Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I was reading Jonh Gruber’s linked list when I found this article:

Wifi-Enabled SanDisk Sansa Connect Features Yahoo! Music Unlimited, LAUNCHcast, Messenger, and Flickr

And I’ll steal the same quote Gruber did, with the same empahsis:

For those of you about to complain about the $12/month to get unlimited tracks (like, um, Steve Jobs), check yourself before you riggity wreck yourself. Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect, whereas we all know iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s.

I found it interesting that “iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s” because for years I’ve been told that I’m a sucker for irrationally owning an iPod, which locks me into the iTunes Music Store, which sells Apple-proprietary AAC format files, which are the only thing the iPod can play.

If you feel the need to talk shit about the iPod by spreading disinformation or by disparaging its users, try not to contradict the other shit talkers.

The creator of the anti-Hillary pro-Obama Apple 1984 ad has been revealed.

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged that he was the creator of the video…

Here’s the amusing part.

De Vellis said he used footage of an updated Apple ad that portrayed the female athlete wearing an iPod. He said he used standard Apple equipment to modify the video and edit Clinton’s image into the clip.
…
“Frankly, given what it looks like, we don’t have the technical capacity to create something like this,” he said. “It’s pretty extraordinary.”

Wow.

For the sake of this post, imagine that the record companies completely ditched DRM tomorrow and all songs sold at the iTunes Media Store were DRM-less.

Would Apple create, say, an installer package that runs an app or a script that would remove the DRM from your already purchased songs, or would previously purchased music retain its DRM?

Put your thoughts (if any) in the comments section.

A few weeks ago I promised to write a little something about the iPhone for this page. Since then, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the phone and what I wanted to say about it. I’ve been through a lot of different permutations of my opinion in my mind, and I keep coming back to a central point.

I’m not paying for the damn thing.

The phone is either $500 or $600 to replicate two devices I already have. That’s a steep entry price, but if the phone offered something truly remarkable, I’d be willing to part with my cash. In addition to the cost of the hardware, some kind of service plan, at least, will be required to make the device useful, and that plan will require a two year contract. Blow me. Like hell I’m going to sign a two year contract when I have options for month-to-month service. And, if you want to do more than make phone calls, you’ll need a data plan of some kind, which will also be part of the two year contract. It’s not unthinkable that an iPhone, with all its abilities enabled, could cost $2000 to $3000 for two years’ use. No way.

I wrote a somewhat popular post about Apple VoIP about a month ago. In that post, I compared Apple’s single most popular device of recent history, the iPod, to a potential VoIP phone, and talked about what those two items could have in common to make them successful. During the keynote where the iPhone was introduced, my friend Shawn King pointed out that, as expensive as the iPhone is (for the hardware), the iPod was also criticized for being outrageously priced at its intro, and now Apple sells them as fast as it can make them.

That’s true enough, but there’s an important difference: The iPod didn’t tie users to any kind of subscription service(s) that required a contract and was absolutely critical to the operation of the device. The iPhone does. So in that sense, the iPhone and the iPod aren’t analogous where pricing is concerned.

During the keynote, I found it hard to get excited about the iPhone. The interface certainly is cool, no doubt about it. But what does the phone do that my current phone already doesn’t? There wasn’t anything revolutionary here, just a new interface on the same old stuff. And, I thought at the time, isn’t this what the cell phone should have behaved like anyway, from the beginning? How excited am I supposed to be about finally getting what I should have had to begin with? I’m more angry at the design idiots who live in their bubbles than I am excited about the one group that seems to have gotten it right.

My idea of a great cell phone is easy. I want it to get excellent signal quality whenever I’m in a reasonably populated area. (I’m not aware of any data concerning the iPhone’s signal reception.) And yes, I realize that’s not exclusively a function of the phone. Apple has partnered with the cell service with “the least dropped calls”, which isn’t much of an endorsement. Second, I want it to have an easy to use address book, with Bluetooth sync and iSync compatibility. (The iPhone does this, as far as I’m aware.) Beyond that, everything else means little or nothing to me. I don’t need a camera. Don’t care about a calendar. I don’t like games. I don’t want to browse the web on a tiny screen, whether I can pinch-to-zoom or not. I don’t want e-mail interrupting my life as often as the phone does. Talking on the phone is almost always better than SMS. Etc.

Is the iPhone doomed? No, not at all. I’m sure Apple will sell a ton of them. Just not to me.

A couple of years ago, there was a big movement among Mac-Macs and entitlement nerds who demanded Apple make a cheap, low-end Mac. It would change the computing landscape, they proclaimed. Apple would sell those machines so fast they wouldn’t be able to keep them in stock. They would be so cheap that one would be on every desk in America because, as we all know, the only thing keeping anyone from buying a Mac is the price. And it would just be so fucking cool for Apple to have a cheap machine that such a device should be built on that premise alone.

It’s several years later now. The Mac mini has done well, but it hasn’t changed the computing landscape. It’s not especially cheap. And in a lot of circumstances, it’s not the best bang for your computer buying buck. The things that everyone was sure were going to happen didn’t. The Mac mini didn’t make the impact so many wished it would.

I feel the same way about the iPhone. It will be successful to some degree, but in a few years it’ll be another phone in the giant sea of phones. It’ll probably still be cool, but it will not live up to the expectations so many have set for it. All the Mac-Mac and entitlement nerd energy wasted on this phone could have been better spent elsewhere.

It turns out I was wrong about the idea that Apple’s phone would be VoIP. However, I think the argument I put forward was logically sound, and certainly had more force behind it than almost every argument I saw for the iPhone, which usually boiled down to “because Apple will make it cool”. Although it is generally agreed that Apple did make a cool phone, that argument before the fact was primarily assumption and very little reason.

And now for the Apple item introduced during Macworld that I thought was much more interesting and consequential: Airport with 802.11n. I am very excited to be getting 100+ Mbit wireless connectivity in my home. I am a compulsive backer-upper (you should be too) and when I’m backing up or archiving a lot of data, 802.11g just doesn’t cut it. Zinging that data wirelessly over the network for safe keeping at high speeds is an exciting thing. Even more exciting was the revelation that USB-enabled drives and storage devices can be connected to and shared directly from and Airport base station. Think Time Machine.

I’m a notebook owner, and I’ve wondered how useful Time Machine would be to me since I almost never have an external USB or Firewire drive connected. How could Time Machine backup my stuff when there usually isn’t anywhere to backup to? Airport provided that answer. When you join an Airport network, the volumes attached to the Airport can be mounted automatically and Time Machine can use them, over 100+ Mbit wireless no less. Awesome. Now I can finally get certain people to (albeit passively) backup their stuff instead of getting grumpy with me when they lose shit. Like it’s my fault. All you IT people out there know what I’m talking about.

All-in-all, when I purchase a new MacBook and Airport base station in a few months, I’ll get infinitely more utility and use out of those things than I will an iPhone. And Time Machine and some of my other backup habits will likely save my butt (and some others’) somewhere along the line. So I’m excited about that.

This past week at Macworld Expo, I finally had the chance to meet Phil Schiller, the funniest guy at every keynote.

He remembered me right away and he listened politely while I told a story about something that happened some years ago while I was under Apple’s employ. Then we posed for a pic and he shook my hand. He couldn’t have been nicer. And that was my close encounter with Phil.

Like many people, I caught the Expo crud mid-week and just this morning was I able to get some real drugs from the doctor, so I’m feeling semi-lucid right now. Later in the week, I’ll trickle out my thoughts about the VoIP idea I was wrong about, about the iPhone-that-will-solve-all-the-world’s-problems, and Apple’s quiet introduction of AirPort with 802.11n.