iPhone hacks and iTunes competition:

[wolven7]

Apple's Notoriously Mod-Unfriendly hardware hacked. Law-Hounds called to cull the herd. I can understand the proprietary angle in all of this, but ask yourself: If you just plunked down $600 on the most "bleeding-edge" piece of technology on the major market, from a company notorious for having pulled itseslf up by its bootstaps, would you want to then be irrevocably locked into a service contract with the telecommunications company notorious for having garrotted its competition with theirs?

Apple makes amazing hardware, fully integrated, unit-ware, available on the go, anytime you want it. It looks amazing, and works wonderfully. As long as you only want it to do what it does. No you can't upgrade it yourself, and no you can't perform your own internal maintenance. Sorry. They also seem to be very much about presenting one image, while operating on a different set of standards. Complexity is one thing, but claiming to support a kind of freedom of choice and ease, while restricting options and movement is just hypocrissy. At that point, eventually, your position becomes untennable, and I think Apple is moving steadily toward that point.

In other news, the almost-universality of iTunes has sparked competition from Verizon and MTV. More cellular music services and pay-for-download clients on the way.

This is funny to me, because of what the mergers and acquisitions flow-chart on this one would look like. AT&T, Verizon, Bell, Apple, MTV, Virgin, Viacom, have all, at one point or another, belonged to the same parent company, and some do, right now. It's ridiculous.

I can't take the business world seriously enough to engage it. Every time people get all crazy about something that is, essentially, intersubjective, I laugh and I can't keep looking at them with a straight face. I laugh, but it's a sick laughter. There are people with the ability to control how we think, and, for the most part, we just take it.

*sigh* I'm for television.

Comments

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Heh. At least you're aware of it.

[kitsuchan.livejournal.com]

So are refurbished apples. This is why I have one- it was cheaper than a Dell. Also, the multi-lingual support is better than XP's was- I have no idea about vista.

Apple is good for some things, PC for others. I get annoyed when either side tries to make the other seem worthless.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, their usefulness, so far as video editing, some aspects of graphic design, and, say, composition of newspapers, is without equal. But it's the weird shift in mission statement that weirds me out.

I'm sorry I missed you, when you were in town, by the way.

[kitsuchan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely weird. I like apple's design and the graphic stuff and language stuff, but I have no special loyalty to them as a company. And my biggest problem with apple has always been that they really seem to discourage modification and tinkering.

I'll be really bothered if the courts rule against modifying your phone. it's your phone. You paid for it. Modifying your phone (or breaking the protection on your CD so you can put the songs on your mp3 player) should be as legal as writing notes in your textbook.

I was sorry to miss you too! I still wasn't very mobile, sadly. But I'm sure to be back soon enough.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I don't think they'll rule against the modification of the phones, to an extent. It's a matter of proprietary contract with the service provider that makes things tricky.

But, in essence, the case can be made that it's as much to say that you've bought, say, a Hewlett-Packard, and you're only allowed to run Windows and AOL on it. It's a major restriction, via third-party interactions.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Wellll... Depending on what you buy, it's cheap.

[wacko1138.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've modded, upgraded, and performed internal maintenance on many Apple products (iPods, iBooks, towers and even 1st gen iMacs, among others). I've found it's generally an easier process than products from other companies because the heavy design effort includes the guts of the devices. Plus with everything so standardized in their products it makes it easy for modding and hacking communities to develop (if a certain modification works on one iBook, it'll work on all the others) (which can of course be seen as a bad thing too). People have already gotten NES emulators, Doom, and voice recording software running on iPhones. One company has already started offering replacement batteries for iPhones. I expect any week now to read about someone upgrading the internal storage of the iPhone.

Suffice to say, while some products are difficult to mod, Apple is not generally a mod-unfriendly entity (heck, I didn't even mention all that's been done with AppleTVs or Mac Minis). The trouble comes in tying themselves to AT&T. They're using the clout they've earned though to try and mod AT&T including getting AT&T to pay them for every customer (no other cell phone maker to my knowledge has gotten a carrier to do that) and eliminating in store activation which is why AT&T is so anxious about unlocking the phone. In the past, if you unlocked your phone, well, you'd already signed a contract. Now, you buy it and only tether yourself to AT&T when you activate it at home. If you can unlock it first, they've just lost a drone.

All of which may make me sound like an Apple fanboy, but I'm very much a believer in use the tech that works for you (and tech should work for you, how you want it to work, you should not be forced to accommodate it), so I'm not here to push Apple, just offering a correction.

And one more correction, Apple and Virgin never belonged to any parent company.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Re: Parent companies: didn't phrase that as well as I should have, because it's even more complicated: Almost all have belonged to, had ties with, or owned each other. It makes for a lot of loops and whorls.

As to the other stuff, you're one of the only people I know who find it easier to do home maintenance on an Apple than otherwise.