Monday, October 08, 2007

The iPhone is not all bad and Fortune's new Apple blog

Rob Griffiths has some kind things to say about the iphone: Macworld: Editors' Notes: Ten of my favorite iPhone things. He even pointed to an unconvincing, but not irrational, explanation for the stupid headphone jack.

It's a soothing story, it helps reconcile me to the bitter truth that I'm going to have to replace my wretched Palm Tungsten E2 with .... another E2. Not to mention that I will have to continue to live with my thrice cursed Motorola RAZR. [John takes another slug of scotch.] The iPhone doesn't do what I need.

I've largely given up on Apple producing the solutions for my n-of-1 market, though I have come up with a theory that suggests some missing features may have been belayed by the seven month slip of OS X 10.5. So I really need third party apps on the iPhone, because the long tail means even a market too small for Apple to notice can feed a hungry developer or two.

Which brings me to an excellent new Apple blog from (of all places) CNN/Fortune: Apple 2.0.

Apple to Open iPhone in particular smells like a leak from somewhere in Apple. It alleges that Apple is going to adopt a regulated development model for the iPhone similar to what Apple did for a few months to a year after the release of the very first Mac. I think it may have also been the development model for the Lisa. I think I could live with that, so I've another reason to hope for an iPhone in 2008 -- even if I have to buy 10.5 and spend $200 on yet another obsolete and increasingly flaky Palm device.

Continuing the theme of "things are not as bad as they seem" Apple 2.0 claims Apple's iPhone attack was manslaughter, not murder. It seems that iPhone 1.0 is held together by glue, bailing wire, and hope. Significant updates will destroy a small percentage of millions of unhacked phones, as well as a larger percentage of hacked phones. This is more plausible than one might think because Apple has a similar, but smaller, problem with OS X updates. Any major OS X update has a small, but real, risk of hosing the OS -- which is why I reboot my machines prior to an OS X update and don't touch it during the update process.

I think I've exhausted my iPhone patience now ...

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