Socks and Sandals

Of course, I had to check, but forgot to post it until the Ars review hit and started talking about the dictionary: the iPhone’s dictionary can correct the word ‘fucking’ right out of the box. I, of course, checked this within the first hour of activated use ;-) So, its got that going for it, which is nice.

I finally got my iPhone activated. I have to say that both of the AT&T customer service representatives that I talked to were absolutely first class. The one woman, Lindsay Brewer, tried to activate my phone 5 times and was on the phone with me for over an hour, well past 2AM her time. That was literally the best support call I’ve ever been on and she couldn’t even get the phone activated in the end ;-) Mad superchamp points all around to the AT&T CSR staff; they appear to be holding up extremely well with must be a powerful onslaught of pissed-off people.

And we’re back: man, this thing is totally fucking awesome. I can’t stop playing with it. I haven’t had this much fun with a piece of hardware since… uh… since… um, oops, different story. Nevermind. Anyway, as usual, I have a ridiculous proclamation to purport:

Toby’s iPhone Proclamation #1:

Every other phone on the market is now officially a piece of shit.

Why?

Because the iPhone isn’t a phone: its a Mac that happens to make phone calls.

That’s the real beauty of it, I think. The mobile landscape today is highly disparate and varied today, much more so than the desktop environment. This leads to wildly different user experiences across phones and even applications for the same phone. By enforcing Mac-like standards on the phone’s apps and functionality, they’ve drastically reduced the impedance mismatch between the desktop and phone experiences.

Oh, yeah, and they rocked out on a bunch of other things, too:

• Fixing issues and adding features via iTunes-based software update is pure genius; people are already totally acclimated to that mode via the iPod
• Apps based on open Web standards and Safari will be a ginormous win for the platform over time; potentially any app on the Web is just an URL away on the iPhone (although Orbitz’s calendar Javascript widget is annoyingly dysfunctional on the iPhone). Plus, crazy bad apps have very little chance of crashing the phone this way
• Getting YouTube to spit H.264 video so that the hardware decoder can take care of it. Flash would have required main CPU time, thus reducing battery life: this way, people get YouTube videos and longer battery life! (unlike the new Flash Lite phones from VZ)
• OMFG: tabbed browsing on a phone!!!! Dood, that might be worth the loot right there, for realz
• Only one hardware button: beautiful and no need to figure out what to do with all those other buttons when you reconfigure the UI with a software update

I think the Verizon executives will rue the day they kicked Jobs out of their offices. It was an incredibly stupid move not to ride this wave. Others think that perhaps that mistake will come to be known as the “not-buying-DOS-outright” mistake the ultimately leads to their irrelevance in the marketplace.

I never had a smartphone before and never had a data plan, either. I’ll probably keep the latter for a good while, but “smartphones” are now a total joke. Oh, and to all the naysayers talking about “iPhone won’t work with corporate email systems”: I was up and running with email from our Exchange servers in under a minute from the iPhone. Eat that.

This iPhone launch has really been screwed. Unlike some of my friends, they haven’t deactivated my old phone yet (mostly, I think, because I didn’t call Verizon to tell them anything) but I’m sure they will do so long before I get the email telling me that my iPhone is activated if the rest of the stories are at all accurate.

At this point, I don’t even care who’s fault it is. The thing Apple had to know is that, whomever is to blame, customers bring this thing home and sit in front of their program on their computers to activate it and that fact makes it Apple’s fault. I don’t even believe that its largely Apple’s fault technically, but again, it doesn’t matter.

Lets look at this from a higher-level perspective. If you are Apple, you:

• had to know how many units you were going to ship out to stores and thus the exact maximum activation load AT&T could possibly have to handle
• had to know how long the average purchase was going to take, since making activation offline then turns the point-of-sale into the same experience of buying an iPod, and thus could model the time series of activations relatively accurately (again, being conservative to make sure the launch went smoothly)
• had to understand demand would be higher on the West Coast because you sell a bunch of other shit that has higher demand levels on the West Coast and the demographics between those customers and iPhone customers are largely the same (if they aren’t, you can’t assume they aren’t, anyway)
• had to know that your partner is basically incompetent

Apple has retail stores, for chrissakes! They’ve launched wildly popular items before! (recently, even) They had to have this data. Not mining it correctly was negligent of them.

There are two important meta-points in all of this that I’d like to iterate.

First, this is Jobs’ legacy product. The “going out on a high note” dealie. He can’t be pleased with how this launch will be remembered at this point. I can imagine him sitting in front of his iPhone screaming at AT&T execs, voice hoarse from having done so since about 7PM PST Friday night. This may all wash over in the end, but he’s just got to be upset right now.

Secondly, this had all better be worked out by Monday morning.

Why?

Because the people buying iPhones have jobs.

It costs too much for it to be otherwise on a large scale. Those people need to make calls. Having to wait 24 hours to make or receive a call again is not a tenable situation for the vast majority of them. If this rolls into Tuesday, expect to see massive returns of the iBrick.

I think they can pull it out if they work it out by Monday. However, if not, I really can’t see anything good coming of it, since Monday is also the day the news media wakes up and they are all just pining for the opportunity to smash a big pie in Apple’s face. That’s schaudenfraude for you. If they don’t work it out by then, the choice of headline words in news stories goes from “bumpy” to “disastrous”.

As everyone I know who bought an iPhone is currently experiencing the awesomeness of the AT&T end of the Apple-AT&T collaboration , I figured I’d post up this story I found in the forums about one guy’s well-put experience with the iPhone to date:

Getting the iPhone was easy. Getting it to work, however has been more of a Microsoft type experience.

I walked right into the flagship 5th Avenue Apple store last night at 10PM to the still roaring cheers of employees lined up at the entrance.

As I marched down the shiny spiral staircase, the view of the crowds reminded me of Moses’s descent from Mt. Zion, masses of people welcoming me, while at the same time occupied with their own business of conducting their iLifes. I was ushered like a movie star into the iPhone line corral, which had about 5 people in it and in less than 2 minutes flat, my Green Amex card was being silently swiped and I was handed a bag with what looked like a small box of very expensive cologne inside.

I had been “gifted” the most coveted tech prize at all and could hardly contain my excitement as I rushed into the round glass elevator full of other devotees with their little black bags. Walking out it felt like I had won the marathon – more cheering and adoring fans. “Where was the champagne”, I asked myself?

I hopped on my bike and rode home to the Upper upper west side and in seconds flat had the bag and it’s contents opened, eager to inspect the candy inside.

I was not disappointed – the phone, and it’s packaging are a model of Apple simplicity and style, well worthy of all the hype and upholding the companies tradition of doing things right that sings a compelling song to my organizational heart. The packaging is minimal and there are no instructions to speak of. The phone told me to connect to iTunes for set up, which I already knew having seen the video on Apple’s website. After a small bit of frustration with nothing happening, I decided to check for updates and realized my iTunes wasn’t the latest version, so I downloaded that version (again with classic Apple ease and simplicity) and re-started iTunes.

This time, my phone was recognized and I was prompted to set up my new AT&T account. “Hooray”, I shrieked, eager to have the phone up and running so I could show it off to a friend who was stopping by any minute now.

Almost 12 hours later, I am still waiting, the “Your Activation Requires Additional Time To Complete” message still taunting me when I open iTunes. I guess you could call it the Hangover. I woke up at 2AM and when I was still greeted by the annoying, sorry you’ll still have to wait message, decided to call the customer service number on the screen. After an 8 minute wait on hold, I was told by the very nice AT&T lady that I would just have to wait until I got said email.

Again, I am still waiting. I imagine there are tens of thousands of us still waiting. AT&T couldn’t hold up their part of the bargain and must have been overwhelmed by the desire to create new accounts. The thing that baffles me and I find somewhat amusing at the same time is, why did the part that involves human beings (going to store, waiting in line, having credit card and other information exchanged and then getting the phone, take less than 5 minutes, while the supposedly automated part, signing up for service take 10 hours and counting? Is this what one can expect from AT&T? Should I really be dropping my Verizon service?

I’m baffled. I’m annoyed. I’m feeling like I bought an Apple product, operated by Dell.

Its really quite a shame. This was Jobs’ legacy product, to be sure. Now it will be marred by this widespread failure to activate smoothly. Initially, I thought it was ingenious of Apple to do offline activation of these phones, but its clear that they and AT&T weren’t prepared. People are without their phones. I imagine there will be a big dip in sales after this hits the news. Good thing they released on a Friday ;-)

This weekend, I was writing a paper that required some mathematical equations be shown. Apple’s Pages does not have an equation editor like Word does. So I fired up Word. Oops, I forgot to install it and the CD is back at the office. Damn.

Then, I figured I’d try LaTeX, but it was a hassle to generate the images the normal way. So I whipped up this little browser-based LaTeX->PNG formula generator so I could just drag and drop the generated images into my documents. I thought it was semi-neato so I’ve posted it up for all to see. There’s even a screenshot ;-) Have fun with it.

So what if Vista steals all of Mac OS X Tiger’s cool features? By the time Vista comes out, Apple will have already shipped another release of their OS, Leopard, adding yet more features that Microsoft couldn’t hope to have copied in time; without another schedule slip, that is.

More importantly, by the time the next Microsoft operating system after Vista comes out, Apple will have shipped at least 6 more releases of OS X. Extrapolating from Microsoft’s current and past release schedule, one would actually suspect something like 8-10 more years, not just 6. The added features in OS X by that time will relegate Windows to the 99 cent bin at Wal-mart.

I’m pretty surprised that people are getting worked up over Microsoft stealing Apple’s features again. They’ve done it so many times in the past, I can’t believe its news any longer.

What’s ironic is that this is exactly the situation Apple used to find itself in with respect to hardware: twice a decade, Apple would get some hot new hardware that would put it at the top of the performance heap for about 6 months, only to find Intel quickly regain the lead for the next half a decade. Now that this can no longer happen to Apple (since they’ve switched to Intel, making that effect work for them), they are affecting the same half-decade period of decline and obsolescence on MS software by their aggressive release schedules, pertinent and well-implemented new features and ability to get it right for most of their customers. Except that when Microsoft comes out with a new OS, its arguably still worse than what Apple has out at the time (at least lately)...

I tell you what: Microsoft better hope that Apple really doesn’t want retail and whitebox hardware running OS X. If it does/can (legally), that will be the single greatest incentive to dump Windows, and with Google absolutely destroying them on the Internet front, they will be left with only their failing Xbox business to save them.

So, there I am… standin’ in line at the bank…

Just kidding.

I get into work this morning and unpack my bag as usual. First thing I do is plug in my Apple PowerBook 65W AC adapter. Unlike usual, I plugged it in and heard a pop and saw a flash. Uh oh. Its dead. So I unpack the rest of my bag and take the dead power brick back to the local Apple Store.

I get to there just before opening time (10:00AM, an hour after the rest of the mall) and there’s already 10 people standing outside waiting to get in. Right as I was walking up, they opened the door, and I just followed my momentum into the opening metal gate, past everyone standing about. I make a bee-line for the second bank of computers, knowing that to see a “genius” at the Genius Bar, I would have to sign in first.

Hit the second machine, and oh, what’s this? They’ve changed the sign-in application. It used to be a simple web application. Now its this Flash-based hunk of shit. And, true to form, on the computer I tried, it hangs and then crashes. So I use the one next to me once the person signing in ahead of me is finished. At this point, it tells me that the queue is already too long to get in and I should make an appointment. I tell it that I don’t want to and it appears to put me in the queue anyway. Now, how the queue could have already been too long at 2 minutes past opening time is totally beyond me. And what is too long, anyway? How many people is too long? Apparently, 3 is their limit.

So, I’m standing there waiting to be helped and there are two “geniuses” waiting on folks. Meanwhile, there are 5 other useless employees walking around doing nothing. After about 10 minutes, another “genius” graces us with his presence after coming out of the backroom.

Waiting.

Waiting.

More waiting.

While I’m waiting, I look around for one of those tube socks they sell to cover the Nano. Mine’s only about two months old and already scratched to shit and I’ve been pretty careful with it. Fabric scratches this thing. I find them buried in a corner. They only come in a pack of 5 for $30. WTF? Look for the plastic tubes instead, and guess what? They only come in a pack of 5 for $30, too. So I grab a red-T-shirted drone and ask him:

“Why can’t I just buy one of those tube socks for the Nano?”

“We like to give our customers choices. This way you can have different colors to fit your mood.”

I couldn’t not laugh in his face, so I did. If you’re reading this buddy, listen up: I’m from the East Coast. We don’t have moods.

At this point, I’ve been waiting a half an hour and they’ve called no less than 12 names ahead of me. One of the “geniuses” spent 15 minutes figuring out that this woman’s “broken” iPod was due to the hold button being on. Finally, a woman walks in with her chaffeur carrying a comatose iMac G5, steps up to the Genius Bar and puts it down, only to have her name called not 30 seconds later. Now, I’m pissed. I step up:

“Wait a minute, she just walked in. I’ve been here a half an hour.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Toby.”

“I don’t see you on this list.”

“Regardless of whether or not I’m on the list, you know I’ve been here since opening and all I need you to do is replace this power brick. It died this morning and I only bought it three months ago.”

A little backstory: three months ago, I left my PowerBook on the couch to go get something to drink from the kitchen. During the 2 minutes I was in the kitchen, my daughter managed to pull the laptop off the couch and mangle the plug end of the power brick. So I went to the same Apple Store that day and bought another one. I didn’t go to the Genius Bar to try to get it replaced that day because I felt that it was my fault for leaving it out where it could be broken and I would just eat the $80. I could have saved myself some money over the next three months if I’d have tried to replace it at that time…

So the woman at the Genius Bar takes my brick and starts fiddling with her retail tech support app. She asks my phone number and I give it to her. She asks me if she has the correct address. She does. Then she blows my mind.

“Did you bring your PowerBook in with you today?”

“No. Why would I need that?”

“We need the serial number off of it.”

“Why?”

“That’s our policy.”

“Well its back at the office. I use the machine for work and I need to get back there.”

“Hold on.”

She goes in the back to confer with another black-T-shirted drone.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t replace this without the PowerBook serial number.”

“Fine, where’s a new one? I just need to get back to work.”

More backstory: I’ve worked a ton on retail in my life. I know how to handle a disgruntled customer in a packed store in the middle of Christmas season. You get them out of the store as fast as possible.

The other black-T-shirted drone (the manager) follows me to the back counter and hands me a power brick box, all the while trying to explain his position while fantastically not noticing that I couldn’t give half a rat’s ass.

“Well, we really need that PowerBook serial number.”

“Why? I told you it was a replacement that I just bought straight out. It didn’t come with the PowerBook.”

“That’s our policy.”

Ah, the drone’s delight. Policy.

“I don’t understand. If it didn’t come with the PowerBook, then how could you possibly need the PowerBook serial number to replace it? This thing has a serial number of its own.”

More mind blowing: “That’s not a real serial number.” I just couldn’t formulate a response to that, other than: “That’s your problem. What if I just bring the PowerBook serial number in tomorrow?”

“No, that’s no good. We need it at the time of replacement. I can’t make any guarantees.”

“Ok pal. Fine. Get out of my face.”

Pay. Leave. I was so heated I almost didn’t notice how pretty the clerk was. Almost.

Now, I’m not sure the manager knew, but I know why they want the PowerBook serial number when they are replacing items. Apple wants me to do the work of tracking product defects for them. And they withhold services until I do. I could have believed that they wanted to actually see the PowerBook itself to make sure that the power brick being damaged wasn’t a result of me trying to shove it up my ass or some other such craziness that’s not covered under the warranty, but at no time did the woman at the Genius Bar ever seem interested in the PowerBook. Only its serial number. So the story the manager later tried to tell me about needing to see it to make sure it was a straight up thing was bullshit and that’s also what led me to believe that he didn’t know why they needed it in the first place.

Plus, I also get why they changed the Genius Bar from a simple web app to a Flash app. It looks fancier (not better, just fancier) and now they shorten the wait queue in order to keep you in the store longer. They clearly didn’t think about someone buying replacement parts on a work day at this location.

Apple clearly is out for that 20% profit margin in all areas and I’m pretty damn fed up with it. I pay for value. That’s what I look for. I thought that by going with Apple this time around, I was getting a superior value. However, if this is the kind of “customer service” that I can be expected to receive, I’m better off going with another vendor that doesn’t break my balls on a work day.

Best part: the woman who had her chaffeur bring in the iMac G5 was lamenting that this was the third time in a few months that its died on her and all she kept thinking on the way in to the store was “Dude, I’m gettin’ a Dell”.

Bray’s been bitching about his new PowerBook again. The thing that gets me is that he complains incessantly about his laptop… and then goes out and buys another one.

Compared to the last machine, this one has about 21% more pixels and 33% more clock cycles. The bigger screen is noticeable, but it doesn’t really feel much faster. This sucks. After a two-year product cycle, I expect to be dazzled by the next upgrade. I’m not.

Well, first of all, it hasn’t been two years. In fact, the last rev of the PowerBook happened just a couple days ago, an instance of which you purchased. Its been two years since you bought one, but I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t measure its product lines on your purchasing schedule. The fact that there was not a bigger bump in CPU speed was simultaneously expected and unfortunate, given their current relationship with IBM. Why would IBM break their balls when there’s no chance of saving their relationship. And they have much bigger chip customers to be worried about right now.

Here’s another thing: personally, I haven’t been dazzled by a laptop upgrade yet. Not Dell nor Gateway nor Apple could manage to dazzle me, since they are making only incremental improvements. Most laptops are not twice as fast as the ones from two years ago when you factor in disk speed and bundled RAM, but rather simply add features like DVD burners, SD media slots and oh yeah, bigger and better screens… sort of the like the one you now have.

Apple actually does their laptop right, in that lots of the video processing is pushed off to the rockin’ video card so that admittedly anemic CPU doesn’t have to work too hard to give the customer all of the GUI niceties that OS X includes. Try getting that from HP or Dell, neither of whom have any control over what the OS does.

But, there’s more.

I suppose Apple doesn’t have too much to worry about, most people who’ve gotten used to an OS X laptop aren’t going to be driven back to Windows because it runs a little faster. But I’m not most people; I use this sucker for heavy lifting, and as soon as there’s some x64-based meat-grinder running Solaris that turns on instantly after sleep and and anti-aliases well and Just Works with whatever wifi, and doesn’t make me download drivers to do basic stuff, I may be outta here. Unless of course, Apple manages to get their act together and start shipping laptops that are delightful, not merely adequate.

The key point to remember here is that you are not most people and, more importantly, you are not even the kind of person that Apple was thinking about when they designed the PowerBook. Therefore, it actually makes no sense for you to purchase them time and time again. These laptops are media hubs, designed to do things the average Mac user would likely be doing, not stressing out the CPU by compiling code.

By the way, have you ever had a laptop that just worked perfectly for all the above-mentioned features right out of the box? I have. It was from a company called Apple and they called it the PowerBook. Asking Sun and the Solaris team to get that right has been beyond their werewithall for the entire life of the Sun Microsystems organization thus far. (in their defense, they only recently started giving a shit about such things)

As well, the take-your-ball-and-go-home attitude is ridiculous in light of the fact that you knew full well what you were getting before you bought the thing and still bought it anyway. There are definitely viable options to the PowerBook for the Tim Bray’s of the world: one’s that do come with big honkin’ x86_64 CPUs and fast RAM. I’ll bet they’ll even run Solaris, though why you’d want to escapes me. (JDS is nowhere near as easy to use or smoothly integrated as OS X and Solaris has the driver support of MS-DOS 5.1 when it comes to the x86 platform) But when you get one of those, you have to realize that you’re going to give up some of the niceties of less powerful but more customer-oriented laptops like the PowerBook.

Now, I own a PowerBook of the same version that Tim just dumped for the new one. I will not, however, be getting another one for all the reasons that Tim has mentioned and more (except for that lame hard drive size complaint). My next laptop will probably be the AV6200 or the AV4155 EH1 because I, too, do a lot of compiling and heavy-CPU-lifting on my laptop. I’ll be running Linux on it, assuming I can get my iPod working with it, or I’ll just wait until I can. But the price/power ratio on these laptops can’t be beat and I don’t understand why someone as smart as Tim would keep torturing himself if he knew exactly what he wanted in a laptop.

Finally, Tim, you have an Ultra 20 desktop now. You want power? Its called screen. Its been around forever and you can forward the X session back to you over SSH from wherever you are. That way, you can have AMD64 power with Apple sleek in one package (well, two). Alternatively, VNC has been around for almost as long and works well, too. I use rdekstop on the local LAN so I don’t have to ever sit in front of my $WORK-mandated Notes instance. And, there’s even NoMachine NX if screen/SSH or VNC aren’t fast enough. I’m getting a little tired of reading your blog and reading these almost-entirely illogical rants against Apple’s laptop division. There are valid beefs to be expressed against them, but yours aren’t generally among them.

This guy John Gruber... he’s one insightful dude. You should all be subscribed to his feed even if you never heard of Apple Computer.

If Intel and Apple merge, that’s my vote for the new name. ;-)

Cringely has some thoughts, but I think he’s mostly wrong, in part due to his misunderstanding of the state of technical affairs on the Apple-IBM side of things. The Altivec was only an advantage for certain applications on OS X and Apple has egg on their face by proxy due to IBM’s failure to get a 970 into a Powerbook. A commensurate feat, by the way, which Intel will have no problem with given their Centrino platform. Hannibal has some theories as to which CPUs we will see in the coming months and years in the Apple line.

Now Jobs does have that famous RDF (Reality Distortion Field) of his, but I don’t see this move as spite for IBM or an attempt to dethrone Microsoft. I see it as Apple finally moving to a platform that will allow them to garner a large amount of developers and one that opens up the possibility of multiple platforms to them (e.g. games, PDAs, servers that people might actually buy, etc). Apple is rapidly moving away from being a “computer” company and turning into a media services company. As such, they need a platform that is sufficiently flexible in order to provide the proper experience for customers. Sticking with IBM means that they are letting IBM call the shots on that score. I’m guessing Jobs no longer considers that acceptable.

I’m guessing they don’t really care about the Osbourne Effect because there are actually two types of people that won’t buy until the Intel’s come out:

• Those upgrading from a PPC-based Mac
• Those who have lost their last excuse to move off of Windows

My guess is that Apple will take the loss of some sales now to increase the overall sales and power of the Apple line by garnering a good customer base of people who are aggravated with Microsoft, but not so much so to switch to Linux. So, in that sense, Mr. Cringely, announcing this a year early does make sense without a merger. Apple is spotting disgruntled Windows users a year to come up with the loot to make the switch to a Mac with a guilt-free conscience.