I can't has cheezburger

When i was in college and the banking crisis was at its peak, I remember reading a comment on Digg that explained that my generation was going to upend this status quo of how our economy works because we saw this disaster firsthand and we are about to take the world into our hands and stop the bullshit.  It was an empowering thing to read, and I hope that my peers take this sentiment to heart as the world grows to become increasingly in our control.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is perhaps the first manifestation of this that I have seen. In a world where the Tea party is considered a mainstream force (despite being nothing more than rebranded Republicans, not even running with the new name), I’m disheartened to see that there is a strong implicit bias in the media and with the police against Occupy Wall Street.  Peaceful protesters are being abused and arrested for breaking now laws, and the media working hard to subliminally make people feel biased against the movement, the most recent one I saw being an article trying to paint the movement as inconsistent since some members were mourning Steve Jobs.

I don’t know how I feel about the movement. There’s an inherent watering down of the issues that necessarily happens when you take your cause to the streets. Any arguments longer than a pithy sign or T-shirt slogan simply won’t do. Such comments make for great grandstanding but I don’t feel like they effect change.  Keeping that in mind, I think the Tea Party has just as little focus and I can’t think of many movements that got taken to the streets with so many people that had any degree of focus. And I don’t want to delegitimize the movement, which is what the media are trying to do by mentioning its lack of focus, so I’m going to accept it as a natural result of what happens when you grow.

I generally am in support of all of the things the movement seems to be for.  Wealth inequality in the US is causing most of the country to suffer. The ratio of CEO pay (and executive pay in general) to the median pay at a given company in the US is the highest in the world by a long shot. Artificially cheap labor abroad is exploiting people in third world countries and is keeping our domestic economy anemic (we’ve been doing it for a long time, but I think we’re really starting to see it catch up with us now). And Wall Street has gotten away with reckless behavior that has caused great unrest in our economy, and the people suffering for it aren’t the same ones . Some of the symptoms of these issues have been decreased government revenue (in part because the wealthiest are earning a disproportionately large part of the income in the country relative to the percentage of the taxes they pay in) and as a result of that, a huge increase in national debt and personal debt. Though we value our freedom even in cases where it leaves us free to do the wrong thing, we need to revisit our values and ask ourselves whether the situation we have right now is what we want.

But instead of demanding that the government step in and bring new regulation (which isn’t necessarily what OWS is calling for; it’s more calling for an end to the greed), I think this is a great opportunity for the 99% (the portion of the 99% that aren’t Tea Partiers, that is) to start trying to make their own wealth and essentially subvert Wall Street’s incredible influence.

Though it is true that a large part of the country’s wealth is held by a minority of powerful people, if you have, say, 10 million people who are against excessive corporate rights, then you have a sizable amount of spending power here, and you also have a potentially large pool of labor available. It’d be cool to see new businesses creating jobs where the money stays in the US and with the people who did the hard work, and it would be really cool to see such businesses grow. It can start with something as small as a lemonade stand, really.

On the policy side, I’m not happy with the lack of warmth I’m seeing from Democrats on this. Though the Tea Party isn’t ballsy enough to break off into its own political party, I think there should be an Occupy Wall Street party on the ballot. Being relatively left wing in nature, an OWS party is more of a threat to Democrats and I more than anything want to see them grow a pair and actually support OWS more and more importantly, get some policies on the books that can help Americans start doing better.

A couple days after the death of Steve Jobs Twitter was abuzz with a quote from Richard Stallman:

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Better choices of words could have been used here, but at the end of the day RMS is entitled to his own opinion and I support that he expresses it, even if my views on the topic are quite different, as I’ll get into in a moment.

People who are deeply dedicated to a cause as RMS is (Greenpeace comes to mind here) are usually pretty good at garnering attention, but they never really effect change. They do keep getting publicity by saying controversial things (and I admit I’m contributing to this publicity in a small way by blogging about it) but what ever really happens? What advancements in our rights as computer users have taken place as a result of RMS? I can’t really think of any.

RMS is always quick to speak out against new, convenient technologies (nowadays the plethora of web apps are a target of his), saying that we should put up with the inconveniences that the open-source software has in exchange for the peace of mind of knowing that we own the data and we truly own the software, in that it’s ours to do what we want with and modify as we please. In RMS’s mind, software that you’re not permitted to modify is a travesty to him, and he feels that we’re imprisoned by such restrictions.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, has a completely different perspective. To him, the imprisoning aspect of technology isn’t the licensing agreement by which you use the software, but rather the fact that the software on a computer is too hard for you to understand how to use. You may be legally entitled to modify the software as you wish and make it your very own by customizing it to no end, but you may as well not be permitted to if you can’t understand how to use the program in the first place.

Free software has some great advantages to it by virtue of being free.  The Linux kernel is worked on by some of the smartest people from top universities and corporations that need a great OS.  It has proven to be a great operating system for servers and tons of embedded devices because it can be customized for exactly the needs the specifications call for. It has thus gained great adoption.

But if you look at RMS’s web site, it looks like it’s from the 90s.  No effort has been put into making the web site appealing to use.  And the GNU software he uses remains as arcane to use today as it was in the 80s. If you look at some of the open-source GUIs out there, you can really start to see the myopia of the FOSS developers. It’s always playing catch-up with advancements made by Microsoft (yes, Microsoft), Apple and others. I’ve seen no usability advancements in the past ten years where the presence was first in an open-source implementation.  And as we start to do more in the cloud, open-source solutions likewise are lagging behind. As far as I know there is no open-source flavor of Google Docs; it’s all centered around transferring and managing files yourself. Remember how Diaspora was going to save us all from the oppression of Facebook? It’s all but vaporware and adoption is nonexistent.

And RMS is ignoring the fact that Apple is quite keen on using open source products and following and creating open standards. It was Apple, not RMS or the Free Software Foundation, who used its clout to push the web away from proprietary plugins like Flash. It was Apple who created the first legal music store that had reasonable DRM and then later went DRM free for music. It’s Apple who has shipped an OS based on an open-source kernel that has gotten mass adoption and is #2 behind Windows. And it’s Apple whose design is the envy of the entire tech industry.

RMS, you make a lot of valid points (especially about the dangers of software patents), but more permissive licenses alone don’t make better products.

So, at about 10:30 this morning I got a nice little bundle of joy from UPS.  After a few hours of waiting for it to get settings restored from iCloud and get the apps downloaded, I had the iPhone 4S functional and in my hands.

There are reviews everywhere for it, and arguably the biggest enhancements that iPhone 4S brings are available to iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 owners in iOS 5 (which I have half a review for but events this week prevented me from finishing it out and getting to a form that wasn’t already stated by others).  And this is as it should be. The cool thing about iPhone is that you can count on Apple to provide one or two major iOS upgrades for your device and those are going to add the lion’s share of user facing improvements. After all, the phone is just a touch screen in a beautiful shell.

As I sat with the virgin iPhone in my hands, I found myself asking “now what?” I asked Siri a couple of dumb questions, but due to high server load it couldn’t do much for my query so I’m not sure what to think about it. On that note, I am a bit disappointed in Apple’s performance this week with their servers. This feels a lot like when iPhone 3G came out. Apple claims to be a company that learned from its MobileMe mistake, and I’m sure the software is arguably more reliable, but the capacity just wasn’t there, and it makes for a poor out of box experience for (new) users.  I can only hope that in the coming days it gets better, but there are only going to be more iPhone 4S users adding to this load from now on. It’s marked as a beta product (and it’s even disabled by default on your phone) but this launch could have been handled better, if only with more bandwidth available.  Dictation was available a few times for me and I can say it had far better accuracy than I’ve seen in the past. I could probably rely on the dictation alone to dictate blog posts or other long notes into Evernote. It’s really great. (Speaking of Evernote, it performs a lot more nicely on this hardware. That doesn’t give Evernote a free pass to write slow software, though; they still need to support people on devices as old as the 3GS!)

One of my favorite features of the phone that can easily be pointed out is the improved speed of the camera. It’s WAY better than iPhone 4, and better more than iPhone 3G and 3GS.  The amount of time it takes to go from phone in your pocket to taking a picture is really important when you want to really quickly snap a pic, and you can take rapid fire pictures without much trouble.  I was taking about one per second average.

But aside from that and Siri, there are no other features that really jump out at you as visible. The phone’s just better all around.  It’s faster.  You don’t necessarily notice it at first, but when you start jumping between apps and doing multiple things at once you really see it. Apple didn’t add more memory to iPhone 4S (a bummer for me; I think it would have really helped speed and multitasking even more) but the previously single core processor is now dual core, and the graphics performance is incredible now. This manifests itself in the form of things just feeling snappier everywhere and you’ll quickly get used to it. It didn’t cross a line where it amazed me per se, and I feel like it could have been made even snappier, but it gets to a point where I can really tolerate it (and that’s exactly how fast I feel the phone seems to get with every iteration of the iPhone since Apple started making the phone more computationally powerful with the 3GS). Keep in mind that I’m in the 2% of people who are just that power hungry for their phones. Personally I wouldn’t have minded Apple clocking the processor at the full 1 GHz instead of the 800 MHz if it didn’t cause a substantial drop in battery life, or at least the ability for the phone to ramp up its CPU when I’m doing something intensive.

I trust that the battery life has seen a modest improvement, but I’ve been giving the phone a good exercise today so this isn’t the best day to judge that.  Antenna performance seems adequate, but I didn’t go anywhere today where I usually have poor coverage. I’m using Verizon so I am not seeing the GSM speed enhancements but my friends using it have reported speeds as high as 7 Mbps down and 2 up. That’s great for those suffering on AT&T’s overcrowded network but I suspect that as more iPhone 4Ses find their way into the world this speed bump will be less evident.

The phone’s a world phone. I haven’t benefited from that quite yet but I am sure I will at some point. I’m told Verizon will unlock a phone for you if your account has been in good standing for sixty days, and I’m going to see if I can’t get the phone unlocked immediately given that I bought the phone outright and since Verizon receives about $5000 a year from my family in wireless bills.

People sure thought the phone was a dud, but really there’s just been a mental expectation for something that looks different. iPhone 4S didn’t need to look different. The iPhone 4 has a great design that no other phone currently has. I would be perfectly happy with Apple releasing one more phone with this hardware design next year.  Apple does push themselves a lot and they surely will change the design once again just to raise the bar and see what other performance they can squeeze out of the phone.

Siri is very interesting. It shows that Apple’s thinking of a new paradigm for interacting with the iPhone. The iPhone is very much a sort of personal assistant of yours, holding a lot of vital information that you always have with you and being connected to the web. Now, instead of doing the work of finding a piece of information, you have the ability to send the phone out to do work for you and come back with answers, or just to do stuff for you. You can have the phone remind you things if needed. Apple only connects to a couple of data sources right now (and they picked really good ones, especially Wolfram Alpha) but I see a future in which there is a Siri API. For sure there are questions to be answered about how you might implement this (presumably the apps would publish their own sort of Siri API that Siri can hook into and use as a data source).  The future’s bright on that front and I think Siri could push iPhone forward in a way that I haven’t seen since Apple actually opened the iPhone up to third party apps.

To answer the million dollar “should I upgrade” question, you absolutely should upgrade if you’re upgrade eligible with your carrier. It doesn’t make sense not to, because your carrier doesn’t lower your rate when you’ve fulfilled your two year contract, thus paying off the portion of the phone your carrier subsidized. And that time you spend upgrade eligible but you don’t buy a phone doesn’t earn you anything with the carrier except perhaps brownie points for being a sucker.

If you are mid-contract then that changes things a bit because you’ll be fronting a lot more money for the phone (I had to pay the phone’s retail price… ugh). But in this case you might just consider waiting till November to buy an unlocked phone. Siri’s worth upgrading for if you are often on the go, and if you find yourself feeling impatient waiting for your phone to load something you’ll probably appreciate the upgrade. Only you can say for yourself whether that’s worth it.

Peace out.

When something as sweeping as this happens, there just isn’t much you can say that hasn’t already been said.

Though some people may remember Steve as the archetypical bullshitter, capable of making something as rudimentary as magnets seem revolutionary, the ironic reality is that he saw the status quo of technology and relentlessly worked to eliminate the bullshit from it.

I can’t help but feel a bit selfish. I didn’t lose a close family member or friend. My relationship with Steve is no doubt quite unilateral and he never even knew of my existence unless perhaps he read an email of mine at some point. Knowing that I really only know Steve in that I have benefited immensely from his contributions to the world does make me feel a bit like I am mourning his loss for the wrong reasons.

But I’m not mourning Steve’s loss because I enjoy some electronic gadgets. I’m mourning his loss because of his ideas and philosophy and his ability to execute these on the scale that he was able to do. His thinking has in part spawned a vibrant Silicon Valley that isn’t so focused on the typical bullshit that you hear about from businesses.  And to top off this legacy, there are tens of thousands of developers making a living using the platforms Steve helped create.

So Steve, you might need yet another blog post honoring your life like you need a Zune, and a passage from your Stanford commencement address is really going to cliché it up, but here goes:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.



I think I did relatively well this time. iPhone 4S? Check. Same design as iPhone 4? Check. Faster processor? Check. Better camera? Check. NFC? I was hoping for an NFC sensor to be added, but no dice. After having seen Touchanote for Evernote I got rather excited for what NFC might bring to our lives. Better battery life? Check. World phone? Check, but nothing really revolutionary with carrier agnosticism.

Other stuff I got wrong was related to iPods. The Classic lives to see another day, and the Shuffle didn’t seem to get the axe. The iPod Touches did get mentions, but little more. Just new prices and a white version. Some hardware love would have been appreciated.

I knew that Apple bought Siri and that this partnership was to come to fruition at some point in the near future, but failed to mention any of it in my prediction post. So that’s a miss for me. Sad, too, because that really is one of the biggest features of iPhone 4S. It does a lot to eliminate the app silo-ing that iOS has been proliferating in the past few years. I think the notification center will do a lot to address that as well.

I was also right about people complaining about there being no major redesign. For me, it’s moot. iPhone’s design is still way more sophisticated than that of any other phone on the market. It doesn’t feel dated by any means, and the most important aspects of the phone have been massively improved. And I know that my accessories all still will fit the 4S.

I’ve created myself a Rackspace account and I’ll be moving icanthascheezburger.com to Rackspace in the next week or so. If I do this right, you won’t notice a thing. Even your RSS feed will keep working. But keep an eye on my Twitter account.

It’s that time again. We’ve got an Apple event coming up on Tuesday morning at 10 Pacific (side note: I LOVE living in the Pacific time zone, because it’s two hours less waiting that I have to do to see the event. Woo!).  My past performances with iPhone predictions are decent.  This time rumors on the next iPhone are more divided than ever, so my predictions are going to be either incredibly good, or incredibly bad, because I’m not going to waver.

I believe this next iPhone is going to be cosmetically very subtle (if there are any cosmetic changes at all) and all internal. There are some camps who think that there will be an iPhone 4S and and iPhone 5 released at the same time, but I can’t imagine Apple doing that unless there’s going to be some sort of major transition coming up, like replacement of the dock connector port, or some other major architecture change that requires a transition. I don’t think that’s happening.  Combining that with the fact that the iPhone 4S name has been seen in Apple inventories and iPhone 5 has not, it is my prediction that the next iPhone will be the iPhone 4S.  I have no doubt Apple is currently working on the iPhone 5 (it would probably be called iPhone 6, though, since it wouldn’t be the fifth iPhone, iPhone 4S is), because it appears it’s going to be a major hardware redesign and Apple needs some more time to make that effort. I’m curious about the timing of when iPhone 6 will be out though. Will they be ready to release it in June ’12? I am almost certain that the iPhone 6 will be an LTE phone, and the market will be ready for one by then (make no mistake: they’re ready for one now, but the hardware surely too power hungry).

This iPhone is going to pretty much look the same as the iPhone 4s we see today.  No wider screen, no “tear” shape, no contour display.  Expect Apple to be focused on performance all around as the theme for the new phone hardware. We’ll surely see a dual-core Apple chip similar to what we currently see in the iPad.  The new iPhone will likely have more memory (probably 1 GB) but don’t expect Apple to mention that spec (side note: iPhones have consistently had less memory on them than their competitors yet have always offered very smooth performance).  For me, new iPhones are only fast enough for me the first time I use them, and within a few weeks I get used to the speed and start expecting more, so I can never get enough performance. I’m really hoping that iPhone 4S will bring performance that I can truly be happy with. I’m not totally counting on that level of performance, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

It’s safe to expect an improved camera (likely 8 MP).  Again, Apple’s iPhone cameras have traditionally not offered the highest resolution of the phone cameras on the market, but Apple has put efforts into making sure the lenses are adequately able to capture the light they need so that the pictures are great.

I’m hoping we might see an NFC sensor in this iPhone as well.  Having them in your phone hasn’t yet hit mass appeal, and at the moment there still aren’t a ton of places where you can make an NFC payment (that’s growing, though), but I have seen some pretty neat uses of NFC, and I think that if it ends up in the phone and an API gets made, we’ll see some really interesting stuff start to happen.

Expect battery life to improve. I think the form factor will remain the same on the outside, but internally the iPhone will probably have seen a significant redesign, and despite a newer, more powerful processor, there will be extra room for more battery.  The improvements will be modest, but I think most will welcome a little more battery life.

There will be one version of the iPhone 4S, and it will be a “world phone,” in that it will have both GSM and CDMA capability in the same device. I’m hoping Apple takes the carrier independence of the phone a step further, potentially allowing you to buy the phone from Apple, take it home, then choose the carrier that’s right for you. If you can’t get the subsidized price with the carrier of your choice, you can pay the difference right then and there with your CC (more likely: you’ll just choose a carrier at the Apple Store and they’ll figure out how much you owe them at the store and they’ll activate).  But I am led to believe that the phones will be sold unlocked now (it’s in Apple’s best interest to sell the phones that way and the carriers won’t argue anymore if the customer’s in a contract with them). A SIM-less design wouldn’t surprise me either but I think that’s probably for next iPhone. You’ll be able to travel abroad with your phone, buy a SIM card at the local shop and pop it right in and be good to go.

This iPhone will be available on AT&T, Verizon and Sprint in the US officially.  Since it’s unlocked it could also be used on T-Mobile (on EDGE).  T-Mobile should really just sell people iPhones and then bundle them with a WiFi hotspot that lets them take advantage of the higher speed data connection when needed.  I’m not an expert on CDMA tech, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could just take your ESN and activate the phone on another CDMA carrier, like US Cellular or Cricket.  On a related note, I think in the next year or two Apple is going to make a big push to get iPhone on every carrier in the US. Adding support for new carriers is really the best (and possibly only) way for Apple to maintain the iPhone growth curve they have now. Granted, I think most iPhone users are going to be iPhone users for life, so Apple’s going to continue making sales, but the growth is most important.

Software

Apple announced some of the most exciting features of the next iPhone already in their iOS 5 announcement. I expect the GM to be released to developers on Tuesday with the general public release a week or two later. That release will come before the iPhone 4S is available in stores. Most of the features are public and I’m under NDA for iOS 5 at the moment, so look elsewhere for info on that. It’s going to be great, though.

I would expect Apple to do some demos of iCloud and announce a release date, but I think that will be later in the fall.  Apple’s going to err on the side of waiting to absolutely nail this, and with the MobileMe debacle of 2008 (or was it 07?) they aren’t taking any chances.

iPods

In the last earnings call Apple referenced an upcoming product transition which could potentially have an impact on revenues. In this case, ‘transition’ is a euphemism for ‘kill off’ and the product in question appears to be some of the iPods.  iPod classic is on the chopping block for sure, and sources are saying the iPod shuffle is getting killed as well, leaving the iPod Nano as the only non-iOS iPod.  I can see Apple releasing a 128 gig iPod Touch to compensate for the loss of the 120 gig iPod classic.

A couple people think Apple’s just killing the products off because you can’t buy iOS apps on them so Apple can’t get more money out of you post-purchase so they lost interest. That’s mostly bunk, because there is in fact a great deal of stuff you can buy for the iPod classic and shuffle from Apple after buying your iPod: music, movies and (until a couple days ago) some iPod classic games. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that you can’t buy iOS apps on them and everything to do with the fact that sales of those devices have likely been anemic, the new iPod nano pretty much cannibalizes the Shuffle, and the iPod classic technology has been on its way out since iPhone was announced in January ’07.

Apple probably could have made this transition last year, but they interestingly waited. I think there’s a couple of reasons. 1) the Zune was still a thing last year. Now that it’s been discontinued, Apple can discontinue one of their own without worrying that someone hell bent on getting a hard drive based non-iOS player would defect to MS.  2) Sales of the shuffle and classic were probably still adequate last year and since then fell below the Mendoza line. And now, assuming a 128 GB iPod Touch sees light, the transition can be relatively easy. If you wanted a shuffle, just get a nano; it’s just as good and has a screen.  If you wanted an iPod classic, ask yourself if you wanted it for the space or for the simplicity. If the former, get a Touch. If the latter, get a nano. This will mean that the click wheel is now retired (we first saw the click wheel in 2003 in the iPod Mini). I’m okay with that, since it’s honestly not remarkable for finding music. Scrolling with your finger is the way to go.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple didn’t mention a word of this transition at the event. I am guessing that the iPod Touches will see a refresh to get faster hardware and a newer, higher capacity, but it’ll just appear on Apple’s web site that afternoon.

There Will Be Disappointment

Because the iPhone is coming out later in the year than usual, I think people are expecting a major redesign, and I think there is going to be some disappointment that the phone doesn’t look different. It’s purely psychological, because the new phone will be significantly upgraded under the hood, but it’s going to leave people in a bitter mood about it (not me). I’m pretty certain the phone has been ready for some time, and there are reports that 150K of them per day have been getting manufactured for the past month or so, but since the phone will need to ship with iOS 5, it has to wait for iOS 5 to be ready before it can ship. I don’t know if iOS 5 is on time by Apple’s internal schedule or not, but to the public, it is late, because Apple traditionally would have announced the new iOS in March and shipped it in the summer.

There will surely be some disappointment that there is no LTE (I’d like some LTE myself), but I don’t think anyone was really expecting LTE yet.  Next iPhone will surely have it.

I’m personally very excited about the next iPhone and I will surely be getting one on launch day (despite the fact that my family pays Verizon $5000 a year for wireless service, I’m not yet early upgrade eligible).  I’m likewise super excited to see iOS 5 get publicly released (if only so that a certain few developers will get off their asses and improve iOS 5 compatibility).

Also, I’m curious to see what Facebook releases.  Either an iPad app or fixes for their site to make it touch friendly would be great.