Equinox of Insanity

If you use your iPhone to call your aunt on her birthday and notice there’s absolutely no sound coming from the receiver such that you think the call isn’t going through but then decide to hit speakerphone and realize the phone is going through and it’s just your receiver and then you spend the next hour restarting the phone and calling yourself at home to try and figure out what’s going on, but each time there’s no sound from the receiver, before you take the iPhone into the Apple Store with tears in your eyes like a man knowing that you’re going to either spend at least 3 days without your precious iPhone or you’re going to have to pony up $30 for a loaner phone take a pair of headphones and plug them into the headphone jack on top of the phone, then wait a second, then pull them out, and see if it’s not just that the last time you pulled the headphones out of the the iPhone it forgot to switch the audio output from headphone to receiver like it’s supposed to do.

I’m just saying.

When Apple announced the iPhone a tiny question popped up in the back of my equally tiny mind: how long would it take before Apple started screwing its customers like all the other companies in the cell phone racket? Answer: two months.

John Gruber brutally analyzes the issue of how Apple is handling ringtones in a post titled (absolutely appropriately) “The Ringtone Racket.” I agree with his overall message and his points about what’s wrong with the entire ringtone industry, but I take issue with him when he says:

The whole ringtones racket is predicated on the notion that ringtones are something different than songs. This notion is bullshit.

It isn’t bullshit at all. Ringtones might be music, but they’re not songs. I’ll go on a limb here and guess that your home phone doesn’t play a song when you have a call — it probably has a very specific ring. Marimba, the default iPhone ringtone sounds nice, but by no means would I call that a song. Nor would I call another iPhone ringtone, “Old Phone” (which sounds like a old rotary phone ringer), a song. While some of the ringtones that come with the iPhone (as with other cell phones) are designed to mimic songs, they aren’t actually songs. They are exactly what we call them, tones.

What John is talking about are ringsongs: songs that are used in place of ringtones. You might think making this distinction is nitpicking, but I think the distinction is very important. Creating a ringtone means thoughtfully composing a piece of music that contains the right balance of alarm and intrigue, while creating a ringsong means putting Chingy on your phone. One requires artistry and talent, the other requires being tone-deaf. Not the same thing.

I’m bringing this up not to be a cock, but because I love ringtones, and hate ringsongs. Yeah, its fun to have the “Knight Rider” theme song on your phone for a while (ahem… not that I would ever put the “Knight Rider” theme on a cell phone…) but it gets old real fast, and also everyone around you is clued in that you’re a moron. I think a good ringtone would be worth 99 cents. Hell, a really brilliant ringtone might actually be worth the $2.50 John says others are charging for ringtones. I want to encourage talented musicians to compose quality ringtones. I want them to know that there are people out there who appreciate what they’re doing. It is unfortunate that ringsongs are easier and cheaper to produce (since Fergie’s already making music, regardless of what any of us — or even Jesus — can do to stop her) and that means more money in the pockets of the racketeers (read: Apple). But, no matter how you slice it, a 30 second clip of “Fergilicious” isn’t a ringtone; it’s a travesty.

I know I said I was returning my iPhone, but as I mentioned I love having a Safari in my pants. So the other big news out of the Apple’s iPod redefining event this week is that they announced a $200 price drop on the iPhone. That’s a $200 price drop on a the iPhone that was released two months ago.

As you know I’m a very, very passionate man prone to wild fits of hadouken throwing and pantlessness, but about this price drop: so what? Yeah, sure, if you buy one today you get to keep $200 in your pants next to your iPhone (as a sort of demilitarized zone between the iPhone and your keys?), but you’re getting two months less of ridiculously awesome smart phoning than I do. That is to say, in the last two months I’ve gotten more than $200 worth of awesome out of the phone. Hell, I’ve probably gotten $100 a month worth of awesome just out of having my email with me at all times.

And that, my friends, is the reality of buying things. Steve Jobs suggested that these price changes are part of the technology market, but that’s not really the whole truth. Sure, technology becomes obsolete faster than, say, Coke does, but the whole point of buying things is that you’re getting something you want for a price that you feel is equal to how much that thing adds to your life. That’s it. Every day that I’ve had my iPhone has been $600 better than the day before I got the iPhone.

Some are ranting that we, the owners of iPhones, are being “ripped-off”. Did you feel ripped-off on September 3rd, before the price drop? If no, then clearly you felt the thing you bought was worth what you paid for it. It’s value — to you and your life — has not changed because the price has changed.

Yesterday Steve Jobs wrote an Open Letter in which he said all the people who got the iPhone before the price drop are getting a rebate of $100. This is great and appreciated, but only because free money is always great and appreciated. The truth is now we’re ripping Apple off. We get $100 back, but we don’t have to give them a month of awesome back. All the email, text messages, phone calls, YouTubes, web browsing, Google Mapping, iPhone hacking, and weather widgeting that we’ve gotten to do for the last two months is ours to keep, plus we’re getting paid $100 to have done it. Wow! Is there anything else you want to sell me, Apple?

So in conclusion, thank you, Apple, not for giving us (your loyal customers) free cash money, but for giving us a product that’s worth every penny we paid for it.

As you may have heard, Apple announced an updated iPod line-up today. Here’s what the front page of Apple.com looks like:

There are two interesting things revealed by this:

1. For the first time, there isn’t actually a product named simply “iPod” in the line-up. It strikes me that the term “iPod” now refers to the entire family of products. By generalizing the branding I think Apple might actually make “iPod” more ubiquitous than it already is (I’m not really sure what comes after “ubiquitous.” Omni-present?).

2. The iPhone is an iPod.

Wait. Is it? Here’s the thing, up until now “iPod” has meant a device that it primarily an audio device. Yes, the iPod proper (now iPod classic) has had photos and videos added to it, but, excluding the short lived iPod Photo branding, they’ve always been iPods. In the consumer’s mind, an iPod is an audio device.

That is, it was. I believe what Apple’s doing with their branding is positioning the iPod family to be more general than that. If it’s a high quality multimedia device produced by Apple, then it’s an iPod. Inevitably, more and more functionality is going to be added to these devices, and as is the case with the iPod touch, sometimes these added features will be to the detriment of it’s music device-ness, but as a whole the devices will get better and better. And they will be iPods, regardless of what they do.

FYI, iPod touch is an Inferior iPod

One of the reasons why I think branding is important here is that strictly as an audio device the iPod touch is going to be worse off than the other iPods. While you gain the slick and fun Cover Flow, you lose the ability to use the device without needing to look at it. Think about this, at the gym, in the car, on the bus, you can fast forward or skip songs without ever having to look at the device. iPod shuffle took that idea to the bank. Screens are nice, but not necessary for an audio device. Because the screens are the interface for the iPhone and iPod touch, you have in to interact with it to actually interact with the device. That is, frankly, a step back.

But, they’re not strictly audio devices anymore. Losing the ability to switch songs while driving is a short price to pay for Internet (not to be used while driving!) or a functional calendar. Branding makes a difference.

Mac vs iPod? Or Mac as iPod?

Paul Thurrott, Microsoft corporate shill brilliant Mac journalist, has predicted, on many occasions, that Apple would just leave the computer market in favor of the much more profitable iPod market. What I think is truly interesting here is that with Apple loosening up on what an iPod is it’s quite possible that the iPod and the Mac markets might intersect, if not outright merge. People have speculated a tablet based Mac for some time (MacBook Thin, or something like that), but what if it’s actually an iPod big that gets released? Make the touch screen palm sized instead of pocket sized and you have basically a tiny tablet Mac. Weird.

I don’t think Apple would ever dump the Mac line entirely, but I would be very interested to see what happens as iPods get bigger. The iPhone is basically a PDA now, and it looks like the iPod touch is very close to that. Maybe, what, another year and we might have that tablet Mac, only not actually branded as a Mac.

Paul Thurrott brings up the notion of an iPod-less iPhone.

Indeed, once you get rid of most of the storage space–I’m thinking 1 GB would do it for whatever random photos you might take–you can also dispense with a lot of the battery, since that’s pretty much only needed for media playback anyway. You could therefore make a phone-only iPhone–the iPhone nano–that was about one-half to two-thirds the size of the existing device, while retaining the same basic proportions. A smaller phone would be highly desirable to a lot of people, methinks.

This would be a great idea, except that a smaller phone would mean a smaller screen, which would mean a smaller everything, since the screen is the UI. Also, a smaller battery really doesn’t make sense, because playing videos isn’t the only thing that whacks the battery life. Doing all your email on the iPhone, as I now am, needs having a nice big battery in there.

However, I do think there’s a market for something like this. Sandy, who’s now desperately in search of an iPhone after he saw mine¹ remarked that he only wanted it for it’s phone/Internet capabilities and not for music or movies. So an iPhone Nano would actually make sense for him. But, of course, I doubt Apple would confuse their product line with a similarly sized but technologically inferior iPhone… unless it was a different color or something. Preferably not shit-brown.

1. Granted, it hasn’t helped that every time he comes by I pull the iPhone out and show him a cool new feature I’ve discovered.↩

It would seem that when you open up a new account with AT&T they go ahead and sign you up to receive spam marketing material via email, text message, your phone, and by paper mail.

Ummmm, yeah, I’m going to have to uncheck these.

If you need to do the same, go to att.com/mywireless. It’s at the bottom of the Account Information tab of the My Profile section.

Robert Scoble has a joygasm over the iPhone, but points out that the photo quality of the Nokia N95 is dramatically, and demonstrably, better than the quality of photos taken with the iPhone.

I have to admit that I’ve never had a camera phone before (yeah, I suck), but to me it looks like it’s not that the iPhone is taking bad pictures, but that the Nokia N95 is ridiculously awesome at taking pictures. According to Scoble it has autofocus and is 5 megapixel. Wow!