Very cool historical look at the innovations and how they led to the iPhone.
iPhone Deconstruction – Ben Millen [via The Big Picture]
A scrapbook for my philisophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.
Archive for the 'Apple' Category
Image: Adobe Flash CS4, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from Thiemo Gillissen’s photostream
A lot has been said about the pros and cons of Flash on the Mac, iPhone, and PC. While I do love the many video sites that use the Adobe/Macromedia technology, I have to agree with most of what Steve Jobs discusses in his Thoughts on Flash blog post. Flash is buggy, slow, and it cripples my MacBook Pro nearly every time I play a video; the annoying ads that whirl and play sound without my authorization have forced me to use an ad blocker in the past and, now, I just read RSS feeds and Instapaper to avoid that garbage. And I’m very happy my iPhone and, soon to be mine, iPad doesn’t have Flash to weigh it down.
But all the talk about Flash has been, well, talk. Most of us probably still have Flash on their computer even if they hate it. Linux users, myself included, have gone out of their way to install Flash using hacks and ugly commands to get their YouTube fix.
But for me, that changes. I’ve uninstalled Flash from my laptop and will try living without it for at least a week. And I think I’ll be successful and won’t miss it too much – both YouTube and Vimeo support HTML5 in limited ways. If I need Flash, I suppose I can always use Google Chrome since it bundles the app with the browser for some God awful reason. But I really like Safari with the latest WebKit nightly build over so it certainly won’t be my primary browser.
Let’s see if I can stick with it. I’ll give it at least a week – and maybe two if I can’t get to the computer that much – and report back.
Slashdot points us to a brilliant article by Steve Cheney who believes the real reason why Apple has forced developers to write applications in their native XCode isn’t because of Adobe’s Flash. He argues that Apple made the changes to the iPhone OS License Agreement to enhance application and, therefore, platform performance while maintaining architecture flexibility in the wake of commoditized products like CPUs.
Apple is sowing the groundwork to make architecture changes seamless—developers will only need to flip a switch to give their apps blazing, native performance.
The analysis is awfully refreshing and inspiring, actually. It makes the move by Apple less, well, douchey when you think about how everyone else believes its about Steve Jobs’ hatred of Flash and its buggy, poor performance. And while Apple’s move does slow down the promotion & adoption of mobile Flash, it is interesting to hear alternate theories – especially ones that involve corporate strategy. If Cheney is correct, it brings new meaning to the Apple’s genius.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t very good at most video games. I don’t know if I never paid attention to the gameplay as much as the others or if I just wasn’t skilled enough. When I became a teenager and hung out at the local arcade place (Spaceport, I think was the name of it), I ran into Street Fighter II and its second iteration, Champion Edition. At first, I didn’t know the moves and sucked at the game, too. But after someone taught me the moves, I was good… real good. Not able to win tournaments good – but good enough to beat all but two people who frequented the arcade regularly.
When SF2 Championship Edition came out for the SNES, I went out and bought the console, the game, and two arcade quality fighting sticks just so I could play the game at home. I’ve owned almost all the other SF2 variants and the other SF derivatives including SF EX3 for the PS2. Feeling nostalgic, a good friend of mine gave me his SNES and SF2: CE after I started searching eBay for a system. For Christmas, my wife got me Street Fighter IV because she knows how much I’m into the series. I’ll probably pick up the next version of SFIV and I’m saving up for the official SFIV arcade stick from Mad Catz.
Not having a PSP or other portable console system, I can only enjoy the game when I’m at home… but not for much longer. Capcom recently announced it was going to release an iPhone version of the game. As you can see from the image below, courtesy of IGN, SFIV will use a virtual D-Pad and buttons to control the characters.
Notwithstanding the reservations I have on the controls (virtual control pads on the iPhone can be hit or miss depending on the publisher), the graphics look great and if the gameplay is the same, I’ll be purchasing the iPhone version when it comes out in March. I swore I read that it should run on both the 3G and 3Gs versions but I can’t seem to find the link which said that; if I find it, I’ll update the post with that info.
So if you live under a rock, you didn’t know that Apple just announced their next iPhone model dubbed the iPhone 3G S… yes, the S is for speed. (Ed. Note: Who came up with that name? The 1800-MATTRES – leave off the last S for Savings guys?) It comes with more RAM, a faster CPU, more storage, and a few other things that make it the envy of Apple fanbois everywhere. You can order it now from Apple.com or pick one up in about 10 days or so assuming they don’t run out in an hour. The cost is $199 for the 16GB version, $299 for the 32GB version – a bargain if you ask this very happy current iPhone 3G owner fanboi.
But for us current owners, there is an extra fee involved. You have to cover the cost of the equipment subsidy of about $400. Whah!!??!! $400 dollars?? SRSLY????
srsly.
If you think that $699 for the 32GB version is a lot, you’re not alone. And people are up in arms. There is already an army of Twitterrers (people who tweet.) amassing a protest to the added cost. Its not anything new to the cell phone industry but this is no ordinary phone – its the iPhone! Not only is it a gift from almighty Jobs, it really is a cool device and set the bar high for everyone else – Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and (/me snickers) Motorola. BWUAAAAAHAHAHHAHAHAA!!! 
Sorry.
If one were to complain about the price – but look back on the cell phone industry – you’d know that this is the way its always worked. I don’t know if its really justified because I can’t determine if the cost of the phone really is $400 more if it weren’t subsidized. But regardless of whether it is a legit discount, all cell phone carriers have locked you into a contract twice – once with the service agreement itself and again with the device subsidies. When people used a cell phone just for dialing numbers, I doubt anyone cared. They might not have noticed that cell phones were getting smaller, faster, with more features because it still did the same thing… make and receive calls. It never streamed a YouTube video over the airwaves, played my iTunes music, or let me watch that movie I rented from the iTunes Music Store.
But the iPhone changed all that… the phone was sort of a phone, sort of a mini personal interactive computing media device. And when you think of a phone in those terms, subsidies just don’t make sense. PCs (Mac, PC, Ubuntu, or otherwise) aren’t subsidized. Netbooks, subcompact laptops, power workstations, and tablets all come with a price. That price stays constant if new features are added or the price goes down as the technology becomes older and cheaper to make; people get that. Hell, other electronics don’t come with an upgrade restriction. You want a new GPS device? Buy a new one! Another Kindle?? Sure, why not! You want a new iPod Touch? Yes, that’s right, you can buy a new one… with NO “penalty” or contract whatsoever.
So all the things that makes the iPhone special – the GPS, music, movies, eBook reader, and so on – can be replaced so easily and at any time without an extra fee added to the cost of the new device. Its easy to see why someone wouldn’t want to shell out an extra $400 just to get a slightly faster version of an electronic device they already have.
But that’s the way the world works, they say. True. But look at all the bad press AT&T is taking from this. And O2, as well. Now, in the short term, this isn’t going to do much. But long term, as Apple seeks to increase its user base, it could. But more importantly, other carriers and hardware manufacturers could find themselves taking advantage of an opportune moment where consumers don’t want to pay a extra on top of the long term agreements they are already obliging to. When your netbook costs $299 and can do more, you might decide its not worth it and go cheap on the phone and get a netbook that can do YouTube, Skype, music, video, and everything else – no strings attached.
So I think AT&T (and Apple) are going to get burned in the long term. The ill will these “games” they play are only going to alienate their base and slowly drive away their customers. As the iPhone-like cell phone devices become so commonplace, you’ll see this happening. Could it mean that Apple will want to set certain price points for all their future portable media devices? Sure. They do it with their normal line of iPods and it would do them well to keep the price constant across all customers. Will AT&T “let them” do that? Eh… probably not. But this argument for unsubsidized phones is greater than AT&T and Apple. Its about consumers equating their phones/media devices to the same cost structure as all their other electronics. Its about realizing that the double lock in they are subject to isn’t right and all about some company charging them twice for the walkman they paid for.
So I think that phone subsidies are going to go away. Maybe not in time for the next iPhone but perhaps the generation after that. Microsoft and Google might come along with their massive piles of cash and build something that will steal Apple’s thunder and remove cell phone carriers out of the picture. If I wanted to topple Apple’s dominance from their PDA/Smartphone position, I know I’d want to make my product as attractive as possible and constant, fair pricing is just one way to do it.