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• Friday, January 12, 2007 09:51 AM

  can an old apple learn new tricks?

  I am less optimistic today about where Apple may ultimately be going with the iPhone.

  Part of the reason for Apple's decline and failure to dominate sales in the personal computer industry was their fixation on maintaing control of all aspects of the Mac hardware and operating system.

  It seems that Mr. Jobs is exhibiting similar behaviour regarding the iPhone and it's embedded OS X.

  This quote from an interview in Newsweek makes me worry:

  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566968/site/newsweek/page/3/

  Another intriguing possibility not yet exploited in the iPhone is the ability to take a song from one’s iTunes music library and instantly make a ring tone from it. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” says Jobs, after (Steve Levy) brought it up. “It could be done.” Then he rubbed his fingers together, the universal symbol for “that would cost us.”

  I had to hack my Nokia own Verizon cellphone in order to assign MP3 ringtones to my contacts. I did this via a USB cable, not Verizon's paid music subscription.

  This means each person in my address book has their own song associated with them. When the phone rings, I know who it is without looking.

  I had to turn off Verizon's setting that blocked MP3 files as ringtones. Verizon did this becuase they wanted me to buy music from them at $2 a pop.

  This quote from the same article is also worrying:

  But it’s not like the walled garden has gone away. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

  Why is this quote worrying? Because it is simply not true. See this quote from Ars Technica:

  http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/12/6597

  There is absolutely no way that a single app on a single phone (or installed on thousands of phones) could accidentally destroy a network.

  Even if there was some sort of malicious, network-melting application making the rounds and that application somehow got installed on many thousands of phones, you would've thought that this would've happened already in the millions and millions of other smart phones already on the market . . .

  What Jobs is doing here is spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) for FUD's sake. I would have understood, but not agreed with Jobs' desire to keep unchecked installation of third-party apps on the iPhone to keep the integreity of the experience intact. He's even alluded to that elsewhere, but to go around and spout off on topics he obviously doesn't understand is just plain low. I hope that somehow, someway this message will get relayed to Jobs and the PR department at Apple (that seems to be Jobs too, these days), but I'm not keeping my hopes held very high. . .

  There has been a lot of controversy in the personal computing indusrty about something called 'trusted computing'. What this basically means is that the operating system will only let 'authorized programs' run on the computer.

  Like the spurious war on terror, this is purported to block installation of viruses. The real reason is to allow the operating system manufacturer to control what programs run on their operating systems and hardware, prevent competition from superior products and extract license fees from software developers.

  Apple already collects a fee from manufacturers and software developers whose iPod accessories and programs say 'Designed for iPod' on the label.

  If the innovations seen in the iPhone's version of OS X include control of what software can be installed onto a device I own, I'll pass.

  —vaporland Read vaporland's other letters
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