Here is my wish list for Apple announcements at this year’s WWDC or sometime soon after:
And a pony.
I received an AT&T Mobility Enterprise Customer Newsletter today. Among the usual blather about their award-winning customer service and news about upcoming events and feature updates, there is a section titled ‘Equipment End of Life and Out of Stock Notices’. It’s a chart that lists devices that are no longer available, along with ‘alternate device recommendations’.
The curious thing about this chart is that out of all 20 or so phones listed, in not one case does AT&T recommend an iPhone as a replacement. For every short-lived low-end Android device, they recommend a newer short-lived low-end Android device. For every outdated Blackberry, a slightly less outdated Blackberry. But most curiously, for the HP Veer Palm device, for which there never will be a direct replacement, AT&T recommends “Any Android, BlackBerry Device, Windows Phone 7″.
Hmm. Seems they are forgetting an option. Weird, since the device they left out of the list is their top-seller.
What I take away from this is that AT&T really prefers to sell anything but an iPhone. I’m guessing they prefer the profit they get from manufacturers that they have over a barrel as opposed to manufacturers who can sell devices on their own merits.
Based on sales, if they were being honest with their customers the chart would look like this:
Over the course of the past week I must have written, un-written and re-written about 4,000 words as I tried to write a review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. But I grew tired of my own complaining, that’s how much of it there was.
So let me just get to the point. The long and the short of it is Isaacson is a boring writer writing about something he’s not all that interested in. He borrows heavily from previous biographies and provides little that is new. Details are rare, huge things are glossed over, and nearly all the detailed bits are uninteresting or depressing. The end result is a generic, detached and slightly morose depiction of a fascinating man’s life. It should have been better.
Isaacson reports taking over 40 interviews to write this biography. Something tells me that a rote transcript of those interviews would make for much more interesting reading.
For evidence that Steve Jobs sometimes made mistakes, you need look no farther than his choice of biographer.
Droppin' on y'all
On October 12th Apple had their largest upgrade rollout ever. On top of that, the iCloud service went public. Let’s look at all that was going on for a typical Mac + iDevice + Mobile Me user that day:
For an individual with multiple Macs and iOS devices, that’s a busy day. For a household with multiple people with multiple Macs and iOS devices, that’s a busy weekend or two (I’m in to my second).
Considering all that was going on the update and cloud services held up pretty well, with some temporary outages here and there. Apple’s authentication process for the iOS 5 update seemed to be hardest hit. This resulted in many people having trouble getting through the iOS 5 install process after the download. Within a few hours the problem had abated. Later in the week Apple reported that they would have to throttle iCloud conversions due to the heavy load. I’m not sure if this is still going on, but I’ve migrated three accounts so far without any trouble.
So what did all this get us? On the surface and in casual use little appears to have changed. But there is a lot of new stuff.
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Amazon sells us everything. They have all of our credit card numbers. A few years ago they started selling us books electronically, and the Kindle to read them on. Later they added music and video to the offerings. And now they’ve announced the $199 Kindle Fire to consume all this content on. And they have a giant cloud service to support it.
The Kindle Fire is going to be the second successful tablet computer and the first real market competition to the iPad. Coupled with their cloud services they have a mobile platform second to none.
Suddenly Amazon is where Apple wants be.
Very interesting.
Apple has sent out invites for an iPhone event at the Cupertino campus for next Tuesday.
May I go on the record with the following prediction?
The new iPhone will be the same basic design and size of the current iPhone 4, with an A5 processor. Possibly both CDMA and GSM 3G in one, but no 4G. No magic-super-new ‘iPhone 5′, although it’s possible they will use that name.
9/29 Update: Looking more and more like the name will be iPhone 4S. MacRumors is reporting a rumor that an ‘iPhone 4S’ has shown up in Apple’s internal database, but not an ‘iPhone 5′. The comments are precious. Denial throughout.
9/29 Update 2: An impressive physical mockup of an ‘iPhone 5′ based on recent leaked case manufacturer images coupled with the design sense of the iPad 2. This looks reasonable and would certainly count as a redesign. At least the rumors are getting more interesting!
9/30 Update: As usual, John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a well thought out and comprehensive analysis of the rumors. Also as usual, he coyly stops just short of saying what he thinks will be announced.
10/4 Update: iPhone 4S as-predicted. Software stole the show from hardware. Siri personal assistant and iCloud are the big additions. iOS 5 drops on Oct. 12th, iPhone 4S on Oct 14th. Details and video at apple.com
A follow-up to my Padme Moment four years ago.
Computers are tools of creation. No company has pushed that concept farther and to more people than Apple. Along the way, computers became tools of consumption and that is where Apple is making the bulk of it’s massive record-breaking income in recent years. So, understandably, that is where a lot of their product energy is focused.
But producing superb tools of creation is how people came to love Apple products. And lately the creative professionals who love and create things on and for Apple computers aren’t feeling that the love is reciprocated.
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I’ve had a week off to think about it and I’m ready to write again. The annual habit of new year resolutions and predictions is a fabulous excuse to take the time to do so.
First I should go back and take a look at what I wrote last Jan 1 . . .
Oops, looks like I wrote nothing between July 2009 and April 2010, and nothing at all after April. Shame on me.
2011 Resolution One: More writing.
The past year has not been one of my favorites. Health issues have slowed me down quite a bit physically. To prevent this from leading to an accelerated downward spiral of physical condition, I need to take better care of myself. That means . . .
2011 Resolution Two: More activity, less eating.
On to the here and future now. One of my constant mental themes in 2010 was ‘new’ – A new decade means new things. A general mantra of ‘old things suck’ pervaded my thinking. I searched for and embraced new wherever I found it and ended up pretty disappointed. From media to gadgets, the newer things didn’t live up to their promise – myself included. New didn’t amount to much progress for me in 2010. So I’m turning around a bit for the new year and picking up some of the good things from the past to move forward with.
Do I love iPad? Nah, it’s a disaster. But it won’t be for long.
First off, I’m definitely NOT seeing the battery life all the reviewers are seeing. Apple says 10 hours of solid use, reviewers say it’s more like 12, I’m getting about 6. Ran it down yesterday, charged overnight, got used today about 1/4th of the day and it’s dead again.