An audience of two

Sunday September 30, 2007

Smart phone, Dumb users
I had to laugh when I read that someone is suing Apple for $1,000,000 over the $200 price cut. It reminded me of the infamous Pressdram V Arkell exchange:

Letter from the legal firm of Goodman Derrick & Co.
We act for Mr Arkell who is Retail Credit Manager of Granada TV Rental Ltd. His attention has been drawn to an article appearing in the issue of Private Eye dated 9th April 1971 on page 4. The statements made about Mr Arkell are entirely untrue and clearly highly defamatory. We are therefore instructed to require from you immediately your proposals for dealing with the matter. Mr Arkell's first concern is that there should be a full retraction at the earliest possible date in Private Eye and he will also want his costs paid. His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.

Response from the lawyers for Pressdram, publishers of Private Eye
We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

There was no further response. It would be nice if that was the outcome in this case too, but sadly I doubt that's going to happen. Granted that I have no sympathy for Apple either; the way they have locked down the phone against third-party extensions is unreasonable. Not that this should come as a surprise; Apple wants to be a monopoly and wherever possible behaves like one. Their beautifully designed systems - iMac, cube etc. - are intended to be unexpandable appliances on proprietary platforms. It must have really irked Jobs to finally have to switch to Unix on x86.

So it should have come as no shock to anyone when all those hacked iPhones suddenly stopped working thanks to the 1.1.1 upgrade. The only surprise for me was that it took so long. Apple is fighting a losing battle there - the hacker community doesn't play by their rules - but they will keep on fighting, and that's why I'm holding off on modifying my phone for now. I'm no longer a fanboy hacker; I'm old and have kids, I need my phone to Just Work Damn It. That means accepting every bug fix release from Apple, even if the iTunes feature doesn't seem to work for me. Not that I'd use it - 99c is still 4X what's reasonable for a compressed downloadable music, but I seem to be in the minority there too.

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