Category: apple

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apple verizon

Verizon has the iPhone 4 and it means absolutely nothing

Verizon Wireless finally has the iPhone 4.  There have been commercials running for the iPhone by both Apple and Verizon for the past month.  Fans rejoice, our savoir has arrived. . . right?  You couldn’t be more wrong.

The iPhone is coming out during a time when 4G and dual core phones have already been announced or are already out in stores by some carriers.  Verizon is potentially weeks away from releasing their next gen 4G  dual-core phone running on Android.  Now that is drool worthy.

The iPhone 4 is a nice addition to Verizon’s lineup, but it’s too late to jump on the Apple train.  True, we should be happy that it is here and when Apple gets around to releasing iPhone 5 then it will certainly be worth the hype, but for now do yourself a favor and hold off.

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apple

If iPhone4 has a problem with it’s antenna, why aren’t there more customer calls about it?

You heard about Apple’s press conference from Friday about reception and antenna issues.  Steve said much about nothing and tried to pass the blame around to whomever he could.  However, I want to concentrate on one particular quote that is surprising at first glance:

Only 0.55 percent of iPhone 4-related calls received by Apple Care have been related to the antenna or reception problems, Jobs said. The return rate, meanwhile, is at 1.7 percent, lower than the 6 percent rate for the iPhone 3GS, Jobs said.

.55 percent having to do with antenna or reception problems sounds remarkably low, so how can we account for that?  Here are two possible explanations:

  1. Most of the iPhone user base does not call customer service for issues.  Instead, they are smart enough to turn to tech blogs such as Engadget or TechCrunch.  I’d say the majority of it’s users either heard from their friend or read it online themselves that there was an obvious issue and waited for Apple’s response.
  2. It’s no secret that at&t has a horrible network.  Users who experienced dropped calls probably just chalked it up to at&t being a horrible network rather than their iPhone4 being the reason.  Who can blame them?  I would have probably assumed that myself had I not been reading tech blogs.

This is just my opinion, I have no real evidence to back any of this up.  What I can tell you is that after the Apple conference, Jobs has never looked more disconnected and arrogant as he did on Friday.

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apple rant

Thank you for DRM free music Scott Ambrose Reilly

I read a post today at c|net saying that Scott Ambrose Reilly is moving on from Amazon.com’s music division. I of course had no idea who he was until I read the article. Now that I know who it is, I have to say thanks for all he has done.

3+ years ago, 98% of the online digital music user base blindly and without question bought music from iTunes with Apple DRM so they could play in only Apple products. Smart business decision by Apple. ::cough:: monopoly, illegal business activities ::cough:: Of course the customers didn’t care because they had no choice. Not only that, but consumers are nothing but stupid, uninformed, lazy sheep.

Other services were out that offered music DRM free. Allofmp3.com was the first commercial music service that was DRM free and you could select the bitrate of your choice. Absolutely brilliant and ahead of its time. Of course they were sued and forced out of business (surprise, surprise). Nevertheless, it showed the way mp3 music is meant to be distributed. I never thought a major retail outlet would ever offer DRM free at reasonable prices.

Then came Amazon.com online music library. When I heard the news that they would be opening an online music library with no DRM at 99 cents a song I was completely amazed. How in the world did Amazon pull that off and get music labels to agree to it? What businessman had the ability to convince music labels this was the wave of the future?

Meanwhile iTunes still had DRM.

Amazon changed the game so much that it FORCED Apple to provide a DRM free alternative to customers, albeit at a cost to the consumer. Prices were over 99 cents for DRM free music on iTunes and no one seemed too outraged about it.

Meanwhile I thought to myself, only a fucking moron would ever buy anything from iTunes. I still believe that and have always thought that. I implore everyone to buy their music from Amazon whenever possible.

While I may have gone off-topic (can you blame me?), I want to come back to my original point of this article. To thank Scott Ambrose Reilly, because to me, he is the person we can thank for DRM free music today.

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apple rant Uncategorized

The Death of iTunes Apps

By now everyone has heard of the iTunes commercials and the phrase “There’s an app for that”, but how much staying power does it really have?  Just yesterday Google released Google Voice as a standalone web application that can be used in the browser.  For some of us, it’s hard to imagine why this might be better or worse than the current system Apple uses.  But hear me out…

Typically when you want to buy or download an application for your iTouch or iPhone, you head over to the app store icon and browse around.  Once you find something, click ‘install’ or ‘buy’.  These apps are then placed on the main screen and can be opened whenever you’d like.  While this may sound super easy, it also causes problems.

Apple controls each application that is approved or disapproved.  Sometimes it takes them up to a month to approve an application.  Other times they deny applications because it might infringe on their built in phone features.  Such as the case with the Google Voice app.  However, the biggest problem is the fact that each phone brand needs to have their own framework for applications.  There is the Google Android, the Blackberry, and iPhone which require each application to be developed specifically for that phone.  To make matters even worse, there are rumors that the reason Apple does not have flash support on their phone is because they were afraid developers would use that instead of their SDK to develop applications.   There has to be a better way?

What we need is an open source way to develop applications to work on any mobile phone with a browser.  It turns out we already have that folks, and your using the protocol right now, HTTP.  There are a few developers out there who hate using Apple’s SDK to build an app when creating a mobile site will work just fine. Sean of GetClicky is one of them.  The truth is that websites create applications to work in the browser, then have to recode them to work for each cell phone SDK.  What was built for the web browser, should remain in the web browser!

There are plenty of examples of mobile sites that work across every single cell phone platform.  Why bother spending time learning Apple’s SDK to offer things that can be easily implemented with regular HTML?  Plus HTML5 coming up in the next few years to add an even richer interface experience.  Each cell brand should have their own unique call requests to gain access to the phone’s contact list, dialing, and anything else they might need.  If cell brands are concerned that they won’t make money this way, why not have developers pay to gain access to some areas of the phone?

In the end, the death of all mobile app stores are exactly what we need.