MacMuser
Me Too
The only problem with Apple is that they just can’t do tacky. What was the first thing that came to mind when they announced mac.com’s name change to “MobileMe’” Mini-Me of course. Unless they were thinking of the Britpop one-hit-wonders Me Me Me or the iTunes track of the same name sporting an “Explicit” warning tag.
Where did Apple get this title from? Steve Jobs was quoted in Business Week May 2005:
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
This time a little focusing might have gone a long way. It must have seemed a good idea for customers to have an e-mail address of yourname@me.com. Thankfully, the old yourname@mac.com addresses will still work.
Get a Good Licking
Jobs also commented on a NeXT programmer’s work in 2000: “You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.” Er…yes. One hopes he also remembers his comment of the same year “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
iDisk’s 20 GB of online storage will be nice to have, as long as the upload speed picks up from the dribble its WebDAV front end currently offers even via dedicated applications such as Transmit, Goliath, or Cyberduck. As it is, we seldom need more than a few gigabytes storage, and uploading is often a painful, all-weekend experience. Most frustrating is when a 700 MB file’s upload times out after 699 MB has reached Cupertino (or wherever they go to).
Gimme Gimme
As for the rest of the 2008 WWDC, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. No details on Snow Leopard yet, so no excuse to get a new Intel-powered Mac, either. iPhone 3G looks lustworthy, but who wants to get locked into a two-year contract? Apparently the new iPhone will fight phone unlockers with contracts activated before the iPhones leave the shop. Unless, that is, the EC Competition Czars can “do something” about it.
Many of us want the device but have no need for hundreds of minutes a month airtime. That’s more than we use all year, but it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t like an iPhone. Come on Steve, let us have them, too.
Copyright © 2008 Mark Tennent.
Also in This Series
- What Trick, What Device, What Starting-Hole… · May 2012
- Do Androids Dream? · April 2012
- Our Macs Are Under Attack · March 2012
- The Best and Worst Christmas Presents · February 2012
- The Best Use for a Kindle · January 2012
- It’s Got No Blinking Light · January 2012
- Box-Shifting Causes Migration · December 2011
- The Best Thing About the iPhone 4S and How to Cope in Clink · December 2011
- Death of a Salesman · November 2011
- Complete Archive
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