My rationale for wanting an iPhone

Posted on July 9, 2008

Over in the comments section of Beerorkid.com Mr. T had asked “What was your thought process behind your decision to buy one? I am always interested in hearing about the rationale behind consumer choices for big investments, particularly things like iPhones which are expensive investments, albeit nice ones.

I had started typing up a response, but it quickly became a short essay, so I decided it would be easier (and give me some content, woohoo!) to respond here. ‘Cuz that’s what blogs are for. My answer begins below:

The iPhone is awesome. But I suppose that’s not enough detail, so I’ll go on. Before I had got an iPhone, before there was even an announcement of making an iPhone, I had been wanting a PDA. Something that I can carry with me, that I can check email, take notes, and browse the internet on. I have had a laptop since 2004, but a laptop isn’t always convenient or practical to carry around, so I wanted something portable enough to fit in my pocket. But between an iPod, a cell phone, and a PDA, that’s a lot of pocket space. Then the iPhone came along. And you know what? It made me a fan of convergent tech.

The big seller for me on the phone isn’t the iPod functionality. I rarely use it, to be honest. When I’m driving in my car or working, I normally listen to my 80 gigabyte iPod, just because it contains my entire collection. The only time I listen to music in phone is if I’m doing some shopping, I might occasionally pocket my earbuds and listen off the phone, just to kind of tune out the rest of the world while I shop. For me, the high point of the iPhone is that it is both a phone and a portable internet browser and email device. I love that.

I can check email pretty much where ever I am, so I’m up to date on what’s going on with work, with blogs, or whatever else I may be into. Let’s say I’m with some friends at a bar or whatever, and someone says, hey guys, let’s go to a movie. Perfect, I pull out my phone, check the local theater chain’s website for movies and times and boom, we’re ready. Need to find somewhere? I can check google maps and get directions from my current local. I can even search for nearby businesses, if I want to find, say, the closest Chinese restaurant. Want to make tentative plans for next week? I can check iCal and pencil you in. It’s perfect for everything I want in a portable device.

There are some caveats though. The internet isn’t as fast as I would like. But to be honest, I’m just happy to have internet where ever I go. The camera isn’t that great. If you’ve got plenty of bright light it works awesome. But anything less than perfect lighting and it’s pretty subpar. I end up throwing away a lot of pictures I take. And every now and then (but not too often) I have to reboot my phone. Which is still an alien concept to a lot of people, but let’s face it, this isn’t a phone, it’s a very compact computer which just happens to have cellular capabilities.

And you know what, nearly a year later, I still love my phone. It fits into my life wonderfully. And even though the phone has been available for just over a year, chicks still dig it

Those Wily Portuguese!

Posted on July 8, 2008

*shakes fists at Portugal*

iPhone Portugal forums‘ user Coimbra claims to have unboxed an iPhone 3G, and has posted pics to prove it:

Now, since none of yous can read Portuguese, and I can, I’ll help. Coimbra says that the 3G speed is “really good”, but most of the good stuff requires the (as of yet) unreleased iTunes 7.7, so he can’t use a lot of the new features yet, including the app store. When asked where he bought it, he said that it’s “not boughten”, and how he acquired it is a “secret”. And that’s about all he says. The thread is only three pages long, mostly posts of “good job” and “can I have one”. The photos, at a glance, look real. And being as the new iPhone goes on sale in a few days, it would seem likely that someone would have gotten a hold of one some how (most likely means used by the criminal classes). Good on ya, I guess, Coimbra.

Point: Counterpoint

Posted on January 16, 2008

Wil Shipley, developer of the fine Delicious Library has a counter-argument to all of those who bitched about the MacBook Air (yes, I’m in that group too), in his delightfully titled MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick.

I’ve read journalists complain that you can’t get at the hard drive in the MacBook Air. What? I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn’t open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel. Ok, yes I would, but you get my point. I’m sorry, Zooey, I didn’t mean it, baby.

Some journalists get so close to the truth it hurts, yet miss the large print. “OMG! The unit is all sealed and self-contained like the iPod!”

Yes… the iPod. That huge failure. Also, the iPhone. Stunning disappointment that it was. I mean, jeebus, why would Apple make ANOTHER device incredibly simple? Clearly the market has spoken, and it wants tons of ports and screws and geegaws and flippers… no, wait, no it doesn’t.

He does make some points, and has fine taste in saucy hollywood actresses. (Hey… Zooey Deschanel is only two years older than me. That puts her in the “attainable” age range…) However, I’m still gonna go out and say that the MBa is too underpowered and too damn expensive. Those so-called “normal people” who are in the computer-as-an-appliance market and don’t care if the computer isn’t user-serviceable, also generally don’t want to spend nearly two grand on a laptop.

But still, that thing does look damn nice, and is a step towards the future of Mac portables.

Macworld Keynote

Posted on January 15, 2008

Welp, another Steve Jobs Macworld address has come and gone. Naturally, every boy and his blog is going to have a post up on their thoughts; I may as well throw my share in. This may have been the fastest they’ve gotten the video online yet, I’m watching it now.

Time Capsule

Time Capsule, the new backup solution to be paired with Time Machine, is intriguing. I’ve been sorely tempted to get an Airport base station, but had a hard time justifying spending $179 on a router, even if it is pre-N. But the 500 Gb Time Capsule is awful tempting. If I can use the drive as a shared network drive for files instead of for backup, I may just get this. Heck, even if I can’t and I have to plug in a MyBook for file serving, I may just get one. I got drives lying around. My only complaint? USB-only for plugging in ext. HDs. Really? In this day and age when we’ve got superior technologies like FireWire and eSATA, I have to use a USB cord? Hecka lame. But still, one of these might be in my future.

iPhone 1.1.3

I’m actually installing this as I type this. I love that whenever Steve mentions web clips, people in the audience laugh. Webclips was a pretty jokey update in Safari 3. The new Maps is an awesome update to the app, and I know there have been a few occasions where I could have used GPS’s half-retarded little cellular-triangulation brother. I’m pretty excited about it.

SMS-ing to different people is neat, although really only useful every now and then. But this gives me a chance to vent my biggest gripe about the SMS feature. Is it Copy and Paste? No. Lack of MMS? Meh who cares. It’s the interface. “But Joshua, the interface is just like iChat, who wouldn’t love that?” That’s the problem. I start to think of text messages as iChat messages, which don’t cost me any money on the computer, instead of text messages, that do cost me money on the phone. It used to be that I’d never get anywhere near my 200-a-month allotment, but with the iPhone I’ve done it twice. Ack. Gotta reign that in, or pay the extra 5 bucks for more messages. But I digress.

Interface customization will hopefully be as good as I’m expecting. I honestly don’t need Stocks on my phone’s main screen, or YouTube for that matter. Watching the keynote, it looks like I can’t remove them completely, relegating them to a menu, but if I can push them off to a second screen where I never have to see them, I’ll be content.

I don’t use my phone for watching movies outside of the occasional Diggnation, so I’m not fussed over the new video features. Oh, and the $20 upgrade cost for the iPod Touch is definitely lame, but I don’t own one so I don’t care. I’ll ask Tyler, who has a Touch, if he plans on upgrading. I’m wondering though, if one chooses not to upgrade, will they be excluded from future point-release software updates, or will there be two versions of the Touch’s updates, one for paid-upgraders and one for the old school Touches.

iTunes and TV

Movie Rentals? Not the most exciting thing in the world, as I’m a Netflix subscriber. But I can see myself being in a situation where I just feel like watching a movie right now, so I may be renting. If anything, now I’ll finally get around to seeing the Simpsons movie and Ratatouille. Funny that Blockbuster’s stock dropped %15 today though.

TV’s update and price drop are pretty meh to me. I still can’t watch my .avi movies on the device without hacking it, so I don’t care. It seems like the price drop is proof that they’re disappointed in the lagging sales of the TV. I wonder if there will be a big outcry the way there was with the iPhone

The MacBook Air

I’m not gonna lie. I’m impressed they got it so thin, and if I’m honest, a little jealous. The 3/4″ thick chassis makes my 1″ thick MacBook Pro look like a fatty. And It is a sexy machine, pushing us even closer to devices that look like something on Star Trek. I’ll cop to saying that it was too soon, they wouldn’t ditch optical drives right away. But I think they’ve managed to do it right. I think. If you have another Mac, the remote optical drive sharing is brilliant. But if you don’t have another computer, you’re kind of left high and dry. It really seems like they’re pushing for buying from iTMS instead of buying physical discs with this. The gestures feature is great too, and something I wish I had on my MBP.

All the sexiness and awesomeness aside though, spec-wise The MBa is incredibly disappointing. For $1800, what I paid for my MacBook Pro, you get a laptop that is spec’d slightly more less on par with a regular $1,100 MacBook. The 1.6 GHz proc is a paltry speed, considering the MB ships with a 2.0 GHz chip in the base model. Once again, they’re using the crappy integrated graphics chip. You get one USB port. Which means you’ll need a hub. No FireWire (once again, why oh why are they abandoning FireWire so?), no ethernet (there’s a USB adapter available for those who need to plug in, but that’ll take up your one USB port…) Nothing is user-servicable. The 2 gigs of memory is onboard memory, meaning you can’t change or upgrade it. I’m assuming the HD isn’t replaceable. Even the battery isn’t user-replaceable.

Oh, and if you want that sweet 64Gb solid state drive? $3,100. That’s fucking expensive for such a low-spec machine, it’s ridiculous. That’s more than I paid for the first three cars I owned. And really, I was surprised they couldn’t squeeze more than five hours of battery life out of the thing. But still, it is a step towards the future, and in a few years, this will be the next generation MacBook. But for now, I’m not buying it. I’m saving my pennies for a Time Capsule instead.

How do You Use Spaces?

Posted on January 6, 2008

And more importantly, I suppose, are you using Spaces? Even before Leopard, there were a number of virtual desktop managers for the Mac, but to be honest, I never really gave them a try for more than a day or two before Spaces. And now, I love it. This is how my MacBook Pro is set up:

The center screen is primarily for Safari. I use it to surf the web, and occasionally, for FTP or TextEdit. This keeps me somewhat focused on whatever I’m reading/writing with minimal screen clutter. The right screen is reserved for iChat, Adium, and Twitteriffic. It’s a sort of communications center. That way, if I want not to be distracted by IMs I can just ignore that screen, and i can keep all the clutter of multiple chats on one screen. Finally, the left screen I use for actual productivity. Photoshop, InDesign, Pages, Illustrator, etc. all go here. This one is for apps that require just one window, that I want to concentrate fully on working on.

Making sure that windows stay organized and where they’re supposed to be in Spaces is simple thanks to the anchoring system in System Preferences -> Exposé/Spaces.

Just add a new assignment, pick an app and pick the window you want it to go in and it’ll generally stay there, except for the occasional fuckery (like when you drag an assigned window to another space, it sometimes does goofy things. iChat is often guilty of this.)

That’s the system I’ve got worked out, anybody have a layout they’d like to share?

Moar Leopard Notes

Posted on December 23, 2007

(See what I did there, it’s a LOLcats reference in the title)

A) Font Book sucks. Not sure if it’s always sucked, as I haven’t used it much, or if it just sucks under Leopard. I’ve acquired a lot of fonts over the years, and a lot of them are not so good. So I thought I’d whittle down the collection a bit. However, if I remove a font/collection using Font Book’s command, a lot of them reappear after a minute or two. After some fiddling, I’ve worked it down to having to hit cmd+R to Reveal the font in Finder, cmd+delete to delete from Finder, cmd+w to close the Finder window, and then switching back to Font Book where the font disappears after a second. Not nearly as efficient as hitting “delete”, but it gets the job done.

B) Font preview in Finder rules. Not only can you preview fonts in Quick Look, which is nice, but the font is also represented by its icon in Finder. It even previews well in a full-size Coverflow-view Finder window. That is the sex

Things I Love About Leopard #1

Posted on November 15, 2007

Drop down menu (courtesy of Spaces). Notice the window behind it. So subtle I almost missed it before. The blurring of the background window is awesome, gives the menu a slightly translucent effect. Very cool.

Installing gOS in Parallels

Posted on November 15, 2007

Today at MacFags, we’re going to try an experiment. Everybody and their blog has written about the hawtness of gOS, so I’m going to give it a try in Parallels. In the name of science, of course. I downloaded the ISO via Bit Torrent (using the fabulous Transmission by the way) at record speeds (for my crappy cable connection anyways). Boot up Parallels, make some basic settings decisions (Typical Install, Other Linux, more power to the virtual machine), select the ISO file and away we go.

So far so good. We’ve got ourselves a nice little start up screen. Let’s select “Start or Install gOS”.

A little text mode before it starts up the graphical environment, that’s cool, always good to keep tabs on what’s happening.

And crap. After attempting to start up the graphical environment it spits this message out. For those with wonky eyes, it says: “The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on. Waiting for 2 minutes before trying again on the display :O.” For the record, the display server was shut down four times. But who’s counting.

I tried again using the Safe Graphics mode, and had the same problem. Anybody out there actually get gOS to run in virtual yet? Or should I stick with ignoring my other Linux VMs, instead of ignoring my gOS VM?

Leopard First Impressions

Posted on November 1, 2007

Over at Wind the Frog DB asked some questions about Leopard. I was going to post answers to his and others’ questions in the comments section, but some how it turned into a whole fucking essay, so instead I’ll just post the thing up here.

The dock on the right or left…works ok?
Yes the look of the dock changes when you’re side dockin’. It reverts to a transparent dark bar similar to the previous dock. Check my Skitch for a screenshot. There’s a hidden preference if you want the dock in the bottom but prefer the new-old transparent dark bar. Oh, and when you’re side dockin’ stacks doesn’t fan out in the cool manner. But that’s livable.

Anyone test the audio/video quality with iChat?
Haven’t done video/audio chat yet, I’d have to do my hair first. I am tempted though because I want to test the new chat recording feature. iChat still disconnects randomly but at least now it automatically reconnects.

Coverflow/Preview work ok? Or is it real dodgy?
I haven’t used Coverflow either, because the only use I really see in it is browsing porn/random images folders. For seeing what documents are I hit space bar and that brings up QuickView right away. Which is another awesome feature. Works like a charm. Preview.app has gotten a lot better at loading quickly and handling multiple documents/images at once. And you can resize images within the app now. About f’ing time.

On the Intel machines, can you tell it is faster?
The OS on the whole does run faster, though that’s always been the case with OSX. The newest version always runs a li’l zippier than the previous. Also: Me and my MacBook Pro are rockin’ 64-bit I was just impressed how fast the installation was compared to installing Tiger and Panther.

Anything else you would like to add?
Safari resizes images to fit the window and zooms to full size with a double click. That is a feature that I rather missed from Firefox. Now if somebody would make proper adblocking for Safari so I don’t have to look at NSFW ads on FaceBook (which I’ve already complained to them about). And I totally love resizable text input boxes. Perfect for when WP gives you a small space to type in and I have to write up a big post like this.

Last.fm’s client needs to be updated because you can’t switch off showing it in the dock, and it hangs when you quit the program fifty percent of the time which annoys me, but I’ll get by ’til they update it. Also, InDesign was totally borked thanks to the upgrade, although I’m hopefully going to be finding a workaround for that next week.

Paul said: I read that the iLife was a backwards step for iMovie and/or iDVD in terms of functionality, otherwise I might be upgrading too.
Yes you can still get the previous version of iMovie after the upgrade, or if it’s already installed, ‘08 leaves it on the system. I would say that it’s not so much a step down for iMovie as it is a step left. They completely rewrote it so that it’s a different program. I think they’re trying to push iMovie as the program for the unwashed non-tech saavy masses who know nothing of video editing, and want to push the more experienced people (i.e., the people complaining about iMovie ‘08) to upgrading to Final Cut Express. iDVD isn’t so much worse as it is that Apple hasn’t really upgraded iDVD in the past two revisions. They just pack in a couple new themes and call it good. I’ve only used iDVD once in the past three and a half years of owning a Mac.

I think that’s all I got for now. I might have more later, or possibly a video of a monkey washing a cat. Who knows!

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