Please don’t hate us, Mike. See, reader Mike emailed me asking us to stop talking about the iPhone. But we can’t. We really can’t. It’s taken over the entire news cycle. Everyone is afraid of the iPhone and they won’t launch anything to compete for it. Imagine releasing, I don’t know, a fairly cool sci-fi movie the same week Star Wars 7: Attack of George Lucas’ Prostate. Would you do it? No. You’d wait until the holidays, maybe. You’d time it just right to avoid the huge shadow Star Wars casts on the landscape.
So please, go watch this crazy video. Manufacturers: go and watch it twice. This is what EVERY PHONE HAS TO LOOK LIKE FROM NOW ON. I will repeat. NO ONE WANTS YOUR PHONES ANYMORE UNLESS SOME GUY IN A BLACK SHIRT TALKS ABOUT IT FOR 20 MINUTES AND UNLESS CLICKING THROUGH THE PHONE REMINDS ME MORE OF MINORITY REPORT THAN NORBIT. This is your Windows/MS-DOS moment — everything that came before this phone was MS-DOS. Sure, you had Norton Commander and that weird graphical DOS shell, but when Windows — and MacOS — hit the street the game changed entirely. MS-DOS doesn’t cut it, EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE THIS IS MS-DOS. End of rant. I’m sorry, Mike, but I had to do it. Only a few more days and then we can all get on with our lives.
by
John Biggs
on
June 22, 2007
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Hmm… for someone who’s first computer was a Mac 128k and lived through MS/Apple DOS and every single damned version of Windows – your rant doesn’t work for me. Especially since MacOS came out just under 2 years before Windows 1.0 did so you got the order wrong.
After MacOS – the next real groundbreaking desktop OS was OS/2 (linux doesn’t count since it wasn’t real usable at the time). A multitasking OS that was years ahead of Windows and MacOS in capability and stability. So while you where rebooting your machine every time you clicked on an icon, piddling with your config.sys files to maximize the available memory under 640k, we were connected to a dozen other hosts, creating and sharing files, and we just turned off our screens at night and went home with the full knowledge that machine wouldn’t be dead when we came in in the morning.
That was my moment – because after OS/2 got beaten down – it was a massive step back to deal with Windows NT and 2000. But by then Unix was coming in being …
I don’t understand the reluctance to cover one of the biggest mobile product launches OF ALL TIME. There didn’t seem to be the same reluctance to cover that turd of a music player, the Zune.
In fact, I still see regular stories about the Zune on here… a music player that by most accounts seems to have been bought by about 3 people.
There IS a difference between “hype” and genuine excitement for an innovative product. That’s the distinction between Microsoft and Apple: MS needs to pay people to act excited about thier products, and Apple just shows you the product, and people tend to wet themselves naturally. Cynics call it the “Reality Distortion Field” (TM), but the reality is that people are ACTUALLY excited about the iPhone.
We’ll see if all you speak of comes true, or Steve Jobs ends up hanging out with Milli, and Vanilli.
I will say though I pity the people who hastily change their carrier to AT&T as they are pretty lousy, IMHO.
Also there is not a phone out there that loads google map data as fast as they depict in the propaganda, not even a 3g phone! So it’ll be interesting how many real-world experiences match the slick marketing pitch.
Stop complaining about people that complain about your coverage of the iPhone. Everybody’s doing it (plug: Engadget), but it’s still not cool.
Seriously, give it a break !! Sure it’s new and interesting but you can’t compare the iPhone launch with CLI (Command Line Interface) vs GUI (Graphical User Interface)..