Mind Design

I have been biting my tongue for some time now about the goings on with Apple and some of Steve Job’s outrageous accusations.  Some of his most heinous accusations being that Adobe’s Flash cuts the iPad’s battery life from 10 hours to a mere 1.5 hours, and how HTML5 is going to succeed Flash for streaming video and other media.

HTML5  requires browsers support a codec like H.264 (currently patented by MPEG LA) which is proprietary and as such would cost a fortune in royalties to use, or a less efficient open-source codec like OGG.  Neither of which currently have  the ability to implement any form of DRM.

Anyhow getting back on track here, Apple’s most recent claim doesn’t come from Steve Job’s this time, but from his lackey and COO, Tim Cook.  They are claiming that the Apple iPad, will wipe out the Netbook market with “magic”.

“The netbook is not an experience people are going to continue wanting to have,” Cook said, according to Macworld. “When they play with the iPad and experience the magic of using it … I have a hard time believing they’re going to go for a netbook.”

Lets go ahead and point out some things here:

Now I may be a bit biased here, but the point I am trying to get across is that Apple shouldn’t make these statements when their product really doesn’t cut the mustard when compared to the market they are pushing the product towards.  They say that iPads will replace Netbooks.  I don’t see that being the case because it doesn’t do what netbooks, at their core, are capable of doing, and thats multitasking.  Netbooks are essentially stripped down laptops.  And as such the iPad IS capable of many of what netbooks are used for, which is light browsing, emailing, and playing music and video.  However being limited to one application at a time is the key nail in the coffin for this argument.

It’s not that multi-tasking isn’t a possibility, only that it’s currently not a viable option. Currently with Jailbroken iPhone’s/iTouch’s you can simulate multi-tasking with an app called Backgrounder.  It is however extremely taxing on the battery.   Did I mention you have to Jailbreak it?  Which is kind of  going against Apple’s EULA.

Most people would not be bothered by the lack of video outputs or USB ports because most of what they do with it would be online or via wireless network anyways. Which is why to some degree it could be a pseudo-netbook depending on your needs.  However the other problem I have with the iPad, or more so with Apple itself is it’s the “We know what’s best for you” policy.  In a nutshell you are really only renting the devices from them, because at this point they currently have the ability, and authority to restrict or even remove the apps you have on your hardware.  The fact that they have repeatedly denied applications submitted by Google to the app store doesn’t help their case any.  When they recently implemented their ban on “sexy” apps they removed all apps and will continue to deny apps which contain the following:

• No images of women in bikinis.
• No images of men in bikinis.
• No skin.
• No silhouettes.
• No sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex.
• Nothing that can be sexually arousing.
• No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content.

Now personally I don’t blame them for deciding to remove those apps, but what about the people that have paid for them?  Or the developers who wrote them; that seriously affects their income.  If Apple can implement a Parental Control system in iTunes to keep things set at a specific rating level, then why can’t they explicitly apple those rules to iPods or iPhones?  Would it really be so hard to plug in your child’s iPod and set it’s default rating to say PG-13, so that it restricts the content they upload like video or music or even the apps they can view in the app store?

I think they should let the end user control what content they deem acceptable to be placed/viewed on their devices, instead of Apple having the final say.  It’s sad that Apple is treating its customers like they are 3 year old children who are utterly incapable of making decisions for themselves.

In closing I think Apple is just a little too full of themselves.  I can argue up and down about how Apple has been dropping the ball and what they could do to get things back on track but I’d rather sit back and watch themselves continue to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lately there have been a number of complaints coming from the tech sector, with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega complaining about iPhone users killing their network, to RIM’s latest Blackberry blackout, and all I can do is look at all these people bitching and moaning about it in utter dismay.

If you have never seen Louis CK’s bit called “Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy” watch it now and continue my post after you have seen it.

I recently watched the video about Louis CK’s take on technology today and it totally altered my perspective on our dependency on technology and the Internet.  Now I’m not saying that the innovations, even in my lifetime, haven’t been completely mind blowing and continue to grow in leaps and bounds, but after watching that video I have come to understand how we are always looking for the next new thing, and how we manage to throw a fucking temper tantrum like a three year old if it doesn’t work.

Now I see people bitching and moaning when their cellphones don’t work in Walmart and I have to resist the urge to slap them in the face and tell them to walk 50 feet to get outside to make the call.  For fuck sakes it’s not like you have to hunt down a payphone hanging on a wall and fumble for change and pull out your 10 pound pocketbook to find the number of the person you want to call and stand there tethered to a phone on the wall that is if you’re lucky enough not to have to wait for some bozo stuck on hold with whoever the hell he’s been trying to get ahold of for the last half hour.

Or people yelling at their GPS because it gave them wrong directions or got them stuck in traffic.  Really?  Are you reading a fucking map the size of your fucking windshield right now?  Do you have to drag another person along just to read it to you like you’re own personal fucking navigator?  How about voice activated controls in your car and people rolling their eyes because it can’t understand what they are saying because they are talking to it while stuffing their face with donuts and coffee in their rush to work.  Come on!  You’re talking to you’re fucking CAR!  AND IT’S LISTENING!  And you’re mad about this?  I mean really?

I think I have to agree with Louis here and say that I am humbled by how far we have come, and while I have also been pissed off when my Internet goes down, instead of throwing a fit like someone just killed my first born son, I grab a book.  We live in an age where we are spoon fed information at such an alarming rate that it’s almost inconceivable how we manage to retain it all, a recent study was done that found that the average American consumes 34GB of data a day, from news articles, to music, to video.  That’s quite a bit to take in, but what if we were forced to go back to reading books on paper?  Or actually having to wait till the next day to get news about the day before?  We’ve come a long way from riding cross country on horseback and I think we need to re-evaluate how we live with technology today.

Now I’m not telling you to go all out Amish here, but to look for alternatives for when your newest technology lets you down.  Because it’s simply Murphy’s law that when you need it most it won’t be there for you.

That is all.

Brian out.

Today is my second day up here in North Bay, Ontario.  For those not familiar with the area it is the definition of cottage country.  More lakes than you can shake a stick at, little communities  spread sparsely apart.  This is just the break I needed.

As I am sure a lot of those who are in the design community understand, working on the same project for a long time can really burn out your creative process.   And if there was one piece of advice I could give to “recharge” it would definitely be…  Get he hell out of the house!

Go find a park, or some backwoods or a beach.  Go and relax.  Although you will likely not go the whole time without thinking about work, at least it gives your mind something else to focus on in the meantime.

I came up here with my girlfriend for her father’s birthday, and I’ve had to sneak away bit by bit to put together this post because I’m not supposed to be on the Internet, usually because one thing leads to another and next thing I know I’m doing more research or just falling into a Stumbleupon induced coma.  It never fails that where there is Internet access, I will get online.