The Macalope: An Apple blog
The Macalope: An Apple blog

• Strike-ortunity.
  

  If the Macalope were Steve Jobs, he'd be sending big-assed fruit baskets to each of the striking writers (tip o' the antlers to BoingBoing).

  As Alex Lindsey has noted several times on MacBreak Weekly, Apple is about one step away from offering an end-to-end solution for video development and distribution for independent producers. Even if it's not ready to pull the trigger for technological or political reasons, it's a great time to make some friends.

• Damn you to hell, John Gruber!
  

  John Gruber finds a glorious nut of stupidity before the Macalope and gives it the appropriate treatment.

• With disappointments like these, who needs successes?
  

  Will someone please page the lithesome yet strong-handed nymphs whose job it is to massage the furry one's scalp right between the antlers? The Macalope's got a headache again.

  What's causing it this time? PC World's 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 (motto: "It's not another lame top-10 piece if we have 15 items!").

  The Macalope doesn't have a problem with most of the items, even Leopard. You just knew an Apple product was going to be on there somewhere -- they simply can't resist -- and Leopard probably did disappoint some people. While this furry beast's admittedly low expectations about Leopard were exceeded and he's had nary a problem with it, others reportedly have.

  But the iPhone? If that's a tech disappointment, the Macalope hopes 2008 brings Apple a slew of similar disappointments. It'll be a banner year.

  PC World itself admits that "the phone itself is pretty terrific". Oookay, so you don't so much have a beef against the iPhone. Then what's your beef by-product?

  But AT&T's broadband service? Definitely second-rate.

  Really? This broadband service? Or maybe you mean this one. Are you at all familiar with the definition of "definitely"?

  The $600 price tag -- which soon dropped by $200 and then was followed by a $100 quasi-rebate -- didn't help.

  What about the fact that it makes every other cell phone look like ass? Did that help?

  "I think the biggest debacle of 2007 is the iPhone pricing bait and switch," says Peggy Watt, a PC World contributing editor and professor of journalism at Western Washington University.

  Wow! That's some statement! Which is to say, that's some absurd statement with little to no basis in fact!

  First of all, Peggy, a bait and switch is when you get someone in the door by telling them the price will be lower than it is, not higher than it one day will be. Or you tell them they'll be getting a "professor of journalism" and then just give them an assistant professor of journalism instead. That's a bait and switch.

  Second, how is dropping the iPhone's price and giving a rebate -- one that all but quenched the outrage -- possibly a bigger debacle than this one, which improbably didn't make PC World's list?

  You're entitled to your opinion, assistant professor Peggy. It just happens to be wrong.

  "People do expect tech prices to drop, but not as quickly as the iPhone did. Apple's response was pretty lame, too; a partial credit that couldn't be used for a lot of popular items (such as iTunes)."

  Uh, yeah, that would be pretty much the only item it couldn't be used for.

  Customers may not redeem their store credits: (1) at any iTunes Store in the United States or elsewhere, (2) Apple Store locations outside the United States; (3) at Apple resellers; (4) for cash; (5) to purchase Apple Gift Cards, or,iTunes Store Gift Certificates, to give iTunes Store content as gifts, or to create iTunes Store allowances; or (6) as payments on Apple accounts. Customers may not resell, transfer, or otherwise assign the credits.

  Unless you count cash as a "popular item". Which, the Macalope supposes, it is seeing how popular it is with masked bandits. Other "popular items" you couldn't use an iPhone rebate for are liquor, anabolic steroids and hookers. Which probably explains why the Macalope has heard that Jose Canseco never cashed his in.

  But, c'mon, PC World. If you really felt you had to put in two Apple products because you had three Microsoft products, you easily could have picked the Apple TV and no one would have thought twice about it. The horny one knows you're PC World, but listing the iPhone as one of the year's biggest tech disappointments just makes you look stupid.

  Er.

• I've got nothing against the iPhone. I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one.
  

  Guess who's coming to dinner at IT's place?! Well, not the iPhone if Forrester Research has anything to say about it!

  According to Forrester (tip o' the antlers to Blackfriars' Marketing), the iPhone isn't ready for enterprise use.

  Well! That must bet the final word on that! Because it's not like Forrester's ever written something so completely bass-ackwards that it made you think about hanging up a shingle and becoming a high-priced technology consulting firm because, holy hell, if they're giving out advice like that, how hard could it be?

  ZDNet's Larry Dignan has rundown of Forrester's Top Ten Reasons Why The iPhone Is Teh Suxx0r. That's right, Forrester's report is in the same format as a late-night comedy routine.

  Even Dignan takes some of these items to task, but not as much to task as Mark Goble, who actually deployed iPhones in an enterprise and was interviewed about it by the Wall Street Journal.

  Doesn't that guy know that Rob Enderle said the iPhone was really just for teenagers?

  Hmm. Maybe his account managers are all teenagers. Well, whatever. Let's go to the list.

  1. The iPhone doesn't natively support push business email and only checks for mail every 15 minutes compared to 1 minute on other devices.

  The connectivity with business email looks to be on Apple's radar as AppleInsider noticed an interesting job posting (tip o' the antlers this time to Daring Fireball).

  As for the time interval, if one minute is a feature, it's a broken feature. The Macalope can't tell you how many meetings he's been in with Crackberry addicts who are not paying attention to the discussion but instead are emailing their buddy in accounting to ask "Hey, did you get that thing I sent you?!" Obviously, if you're a heart surgeon or nuclear engineer or Jack Bauer, you're going to want to get that critical email before you hear "CODE BLUE" or "CORE BREACH" or "Deet-doo... Deet-doo... Deet-doo..."

  But -- and the Macalope really hates to be the one to break it to you -- the odds are your job isn't so important that you can't wait another 14 minutes for an email.

  Doesn't anyone call anymore? It is a phone after all.

  2. The iPhone doesn't have third-party apps.

  Dignan seems to think the SDK coming early next year "may alleviate the situation". The Macalope will go not very far out on a limb and say that not too long after the SDK's release, the iPhone will have better third-party applications than any other cell phone platform (unless Apple supplies some kind of broken authentication model).

  3. You can't encrypt data on an iPhone.

  As Goble notes, other "enterprise phones" don't encrypt data either. Also, it's a really good thing that enterprises make sure every laptop and cell phone they currently hand out is encrypted.

  That's a joke. They don't, of course, which is why you hear so many stories about social security numbers and medical records and human genomes being lifted from stolen lap