Slate Article: Is Something Rotten at Apple?

an article from . This is an article from Slate about the problems people are having with connecting to the supposed 3G network, or even just holding onto a phone call. It doesn't display right but I don't know what I can do to fix that. This was emailed to me and I forwarded it to my blog by email. I've been telling people the iPhone is junk since it first came out. Now they just proved me right. Macs are still the far superior best though. I'm still a Mac zealot and always will be. I'm just not in love with Apple and I'm not an ignorant follower that just believes in hype and spends too much money on something just so I can say I have one.

Is Something Rotten at Apple? E-mail problems, flaky iPhones, and broken Macs. What's Steve Jobs to do? By Farhad Manjoo Posted Monday, Aug. 25, 2008, at 5:40 PM ET In its ubiquitous TV ads, Apple claims that its new iPhone is twice as fast as the original version and just half the price. Neither is true. The half-price fib has been obvious for some time: When you add the price of AT&T's required two-year contract, the new phone costs slightly more than the old phone. In a lawsuit filed last week, an iPhone owner na med Jessica Alena Smith argues that Apple hasn't been honest about the phone's speed, either. Smith, echoing thousands of complaints logged on Apple's Web site, says that her iPhone rarely connects to AT&T's fast 3G network, instead staying fixed to the pokey EDGE service that was the bane of the first iPhone. Smith's iPhone doesn't just fail on tasks like downloading e-mail and surfing the Web, she says. It also drops many of her voice calls. Smith lives in Birmingham, Ala., but I've had the same problem with my iPhone 3G in cell-tower-rich San Francisco—more dropped calls than I've ever had on a cell phone (including on the original iPhone) and terribly spotty 3G service. Last month, I raved about the great third-party programs available on the iPhone's fantastic built-in App Store. But I've since soured on that system, too. As many iPhone owners have noticed, the phone often mysteriously refuses to load these apps, rendering them useless. Smith is asking a judge to grant her lawsuit class-action status. I hope it's approved. Apple has reluctantly acknowledged flaws in the iPhone and has quietly promised to correct them, but there's no sign that it's taking the complaints very seriously. The lawsuit might be just the kick it needs to fix the world's broken iPhones. But the company's troubles go beyond the iPhone. Last month, Apple launched MobileMe, a $100-per-year online service that aimed to sync documents and e-mail across computers and Internet devices. MobileMe failed spectacularly in its opening weeks, with some users reporting losing years of saved e-mail. In a widely circulated post, Techcrunch's Michael Arrington claimed last week that Apple's PCs aren't doing so well either. Arrington, a longtime Apple fan, says he's had four new Macs break in different ways—one refused to connect to Wi-Fi networks, one suffered a keyboard flaw, and two shut down mysteriously. Is something rotten at App! le? Is it "flailing badly at the edges," as Arrington argues? Is it possible that Steve Jobs' reality distortion field is finally weakening—that the scales have fallen from our eyes and we're now seeing that Apple's products are just as flawed and prone to failure as any other hardware? Well, not really. As Apple fans point out, people still love Apple. Last week the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an annual survey of consumers' feelings about major brands, gave Apple a record score of 85 points out of 100 in the personal-computer cat! egory. Apple scored 10 points higher than Dell, 12 points higher than Hewlett-Packard, and 13 points higher than Gateway. Apple has led the category for five years straight. Claes Fornell, who directs the survey, told Computerworld that even though customers know that Apple's products aren't perfect, "Apple has an almost Teflon-like quality. Its problems don't really seem to matter to consumers." So much for the death of the reality distortion field. Why don't consumers seem to care about Apple's problems? For one thing, Apple gets more press than any other company in tech, and both its successes and failures tend to dominate the Silicon Valley blogosophere. It registers as big tech news when a high-flying blogger like Arrington gets a few unlucky Macs, but such difficulties probably don't filter down to most customers. Years of savvy brand advertising and a string of genuinely great p! roducts have helped Apple build up a well of good-feeling; as a result, people are more willing to overlook the company's occasional failures. Besides, many Apple products still beat their rivals, hands down. You may hate Apple for selling you an iPod with a battery that dies, but what are you going to do when you go looking for a new music player—get a Zune? Not likely. What's troubling, though, is Apple's tendency to milk this advantage—when it does screw up, it prefers secrecy over full disclosure, and it expects customers to quickly forgive any slight. Its response to the MobileMe meltdown was a classic example. For several days after the site's rocky launch, Apple refused to disclose what had gone wrong. It wouldn't say why MobileMe was down, and it wouldn't say when MobileMe would be fixed. Only after the New York Times' David! Pogue and the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg published critical columns did Apple change its tune. Two weeks after MobileMe's launch, the company put up a blog documenting the service's status. Last week, it gave all users a credit for two months of MobileMe service. Apple is dealing with iPhone problems in much the same way—grudgingly. Apple-focused blogs recently reported that Jobs fired off one-line e-mail replies to two different customers upset about iPhone difficulties; in each case, he said Appl! e was working on the problems. And an Apple spokeswoman told USA Today that Apple would issue a software patch to improve "communication with 3G networks." But that's it: The company won't say why the phone's failing to load apps or connect to 3G, it won't say how serious the problems are, and it won't say what, if anything, customers can do to resolve the problems until it issues a fix. Contrast Apple's response to how other major tech firms handled recent failures. As Adam Engst, editor of the Mac newsletter TidBits, points out, when Netflix suffered shipping delays earlier this month, it issued an immediate, clear explanation and apology and automatically credited customers' accounts. Netflix customers raved about how the company handled the p roblem. Voilà: The company turned a tech failure into a PR win. Google accomplished something similar when Gmail died for a few hours on Aug. 11. Within hours of noticing the problem, Google put out a statement on its blog explaining what had gone wrong—the post was titled, "We feel your pain, and we're sorry"—and the steps it had taken to prevent a future failure. Apple's strategy for dealing with complaints stems from a companywide emphasis on secrecy. Tight lips work well for Apple, building suspense among loyalists and the press about upcoming products and burnishing its reputation as a company that leads rather than follows. But as it expands into new, highly complex businesses—phones, set-top boxes, "cloud computing" ser! vices—Apple is sure to make more mistakes. As Jobs wrote in an internal e-mail to employees, the MobileMe screw-up happened because the company was trying to do too much at the same time (the system launched on the same day as the new iPhone) and because "we have more to learn about Internet services." What's more, Apple's customer base is widening beyond longtime Mac fanatics—people who give the company a pass because they regard it as an underdog. The Mac's market share is growing rapidly, suggesting that lots of Windows users are switching. Last month, millions of people waited in line for the iPhone not because it was emblazoned with the Apple logo, but because they'd heard it was the best phone on the market. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone and MobileMe are vital to people's lives in a way that, say, an iPod isn't, and you've g! ot a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. You may be willing to overlo ok Apple's silence about a dead battery on your MP3 player. But if the company continues to stonewall people whose phones cut off every five minutes, Steve Jobs better get ready for some marches on Cupertino. Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2198535/

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This is the first phone that really seriously comes close to being as cool as the iPhone

As much as I hate to admit it, the iPhone is the coolest phone out right now. It's not the best, but it's the coolest. That is how Apple has for so long gotten away with selling an inferior product and beating out all of its far superior competition. The HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro is the first real competitor that raises the bar for Apple.

Go here and look at what the interface is like on this phone. It's the first one I've seen that looks better than the iPhone. It's all 3D and it does the automatically tilt the screen when you rotate the phone thing like the iPhone does. And the phone looks better and you can get it with or without a keyboard. It's also got a tv out so if you get the HTC cable to go with it, you can connect it to a monitor or tv and run a Powerpoint presentation off it, and who knows what else. It's got all the specs of the iPhone and some better: wifi, 3.2 MP camera, memory card slot up to 16GB, Windows Mobile 6.1 (so lots of apps and support), stereo bluetooth, 3G, GPS.

There's going to be some variation of it on all the major carriers this fall, both GSM and CDMA, so anybody can get one. The iPhone would sell a lot more if it wasn't so far out of reach for many people like myself. For me personally, the iPhone is not everything I want and I'll never have the money to get one nor the desire to tolerate Cingular/AT&T screwing up my bill every single month. For me to get an iPhone right now, I'd have to buy out of my Sprint contract, pay up money I owe to Cingular, pay a security deposit to get service with them because I have bad credit, then pay for the iPhone and a more expensive plan every month. I still wouldn't have a keyboard to type on or some of the other things the iPhone still lacks that I value. So there is nothing Apple could ever do to the iPhone that would make it worth the literally $1,000 to $1,500 I'd have to spend to get one. Even if I hadn't screwed Cingular out of the money they tried to screw me out of all those years ago, it'd still be a venture that would cost me many hundreds of dollars. I am certain there are many people out there like me. When you consider that Tmobile will let anyone have service with a contract regardless of their credit with little or no deposit, and Sprint will let anyone on board with a deposit far less than that of Cingular (at least the deposits Cingular demanded a few years ago when I worked at Cingular), this phone being available on all carriers allows it to reach a vast audience that the iPhone doesn't have access to. Also, Sprint still allows customers to upgrade their phone after one year into their contract. They will get less of a discount than someone off contract but they will still get a cheaper price than buying it outright. So, in the example of me, I can spend four figures on an iPhone and enslave myself to a vile company that I despise, or I can spend a third of that or less and get the Touch Pro on the carrier I'm already on.

The HTC Touch Pro is like the iPhone's hotter, more talented sister. It's also the iPhone's less snobby, more slutty sister since it can be had by anyone rather than just the chosen ones as with the biPhone. It's not the first phone to come out that is better than the iPhone. But it's the first to really compete with iPhone's style and surpass all the other wannabes in its availability to everyone. If HTC gets this message across and prices the phone as reasonably as the iPhone 3G, then it will give the iPhone a run for it's money.

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Three Consumer Products That Changed the World

In this era in which technology develops faster than a baseball player’s steroid fueled backne and man-boobs, it is difficult to narrow down the best of the countless products that have excited consumers. There are different criteria for selecting candidates, such as best selling, most innovative, or simply the most fun to use. But since high sales is not an indication of innovation or even quality, and innovation is not necessarily an indication of usefulness or fun, it is better to look at it in a more abstract way. What products have had the greatest impact on our lives? Is it the creepy little Furbies that showed us a glimpse of a future in which our closest friends are objects with personalities? Or is it the iPhone, which cost more than a computer when it was launched yet was capable of less than what a freebie phone could do but still had consumers in an ignorant frenzy? Both of these iconic gadgets were huge sellers and were innovative in different ways, but they did not have the same effect on the cultural landscape. The iPhone, as much as it is an overpriced, over hyped waste of a great advance in touch screen technology, still had a far reaching effect on the cell phone industry’s future. The Furby on the other hand, however it may have haunted our nightmares of living dolls and robots running amok, was little more than a fad and a brief glimpse of what our grandchildren may be playing with. Here we examine three products of the past 25 years that changed the world.
The first is that great savior of video games, the original Nintendo Entertainment System. This unassuming little grey box, commonly known as the NES, made possible the sleek consoles of today that power games with eerily realistic looking characters and worlds, with musical scores written by famous composers and performed by a full orchestra. It ushered in a new era for video games that continues to grow today, with some games such as Halo 3 dwarfing the opening day revenue of most movies. When the NES was released in 1985, the video games industry had peaked and collapsed and was considered by most to be at the end of its popularity. The whole industry of video games had begun to carry a stigma associated with its name. But Nintendo took a different marketing approach by releasing peripherals with the NES that made it seem more like a toy than a video game. It released what it dubbed the Power Glove that was touted as a virtual reality glove, a light gun to shoot at objects on the screen and a pad on which gamers could run in place to make the on screen character run track and field events. The strategy worked and the NES became wildly popular. Other companies began making game consoles and soon the industry was alive again. It is likely that video games wouldn’t be what they are today if Nintendo had not found a way to make the NES the monumental success that it was.
The next consumer icon on our brief countdown sparked a revolution in a way similar to the NES; by changing the way we interact with a technology already established. Ironically, it was the rather primitive iPhone that changed the landscape of the cell phone industry. Yes, primitive is a correct adjective to describe the iPhone. There are 13 different things the iPhone can't do that most other phones on the market can do, at half the cost or less, including things most people take for granted like sending picture messages, and shooting video clips. The iPhone is a remarkable example of what hype and marketing can do for an inferior product and how human nature is to favor "cool" over functional. Although the iPhone is retro in its features, it did play an important role in the evolution of cell phones. Its touch screen technology was previously unparalleled. It reads the electrical energy in your fingertips rather than relying on your finger breaking an infrared beam. This means that two fingers can operate the screen at the same time without confusing the device’s software and it understands the differences between an accidental brush across its screen and an intentional touch. This made the device so cool and so much fun to interact with, and simply easier to operate than anything else gadget geeks had ever seen. Since then, other touch screen technologies have been developed that compare but the iPhone’s popularity forced cell phone manufacturers to examine their design concepts. All the major cell phone carriers have released iPhone clones or are planning to and there are several other variants of touch screen phones now on the market. More are in the works for the more distant future as well and it seems inevitable that touch screen is the way most or all interactive personal devices will be controlled in the future. Nokia even has in the works a new type of morphing plastic, somewhat reminiscent of the liquid metal bot in Terminator 2. Nokia also recently formed the Symbian Foundation, a collaboration of cell phone manufacturers, carriers and software developers working together to create a mobile phone platform to compete with Android and iPhone's OS X interface. The iPhone raised the bar so much that it caused the rest of the industry to revolutionize its design model, rather than continuing to create ever more advanced versions of the same basic concept. So while the iPhone is really nothing more than a basic but extremely cool phone, it can proudly say it changed the world, or at least the world of personal electronics.
The final in our triumvirate of great cash vampires is something that is still at the beginning of its life cycle but seems poised to chang the future of the world and indirectly save countless lives. The gas/electric hybrid car is the beginning of the end for oil companies', and oil producing countries', domination of the world. It is also the beginning of a cure for our pollution problem that we have known for decades would slowly destroy the world yet has been largely disregarded until the current generation. Hybrid cars may not be the final answer in the battle against the robber baron oil companies that hang us by our collective feet and shake until they get every last penny from our pockets, but it certainly is the beginning of the rebellion. Wars are fought over the lucrative oil reserves that all governments want to control. It is impossible to know exactly how many soldiers and bystanders have been killed or had their lives otherwise shattered directly or indirectly in these wars, or how many will face the same fate in the future. But the day is dawning when we will no longer depend on these ill gotten gains for our livelihood. It seems as if the oil companies know this as they have doubled the cost of our desperately needed gasoline in the past decade, presumably to maximize profits while we still have no choice but to pay their price. So let them milk every dollar they can out of us while they can because in the next generation, they will be a shadow of their current glory and we will have saved lives in wars never fought and potentially the planet itself. What other consumer product could dream of boasting that?
The past 25 years have seen the introduction of so much change in technology, it would take a whole set of encyclopedia sized volumes to attempt at discussing all of them and their impact. The changes in this 25 year set far out pace that of any other period in recorded history. If technology continues to change this fast in the next 25 years, there is simply no way the human mind can fathom what is in store for us. These three consumer products are but three mile markers on a highway of technological breakthroughs that crisscrosses the globe. Yet they remain icons that will never be forgotten and whose influence will always be felt; three mile markers that will forever loom large in our rear view mirror.