Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!
In the mid-1990s, gaming on the Mac was an incredibly sad affair. Very few titles were available outside of Myst and the various Sim titles, and the performance was quite poor. Games were regularly, and correctly, cited as a legit reason to prefer PCs.
But there was one exception that made the whole thing work: Snood, a tiny puzzle game from a geology professor at a liberal arts college in North Carolina. You shot little colored creatures (Snoods) from a cannon, attempting to match colors and clear the board. Yes, it was a whole lot like Bust-a-Move. That’s not the point. It had the ability to make shots through tiny cracks and suddenly clear the whole board with one click. It was fun, exciting, and, most of all, addictive as hell.
And it was a phenomenon. Basically, if you were college-age or younger and owned a Mac, you owned Snood, and you played it all the time. I still remember trying it for the first time in the Fall of 1996 when my older brother returned from his first semester at the University of Michigan and introduced me to my new gaming crack. I later became Johnny Snood-Seed, installing it on Macs at my high school that weren’t locked down (I disguised them as Internet settings panels so administrators wouldn’t delete them) and had my entire high school paper staff blowing deadlines because of it.
The game eventually got ported to pretty much everything, including Windows and TI-84 calculators, but its real roots are with Apple. And that’s why it’s such good news to learn that the iPhone version (App Store link) is out now. I’ve only spent a little time with it, but the developers have captured some of the feel of the Mac original. Now I’ll be able to procrastinate my professional work the way I once did my homework — in the palm of my hand! It’s even got Facebook connectivity so you can play against my high school friends, too. Quite a set-up. Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, isn’t it?
Alan Kay, the computing visionary who first envisioned the Dynabook computer concept, worked at Xerox PARC and helped make the original Mac amazing, is one of my favorite technology philosophers. Simply put, he had a way of turning a phrase when discussing the progress of technology that could bring clarity to a muddled topic.
Of all his quotes, my favorite is also one of his most casual. He said that the Macintosh was “the first personal computer good enough to criticize.” In his mind, everything else had been so crummy that to begin listing faults would pretty much convince you that PCs shouldn’t exist at all. Ever since, the mark of an emerging technology’s arrival is the point at which it becomes good enough to begin figuring out what’s wrong with it.
And of all of Apple’s announcements this morning, only the digital album format iTunes LP (also known as Cocktail) qualifies as a major improvement to a nascent technology. Simply put, though Apple long ago figured out how to sell music as digital downloads, it’s taken until now for them or anyone else to get in the ballpark of how to make those downloads feel anywhere near as special as a physical CD or LP.
Having played around with it for a bit (and watched several more demos of albums I haven’t picked up), it’s quite clear that Apple’s made a huge leap forward. And in so doing, it has made it abundantly clear how far they have to go.
Here are five steps Apple could take to make iTunes LP a competitor with your vinyl collection:
1. Get It Off My Computer and On My Devices The nice animation, visuals, video, and lyric displays offered for the first round of iTunes LP are nice and all, but I don’t actually spend a lot of time focusing on my music when playing it back off of a computer. iTunes is a background task most of the time, and even this immersive experience won’t change that — and it’s kind of weird to “page” through liner notes with mouse clicks. The entire look and feel is dramatically more suited to the iPhone or, dare I say it, a tablet computer. If Apple brings multitouch into the equation, maybe the format will restore some of the emotional connection to the tangible object of music in some way. For now, this is some nice animation I’ll never look at again.
2. Offer Lossless Audio Files At this point, the only people who are under the impression that limiting the supply of legitimate digital music actual limits the piracy of music work for record companies, yet it’s nearly impossible to buy truly CD-quality (or better) digital audio from major recording artists online. Apple should use the opportunity presented by iTunes LP to significantly up the quality of its audio to make the music itself sound more special.
3. Make it Simple for Artists to Use Do you know how many iTunes LP titles are available today, the first day of launch? Six. A 43-year-old Bob Dylan record you should already own, a greatest-hits collection from the Doors, American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, the new Norah Jones, the new Dave Matthews Band, and actor Tyrese Gibson’s way-autotuned comic book mash-up MAYHEM! Something for everyone, eh? If that somehow isn’t enough music for you, Apple is offering five (5!) additional albums for pre-order.
Yeah.
Clearly, the format is too complex for artists and labels to get behind yet. If you have the budget of Dave Matthews or Bob Dylan, you can have people make it for you, but if you’re pretty much every other artist, taking advantage of the format will take some (or a lot) or doing. If Apple wants this to become a de facto standard for digital albums, it needs to make this a blindingly easy process for artists to participate in — as easy as submitting your record to iTunes for sale. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but it’s a clear key to success.
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Again, iTunes LP is a fascinating effort. But it’s only good enough to criticize. The next year will be Apple’s opportunity to get it right or watch this concept go the way of the enhanced CD.
Noted cogitator Jason Kottke has an interesting thought on the experience of getting fully up to speed with brand-new Apple hardware and software. Basically, things have gotten so good that, barring minor speed improvements, you can’t tell any difference between new and old. He terms it “The Apple Upgrade Problem”:
“Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.”
Jason’s on to something interesting here. If you are a frequent Apple upgrader, you get far less of a thrill than if you wait a long time between devices. Consider the negligible differences between last year’s MacBook Pros and this year’s (unless you love battery life, FireWire, and SD cards, there’s not much to discuss). Or between the first video-capable iPod nanos and the current models (styling and form factor tell the whole story). And that’s without mentioning that it’s literally impossible to tell a 16-gig iPhone 3G apart from a 3GS.
So what does this mean?
For most people, very little. Unless you’re buying replacement hardware on an annual or at most biannual basis, you won’t have these kinds of difficulties. I, for one, had an iPod from 2004 that lasted me until I bought a green nano last year — huge leap forward. My PowerBook G4 stuck it out for five-and-a-half years before my beloved unibody MacBook arrived. And I won’t even go into just how much better the iPhone 3GS is than the BlackBerry Pearl it replaced.
For some people, Apple’s current predictability is a major boon. For corporate purchasers for example, the ability to requisition multiple models of a computer and not make it clear in the design who has the nicest or newest machine is a big deal for IT. That way I don’t get jealous when my 2008 unibody MacBook starts to age unfavorably against what I can only presume will be a 2010 unibody MacBook Pro. That’s true on iPhones, too, where executives who adopted a 3G last year don’t look hopelessly out of date around their 3GS-packing peers.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the very few people who are negatively affected by stuff like this are Apple’s most diehard fans — creative professionals who rely on new Mac hardware and software to help them do great work. The same people, it should be noted, who carried Apple through its darkest days. I’m less concerned on the hardware front (Apple always sticks with a design for a few years to avoid costs and focus on bigger leaps forward), but in software, it is a niggling question. And if the Mac isn’t providing creative pros with interesting novelty and inspiration, Apple isn’t executing on the fullness of its mission — where’s the creativity?
Now, it’s clear that Snow Leopard was a deliberate pause in the OS X development cycle to make sure that everything just worked a whole lot better. Other than a few front-stage changes, it was meant to invisibly make your existing Mac more stable and speedy. The question remains just how Apple will evolve OS X next. There are a lot fewer gaps than there used to be — and so much interesting work to be done in mobile and other touch interfaces.
What do you think — is there interesting work to be done on OS X as we know it? Or does Snow Leopard signal an end to innovation in conventional desktop operating systems?
Assembly 2009 is a gathering for programmers who love to write low-level code. Basically, any cross platform language has a level of abstraction from the hardware that prevents you from running truly optimized code. These folks love to get the most out of any chip.
That’s in abundant evidence in this clip, “3 1/2 Inches is Enough” by Unreal Voodoo. It’s a drama starring two modern laptops and an earnest classic Mac that was rendered entirely in assembly language on a Mac Classic II — presumably running a 68030 16 Mhz processor. It’s beautiful, and it’s got a great beat. Nice.
Renowned blogger, FriendFeeder, and all-around social web socialite Robert Scoble has pointed out something really interesting about the latest updated to the new revision of the Yelp iPhone app (iTunes link): it has a secret augmented reality mode dubbed “Monocle.” It is, of course, for iPhone 3GS only.
To activate, simply shake your iPhone a bunch (I’ve heard three times, but it took me like 10) until a blue box lets you know Monocle has been activated. Then just tap the Monocle button, which sticks around for good, and the app uses your camera, GPS location, and compass to put up signs and reviews for nearby restaurants and bars.
I just tried it out in my living room (that’s the view from my window circa 9 p.m.), and it’s seriously amazing. That list is pretty much exactly the full complement of cheap eats south from my window.
I don’t know how useful Monocle is (using the standard map mode is probably faster and definitely less battery draining), but it is a great way to feel like you live in the future.
One of the more, um, INTERESTING, design choices in Snow Leopard is the option to show icons in the new Cocoa-based Finder at an insane 512×512 pixels. Here’s how big that is: on a unibody 13.3″ MacBook Pro, you can display exactly two of them without either overlapping or running off the screen. The 30″ Cinema HD Display can only display 15 of them, and it’s significantly higher resolution than a 1080p television. The original Mac, at 512X342 pixels, could only display the width in full.
They’re enormous, and only possibly practical if you want to read documents without opening them, in which case Quick Look is a way better option anyway. Regardless, the new high-definition icons are fascinating viewed at full size. I’ve put in just the Folder icon, which is now big enough to have discernable flecks of dark blue in the grain. Amazing. Totally obsessive. And totally Apple.
With Uncle Walt’s confirmation, the cat’s officially out of the bag: That $30 Snow Leopard disc Apple’s making available starting Friday? It works with more than just full Leopard installs — it can upgrade any Intel Mac, including those running Tiger. In other words, unless you want to pick up iLife and iWork in the process, the only reason to buy the $169 Mac Box is if you want to live by the spirit of Apple’s marketing.
What do you think, Tiger users? Will you abide by formal ethics or just buy the cheapest upgrade path ever? And will your Leopard-buying friends hate you for it?
It’s easy to take for granted how rapidly Apple upgrades Mac OS X with meaningful new features. After all, with Friday’s Snow Leopard release, the world’s best desktop OS will have seen its fifth major leap forward in the same time it’s taken Microsoft to add only Vista and the promise of Windows 7 (I know it’s coming soon, I’m just impressed Apple’s beaten Microsoft again).
Three days from the next great version of the best great thing, here are 10 reasons why you should upgrade to Snow Leopard.
10. It’s Leopard Done Right The release of Mac OS X Leopard was fraught with peril. It was late, it ran a bit slow, and it offered amazing new features — some of which weren’t fully ready for prime time. Snow Leopard is all about performance, optimizing features to deliver a great experience. It takes what you know today and makes it perfect.
We now know that Snow Leopard will be released on Friday for just $29. Even better, that already low price can drop to $10 if you’ve bought a new Mac since June 9 through the Mac OS X Up-to-Date program. Not sure if you qualify? Head here to find out.
UPDATE: Apple’s US and Canadian stores also briefly said August 28th will be the release date. The stores have now been changed back to “September.”
Though it might lack the wow factor of Leopard or revolutionary features like Tiger brought to bear, Mac OS X Snow Leopard is still going to be completely amazing. Some times tuning up everything under the hood is a lot more important than changing the icons in the Dock.
And, from what we can tell, we’ll all (well, some of us) finally get to enjoy a fully 64-bit OS, advanced multicore support via Grand Central, OpenCL, and the rest very soon. The Apple Store UK yesterday listed an August 28 release date for the little upgrade that could (it’s since changed to “September,” but I think that’s just trying to shove the cat back in the bag), so get ready to spend next weekend benchmarking your machines.
At this point, it’s hard to get excited by every amazing new iPhone app that comes down the pike. Even augmented reality has started to feel boring, and it isn’t even allowed on locked-down iPhones yet.
But man, does Cadence have me excited. Basically, it figures out the average tempo of your iPod library, then creates playlists by different BPM speeds so you can easily browse your music by pace. Watch the video at their site (not embeddable, unfortunately). It’s amazing, and a totally new experience.
And it’s something I’ve been looking for. I’ve never had my whole 25-gig music library on a single handheld device before, and I’ve found it’s hard to take advantage of so many songs and artists. I’ll inevitably stay in my comfort zone if I don’t discover what I’ve been missing — and Genius doesn’t help, it regurgitates the same 20 songs every time I use it.
This has that potential, if it’s smart enough to pick a random song within each tempo. I’m excited to use this, and I hope Apple has the sense to approve it. This is not duplicate functionality.
I am a sad panda today. As you may or may not have noticed, three quarters of my big post on Apple vanished when I fixed a typo.
Why? Because I was using Blogpress, an iPhone blogging app that I had been enjoying. Here’s the thing: Blogpress has a show-stopping bug. It doesn’t correctly interpret the tags we use for jumps.
Which is pretty inexcusable. But rather than talk about how Blogpress is deeply frustrating and ruined my morning, I thought I’d make this a positive thing. Tell us what the best iPhone blog apps are. Whichever we like best will get some positive coverage, and we might even document the whole bake-off process. Developers with promo codes, bring it on.
Here are the requirements for the app:
— WordPress compatible
— Landscape keyboard
— Can edit in HTML and WYSIWYG
— Recognizes tags
— Handles categories and post management
The Internet has lately played host to a near-infinite amount of fol-de-rol regarding a rather silly post from Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in which he railed against Apple’s recent paranoia. There’s plenty wrong with the gist of his argument (as Leander points out in this rather nice post), as well as a few things that are right on.
But I’m not here to dwell on that. I just want to make one thing very clear: what makes Apple great is not what it puts into its products. It’s what gets left out. As exciting as visions of flying iPhones with 8 sim slots, a Zip disk slot, and dual head-mounted displays might seem, the original iPhone (and iPod, for that matter) became iconic because of its limitations — not in spite of them. Innovation, contrary to Calacanis, is often more about editing than possibility. Apple, more than most companies, is defined by its unwillingness to do too much. The greatest design impact is in what we can’t see.
Apple’s board of directors is a bit light these days. In addition to recently resigned/forced out/exiled Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is the eye of a hurricane about the notorious Google Voice/App Store rejection/AT&T imbroglio, the company has an internal seat it has kept vacant since the resignation/dismissal/ejection of former Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson in the wake of the backdating/did Steve or didn’t he/stock options fiasco.
In other words, Apple could add as many as two board members to its strange leadership team, which currently stands as Jobs, Al Gore, Genentech Chairman Arthur Levinson, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell and the CEOs of both Avon and J. Crew. The ghost of Andy Warhol, despite rumors, does not actually sit on the board.
So who should join this squad? Fake Steve’s had his say, and it’s high time we had ours as well. As BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl points out, temporary CEO/COO-extraordinaire Tim Cook seems like an obvious addition, especially given his position on Nike’s board, and his value to the company is at this point proven and prominent. He seems like a gimme, particularly if Apple wants him to become the real CEO at some point.
From an external perspective, however, things get much more interesting. At this point, Apple’s board is very light on tech folks. Besides Steve, only Campbell is directly involved in computers, and he’s only on the consumer and small and medium business markets constituted by Quicken and QuickBooks. That said, Apple is running out of friends in technology — virtually everyone is in competition with them in some form or another, which is partially what led to the awkward situation with Schmidt.
Tenuous as their relationship has been in the past (particularly over use of the term iPhone), I would love to see John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, on the board. He’s an incredibly bright guy, a brilliant manager, and he really gets tech and telecommunications without being an Apple competitor in any meaningful sense. Additionally, he has a reputation for remarkable ethics, both personally and across his organization — Cisco was one of the only organizations in Silicon Valley that didn’t have stock backdating issues a few years back. He also gets business customers in a big way.
What it is: Nike+iPod-iPod. Basically, an inexpensive watch that doubles as a run tracker with the help of a transmitter in your shoe. Not an Apple thing, per se, although they did design the chip that goes in your shoe.
Why it’s cool: The Nike+ system originally developed for the iPod nano is a pretty remarkable little invention that allows you to keep track of your running statistics and inspire yourself to greater heights.. Unfortunately, it’s only recently been available across Apple’s mobile devices. If you own anything but a nano, a second-gen iPod touch or an iPhone 3GS, you can’t use Nike+ with your iPod. And, bizarrely, the Nike+iPod set-up actually behaves in obnoxious ways if you’re an urban runner. For example, if you get caught at a long stop light and pause your run clock, the iPod stops its music, too, making the wait that much more interminable. The NikePlus Sportband acknowledges the value of run tracking and music without making them interdependent. You can pause your workout and keep listening. And it obviously works with older iPods and iPhones, or even your shuffle.
And the new model, out as of a few weeks ago (available in gray/neon yellow or white/hot pink), is brilliant and fixes some significant flaws with the previous generation. The original black and orange Sportband had poor sealing, which led to a lot of people ending up with unreadable watches as moisture left smears on the inside. Nike recalled the product and now offers one-for-one swaps if you help onto your original Sportband. Besides fixing the moisture problem, the new display goes for a pleasing black numbers on white background instead of the former’s extremely dim white letters on black. It’s very stylish, and the functionality is better than ever. Additionally, because the face clips off and syncs vis USB (see below)
The watch sets itself and can even charge its (already long-lasting) battery, which means it won’t die the way normal watches do. It’s fuss-free, and the nicest $59 watch you’ll ever find, whether or not you’re a runner.
Where to get it: Finer local running specialty shops or the Nike Store. If you’re making a swap, bring it into the original place of purchase, with or without a receipt. At any NikeTown location, they’ll even give you cash, including tax, if they don’t have enough in stock.
The comically wrong-headed announcement that Verizon would be launching VCast Apps, its response to Apple’s App Store, made me realize that pretty much everyone, including, major cell phone carriers, are confused about how and why the iPhone has been such a success. I could spend awhile talking about why an all-Verizon app store is a stupid idea (when you create apps for dozens of phones, all running different OSes and using different interfaces, you get the lowest common denominator; Verizon already has a pan-network app store; people love iPhone App Store because the software is good, not because of the basic concept), but instead I’ll devote a little while to analyzing the success of the iPhone and provide some basic definitions that are going to be critical to understanding the new mobile landscape in years to come.
Those terms? Products, Platforms, and Networks. To have a truly great experience, you need to excel in all three. Unfortunately, no one in the U.S. is doing that. Read on for more.
Add one more to the list of classic Mac apps making a comeback on the iPhone. MetaTools, famous for the legendary PhotoShop plug-in suite Kai’s Power Tools, has brought goofy photo manipulation back in the form of Making Faces (App Store link), an adaptation of its wacky classic Power Goo.
I haven’t tested it yet, but I used to rock Power Goo on my dad’s Performa 6115. In retrospect, it would have worked way better with multitouch than it did with a mouse. Ah, sweet memories. Like almost everything else on the App Store, it’s $2.99.
For the second time in less than a week, news has leaked that Apple has rejected a Google app for the iPhone. First was the location-awareness tool Google Latitude (which is fun but just as good in a browser), and today came word that the official app for Google Voice has been turned down. Worse, two prior client apps for Google Voice, GV Mobile and Voice Central, have both been withdrawn from the App Store (though it appears Apple hasn’t deleted them from users’ phones; yet).
All of this is incredibly puzzling. Nothing has happened suddenly today that suggests in any way that Apple suddenly discovered new information that disqualified GV Mobile (which was approved personally by Phil Schiller) and Voice Central from sale. And this antagonism toward Google in general is deeply troubling. Yes, the official Google Voice app includes a dialer, as do the other apps, which technically replicates functionality on the iPhone. But so does Skype, and it’s still on sale. Apple also cited duplicate functionality as reason to reject Latitude, but no one sophisticated enough to use Latitude could possibly confuse it with the built-in Maps program.
And it’s all fairly pointless, anyway, because all of the functionality Apple might be obstructing by holding these apps back is available through Mobile Safari right now. Latitude is currently functional through a custom web app, and the Google Voice website can place calls and send free texts from the iPhone. It could use a new interface, but the full capability of the technology is there — I called my wife with it, and it works perfectly. Screenshot’s from my phone.
No, something else is going on here. And as I see it, it’s one of two possibilities. The first is that Apple is finally starting to feel some heat from Android (I know it’s ridiculous, but hear me out) and wants to prevent Google from dominating two mobile platforms. Actually, I’ll just reject this one. If Apple wants to stay ahead of Android, there’s no better tactic than to get great Google apps on the iPhone.
So that leaves the other alternative, spelled AT&T. We know, with some certainly that Ma Bell is the reason that SlingPlayer only works over WiFi on the iPhone, and we know that it, not Apple, wanted Skype kept off of 3G. Worse, we know that AT&T’s battered 3G network is struggling to keep up with the incredible data traffic generated by iPhones. Now, Google Voice isn’t data intensive, but it does allow you to send free text messages (AT&T charges 20 cents a pop) and insanely cheap international calling (India is 7 cents a minute, a full two cents cheaper than Skype). When your network is in trouble, you might as well make sure people don’t find ways to get around your punitive fees, right?
Now, if this were AT&T’s app store, I wouldn’t have a problem with the carrier dictating which apps were approved and which weren’t. But this is supposed to be Apple’s show. Worse, other phones on the AT&T network are allowed to get Google Voice, full SlingPlayer and other functionality that is being held off the iPhone for fear of the traffic burden. If AT&T is behind this, I understand it, but I’m incredibly frustrated. If Apple’s hand is on the switch, I have serious doubts about the company’s ability to hold onto a developer community much longer.
A bit of fun, here. Multiple websites and stock reporting services today briefly misreported that modest gains in Apple’s stock today (2 points as of 11 a.m.) was actually a titanic leap of 40 points, or more than 33 percent of its gain.
As submitting reader SBI notes:
“WTF? Â Just checked AAPL and almost had a heart attack. Â I thought maybe Redmond and Enderle just spontaneously combusted. Â In all honesty, I don’t know where everybody draws the stock data from, but I saw this on at least 3 diff sites.”
Amazing. Apple announced great results, but that would be something else…
Malcolm Gladwell is a very sharp guy, on a whole lot of topics (heck, he liked my book!). One of the most enjoyable reads of the past month is his point-by-point thrashing of Chris Anderson’s book Free in the New Yorker, which basically established that, all protests to the contrary, charging money is a better business than giving things away for free.
But in the course of this deconstruction, Malcolm made a pretty big arithmetic error that made it sound like Apple was on the verge of making the content it sells for its devices more important than the hardware itself:
“And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both.”
Actually, Apple is really, really far away from making more money selling iPhone downloads than from the iPhone itself. Let’s take the most recent data we have.
Apple is due to announce Wednesday its earnings for the quarter that ended June 27, and you know what that means: wild speculation by analysts followed by pouting and a drooping stock price when Apple out-performs expectations.
But lately, it’s gotten still more insane: now, these same analysts are trying to infer some read of the overall economic condition based on Apple’s earnings. Which, to me, is a comically fruitless exercise, because Apple operates in a different universe from most companies. It has radically differentiated offerings in all of its businesses, and its focus on innovation is such that it always comes out with a new market-defining product that the rest of the industry can’t match. Apple’s an especially bad indicator of the rest of the consumer tech sector during this recession. Apple doing well doesn’t mean that Dell’s in good shape, or vice versa.
BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl, a long-time Apple-watcher, has a very sober account of this lunacy, which suffers from the problems associated with a lot of traditional business reporting — in pursuit of balance, he can’t actually address the questionable premise that Apple, a company that was out-performing the market before it collapsed, might signify the end of the recession by continuing to out-perform the market.
I can say this much: Apple will have great earnings on Wednesday. And that means that it remains good to be an Apple stockholder, even as the rest of the world is in chaos. It doesn’t mean we’re getting back to normal anywhere else.
After my post yearning for more battery life out of my iPhone 3GS and hoping that the Mophie Juice Pack Air might hold the solutions to all of problems, a reader, who shall remain anonymous, tipped me off to some unresolved problems with the current generation fo the combination iPhone case/battery pack.
At left is one of two screenshots he sent me purporting to show the Juice Pack Air refusing to provide power to his iPhone (which kind of defeats its purpose). He bought one, was told it was defective, was given a replacement, and found it had the same troubles.
Here’s his explanation:
“It only happens if you discharge your iPhone to 20% warning. Then allow the Mophie to charge your iPhone 3GS until its depleted. Once it’s at zero charge the errors happen in the iPhone 3GS every time. I think those errors even crashed the phone once, but this is unconfirmed but feel its right since it was left to charge, placed in an outer mesh pocket of a laptop bag and found unresponsive later until removed from the Mophie and hard reset. Sigh.”
Anyone else seen these issues? I’ll admit, it has me back in a wait-and-see mode again…
The iphone nano: Like throwing your two favorite things in a blender. Via Solomobi
There’s been a lot of concern of late about just how sophisticated Chinese bootleggers have become at creating counterfeit Apple products. Leander got snookered by near-perfect iPod earbuds, the head of Apple Switzerland was furious to receive a gift of a bootleg iPod shuffle, and we’ve all seen an increasing number of knock-offs popping up all over the place, potentially undermining Apple’s value.
But for all our concern, there are also magical gifts like the above “iphone nano,” which looks as elegant and beautiful as if Conan O’Brien had done a “What If They Mated?” segment on his show for the iPod nano and the iPhone. Simply stunning. I know I’m jealous.
Having now lived with an iPhone 3GS for the better part of three weeks, I remain incredibly impressed with the device. It’s powerful, fast, and running extremely mature software that’s delightfully quirk-free.
That said, it’s also become apparent that if you’re actually interested in using the phone for its intended use (web browsing, e-mail and video), battery life is ridiculously inadequate. In spite of assurances at WWDC, the 3GS only lasts marginally longer than the 3G, and I often need to charge up mid-afternoon to make sure i have decent battery for my train ride home.
Yesterday, things really went out of wack, and I could literally watch my charge diminish by 2 percent per minute when I was doing nothing so much as leaving it on my desk. A restart fixed it, but it was an extreme case of a persistent problem.
I started thinking about all of this thanks to Joel Johnson’s review of the Mophie Juice Pack Air over at BB Gadgets today. I still think having any case would be a downer, but the extra battery power is becoming increasingly necessary to enjoy my long-awaited iPhone in the manner I choose. That said, I can’t really bring myself to by one of those big battery packs that hold four times the charge, or what have you — afraid of losing it.
What’s been your experience? Do you moderate your Flight Control play to preserve your talk time? Or do you sport a bonus battery pack?
