Blog / Apple

You know the worst thing about owning an Apple product? They tend to work all the time.

Hey, quit giggling. For the easiest proof that any activity repeated enough times becomes a habit, consider that I’m apparently compelled to reformat my computing devices at least once every six months. When OS X Mountain Lion came out, I reformatted. I do it to my iPhone and iPad every time there’s a major version number upgrade. I’ve even done it to my Xbox 360, moving my saved games onto the internal memory, wiping the external hard disk, then moving my data back and setting the machine back to factory specs. All of it’s totally pointless. My devices run just as well as they did before, but now my brain can rest.

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My first day with the Nexus 7 included two epiphanies. “Oh, I get it now,” spoken slowly. Then later and more frantically, “how do they live like this?”

Yeah, it’s bad. But not all bad.

I’ve dabbled very briefly in Android before: gawking at other friends’ huge phones, trying to help a coworker get her mail widget working, drooling over the esoteric 8pen keyboard. An iOS stalwart since the early days, I’ve always wondered about the grass on the other side.

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There’s only two times Apple reduces prices on a product: when its successor is near and on Black Friday. That’s it. Unless you’re a student or buying refurbished, you may as well get that $200 out now.

What do I expect from the new iPhone on September 12?

• It’ll be named “The New iPhone” rather than “iPhone 5”
• 4G LTE support so Verizon reps can complain about a different missing feature
• A 4" screen, extended vertically in height but otherwise identical
• Only a slight change to the exterior to accomodate the new display
• New processor/graphics chip to handle the increased screen size

An NFC chip would be a shock. Forget about an OLED screen (which I can only read as oléd for some reason). Widgets on the home screen or elsewhere are a pipe dream (hands up, anyone who uses Dashboard on OS X… thought so).

I don’t expect to buy the new iPhone, but I will probably be shelling out some money next month. I bet an Android-toting co-worker ten bucks that Apple wouldn’t release an iPhone with a 4 inch screen this year. Losing that bet is going to sting. Maybe I’ll give him a $10 iTunes gift card instead.

Quick, what’s the most Apple-like company in the PC space?

No, not Samsung. You’ve been reading too much of The Verge lately. Putting aside rounded rectangles, the company doing the best job emulating Apple’s professional aesthetics is actually Vizio. Well, at least online.

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The biggest sin in the technology world, if you believe the journalists of same, is hypocrisy. Bad products and security breaches are one thing, but if you betray the principles on which your products are currently built, you’re a monster.

I emphasized “currently” for a reason. Once upon a time Apple was the little guy fighting against the stodgy behemoth that was IBM. Apple was the different computer, the choice of renegades and rebels. But once you’re the new leader in selling personal computers, you can retire the notion of being the little guy and do whatever you want.

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The patent trial of the century is in full swing, with The Verge providing play by play reporting. Phil Schiller’s testimony is fascinating, revealing that yes, of course Apple does market research like any other company. But it’s depressing to hear suggestions of a 7.85" iPad entered into evidence.

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One thing that really struck me while reading Fake Steve Jobs’ book was his assertion that Apple designs products backwards. Usually you start with market research, design the hardware, write software, run tests, then create marketing and release the device. Apple, he claims, starts with the marketing. If they can’t make a good ad for the device (whatever it is), they won’t create the product.

It’s funny - of course no product could actually be made like that! - but Apple’s advertising for the iPad watered the seed of doubt in my mind. The key words that stuck out were “magical” and “revolutionary” which Apple relentlessly repeated in their public relations.

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I love my little Apple TV. The last television accessory that showed this kind of care and detail was the TiVo, and I gave that up when I ditched cable TV in 2007. But as the rumors swirl about Apple releasing an actual LCD television I wondered about the point of it. Aren’t our current televisions acceptable as they are? What would Apple do differently?

Grand feature

When expanding into an existing market, Apple likes to bring one grand new feature that nobody else has. I’m thinking specifically of the iPhone’s capacitive touch screen. What would that be for televisions? We’ve already got 3D (which nobody likes) and 120 hertz displays (which have zero native content for them). What would make Apple’s TV stand out?

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It’s Mac OS X upgrade time again, which means a lot of stuff will be mysteriously broken. My first casualties were the websites I hosted locally.

Happily, it’s not hard to fix. Mountain Lion doesn’t have a “Web Sharing” button anymore (boo), but all it did is mangle your Apache configuration file (…yay?).

This is mostly a copy-paste from my previous guide.

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Today’s big news is that the popular Mac mail app Sparrow has been bought by Google. No new features are coming, and people are upset. Really upset. Betrayed, even.

I should be too, I suppose, as I use and adore Sparrow for Mac (not so much for iPhone). But schadenfreude warms my heart too much for this to douse it.

Open source software gets a lot of knocks for poor usability and integration. But you know what happens when the developers of an open source project stop working on it? Someone else can pick up the code and keep going right where they left off.

I love my Mac, but on a long enough timescale Richard Stallman is always right.

Update: Matt Gemmell says it way better.