Sorry, but the iPhone Still Doesn’t Suck
July 15th
I’m no idiot. I realize that relentless pursuit of the counter-intuitive is the implicit goal of every snooty, left-leaning publication in existence—the latest New Yorker cover ought to assuage any doubts about that—but for crying out loud, I wish the highbrow media would just get over itself about the iPhone.
Don’t mistake me for a slobbering Apple fanboy. Back when Jobs announced the thing last year, there was a definite need to reign in expectations. It should have been obvious how bad EDGE would suck. Triangulated GPS was clearly going to be imprecise. And for those insecure enough to demand a GWAM of 70 or higher at all times, a Crackberry will always be the mobile of choice. Verily I say unto thee, speedtexter, you have your reward in full.
But a year after the shortcomings became clear, magazines and web pages still as full of iFap as ever. This piece at Puffington Host yesterday stated with alarm that “Hundreds of iPhones have cracked and have had to be replaced because of the glass screen”. Hundreds? Out of 4 million sold? Good lord, that could mean a failure rate as high as .024%! Look, I’m as klutzy as the next guy, but the iPhone isn’t fragile, and repairing it ain’t exactly rocket surgery.
It’s not so much the inanity of the counterarguments that gets to me, though—it’s the presence of the comparison itself. Slate’s PauI Boutin wasn’t quite direct enough last year when he termed iPhone “less a phone packed with extras than a full-fledged computer for your pocket”. The iPhone is a full-fledged computer you can put in your pocket.
People who bemoan the lack of AD2P in the iPhone 3g seem to have forgotten that until OS 10.5 came out, no Apple product had AD2P compatibility. It was a feature added by a software fix; the same sort of software fix hackers, and latter Apple, employed to open up the iPhone to “third-party apps”, or, as most people would call them, “programs”.
Yet, for some reason, technology writers continue to whine about trifles like AT&T’s lousy network. Once hackers crack the iPhone 3g open serve up the iPhone’s soft interior on a silver platter, you’ll be able to use whatever network you want, or install any iPhone-compatible program you can find to download. Your computer doesn’t care if you connect to the internet through Verizon or Comcast, or whether you surf with Firefox or Safari. It’s high time that your phone started thinking the same way.
I’ll be the first to admit that, going by the specs written on the box, iPhone 2.0 doesn’t offer anything more impressive than a 3g chip. But that’s missing the point. This phone runs a computer’s operating system; it can do anything your computer can, within reason (e.g., no Halo). You could even mount its file system like an external drive to bypass the iTunes store, if only iPhoneDisk weren’t so frickin’ buggy.
Anyone out there know a software company that might be into fixing that sort of thing?
