inconsequence

iPhone 4's "flawed" antenna design

I’ve now had an iPhone 4 for about a month (as you no doubt recall, I queued for a product on launch day for the first time in my life) and my (apparently) free bumper case is in the mail (it’s in Netherlands orange — so much for my plans to bask in reflected glory).

A friend of mine used to joke that if Microsoft ever released a version of Word that actually worked it would go out of business. Word is the very heart of Microsoft’s revenue stream: people buy PCs (and thus Windows) to run Word, not the other way around. People upgrade their PCs to run newer versions of Word they hope might address their current problems with Word. So it follows that once people have a version of Word they’re happy with, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

Word hasn’t become a perfect product, but it’s good enough and Microsoft’s record of improving it is bad enough that no-one feels very compelled to upgrade. But Microsoft isn’t in trouble. The fact is that a lot of computers are out there and they die fairly often, so just based on the need to maintain the fleet, Microsoft will make money for a long, long time, but its days of giddy expansion are behind it. It’s gone from being the phone company of the late 19th century (rapaciously devouring competitors) to being the phone company of the 1950s (fat and happy and utterly dominant).

The iPhone 4 just works. Forget the baloney about its “flawed antenna design” — no-one who has one cares. It has awesome battery life, runs as fast as an iPad, is a better camera than a point-and-shoot (except for lacking optical zoom), feels like a piece of jewellery in your hands, and is rock solid (yeah you can smash one if you drop it on concrete). And here’s the kicker — it’s price competitive with its shoddy plastic rivals that run “free” open source software (developed by an advertising company to spy on its customers and deliver ads to them). All this, and Apple’s margins are almost certainly higher than its rivals’, which means that in a race to the bottom, Apple won’t bother competing.

It follows that Apple is doomed. The original iPhone was a great idea for a device, crippled by lousy battery life and a slow CPU, that became enormously successful in chief because its rivals were so incredibly worse (kind of like Word vs. Wordperfect). Of course, what Apple is doomed to is becoming a fat happy complacent company raking in cash for generations.

I hope the title of my post drives down Apple’s stock price a little bit further, but I’m not holding my breath.

Apple got 600,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4 on launch day. AT&T’s web servers basically died (but not before failing in even more embarrassing ways). Apparently Apple’s Apple Store App (specifically developed to streamline pre-orders) also had issues (my wife and I only had one problem with it — it wouldn’t let us preorder two phones from one iTunes account, so Rosanna had to go update her ancient, unused iTunes account specifically to pre-order her iPhone).

This is amazing, but should hardly be a surprise. The iPhone 4 is the first major iPhone revision to follow the first really big wave of iPhone purchases (i.e. the ones that followed the release of the 3G) when the people who bought those plans are able to upgrade within plan. That’s certainly my case. Everyone I know who has an iPhone 3G and is eligible plans to upgrade, and most have pre-ordered.

Why?

Here’s what I said the iPhone would do for me before I actually bought one:

• Not replace a laptop. Correct. The iPad hasn’t replaced my laptop either.
• Allow me to read product reviews in stores before buying. Absolutely correct. More importantly, it lets me price compare while I’m in stores, which often leads me to rethink a purchase or simply save money.
• Read books. Incorrect. Nope the display isn’t up to it.
• Replace iPod. Correct. And I’ve always got it with me (whereas I’d usually not have the iPod when I most wanted it).
• Replace paper notebooks. Incorrect. But the iPad has.
• Be a decent personal organizer. Correct. Actually better than correct — recurring alarms are totally awesome.
• Get photos from phone without paying service provider. Correct. And they’re surprisingly good. I also use it as a scanner in a pinch, which is awesome.
• Make my own (free) custom ringtones. Correct.
• Replace my DS. Correct. The only thing I’ve done with my DS since getting the iPhone is play Scribblenauts for a few hours.
• Develop apps. Finally shipping in July I hope!
• Replace (good) pocket calculators. Correct.
• Fail to stop me pining for an updated Newton. Correct — and neither has the iPad. (I want pressure-sensitive stylus support.)
• Stream internet radio. Correct, although the twins pick what we get to listen to on road trips these days. Argh!
• Fail to replace my Panasonic TZ-5. Pretty much incorrect, because I’ve always got it, and the photo quality is very good. (In fact on one vacation my DSLR ran out of juice and all I had was the iPhone, which took some pretty nice pictures.)

But, for all its many virtues, the iPhone 3G has lousy battery life, its slow, its camera is lackluster, and, let’s face it, the curved shape is getting old. $199 (or $299) may seem like a lot, but bear in mind what it replaces. The last time I bought an iPhone I looked at the gadgets I’d never buy again (e.g. Nintendo DS, Cell Phone, iPod) and the price suddenly became a bargain. The new phone is replacing point-and-shoot cameras and video camcorders (like my beloved Panasonic TZ-series or the Flip) in a way that the 3G didn’t. Just two weeks ago I was amazed to see the previous generation Panasonic TZ camera (basically just like the current one, without GPS) selling for $170 in Costco and was sorely tempted until I realized that for $199 (of course I’m getting the $299 version, but that’s not the point) an iPhone 4 would (a) shoot HD video, (b) include GPS, and (c) not be one more damn thing to carry around and recharge. This is without even considering its virtues as a phone, iPod, or iPhone 3G replacement.

It’s the Convergence baby.

Meanwhile, the only company in the world that’s as user-focused as Apple has a new trick up its sleeve.

Nintendo has been showing off a new prototype DS with a genuine, working, apparently non-sucky 3D display. This sounds like a pretty wondrous device, but one has to ask if it justifies its existence against the iPhone or iPod Touch. In the end, pretty much anything in the way of a gaming console, computer, audio or video accessory, or camera these days is a computer, and why buy, maintain, and carry around more than the minimum number? If my iPhone could support a large display, keyboard, and mouse when docked — why would I want anything else?

I’d probably be more tempted if their launch game weren’t Zelda. (And MGS is barely any better.) I’ve never even gotten half-way through a Zelda game before becoming too bored and frustrated to continue.

Nintendo can sell new gameboy variants to its user base with features as banal as a new headphone Jack, so I have no doubt this gadget will sell, but in the end it only staves off convergence. To actually compete in the long term, the DS needs to start boring other stuff, and that’s not going to happen.

$699 (notice how it’s crept up in price from $499 in the G4 days to $599 for the Intel version and now to $699?): 10W, unibody construction (thinner!), no tools required to get to RAM, no power brick, 2.4GHz Core2Duo (2.67GHz in dual 500GB no optical drive “server” version), HDMI, SD, FW800, GeForce 320M, up to 8GB of RAM.

This is Art.

iCab for iPad is so staggeringly superior to mobile safari it’s almost embarrassing, especially when you consider that most of the ways in which it’s superior are obvious and essentially stolen from desktop safari.

First, you can press and hold on a link to download it (e.g. You can download PDFs and view them offline). You can launch downloaded documents in other programs. You can jump from page to page using tabs — remember those.

The Ui is brilliant. By default it uses some real estate fora tab bar, making life sooooo much better, but if you need the space, it offers full screen mode with subtly displayed controls tucked in the corners and edges.

I often wonder how close the iCab guy got to having his browser acquired by Apple in the Bad Days of IE5.1.

Oh, and it has a slightly customized keyboard that doesn’t suck.

$1.99 well spent.

Not just the best FTP client, but the prettiest icon.

Panic has done it again — they’ve taken what was already the best FTP (et al) client on the Mac (or any other platform, seriously) and made it not only better but transcendently good. I have to agree with the review from Smoking Apples that the only FTP client that even remotely challenges Transmit is Flow (which I fell in love with instantly, and then abandoned because it’s simply too unstable), but Transmit has gone way beyond matching Flow’s features.

Three words: seamless Finder integration.

It’s hard to imagine how to add features to an FTP client to make a (non-free) upgrade release compelling, but somehow they’ve managed it. Aside from the above headline feature, my favorite new features are:

• instant access to favorites via the global menubar
• automatic inference of timezone differences (something I’ve wanted for a long time — but when I explained this to folks from the Dreamweaver team back in about 1998 they didn’t even understand the question: apparently administering servers in different time zones wasn’t a use-case they’d contemplated)
• FXP (server-to-server) file transfer (Forklift‘s killer feature)