Category: Technology

Belated Thoughts on the iBrick

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.

The Older I Get, The Scarier This Is

I can take being rejected for a job because I don’t have the necessary skills, or because someone else was a closer match to the skillset in question. That’s business. But this is another matter altogether:

A state appeals court reinstated a fired manager’s age-discrimination suit against Google Inc. on Thursday, saying a jury should hear his evidence that a supervisor told him that his ideas were “too old to matter” and that the giant search engine company gave its older employees lower ratings and lesser bonuses.

[snip]

As part of the lawsuit, Reid presented a statistician’s study of employees and managers in his department at Google that found older employees consistently received lower evaluations than their younger colleagues, and older managers got bonuses that were 29 percent less than those awarded to managers who were 10 years younger.

Age discrimination is not new to Silicon Valley, but you’d think that as the industry matures we’d see less of it. Not yet, it seems.

Twitter: 90 Day Review

I signed up for Twitter some three months ago. Unlike some of Twitter’s more rapturous fans (like Scoble), my feelings are more mixed. On the one hand, I “get” Twitter. I like the idea, I think there’s a lot of uses for the service, and I’m pretty happy with the feature set. I’ve found some people who are using Twitter in interesting ways, and two real-life friends also Twitter. When it’s good, Twitter can be a lot of fun.

On the other hand, using Twitter feels like shouting down a well most of the time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who’ve actually had any interaction with me on Twitter (including the friends). It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about something when you get so little feedback.

All in all, I’d give my first 90 days with Twitter a B. I’m not inclined to stop Twittering, but it’s in no danger of replacing my blog any time soon.

The Apple Backlash

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.