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iPhone redux
Following up this morning's iPhone dispatch:
Allen Stern puts the first year cost of the iPhone at almost $2,000. That's a lot of money to spend on a paperweight.
Posted by Charles Star on 01/15/2007 | Permalink
Comments
Fuck Jobs. That queer never gives any credit to his design teams or inventors. Tell me, who came up with the iPod? The iPhone? It's all Jobs, all the time.
Posted by: Jen | Jan 15, 2007 8:51:00 PM
jobs recognized the lead designer of the iphone, johnathan ive, during the keynote. ives is a renowned british industrial designer who has worked for apple for over a decade now i believe. he was the first person jobs called from the iphone on stage. he also designed the imacs and most of apple's other star products. there has never been any effort to hide this fact. he is featured prominently in many of the videos apple has produced promoting their new products.
as to the obsession with ipods sucking on this site in general, i find it a bit over the top.
i've had three ipods over the years. the first one was the original, mac-only 5gb model with a non-touch-sensitive spinning wheel and all that. it still works, but the port was jerked around one too many times, and while it charges you can no longer mount it to put new music on. so as long as you're content with what's on there from a couple of years ago, it works fine. not bad for a 6 year old portable hard drive. my second one was the 10gb model, which i never had any problems with. it was lost in a *very* costly accident involving a lost camera bag. i replaced it with one of the newer 80gb video capable ones. again, i've had no problems with it.
so i think while there is merit to the criticism that it isn't made in an eco-friendly enough manner, i think that's really the only legit problem with them. to the point that they have perhaps failed at an unusually high rate, i think this is perhaps because there is a delicate balance in designing a portable device which is also sleek and small and technologically sophisticated and has a huge storage capacity. due to current technology limitations you simply can't have all of those things at once. it can be extremely rugged, but it'll be bulky and have a small storage capacity. or it could be extremely small and sleek and feature packed with loads of space on it, but the trade off being it's rather fragile. thems are just the breaks. and people want the ipod precisely because it's small and sleek and stores a ton of stuff. but then they go jogging with it, and when it breaks they're like "these things suck! why don't they make them more durable!?" (note: the nano and shuffle are jog-friendly, but the bigger ipods are not). the fact is, if they were more durable, you wouldn't have bought it fair jogger, because it would have been big bulky and ugly and not held much.
"but what about the battery!?" well, basically the same deal. battery technology currently totally sucks. these tiny devices have as nice of batteries as exist (which isn't saying much) but still manage to be extremely complex and fancy. they have also managed to make them extremely small. but at the end of the day, all of these things aren't very compatible. batteries are bad for the environment no matter how you slice it. so apple's call to make the batteries not be something users can easily, inexpensively swap out themselves discourages people to throw batteries in the trash. you have to have it 'serviced' and someone will put in the new battery for you, and recycle the old one the way they should. originally, there was no cost-effective way to handle this issue. but since that time, and with the ipod's increasing popularity, many places have popped up that service ipods and will put you in a new battery for not much money. if you have problems with your ipod (battery or otherwise), and it's out of warranty, try a place like this:
http://www.ipodresq.com/
or in nyc, you can get walk up service for great prices here:
http://www.portatronics.com/
or even tekserve i think does it:
http://www.tekserve.com/
so like, is the ipod perfect? fuck no. clearly. but are you really saying that it like sucks a lot harder than some other similarly functioning device? are you holding up the creative zen as some pillar of awesomeness? i'm sure that thing has the same draw backs as the ipod, but sucks from a UI perspective too.
for me, i'm sticking with my ipod. do i want an iphone? of course! but will i get one? not initially. maybe eventually. once they've worked out the bugs, the price has come down, the storage has gone up, and the monthly fee is less, and so on. ...but that's sounding pretty 'eventual' indeed.
Posted by: daniel | Jan 16, 2007 11:08:14 AM
Thanks, Jen, for starting the comments with a soupcon of homophobia. This keeps happening (from different commenters) and I'm at a loss as to what is inspiring this nonsense.
daniel, you asked whether we think the iPod is any worse than other similar devices. As we've said before, probably not. But as an iconic brand that is, for lack of a better word, worshipped by its devotees mostly uncritically, we think it is useful to point out that just because Apple isn't Microsoft that doesn't mean it isn't also doing wrong.
Your example regarding the inability of users to change the iPod battery is a bit of a stretch. Apple didn't make it impossible to switch so that the Genius Bar staff would recycle the batteries - they did it so that you would throw the whole iPod away and get a new one when the battery dies. The grey market in battery replacement exists in spite of Apple's efforts not because of them.
So, again, we don't hate Apple (particularly Carrie, who does all of her work on a G4) but believe that, amidst all of the fawning coverage, someone neutral (ie, not Microsoft) has to point out the flaws.
If you want me to say it I will: the Zune probably sucks also, but if all three people who buy the Zune throw it away it probably won't be a big deal. If Microsoft throws away the extra inventory, on the other hand...
Posted by: Charles Star | Jan 16, 2007 11:55:27 AM
fair enough, charles. i take your point.
btw, you should do more standup. holy shit. i saw your show at mo pitkins a while back and you were *by far* the funniest of the bunch. it was like borat up in there, what with my near-painful laughing.
Posted by: daniel | Jan 18, 2007 9:23:35 AM
daniel, you are officially my favorite commenter.
I do as much standup as I can, actually. My schedule is kept up to date on MySpace or you can sign up for my mailing list by sending an email.
Posted by: Charles Star | Jan 18, 2007 10:33:03 AM
