Stereotypes.

after my initial hype over the iphone (as evidenced in previous posts), and as the release day draws ever nearer, i am starting to hear more and more details leaking out - some of them which aren’t sounding so cool. yeah, yeah, the iphone isn’t actually out yet, and seemingly NO ONE outside of the inner echelons of Apple have even touched one, so a lot of it is speculation based on scans of employee manuals and whatnot. i’ve read like 50 different blogs and messaageboards on this crap and this is what i can summarize that is annoying:

* the iphone isn’t going to ship with iChat on it. that sounds totally lame to me for multiple reasons, and there is no known explanation why. people are theorizing everything from that at&t doesn’t want to include it because they won’t generate any revenue from it; to that the app is not secure or finished. it seems really really dumb not to include iChat. most blackberries and treos run some form of AIM client. i thought i remember steve jobs using iChat in the initial keynote when the phone was first demonstrated? was i imagining things? i use iChat way more than i use texting at this point, and it would be nice to have ichat available via WiFi when available. i don’t understand the cost argument because most people who text a lot just pay for unlimited texting anyway. people are also talking about possible video ichat with the phone which is straight retarded. for one thing, the lens of the camera is physically on the other side of the device, and for another, the bandwidth for that sort of thing isn’t possible over a mobile phone. i’m not expecting iChatAV with three-way video chat or something. just a basic AIM client.

* a lot of developers are upset because apple was saying the phone would be open for 3rd parties to write software for it, now Apple is saying it’s not open. or more precisely, they’re saying that it’s open for “web applications” which isn’t the same thing as apps (aka Widgets) on the dashboard of the actual phone - also totally lame. i can understand Apple’s concern about security, or the phone crashing from faulty 3rd party apps, but they’ve been really shady about how they’ve spun this info. i’m not a developer so i don’t care so much on that level, although i’d like to see some cool 3rd party apps like games or PDA like things. regardless of whether it’s open or not, or will be open in the future, i think most people would appreciate it if Apple would have been up front about it in the first place, instead of trying to sell people on some “web application” crap.

* i heard a rumor that the iPhone won’t allow mp3 ringtones because at&t wants to make money from selling ringtones. may just be a rumor, but if this is true i will be fully annoyed. since the phone is a friggin 4gb or 8gb iPod nano, i better be able to choose a ringtone from one of 1000s of songs available ALREADY ON MY PHONE.

* as cool as the apple commercials are for the iphone, other than the steve jobs keynote i’ve seen ZERO demonstrations of any of the other desktop widgets it ha displayed. ie, notes, or the camera, or any of the other stuff. this could be because none of these apps are totally finished, or it could be that apple wants it to be a surprise when the phone drops? i dunno. speaking of the camera, there has been almost zero mention of it either, or how it will work, if the images will be email/IMable. again, with no ichat it would be totally lame to have a camera and not be able to IM a pic just taken with the phone.

* the iphone doesn’t have a SIM card port, even though it was originally announced to have one. or something? i don’t even know WTF a SIM card is. maybe more memory?

* speculation that the soft keyboard is janky. who knows, it’s only been shown for a second in the ads and seemingly no one has actually used it.

* people are whining about other crap like no GPS, or lack of G3 or something. that’d be cool, but the thing is pretty small, i dunno how you could cram GPS in there. and i’m not a cell-phone nerd, i don’t know what most of this junk is about networks or .2343 standards or whatever and i’m too lazy to google it because i don’t care. my own cell-phone is so old i can’t even set a desktop pic on it, there’s no camera, it can text but only in a super-lame roundabout way… so anyways, all this blackberry/treo nerd stuff is lost on me. “oh dude, it doesn’t have 3.5gigahertz flux capacitor GX network ability with a 6-8 blehblah card”. whatever. do you really use that stuff to call your friends to see what time you’re meeting for dinner? even if the iPhone is not tech-ed out as some geek’s blackberry whatevs, i’ll be psyched to step up from my POSphone to the iPhone. ish looks dope.

to sum up, as disappointing as these things are to hear about (esp the iChat thing. why Apple, why??), i still want an iPhone for reasons mentioned above. just being able to synch contacts with my mac will make things nice and hopefully make my PDA obsolete. fingers crossed that the iPhone won’t be this generations Newton Messagepad, and hopefully things will change with it in the future. the handwriting recognition on the Newton sucked at first but gradually improved, and check out the evolution of the iPod. comparing a first gen model that has the physical clickwheel to a current iPod video - they’re the same but totally different. the good thing about it being largely software based is that it can be updated.

…

also, Leopard (the next version of OsX) has been announced and it looks like a big “whatevs” if you ask me. which you didn’t, but you’re reading this so you must care to some degree. hah. anyways, there’s a bunch of “features” like using the iTunes-style coverflow option to browse files in the finder, a thing called Quicklook that coud be cool, and something called Spaces which seems kinda confusing from the demo. it’s one thing to watch a demo and then another to figure out how one would actually use it in their daily life or workflow. anyways, coverflow, huh? oh boy, something i know i will probably NEVER use. i’m a graphic designer and i have a crazy amount of files on my HDs, from old projects to fonts to reference material, etc. so you’d think it would be useful because of it’s visual nature. however, i seriously doubt that coverflow will handle heavy browsing or searching of literally 1000s of files. just the regular text finder balks at that stuff sometimes, i can’t imagine trying to flip thru it all visually in deeper and deeper nested files. there’s also Stacks which is supposed to keep the desktop neat. it might work, except in the demo version, the stacks only contain a few items. for me, this is like going to Ikea and looking at a bookcase in the living room with like 10 books on it. looks pretty nifty, right? all neat and clean… then what happens when you get it home and try to cram about 500 books into it? doesn’t really look the same as the catalog. what about power users who would want to have literally 100s of items in any given “stack”? there’s also some auto backup software they’re pushing too.. Time Machine or something. having integrated auto backup software seems cool but considering i have about half a terabyte at home on my desk, it’s not like i have another spare half terabyte just lying around to back the first half up onto. i hope there’s options for backing up essential system stuff like email though, that would be nice.

a big thing Apple is pushing for leopard is wacky visual stuff like transparent menu bars and a visually reflective dock. uh… whoop-de-do. nice eye candy for demos and showoff factor, but not really all that functional day to day. i mean really, who cares that the dock reflects? i hope there are options to turn all that junk off, i’d trade all of it to have a decent minimal search function and Os9’s true spatial finder back.

speaking of search, i hope they fixed Spotlight because it’s search abilities SUCKED. so much so that i disabled it and use a 3rd party app to do it. i want Tiger’s (or even Panther’s) search back, it was really minimal and was crazy fast, didn’t need to index the entire hard drive either like Spotlight does. again, i have 1000s of files i need to reference on my HDs and sometimes i need to find something VERY specific that’s buried deep. Spotlight was friggin’ annoying when it wasn’t turning up proper results, and the search in Mail sucks too, for it not finding certain things. the old search in mail was much better.

on the positive side, overall, Apple claims there’s like 300 performance improvements “under the hood”, which i guess are hard to actually show off without someone sitting down and using it. that may explain goofy ish like the transparencies. “hey, gotta make people feel like they’re getting.. SOMETHING”. “wow… pretty! shiny!” i seriously hope there are genuine performance enhancements, because in heavily using Tiger’s finder every day, i can say there’s some really annoying stuff about it i would like to fix. little things all over the place, but annoying nonetheless. i also have a feeling i will have to finally upgrade my computer to even attempt to run Leopard properly, because my 2001 quicksilver G4 tower is barely hanging in these days with Tiger. non-essential dock reflections are aren’t gonna help.

sorry for all the griping, but as somewhat of an Apple fanboy, this stuff is frustrating. if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it, or at least give people the option to turn it off. if it’s broke - fix it!

Published June 13th, 2007 in gripes, observations and mac nerd.