Dude.
No, really… dude.
Pretty sweet, but there are three items that will keep me from getting one for a good long time. First, I have a reasonable investment in my Palm in terms of time and brainpower that I am not willing to relearn. Until those tools switch over (which I am sure they will) I will keep using my palm. (Also, I really do love my palm, it does what it does really really well.) Second, 8gb? My bros-in-law picked me up a sweet 30gb iPod this Christmas, so there is no way 4 or 8 is going to turn my head. And finally, I actually have fought to get a plan I like from Sprint, there is no way that I am going to go through all that again with another carrier.
Having said all that, it does look very very cool and I will certainly be looking to play with one at some point in the future. What I find currently interesting however is the other announcement…
Update: Blackberry style push e-mail from Yahoo!? Are they just giving up on .mac?
Both A. and I have moved into nano’s from big, fat ipods. Primarily, my old brick is exactly that and Adam’s 30GB had 3 hard drive failures. So, we have 2 nano’s. Me the standard look, him the new aluminum body in black. Trust me - you can easily adjust to the size. It is actually rather fun. I would lament not having this one song, but that is gone with decently though selections.
It is fun to have all you collection on an ipod, I don’t deny. I did for a while, then A. exploded out collection to ‘huge’ and it become untenable. But, it can be fun to go the other way even though I know you had the ’small’ selection for quite a while.
Why do you find the AppleTV to be interesting? It doesn’t seem to add much value for the price. I can already watch movies on my TV with ease, and I can already listen to my entire music collection from my ipod on my stereo. For $300, the extra value doesn’t seem to be there, at least for me. I guess I can put downloaded movies onto my TV more easily, but that’s just not very compelling.
-alain, still content without a cellphone
Okay, so I’m totally clueless.
I bought a MacBook Pro, which has the idiosyncratic random shutdown problem. I’m pretty pissed off at Mac, since the stability that comes from not having viruses is, like, the whole reason I like Macs. But if the stability sucks, why am I paying more for it?
So, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, I see that the company that fucked up my laptop is offering me a new cell phone that looks like it would take a year to learn how to use it, and would break the first time I dropped it (Like my Palm IV did). Keep in mind that I despise Legend of Zelda-type games because they require me to learn a bunch of basically random codes to get past the opening screen, so I’m no techno-geek. I expect technology to perform, or screw it. Learning new gizmos is not my hobby. So I don’t get this phone. If I’m going to force myself to learn something huge, obscure, and useless, I can memorize the Odyssey in the original Greek.
Bottom line: does this phone actually do something new and useful, or is it just the latest collection of gizmos jammed into one plastic shell? How will it improve my life?
The iPhone does nothing new, though it is prettier and perhaps easier to use. It is just the latest collection of gizmos jammed into one plastic shell. For people that like that sort of thing, they will be measurably happy for five minutes until the next new gizmo comes along.
I appreciate the design of the device (it’s quite nice!), but I think that it will not improve my life. Doing volunteer work or writing a will might improve my life (or that of my children) far more than owning an iPhone.
Gee, was I in a sour mood or what?
Anyway, thanks for the straight answer. It was the question I wanted to ask, but I might have changed the tone a little…
Eh… they are all just tools. You need to find the tool that works for you, and it might be none of them. For me the Treo combines a lot of features that I used in many different devices, making it an “obvious” upgrade for me. Now I am down to two devices, and the thing that makes the iPhone interesting is that it combines those two devices. The problem is that it doesn’t combine them in a way that applies to my use pattern. So the answer to the question of “how will it improve my life” is that unless you see how it will fit itself into what you want to do with a mobile device and make that easier to do than what you currently do, it probably won’t.
As for your mac, I am really sorry to hear that. I have been very fortunate in terms of hardware problems with my macs. Hardware problem are a fact of life with any complex piece of machinery though, I assume you took it back to have it serviced? I can assure you that the stability of the OS is fine. More importantly though, the configuration of the OS is much simpler than on Windows (XP and older, haven’t tried Vista yet). The real problem with stability on the Windows side comes from people accidentally messing up their system’s configuration (or Win messing itself up through normal use). But again, it comes back to being a tool. No system or hardware is going to solve all your problems, they are just tools to do jobs, for me the mac makes my work easier, but I still have to keep a PC around because sometimes the mac is the wrong tool for the job.
I feel like I need to note that while I love reading about computers and gadgets, I am actually not a gadget freak, it took me years of oogling Palm Pilots before I got one, and I didn’t even get it (my lovely wife got it for me). And I didn’t upgrade my old mac until I absolutely could no longer get the programming done on it that I needed to do for work. So maybe you should ask an upgrade a year type person and they can give you a better description of why you need an iPhone. (Or a teenage kid.)
As far as the sick laptop goes, I recommend taking it in to an Apple store if you have one handy. You may have to resort to doing a warranty replacement thing; I’ve heard reports of people exchanging non-functional MBP’s for working ones, and other reports of people who’ve had no problems at all. Hopefully you can get yours fixed - good luck!
Yeah, I guess I’ll have to consign myself to spending time and money getting my Mac fixed. I’ve just never had to do that before.
That’s an interesting statement, now that I look at it. On the one hand, what an amazing thing to have one machine as complex as this work fine, let alone decades of Apples working fine, from the Apple IIe through my G4. On the other hand, even my Timex Sinclair or TRS-80 did almost everything I do now, just with smaller files back then: word processing, number crunching. Hooking up to the web was a little different, since there wasn’t a web, but I do remember using a modem that measured in baud, and that worked as long as nobody wanted to make a call. My strategy worked perfectly: Just don’t buy a DOS/Windows machine, and your computer will never break. The strategy worked from about 1983 to 2006. This is really the first time I’ve had a machine that can’t reliably run circles around my puny demands. I don’t see any good reason why 2007 is different from prior years - there has always been advancing new technology, and Apple always managed it before. It’s unsettling.