Fiat Lux

Another year, another birthday. It’s nice to celebrate one on a weekend for a change. We slept in, then made our way up to the farmer’s market at the San Francisco Ferry Building and wandered the stalls in search of a few future dinner ingredients.

The Saturn also hit a milestone today as we drove back home — 90,000 miles. Unfortunately, gas prices are way over $3.50 a gallon at all but the cheapest off-brand gas stations. *sigh* With my long commute, this is Not Good At All. If, as predicted, gas goes over $4 a gallon this summer, I’m going to be spending about $200 a month just to drive to work. That sucks.

On a happier note, we finally got a Mac in the house. I picked up an old but serviceable Apple G4 for peanuts, and Scott’s been having fun tearing it apart and learning his way around OS X.

Gimi likes the Mac too. Or at least the monitor!

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The Apple iPhone/ iBrick thing is starting to become old news. Since I’m happy waiting on the sidelines until a 3G iPhone comes out, I haven’t weighed in much, but there’s one or two things I do want to put out there.

I get that users want to hack their iPhones. It’s such an amazing device, and it would be even more perfect if you could only add [insert favorite missing application here]. It makes perfect sense. I’d be tempted to do it too, which is why I am deeply grateful I didn’t buy an iPhone.

What I don’t get is the outrage over Apple’s lockdown. It’s not like Apple encouraged developers to hack their phones and unlock their SIM cards, then turned around and went the other way. Apple was really clear from Day 1 that they expected software development to go via web apps, not installed apps. So why is anyone surprised when Apple started enforcing what they already said they were going to do? Did they really think that they’d let the “hackintosh” crew do whatever they wanted to the iPhone?

The fact that Apple was willing to go to the length of making hacked iPhones utterly unusable as phones strongly suggests to me that they’re doing it not just because of any Steve Jobs control freak tendencies, but because they have to in order to maintain the AT&T contract. And if they want to sell iPhones in the USA, that’s what they have to do. There is no getting onto the US wireless network without getting into bed with a telco. I don’t like it one bit, but it’s the way the industry is right now, and if you want to be in the game you cannot ignore reality.

I well remember when the Treo was first coming onto the market, hearing from some of the Handspring and Palm people about how utterly painful it was to get telcos to be willing to let it in. That was 5+ years ago, but somehow I suspect not all that much has changed.

At any rate, what I understand least of all is this: paying $100 to some 3rd-party outfit for an iPhone “unbricking” that will at best only work until the next Apple patch.

The phrase ‘”throwing your money away” comes to mind.

Update: Nice to see I’m not the only one weighing in this week.

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There’s a downside to every hype cycle, and given the heights of hype Apple received around the iPhone, it was inevitable that a backlash would hit sooner or later. The last 10 days have seem a number of Apple missteps, from the $200 iPhone price cut, to dissatisfaction with the way Apple is handling custom ringtones, to reports that the new, oh so sleek iPod touch devices may have some display issues.

And to top it off, the New York Times has weighed in with an article suggesting that Apple’s making no gains in the overall computer market due to poor handling of their retail channel.

It’s certainly not positive press coverage. But if you compare it to the kind of coverage Microsoft is getting these days — that same NY Times article called Vista “a world of hurt”, and when what the last time you saw any press at all about the Zune? — I’d suggest that despite the backlash, Apple is still in a better position.

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Wow, I’m tired.

So, as a preface, here’s what I know about software development: just enough to know how much I don’t know. In other words, once the conversation moves past features and functionality and starts getting into in-depth discussions of threading and memory management, I’m quickly going to be in over my head.

That said, I had fun at WWDC today. Even having to stand on line for 90+ minutes to get into the keynote room wasn’t that bad. The keynote was fun, and Leopard looks like it’s got some nice new functionality for end-users, and the fact that it will be fully 64-bit has got the developer I was sitting with jazzed.

I don’t quite know what to make of the “Safari on Windows” announcement. On the one hand, given that Apple is going to pursue a strategy of getting 3rd-party apps onto the iPhone via Safari, it makes sense that they would push out the browser to Windows as well. It reminds me of the old Java “write once run anywhere” idea. It’s great, if you can pull it off.

On the other hand, I also can’t shake the thought that what they really should have done was to buy Mozilla instead.

Edit: forgot to add — I’ll probably skip days 2 and 3 of WWDC and be back in SF on Thursday. I have to get some real work done too!

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Seriously, who thinks this stuff up?

And who buys it?

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Seen in Flickr today. Apparently it’s a gag, not for real.

On the one hand, this type of commercial would be a natural extension to the existing “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” campaign Apple has been running.

On the other hand, would doing so give the Zune too much legitimacy? Probably.

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