Phase 1.5 of The “Apple Scandal” Lifecycle Begins

NMD

There is an interim phase in the life­cy­cle of an invented Apple scan­dal. Once the hacks in the blo­gos­phere begin ampli­fy­ing and dis­tort­ing the orig­i­nal bull­shit story, a (usu­ally) hereto­fore unheard of com­pany sur­faces with “hard” data that some­how pur­ports to rein­force the “Apple has a design flaw” meme. In this case the com­pany is SquareTrade. And what’s SquareTrade’s stake in this? They sell acci­den­tal dam­age war­ranties — sur­prise, surprise.

The key part, though, of phase 1.5 is that it allows pub­li­ca­tions that knew bet­ter than to report on the bull­shit unsourced alle­ga­tions that began the cycle to get in on the action and main­tain a veneer of respectability.


Continue read­ing Phase 1.5 of The “Apple Scandal” Lifecycle Begins


One for the Bucket-List, I Witness A “Scandal” Being Born

NMD

Today I had the priv­i­lege of wit­ness­ing some­thing rarely glimpsed in the wild. An event so rare it’s akin to see­ing a snow leop­ard (the cat, not the oper­at­ing sys­tem) per­form a back-flip. For the first time in my career I was present at the exact moment that a New Media Douchebag attempted to start another lame Apple “scandal.”


Continue read­ing One for the Bucket-List, I Witness A “Scandal” Being Born


My Reaction to Apple Revealing the App Store Review Guidelines

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Whatever.

Apple Special Event Predictions — the Results

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Last week I tal­lied up my pre­dic­tions on the pre­dic­tions being made for the annual Apple September Music event by the rumor­sphere. Now that the event is come and gone it’s time to grade my per­for­mance, and the per­for­mance of the rumor­mon­gers in gen­eral. Before I begin though, I think I need to clar­ify what I’m up to with these rumor pre­dic­tions posts. First of all, the items that I list are not my pre­dic­tions. They are the pre­dic­tions being bandied about by the pun­dit­sphere. Secondly, the per­cent­age val­ues that I assign are com­pletely pulled from my ass, often for comedic effect. That said, let’s see how we did.


Continue read­ing Apple Special Event Predictions — the Results


Flighty Whitey

iphone4

If you haven’t heard the news, Apple has delayed the white iPhone yet again; this time to “later this year” which, as we all know is Apple-talk for December 31’st.

All jok­ing aside, if the media is look­ing for a story to play up the “Apple is run by incom­pe­tent design­tards” there you go. Announcing a prod­uct and not being able to ship it for upwards of six months is pathetic. Where’s my press con­fer­ence mother-fuckers?

I’m going to buy a Droid X out of spite.

Why Steve Jobs Is (Legitimately) Pissed at the Media

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I wasn’t present at Friday’s spe­cial iPhone 4 Press Conference held by Apple at their Cupertino Campus, but I fol­lowed the excel­lent live cov­er­age from Jason Snell at Macworld. Ignoring the specifics of the announce­ments (spoiler: there is no fuck­ing recall you fuck­tards), one thing jumped out at me: Steve Jobs was pal­pa­bly angry with the media.


Continue read­ing Why Steve Jobs Is (Legitimately) Pissed at the Media


iPhone 3G iOS 4 Upgrade Aftermath

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Yesterday, like a good lem­ming I updated my iPhone 3G to the newly released and re-named iOS 4. For what­ever odd rea­son it seems that you peo­ple are inter­ested in my opin­ion on such things — which frankly is more than a lit­tle dis­turb­ing — so here are my ran­dom thoughts on the update process itself, as well as run­ning a nearly 2 year old phone with Apple’s newest oper­at­ing sys­tem. Note that this will not be any­thing approx­i­mat­ing a full review of iOS 4. If you want some­thing like that I highly sug­gest that you read the excel­lent review from Ars Technica.

The Update Process

First some notes on the update process itself. I’m happy to report that, unlike many who were upgrad­ing an iPhone 3G, my upgrade went rel­a­tively quickly. All told it was prob­a­bly an hour start-to-finish, but that doesn’t count time spent sit­ting idle wait­ing for my input while I bug­gered off for din­ner. That said, the iPhone upgrade process as man­aged though iTunes is fuck­ing inter­minable. I’m not yet one of those peo­ple who call for the split­ting of iTunes into mul­ti­ple seper­ate appli­ca­tions, but I’m get­ting there.

During the entire process, which consists

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WWDC 2010 Roundup

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Well, there you have it. The WWDC 2010 Keynote has come and gone. The big news, of course, was the new iPhone 4. Additionally Steve Jobs talked about the newly renamed iOS 4 and minor updates to iBooks on the iPad. I’m not going to bother run­ning down the fea­tures of the new OS, Apple cov­ered that dur­ing the spe­cial event ear­lier this year. Nor am I going to go through a detailed list of the specs of the new iPhone. You can get a good run-down of that at Ars Technica. What I do want to talk about are my impres­sions of some of the announce­ments, and in par­tic­u­lar, the reac­tions to them.


Continue read­ing WWDC 2010 Roundup


Adobe’s Messed Up Metaphors

I ran across this arti­cle on TechCrunch by M.G. Seigler regard­ing a recent state­ment made by Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch. Regarding, what else, the iPhone and Apple’s refusal to allow appli­ca­tions built using Flash on the plat­form. Kevin’s full remarks are avail­able here, but here is the part that M.G. focuses on, and that I want to address:

But look at the iPhone heli­copter we just saw — why should I only be able to use an iPhone for that? Why can’t you do that with any phone? If you look at what’s going on now, it’s like rail­roads in the 1800’s. People were using dif­fer­ent gauged rails. Your cars would lit­er­ally not run on those rails. That’s counter to the web. The ‘rails’ now are com­pa­nies forc­ing peo­ple to write for a par­tic­u­lar OS, which has a high cost to switch

M.G. does an ade­quate job of demon­strat­ing why Lynch is wrong by delv­ing into the his­tory of the U.S. rail­road sys­tem and by look­ing at the Japanese model, but he makes the mis­take of accept­ing the metaphor in the first place.

Lynch is craft­ing a metaphor where the devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment used to pro­duce smart — phone

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Reasoned Commentary

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From the Christian Science Monitor.

It’s nice to see some­one “get it” in regards to the JizzmodoPhone saga.

H/T to John Gruber.