Geek Chic

My pre-emptive response to the next phase of Microsoft’s ad campaign:

It comes in regular and extra-snarky:

I just want to take a sec to give a shout out to the iPhone Dev Team — our friends who have come up with the most reliable way to jailbreak your iPhone.  They’re so fast, and so very good.

Case in point: Apple released the new iPhone 2.1 Firmware last Friday.  By Saturday morning, the Dev Team had cracked it.

If you’ve got an iPhone and you’re looking to do some Jailbreaking, accept no substitutes. These guys are the real deal.  I’m seriously looking forward to the point when these guys have a solution for actually unlock the phone for use on any network.

Or the day when Apple makes Jailbreaking (and even unlocking) irrelevant.  Their current pattern of rejecting applications for the App Store without having any sort of clear acceptance standard (AFTER developers have paid $100 for the privilege of being able to submit to Apple in the first place and invested countless hours of unpaid development time) is pretty tyrannical, imho.

I would fully support anyone who wants to Jailbreak their phone  — if it didn’t violate my service agreement, of course.  There are a lot of useful applications out there that, for some reason or another, Apple does not want you to use (iPhone Modem, NemusSync, Snapture, VideoRecorder, BigBoss Prefs, Searcher, WinterBoard, Customize, not to mention Terminal and OpenSSH for the hardcore nerds.  And that barely scratches the surface).

It’s my feeling that —  I paid through the nose for this particular piece of hardware.  Like any hardware that I own, I should be able to control how I use it.  Apple doesn’t dictate to me what color my MBP’s desktop is.  Why shouldn’t I be able to customize what my iPhone Springboard looks like?  The camera on the iPhone can record video.  Why shouldn’t I be able to use an application that takes advantage of that?

For more about how to Jailbreak your iPhone using the PwangeTool or QuickPwn, check out the Apple iPhone School.  Or just jump right in with QuickPwn.  It does all of the heavy lifting for you.

As I said, I cannot condone this sort of behavior.  And I’ve never even considered Jailbreaking my iPhone.  I mean, that would violate my service contract, now wouldn’t it? And I wouldn’t want to piss off AT&T…

Steve Jobs announced a whole mess of new iPods at the Apple Annual Autumn iPod Hoedown.

The iPod Touch. Why?

The new Nanos look pretty sweet.  No argument here.

But can we talk for a second about the iPod Touch?  Seriously.  Why?

Is the Touch’s existence for the sole purpose of making one look stupid for not getting an iPhone?  Why on earth would one pay $400 to get a limited 32GB of disk space and the occasional opportunity to access one of 2 open WiFi points in your general vicinity? (if you’re lucky — thank you “Liberal Media” for scaring everyone into locking their networks… You are all pawns in the ISPs game to make more money.)

So what is the iPhone good for, exactly?  The App store?  Just how many copies of Sudoku do you need?  The Nanos now come with an accelerometer, so that cool feature is no longer exclusive.  It doesn’t come with a camera, so that’s out.  And only the flaky pseudo-GPS.  The touch screen?  Seems cool, but if you can’t do anything on the device it doesn’t really matter what the mode of interaction is.  Silly putty responds to your touch and you don’t have to pay $400 for it.

So I ask again, what good is this expensive little hunk of plastic and metal?  Why does Apple keep it around?

Anyone?

But this is what his obituary might look like if he happened to die:

Steve Jobs’s Obituary, As Run By Bloomberg (thanks GAWKER)

from www.schneiderism.com

Special thanks to Bloomberg for releasing this.

Ok.  So because the 2nd Gen iPhones were so ‘affordable’ some developer out there made a completely frivolous show-off app called I Am Rich.  It costs the maximum application cost in the iTunes store ($999.99) and it’s only purpose is to let people know you have money to burn (when you start the application all it does is display a cheap looking glowing ruby).

I Am so totally Rich

Now it’s time for you to decide which is more ridiculous:

1. 8 people purchased this application — 6 from the US, 1 from France and 1 from Germany.

2. Apple was so offended by the application that they removed it from the store, even though it didn’t technically violate any terms of the iPhone Developer contract.

I’m still trying to decide myself.

Anyway, it’s gone now.  So all of you fat cats out there will have to sling your money at something else.  Too bad you didn’t get a change to download it in time.

And you thought you lost out when Apple pulled down the NetShare tethering app.

Read the full story on I Am Rich on the LA Times

I got an iPhone yesterday morning.

Now my conversion to the dark side is complete.

I’m a Mac user.  Have been pretty exclusively for years.  I use a Macbook Pro at home and at work, and I really love it.

Up until recently, that love of Macs has extended to Apple in general.

But so much is truly fishy about their latest iPhone deal that I’m starting to have some misgivings about my blind support of what I thought was a philosophy, but which is turning out to just be another brand.

It all started when it became clear that Apple made a deal with the devil when it got into bed with AT&T.  The carrier is now charging more for text messages and basically undermining Steve Jobs’ promise at the WWDC: a new 3G iPhone for $199 or $299.

That, my friends turns out to be a complete and utter lie.

Because the new service contract is now more expensive than the old one, it turns out the new iPhone, overall, is more expensive than its predecessor.  Not less.

Check the math
Or ask David Pogue

What’s more irritating to me is the fact that, as a current AT&T customer who is not eligible for a phone upgrade, I have to pay $200 more than these base prices in order to get an iPhone.  Analyst Gene Munster says I’m not alone.  He estimates that only 35% of iPhone purchasers will see the prices that Steve Jobs promised.  Turns out the only people who are eligible to get the announced prices are 1) new customers 2) customers eligible for an upgrade 3) current iPhone owners.  This means loyal customers like me (I’ve been with AT&T for 7 years) are SOL.

That’s shocking! No?

Why isn’t anyone screaming through the streets calling Steve Jobs a big fat liar?

The whole point of this, I remember, was so that more people could afford the iPhone.  So that it had a lower entry point, and wasn’t viewed as a luxury item.  What a scam.

What’s more insidious, I think, was brought to light in an opinion I just read by Nik Cubrilovic on TechCrunch — where he calls out Apple and Apple users for the fact that everyone is raving about the iPhones without acknowledging that they are a proprietary, DRM infested walled garden.  The points that stuck out in my mind were:

1. Apple has a tendancy to take open source technologies and package and rebrand them in such a way that they are no longer open source.  Which seems pretty parasitic to me.

2. All of the open source fans around the world are drooling over iPhones and Apple (me included) and that’s more than a little bit hypocritical.

Solutions?  I have none. I would be the first to buy an Android phone if they were actually an alternative, but I can’t imagine they’ll have anything like the iPhone anytime soon.

But some competition might be nice.  Competition was how Apple got to be good in the first place.  They were the underdog, so they had to fight.  Now it seems like they’re just as bad as Microsoft when they know they don’t have any competition.

All of that said, i’ll probably join the rest of the hypocrites and buy an iPhone when my contract is up in October.  But not before, dammit!