phonei

[ljplicease]

You should never buy new technology the day it comes out. This should be pretty self-evident. The Sony fan boys who camped out to buy themselves a PS3 now have an expensive (AU$1k minus the even more expensive HD TV that you will need to see any difference from a Wii or PS2) box allegedly without any good games. Nice one!

I was talking to someone last night who said she would rather play my yet to be implemented retro Orange Attack^[1], than all the complications and the internets and everything rolled up into a little ball.

Ahh the iPhone. Already predicted to be the next iPod right^[2]? Well, maybe you should ask some users:

• 10 Things that "Absolutely suck" about the iPhone. (Yes he has one)]
• No iPhone For 64-Bit Windows

Of course many of these issues will be corrected in time, but why brutalize yourself with Apple technical support unnecessarily^[3]? Let the fan boys do the beta testing which apparently Apple failed to do.

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1. If you think about it you can probably guess what the game is like
2. iPhone: all set to do for phones what the iPod did for pods (I know I stole that somewhere, but can’t remember where: was it Colbert)
3. I am on my third iPod and had to send it back three times. If you do the math you will notice that I sent it back broken once and they didn’t even fix it! All this, mind you, with a device that had been out for years by the time I got it. Can you imagine my pain if I had gotten it the day it came out?

Comments

[butterflyblob.livejournal.com]

I'm on my third iPod, too. I would get a Zune or Creative Labs or some other brand, but iTunes has succeeded in locking me into the iPod. I hate Apple.

[plicease]

I don't really hate Apple. They have a number of products that are good for domain specific applications (I regularly use OS X, Windows and Linux so I have some familiarity with their strengths and weaknesses). Colour management and correction in Photoshop on the Mac is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than it is on a PC, for example. This has to do with the long term philosophy of the operating system, where screen matches output as closely as possible. That isn't important to most people, but for photographers, it's essential.

When my iPod works I'm very happy with it and the way that it integrates with the operating system (although I have never synced it with Windows iTunes). What I find obscene is the cult of mac that has grown up around Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field. I also think Apple hardware tends to be over priced for what it is and I don't agree with the argument that Apple drones make that as a result the tech support is better. Consumer tech support is shit. It doesn't matter if you are Apple or Dell or Micro$oft. It's all shit.

BTW- if you hate vendor lockin then you definitely do not want a Zune, as their DRM is much more onerous than iTunes/iPod. There are a number of ways to easily defeat the DRM on iTunes purchased music, and most of the ones that I can think of are even legal.

[butterflyblob.livejournal.com]

I use my iPod with Windows and with two of three iPods, I didn't have any problem syncing. The second one got stuck in an infinite restore loop for hours every time I tried. In school I used Macs for design and Photoshop, and I agree that they're great for that.

Thanks for the tip about Zune. I haven't done a whole lot of research on them. I know I can change the iTunes format; I just don't want to bother, haha.

[hammer-reality.livejournal.com]

Is the iphone available in Oz now? It's not out here yet.

[plicease]

Just the US. You can read about it all the Australian papers though. Shesh.

[plicease]

BTW- I meant "shesh" as in "it's pretty silly that Australian newspapers are reporting about this in such depth"... it wasn't meant to be snide, but I just realized it could be interpreted thus.