’t afford a 70/30 split. Apple’s running a competitive business; competition is cold and hard. And who exactly can’t afford a 70/30 split? Middlemen. It’s not that Apple is opposed to middlemen — it’s that Apple wants to be the middleman. It’s difficult to expect them to be sympathetic to the plights of other middlemen…
This is what galls some: Apple is doing this because they can, and no other company is in a position to do it. This is not a fear that in-app subscriptions will fail because Apple’s 30 percent slice is too high, but rather that in-app subscriptions will succeed despite Apple’s (in their minds) egregious profiteering. I.e. that charging what the market will bear is somehow unscrupulous. To the charge that Apple Inc. is a for-profit corporation run by staunch capitalists, I say, “Duh”.
Gruber has scored a direct hit on Apple’s strategy, and his explanation makes it seem very solid for Apple, its customers, and content creators. The biggest losers are Apple’s competitor middle-men. I think Apple’s main interest is being the best damned middle man in the business. The only problem is that some of those middle-men make products I really like, and Apple will only play ball with them if Apple gets to make the rules.
Daring Fireball: Dirty Percent
The iPad created a new class of computing devices and a new way of interacting with technology. It seems like this ambitious device means something different to just about every segment of the technology world: Old Media publishers herald the device as their salvation from death at the hands of the Web. Open software advocates balk at its controlled app platform as a regression for things like rich web applications and open standards. Tech pundits label it a device which prioritizes passive consumption of content over production and collaboration. Customers complain about the $500 starting price — and then buy over 15 million of them in under a year. (This quarter, Apple is on track to sell more iPads than Macs.)
I took the plunge and bought an iPad last September to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say that I don’t think any of the popular perspectives effectively mirror my experience. Things are about to change very quickly in this new space, and I think this is the appropriate time at which to reflect on its current state and potential in the future.
Continue reading The State of the Slate: Today’s iPad and Tomorrow’s Tablets
The Internet has shaken up the status quo for many incumbent economic leaders – and newspapers have seen this effect more so than any other industry. Since the Web hit the American household in the 1990s, print media has been experimenting with strategies for digital distribution and revenue streams, with few conclusive results after well over a decade. The Web has moved the audience’s attention from monolithic news outlets controlled by publishers in favor of social links (Facebook and Twitter) and aggregators (The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Drudge Report.)
This year’s announcement of the iPad seemed to change the publishing industry’s outlook on doing business over the Web. Instead of the hyperlinked, non-linear, short-attention-span, copy/paste-friendly nature of a desktop Web browser, the iPad offers a publishing platform similar to their paper product – with an iPad app, the publisher has verticalized control of available content, its layout, navigation experience, and – most importantly – revenue generation methods.
On October 15, the Times released “NYTimes for iPad,” (iTunes Link) labeling it “free until early 2011.” In testing it, I’ve decided it’s an excellent application in its own right, and could potentially be a great sign for the future of print journalism, but it could be yet another business fumble if the company doesn’t execute the proper balance between advertising, consumer pricing and usability.
Continue reading New York Times for iPad: Legitimate heir to the Newspaper?
iPad, meet your first killer app.
(This does continue to promote the view that the iPad is a device for consumption rather than creation of content. In this case, that doesn’t bother me.)
Today Apple announced their latest revision to iPhone OS, the mobile computing platform behind the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. iPhone OS is running on over 85 million devices, so it’s a pretty big deal. I don’t want to waste my breath repeating every announced feature, so I’ll just refer you over to Engadget’s excellent summary of it all.
This will be the fourth major release in four years for Apple. But for the first time, this release seems to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Overall, I think Apple is trying to keep up in feature parity with this year’s huge new threat from Android devices. That competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Apple has a long history of waiting to enter a market and then turn it upside down and shake all the customers out of the competition’s pockets. (See: iPod, iPhone, possibly iPad.) But I think OS 4 in specific brings up some new issues for everyone who has a reason to care about mobile computing.
What worries me most is Apple’s approach to allowing background tasks to run. Instead of implementing real multitasking in the same way desktop computers do, where every program stays running and can request CPU resources at any time, they have created seven services to allow specific actions to run in the background: audio, VoIP, geolocation, push notifications, local notifications, task completion, and fast app switching (which isn’t really a service, but the new behavior of “sleeping” rather than quitting an application.) Yes, this allows for a lot more functionality in apps while addressing a lot of the problems inherent in allowing multitasking on a mobile device. But why it’s interesting, and in my opinion not so great, is because it limits ways developers can innovate and make the next “killer app.” It’s like Apple said, “What can’t people do without multitasking?” (Or more likely, “What is Android doing now that we can’t?”) and then put out specific fixes for those existing use cases. Yes, users will soon be able to leave Pandora or Skype running in the background. But guess what? You don’t work for Pandora or Skype, and you probably don’t want to compete with them. This is a stop-gap reaction to current iPhone deficiencies instead of a new platform upon which innovators can make the Next Big Thing. I’m not saying iPhone OS multitasking itself is a bad feature; I’m saying that the platform is restricted to moving in directions chosen by Apple instead of letting developers take the helm. My bet is that we’ll see killer apps continue to be more functional on Android before they get “backported” to iPhone versions.
Another disturbing revelation is Apple’s banning of tools that allow applications to be developed with other platforms and then cross-compiled to run as native iPhone apps. MonoTouch allows iPhone apps to be written in .NET, and later this month Flash CS5 will add iPhone support as well. The new terms:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
I believe this crosses the line and is textbook anticompetitive behavior. It’s one thing to say your OS will only run Objective-C apps. It’s another thing to say that your Objective-C can’t have been created by certain tools. I’ll leave it at that because John Gruber already has a thorough analysis of this issue.
Customers can look forward to yet another great evolution in one of the best – if not the best – mobile platforms. The new features keep up to par with all the new Android phones while still beating them on ease of use. If Apple’s track record continues this year, there will be a whole lot more for consumers to be excited about when new iPhones are announced this summer.
Skype has an amazing iPhone app. It will soon be running all the time and will let people make and receive unlimited calls for free. AT&T has already changed its mind and decided to allow unlimited VoIP traffic on their cellular data networks. The days of bundling tiered voice plans to smartphones are numbered.
This just further intensifies the smartphone identity crisis I’ve been going through all year. As a consumer, I feel like I’ll be very happy buying an Android phone or a new iPhone later this year, as both serve my needs so well. Apple still creates a better holistic product due to their vertical control of the whole experience. But at the same time, my long bet is on Android’s success as an open platform. The feature parity is so ridiculous now that I’ll be mostly considering non-OS aspects to make my purchase, like network providers, hardware features and build quality.
