10.22.07

Thoughts of a Despairing Appleologist

Posted in Appleology, Rants at 4:33 pm

Over the weekend– which was fantastically relaxing, thank you– I came across a post on an unnamed forum by an unnamed individual. Well, all right, the forum and the person do indeed have named, but I’d rather not reveal them here. Anyway, this person’s someone who I’ve had an arm’s-length relationship for a while, and in general I respect his opinion, even if I also in general almost never agree with him. Funny thing about that, really; I might not agree but he’s got a solid opinion and his arguments work from his point of view… just not mine, usually. That’s tangential, really, to the point at hand, being that he had a temporarily-bricked iPhone because he loaded a custom ringtone on it prior to the firmware upgrade.

Needless to say, he was upset. I don’t blame him, really; $2 total for a ringtone (since Apple’s forced into the mentality that any track that’s sourced outside of the iTMS must be considered to be illegally-sourced) is ridiculous. Locking the phone to a single carrier is ridiculous (I would be happier about this if it was just making a GSM model and not CDMA). Preventing third-party applications at launch is ridiculous. And then not testing the firmware update to make sure that it doesn’t destroy phones that have modifications that you know your customers are using is ridiculous (bricking is an unacceptable failure mode, even if the modification voids the warranty; at the very least it should refuse to update or undo the mod). I’m likely the most ardent Apple fanboy I know, and you still won’t get me to touch the iPhone. (Tangentially related: the iPod Touch has some of the same problems, but I’m not touching that one due to capacity– if it had an 80GB hard drive I would have sat out in line at the Apple Store for it.)

Here’s the thing. Apple has no business being in the phone business. I was psyched for the iPhone until the drawbacks started coming in. As soon as AT&T started playing hardball on some of the features, Apple had the right and the responsibility to its legacy and its customers to say, “forget it, we’re going elsewhere”. I’m honestly disappointed that the AT&T deal was really, honest and true, the best deal that any of the providers could come up with. At launch, it was overpriced for all of the features it had to lose and promises it had to break, and the price drop was not enough to overcome some of the perceived inflated cost. In the end, the iPhone has proven to be a serious misstep in terms of the Apple philosophy.

And yet, it’s hard to complain too much when you realize that it basically is printing money for Apple. I suppose that that just proves that slick marketing and snazzy commercials will trump technical quality and brand integrity every time.

Don’t get me wrong. I still like my MacBook. I still dig my iPod and am looking into jumping to the Touch once it gets a decent hard drive. And I will shamelessly admit that I dropped a bit more money than I strictly should have for a RAM upgrade last week (to be fair, the clerk at the Store did waive the $30 installation fee for me, and in fact showed me how to replace the memory– that’s class-act service right there). In terms of the products that Apple has traditionally sold– computers and music players– I’m still firmly in the thrall of the Jobs and W’oz-Loggoth. I just have my doubts about the next generation. If the iPhone is indicative of where Apple’s going, I’ll be looking into ways to stay right where I am, technology-wise.

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