andywar's Profile

  • Oct 06, 2008
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Latest comments made by: andywar

  • James. With all due respect, if you want to install unauthorized apps on your iPhone you can always jailbreak it. While I don't share your views, perpetuating the myth that Apple is doing anything extraordinary here is irresponsible. To take your car analogy, if you install rims that's like changing the wallpaper on the login screen. But no Honda dealer is going to service your car or support it if you swap the engine out or decide to change the gearbox. What the geeks and nerds seem to forget is that Apple are now a *consumer* electronics company, and not a computer company; and I don't see my 67 year old mum knowing or caring the hoops developers have to jump through to get their apps into the iTunes App Store. And why doesn't this same argument get trotted out re. games consoles, where developers are under much stricter guidelines, and a much higher walled garden, about getting their games onto the xBox, Playstation or Wii? Apple have opened up the iPhone platform to an unheard of degree for a consumer product and all the self-righteous, 'world owes me' developers and users can do is whine about how it isn't open enough. If you want to buy an Android phone you do that, but don't expect your defection to make one iota of difference to the way Apple runs its business.
    andywar had this to say on Sep 29, 2008 Posts: 6
    Don't Be Fooled, It Isn't a Walled Garden Its a Prison
  • Mine will end up serving two roles: (1) As a spare, backup phone, or 'primary' when I'm out and about in places where I might not want to take the newer one (e.g. clubbing or in a bar, etc.). (2) As a test platform for work-in-progress iPhone applications, which I have promised myself I'm going to learn how to write. Re-use is partially the fact that even old Apple hardware can be re-purposed past its original use and remains viable for many months/years, and partially the fact that the phone was a 40th birthday present off my family, and I don't want to sell it on.
    andywar had this to say on Jun 20, 2008 Posts: 6
    What to Do With Your First Generation iPhone?
  • The original question was like asking which would you take to a desert island: 1) A supermodel who wouldn't have sex with you. or 2) A pig with lipstick that would have sex with you. Just because the pig will have sex with you doesn't mean it's automatically the best choice. You might sate the need to have sex, but you'd feel a whole lot more dirty about it afterwards than if you just settled for life with a celibate supermodel. I think most supermodel users would learn to live without getting their end away, than kid themselves that they were actually attracted to the pig.
    andywar had this to say on Sep 29, 2006 Posts: 6
    Wherein John Gruber Picks Windows
  • I think what you are all missing (or perhaps not touching on, relative to it's importance), is that for the vast majority of the public that don't follow the computer press, iPod = music player. The name iPod has reached the point like hoover or sellotape, where a single manufacturer's name has become synonmous with a product category. How many of you have parents or grandparents that call your Macs a PC (or just use the name Windows), because that's their understanding. They aren't into the 'scene' enough to distinguish the difference. That's why most players still play MP3s rather than other, more open and better standards; because for a large proportion of the market MP3 = iPod = music player. MP3 has entered the public lexicon to mean *all* music saved to protable players. I bet there a load of people out there call *any* brand of music player an iPod. Go into any electronics store and listen into to parents discussing what to buy little Billy for his birthday. They'll ask for an 'iPod' despite the fact he wanted a Sony, because to them the name is generic and descriptive of the type of device rather than the manufacturer. That's why Apple has been so 'hard' on people using the trademark loosely and generically (stopping 3rd party stores from using it). If they fail to defend the copyright, there will be nothing to stop it becoming legally generic, and you'll see Sony, Microsoft, et al start using it to describe their own players. That's the real threat to Apple; making sure iPod continues to be the name associated with the niche, yet remain in control of it's use. And whether deliberate or not, the name iPod was a good move, as it doesn't suggest music, video, or any other kind of media, unlike a lot of the competitors' branding. So as the capabilities of the line, and number of models increases, they can still be called iPods. How many people think Sony sold a *lot* of Walkmans because *that* term became generic for all manufacturers' portable cassestte players, and ill-informed grandmas, uncles and parents bought the model that had that word on the box...
    andywar had this to say on Jan 20, 2006 Posts: 6
    Want to Marginalize the iPod? Ask Steve Jobs How!
  • Interestingly, MacRumors have just published a story about a Handwriting Engineer vacancy at Apple. http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/08/20050824060819.shtml I'd love to see an Apple tablet in a small enough form factor (A6/A5) with a hi-res screen. I'm getting into the GTD fad (Google it, if you don't know what that is), and something to help with planning and slightly larger than my Treo 650, which could also run all my OS X programs would be a $deity-send. Using it as a desktop PDF reader for all my apps electronic-only manuals would be nice as well. Besides which it would be nice to show Scoble how a tablet should be done .
    andywar had this to say on Aug 24, 2005 Posts: 6
    Can Apple save the Tablet?
  • Of course, you then have to ask the question would Intel be willing to develop a 'custom' chip specifically for a customer with such a small share of their market; after all, IBM wouldn't do it for Apple, so why would Intel? Unless they really, really want to break up their intimate link with Microsoft... And who'd want to do that :)
    andywar had this to say on Jul 29, 2005 Posts: 6
    PowerMac on Intel, the Beast Cuts Loose