Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

I’ve written about this before, but I wanted to quickly re-state it: It doesn’t make any sense for Apple to create a cell phone. The Almighty Pogue agrees with me, albeit for different reasons. Apple usually introduces devices that fill a market that is poorly served, or in which they can make significant improvements to existing products, and the cell phone market doesn’t fit that bill. Apple is also a company that is all about control (and I say that as someone who has signed an Apple NDA), especially vertical control, and relying on a cell phone service provider to make a product usable (or not) doesn’t seem to be Apple’s modus operandi, nor in their best interest.

How is Apple going to convince enough people to change cell phone carriers to make the alleged iPhone sell? How is Apple going to talk people out of existing cell service contracts? How is Apple going to talk people out of staying with service they’re already happy with? Is Apple going to wait for existing contracts to expire while the slow-selling alleged iPhone takes a beating in the press, and Apple’s stock takes a beating by extremely fickle dump-it-at-the-first-sign-of-bad-news short-sighted investors? What is it that Apple is going to add to a cell phone that will make it so much better than the phones available now that you’ve just gotta have it? An Apple logo? The ability to play music with an iPod interface? A scroll wheel? (Frankly, all those things together wouldn’t compel me to buy one since I already have a phone and an iPod.) Would Apple really sell an incomplete solution in the form of a provide-your-own-SIM-card phone, placing the work and the hassle (however small it may be to some of us) on the customer? Wouldn’t that be unApple-like? Would cell service providers support hardware they don’t explicitly approve for their network? Would you buy an unsupported phone like that? What is this compelling fire in the minds of people who want this phone so damn bad? What do they expect to gain?

This iPhone stupidity reminds me very much of the Mac mini. For months before its introduction, we heard all kinds of bullshit about the Mac mini. It was going to be super cheap. Everyone who always wanted a Mac but was too cheap to drop the cash for one would snap up a mini, and meaningless Mac market share would shoot through the roof and Mac minis would be everywhere. It was going to fundamentally change the universe. We must have them, now! My God, how can Apple survive without the Mac mini? Unless there’s a Mac mini introduced right freakin’ now, dammit, Apple is doomed, I tell ya! Dooooomed!

Almost two years after the Mac mini saw the light of day, it’s not super cheap (and never was). Users of other platforms either kept their same reasons for not buying one, or dreamed up new reasons. Meaningless market share did grow, not explode, but that growth is primarily because of Apple notebook sales, not the Mac mini. The Mac mini didn’t change the universe. It’s a nifty little box and I’ve recommended one or two to people, but it didn’t bring about world peace and a cure for cancer like so many predicted.

If there is an iPhone, and I hope there isn’t, it will turn out to be a similar kind of stupidity. It still doesn’t make sense to me, and while they would theoretically sell them to the people who get hard nipples just seeing the word “iPhone”, it wouldn’t help humanity create a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and it sure as hell wouldn’t clean behind the toilet for me. It will, however, continue to annoy me (and anyone else with a clue) because it can’t possibly meet the expectations of financial analysts and Mac-Macs. Either we’ll all keep reading this idiotic idea for the next decade until, under vastly different circumstances, Apple release some kind of phone (”See! I told ya so!”), or the idea will come to fruition and it’s failure to instantly bring dead loved ones back to life will earn it a bashing by the very people who closed their eyes and wrinkled their nose and clenched their fists and wished real hard for it to begin with.

Here’s a problem I ran into today: I control-clicked an icon on my desktop, pointed to the “Open With…” menu, and it listed two of every application. That’s not right, and I’m not sure what caused it, but I found out how to fix it.

Thanks to this page at The X Lab, I learned how to reset the Launch Services database in Tiger to correct my problem. The page also has instructions for Panther and Jaguar.

To fix your “Open With…” menu, open /Applcations/Utilities/Terminal, and type the following:

sudo rm /Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices-014*
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
The sudo command will prompt you for your admin password.

Then restart your Mac. The menu should be back to normal, although you will be prompted to confirm that you want to open the document you just clicked with the associated application.

This past weekend, I was joined by Todd Ludington of Phintec to break in the first edition of my podcast. There’s a little bit of a learning curve that comes with making a decent recording, so bear with us as we find our groove and attempt to bring you a casual yet informative discussion about the supercritical issues facing civilization today.

This time around, we covered a potpourri of topics to attempt to get the ball rolling. We talk about the HP slimming cameras, Napster’s desire to be sold, Jackass Two, pirate stupidity, nutritional drinks, and probably some other things I don’t remember just now.

Click here for the RSS feed to the podcast.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

New to the site as of today is the forum, where you can respond to what you hear. There’s only the one topic now, but new categories and forums will be added as time progresses. So stick with us.

Edit: New! Improved! Smaller file size! The RSS feed may not be updated to reflect the smaller size, but it is smaller. Really.

As some of you may realize, I’ve been both a fill-in co-host and guest on a show called Your Mac Life where my friends Shawn, J, and Lesa let me talk about the latest Mac-related news until we get tired of it all (approximately 2.5 hours). I enjoy being on the show very much, and if it weren’t for the fact that I live in Dayton, Ohio, and the show originates in Nashville, Tennessee, I’d probably be there a whole hell of a lot more.

For quite a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of doing my own podcast, not as a competitor to something like YML, but more of a “me too” kind of thing. If I can’t join ‘em there, I’ll supplement ‘em here. The reason I haven’t created a podcast yet is because I don’t know if anyone would really be interested. I have a rough idea of approximately how many people read this page regularly, and it ain’t that many, often times because I’m not motivated to write in the depth that some other bloggers are. Every now and again I have something original here, and it seems to get its share of attention. But generally, I hate to use this page to repeat points that are better articulated by others, and turning it into link-o-rama would be equally pointless. Talking, however, is a different matter. I can say more than I can write, and I can say it with other people presenting different viewpoints or counterpoints. I can do more humorous things in a podcast than I can in writing. The format just lends itself to greater spontaneity and more information conveyed for less work.

But… the world of podcasting seems to be chock full of everyone with a microphone and an opinion chatting about many of the same things. I don’t want to be someone here spinning my wheels and creating more noise when nobody may care. So I have some questions for the readers of this site, and I’d like to get your responses in the comments section. To control spammers, I moderate comments to weed out the nastiness that isn’t caught by the filter, but rest assured that I want your honest opinion and censoring negative comments to this post isn’t the kind of petty stupidity I care enough to engage in.

Would you listen? Do you have the time and interest to add one more podcast to your list? Is the technology news and opinion podcast genre pretty much full? What would you want to hear? What would you not want to hear? Am I over-thinking this? Is there something I haven’t considered? Submit a comment and let’s see where this goes.

… ok I guess. They’re nifty and all, but I didn’t see anything that makes me want to upgrade. Getting the search and letter display feature on existing iPods via a software update would be nice, but I understand that Apple needs to differentiate new products with new features and that older models may not see such changes. In any case, I’ve had my iPod nano 4GB for almost a year now (With no scratches! C’mon people, take care of your shit and stop complaining.) and it suits me just fine. As far as the iPod goes, could Apple’s biggest competitor be itself? Obviously the market isn’t infinite, and how many iPod owners are happy with what they have? It seems like a Microsoft-ish sort of problem.

As for the new nanos, well, they seem to me more like the iPod mini 2.0. I’m not all that into colors. In fact, I prefer the white iPods and Apple accessories because I wash the freakin’ chicken grease off my hands before I use my stuff. My wireless keyboard is as lilly white as the day I bought it, and I use it something like 40 hours a week. So there. And I am not a hyper clean germophobe!

The announcement that movies will be available in 640×480 format left me with a few questions. I bought the first six episodes of The Revolution , the excellent series from The History Channel about the American Revolution. Those episodes are all that’s available at the moment, and I assume iTunes and THC will eventually make the remaining seven episodes available as well. Will the new episodes be 320×240, or 640×480? Would they have half of the series at each res? Will existing videos be upgraded to 640×480 for future purchasers? In the case of The Revolution, if they do upgrade the resolution, will those of us who purchased an unfinished series be able to get the existing episodes at 640×480? I think I know the (pessimistic) answer to these questions, but maybe I’ll be surprised.