Hatin’ on the iPhone
I’ve gone from a hate-hate to a love-hate relationship with Apple over the last few years, but it can’t be a positive characteristic of my Apple Appreciation that as soon as I saw the title of Barry Dahl’s recent blog post I had a good idea what he was going to say and that I was going to agree (for the most part). I know that for Apple lovers the Borgish lock-in is like being sentenced to life with your dream lover. But that’s also known as “marriage” and those lovers become ex-lovers, and then all you can do is run away taking almost nothing with you.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I dunno, I might go for a few years of unbelievable luscious intimacy with my dream lover than to be free for a few dates with my half sister Edna
But here I hesitate, as I know your careful analytics will shred any stand I make to bits. I’ve left a few comments on Barry’s post; he has made a clever analogy but like many, it is a stool standing on one leg.
Compuserve provided an un-innovative and closed gateway to the internet; the iPhone is a platform and interactive technology that did not exist before. It is not offering lay people an easier way to access the world of mobile phones. But if you want to boil it the comparison down to what is “open” and what is “not”, well you can pin up Barry’s poster over the one of Farah Fawcett and feel self-assured. It does nto work.
There is the unsaid tacit assumption I question that folks like Barry make that OPEN and HACKABLE is always better then CLOSED and NOT. Please explain how that works. Open hardware gets you… hmmm BSOD? I don’t have to hack the technology of my refrigerator to have full and best of world use of cold beer.
It might be different if Apple made crappy software and had lousy design, but again that is not the case… how am I deprived if I cannot hack my iPhone? Yes, I know of the things it cannot do (cannot stream Qik, cannot play flash), but the things it can do, to me, are more important than what it cant.
And as far as Big Brother Steve reaching down and resetting my iPhone… well it is weird, but why should I quiver over such a possibility? If I know people are killed by white sharks more often in Australia, am I not going to ever go swimming again?
So if that’s really the case, then I, as an iPhone fanboy am loving the new Compuserve. It comes off to me a rather smug stand of superiority, which I guess I stand on too. But I have learned many times, clever analogies can cut back the opposite way.
Okay, I am ready to be cut down to shreds (bows your way)
November 20th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
For me it’s not so much “open is better, closed is not”– which is why I have a love/hate relationship with Apple. I like the advances that come with the kind of dedication they put into, for example, the user interface, but at the same time I suspect that they could do the same thing with MORE openness (not completely open) and be just as successful– and allow the community to contribute more and make things happen that don’t otherwise.
Maybe I’m arguing “it could be better” and you are arguing “it could be worse.” I do think that a more open effort could have lead to something as good as the iPhone and in my ideal world we’d have a Google Android phone that was open and as good as the iPhone rather than a single monopolistic superior product. IPhone is quickly becoming the microsoft of phones, the kind of thing the Mac OS has fought all its life. It’s a weird thing (to me).
Barry’s comment hit home to me and I think the fact that I understood immediately where he was going doesn’t seal the case, but it does make clear that some of those feelings are there.
I’m not an equal opportunity Apple hater by any means and even within the realm I sometimes go back and forth. iPod and Touch? Love ‘em. Mac OS and most hardware? Love it. Lack of obvious things like docking station and relatively closed technology, often as a sacrifice to design elegance? Love it when it works, hate it when it doesn’t. iPhone? Don’t much care for it.
But a lot of that is wrapped up in the fact that I don’t like cell phones and refuse to carry one and think that ubiquitous wifi would be a lot more useful than the funnel of the iPhone and internet via cell…
December 5th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I don’t like the iPhone at all. I remember when we used it for a twittering exercise back in April/May, it was a fun exercise but I couldn’t type or do anything on that touchpad. I found it very annoying. Plus imagine how dirty those things get? Anyway, it’s also disturbing how anything you develop for Apple is basically owned by Apple and they have rights to it – and worse, you can only develop what they approve! I don’t like that at all. Mmm, not very analytical but I had to say something :p
December 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Hey Sage– nice to see you here. Are you recovered from celebrating the big Obama win?