Atomic iPhone

April 21st, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Amidst the generic sense of rage that the whole JizzmodoPhone deba­cle has engen­dered in me, I find myself amused by one thing. I find it hilar­i­ous that a large chunk of the tech media now uncrit­i­cally accepts that the phone that Jizzmodo has in it’s pos­ses­sion is com­pletely, and with­out any pos­si­bil­ity of change, the phone that Apple will intro­duce this summer.

Let’s ana­lyze this assump­tion in detail. First, let’s go ahead and assume that this phone isn’t some sort of nefar­i­ous Apple PR stunt (because it isn’t you rubes), and let’s fur­ther assume that it is a pro­to­type of a future Apple iPhone. Why is it, other than sheer igno­rance, that peo­ple assume that this phone, in it’s exact con­di­tion, is the next gen­er­a­tion iPhone?

Of course, the answer is actu­ally fairly sim­ple. Most “tech jour­nal­ists” have about as much under­stand­ing of actual tech­nol­ogy as my cocker spaniel. For the unini­ti­ated, there are three gen­eral areas that would need to be pro­to­typed for a new iPhone: the elec­tron­ics, the oper­at­ing sys­tem and the remain­ing hard­ware. In a nor­mal man­u­fac­tur­ing process all three of these items would be pro­to­typed sep­a­rately with a very small num­ber of final pro­to­types rep­re­sent­ing the syn­the­sis all the parts. For all we know, the only thing in the JizzmodoPhone that will see the light of day later this year is the mute switch.

Sadly, noth­ing that I write will stem the tide of asi­nine com­men­tary that the JizzmodoPhone will bring over the next few months, but for­tu­nately I have the Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast to let me call the spec­u­la­tors igno­min­ious twats. I look for­ward to it.

7 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • damian_k

    you have a cocker spaniel?

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Actually, no, but “whip­pet, bor­der col­lie, unknown ter­rier mon­grel” doesn’t flow as well.

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    Anyone with 1/2 a midget dicks worth of knowl­edge about Apple (which seems to be almost nobody on the inter­net) and Ive in par­tic­u­lar could tell you that those seams are cer­tainly not shipping.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Hmm, too bad, cocker spaniels are awesome!

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I’ve looked at the pic­tures for the phone try­ing to make up my mind as to whether I like it or not. I con­cluded that I do like it for some rea­son, but:
    Those remain­ing creases are weird­ing me out. I hope that this is a pre-production model and that the final prod­uct will not have those.
    If they are still present in the final prod­uct I’d guess Apple put them there for a rea­son (I’m think­ing accessories).

  • Sigivald

    Well, Gruber makes a good case that it’s a very late-stage pro­duc­tion mile­stone and will thus be very close to what’s release.

    It’s really late in the game to be mak­ing hard­ware changes. Maybe they have another case lined up to swap in before mass pro­duc­tion starts, but they’d want to do test­ing with it in the real world, just like with this pro­to­type, to make sure the recep­tion was good.

    And of course in case it isn’t you need to do that months in advance.

    If they’re aim­ing for a tra­di­tional June announce or release, it’s kinda late to be switch­ing cases…

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    I know and I don’t dis­agree, although the seam in the alu­minum side­wall seems off to me.

    My greater point is that tech “jour­nal­ists” do this all the time. Another exam­ple that has noth­ing to do with pro­to­types is mul­ti­task­ing on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Prior to OS 4 almost every­one com­ment­ing on the mat­ter used phrases like “the iPad can­not mul­ti­task” ignor­ing that mul­ti­task­ing is a func­tion of the OS, and that Apple could, and did, enable it in a OS update.

    It slays me watch­ing peo­ple who are sup­pos­edly tech “experts” who can’t under­stand that a gad­get isn’t an atomic (in the Aristotelian sense) unit. Hence the title of the post.