“Software Development Kit.”

Today Apple announced its iPhone SDK. Considering how excited I am about the release, I don’t want to imagine what it’s like for people who are actually going to have time to use any of it.

I’d been saying that the real potential of the iPhone (and iPod touch) — whether it’s just an expensive and flashy status symbol/geek toy gadget, or a truly revolutionary device — would come down to the SDK release. It’s what made Palm a big (albeit temporary) player: half was the novelty of the gadget itself and the simplicity of its design, and half was that it was an open development platform. From what I can tell, Apple’s surpassed that several times over with this release.

Like any other Apple follower on the internet, I’ve got a few complaints. But overall, they knocked this one out of the park, and did everything right from start to finish:

• Everything’s built into the already-free XCode and developer tools.
• Pretty much every useful feature on the device is supported by an API, including the camera, accelerometers, and even the location-detection feature in Google Maps.
• It’s all well-documented, with slick API reference docs and plenty of how-tos.
• The sample apps are slick and polished, and a few look like they’ll even be useful.
• There’s a complete UI kit, so it’ll be difficult to make an app that’s not as professional-looking as the built in ones.
• An iPhone simulator is included, that works immediately after install without having to mess with licenses and downloading the correct ROM version and the like.
• The SDK is free for anyone (with an Intel Mac) to download and try out with the simulator, but
• To install apps on the device itself, or to distribute them, you’ll need to pay at least the $99 developer program fee. Which is actually a good thing, because the cost alone might help weed out thousands of worthless apps — I think the Palm OS had at least 20 “Turn your Palm into a mirror LOL!” apps and variants on the Magic 8-ball.
• Apple’s “App Store” for distribution has the potential to make the company a bundle and will be easier to deal with than having to go through the iTunes store.
• Assuming Apple applies the same policy for vetting apps on the App Store that it does for software on its own site and music through the iTunes store, you sacrifice the open-endedness of free downloads in favor of at least a base level of quality in the apps.
• They finally seem to be targeting business users as well as consumers and gave a nod to game development, without making any one of them feel like an afterthought.

But from what I’ve seen so far, there are some problems too:

• Although the SDK and the simulator are free, the simulator doesn’t support the coolest features of the phone: no accelerometers, camera, or OpenGL support. To do anything really cool, or even to run half the included sample demos, you need to pony up the hundred bucks.
• The App Store takes a 30% cut from the developer distributing any iPhone software. Just speaking as someone who doesn’t make a living directly off selling shareware, I’d say this isn’t completely unreasonable, but it does sound pretty high.
• I definitely haven’t given more than a glance to the documentation, but I haven’t seen any sign of support for syncing between the phone and the desktop. This is a necessity for most productivity apps, and all the fancy screen transitions in the world aren’t going to do any good if you can’t get your notes or To-Do list off your phone.
• It’s understandable considering what’s been included and the level of polish and professionalism in the SDK, but still: the official version isn’t coming out until June, a year after the phone’s release.

I’ve already got a dozen ideas for things I’d like to write for the phone, assuming I could ever find the time and/or skills. No doubt they’re all already in development by somebody else, not to mention more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me yet. Even though the likelihood of my making productive use out of it is infinitesimal, I’m tempted to pay the developer fee just for the sake of getting to play around with it.

I think I already mentioned on here my reaction to seeing a co-worker’s Pilot PDA for the first time, years ago. Even on a small, low-res, black-and-greenish screen, with a cartoonishly simple interface and no connectivity, it was like seeing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The neat thing about the iPhone is that it’s already cooler than I ever imagined the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy being.

Just the sample apps alone show that they’ve got people on staff who are thinking of non-obvious ways to use the phone. After watching today’s announcement, I felt like the hyperbole around Apple was almost justified, for once. I had been looking forward to the SDK just for the chance to have e-books, a decent ToDo list, and a personal database on a device as small as the iPhone. When they start throwing in the stuff you can do with motion detection, always-available wireless access, 3D support, and pseudo-location detection, it really does seem like an entirely new platform with enormous potential. It’s like getting to write the first programs for the tricorder.

I’m not going to the MacWorld this year, which turns out to be okay because I woke up this morning and discovered I was already there! By which I mean: either I’ve become the prime example of the Mac demographic, or the company is aiming its (no doubt slim and flawlessly designed) mind-scanning ray gun directly at my beguilingly exposed head.

Just last night, I came home to find myself internetless. My aging router used to need a reset once every few months, but lately it’s been once a week. To get it working again, I have to shut everything down, do a hard reset on the router, hook up my laptop to the DSL modem, re-establish the DSL connection, re-enter all my router security info, then hook everything back up and hope it all works. I’d convinced myself to splurge on a new router, one that’d be easier to set up and hopefully more reliable (and faster).

I was trying to find a reasonable price on the Airport Extreme when my laptop popped up a message — the system was warning me that Time Machine hadn’t backed up the laptop in over 30 days, and what the hell was my problem? I replied that to back up the laptop, I have to do a lot of unmounting and firewire cable swapping and waiting for the backup to finish and more cable swapping (all of which I think was implied by my “OK”), and it makes the whole backup thing kind of a drag again. So the question became: do I waste more money on a new router, or on another external hard drive?

Boom. A router with a hard drive built in. It’s eerie. Apparently the concept is common enough to have its own three-letter acronym (NAS), but I’m so far from understanding IT that the idea was new, and even a little creepily appropriate, to me. The really odd thing is that it’s an Apple product, but as far as I can tell, is actually reasonably priced; it’s about the same as a router plus a hard drive of that capacity, Apple-built or not.

I’ve got to say I don’t really get the “MacBook Air“‘; it just seems like a parody of Steve Jobs’ freaky, Stephen King gypsy-like fetish.

And the iPhone update is neat but not particularly earth-shattering. The whole page-curl thing for setting Google Maps options is a million times cooler than it needs to be, though. I can predict that effect getting way overused when people start writing apps for the thing, and I’m looking forward to it.

There’s a new update for GarageBand that adds a “Send to Ringtones” item to the “Share” menu.

That’s kind of cool, just because it means I can finally start using “Apache” by the Sugarhill Gang as my ringtone again.

But what’s more cool is that it’s a sign there’s still remnants of a soul left somewhere in Apple. Charging users a buck to make their own ringtones is pretty standard in the cell phone business, but it was a downer seeing it put into place by a company that was claiming to “think different.”

Steve Jobs got a ton of good PR for putting himself forward as the guy who was going to stick it to the record companies. And part of the whole design manifesto behind the iPhone is that they were making a cell phone that worked like phones should work, instead of whatever business practices the cartel of manufacturers and service providers had already established.

If they’re acknowledging that you should be able to use your own music as a ringtone — and quietly acknowledging, instead of drawing a lot of attention to how incredibly generous it is of them to let you copy files from one place to another — that’s an encouraging sign for the SDK. Maybe there’s still hope they’ll do the right thing.

Of course, I still won’t have any time to write anything for the damn phone, and I suspect by now I’ve forgotten how to program. But it’ll be useful for future occasions when I decide to start moralizing about a consumer electronics and software company.

As expected, I used the money Apple overcharged me for my phone to get OS X Leopard, and I’ve been really impressed with it so far. I don’t agree with most of the criticisms that have been made against it — I actually like the new Dock — and I think in just about every category, it’s an unqualified improvement. In some cases, an outstanding improvement.

But I’m kind of easy to please, since I was sold from the moment I saw the installation movie. (You can see it at the bottom “It’s hot” link in the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa. I don’t want to link to it directly). Is it shallow to base my overall impression of an operating system on a 1-minute intro movie? Of course. But then, that’s a big part of the appeal of Apple. You take for granted that they’re going to get things right under the covers; what sets them apart is the amount of effort they put into making the experience enjoyable. Right down to the gratuitous flair; the thing that finally convinced me to switch back to Macs after using Windows for so long was seeing a movie of the Dock magnification in action.

So onto the functionality: QuickLook is perfectly implemented and has instantly become essential. Spotlight is so much improved that you can finally see its potential in changing the way we use computers — random access instead of browsing. CoverFlow in the finder, and the “stacks” on the Dock, are a little useless, but don’t get in the way, either. Spaces is generally well-implemented and nice enough but not essential. Accessing networked folders, especially Windows ones, finally makes sense. Overall, things look more consistent. There’s a feeling of things being not overwhelmingly “Oh my God I never knew such bliss from browsing files” better, but just better.

Except for Time Machine, which is a perfect example of how Apple gets it right. First, they recognize the problem: nobody backs up their files as often as they should. (I do it once a year at most, and I should technically know better). Then they take each one of the reasons why, and they come up with a solution.

You have to buy or download separate software to do it, so they include it in the OS. Backing up to CD or DVD media is extensive and time consuming, so they make it work with external drives, and any external drive. The existing stuff is usually complicated to set up, so they make it bone simple — you plug in a drive, and it starts. There are usually tons of confusing options and settings in backup software, so they give you one big on/off switch. It’s always tedious to do the actual backup, so they do it all in the background (after the lengthy initial copy). Actually recovering files from a backup is tedious and error-prone, so they integrated it into the Finder and made it painless. When you realize you’ve lost a file, you’re in a state of panic and frustration, so they put all their UI and presentation energy not into the backup stage, but the restore stage — it’s straightforward and actually kind of fun to use.

And on top of all that, it does intelligent incremental backups that don’t take up a ton of space, and it still presents it as if it were a normal disk hierarchy, letting you browse through it outside the fancy Time Machine interface. It’s just an outstanding job all around.

There have also been a ton of improvements to the development side of things. XCode just feels a lot more substantive and less like an open-source development app. And looking through the Interface Builder has all kinds of new items you can drop into your apps, with extremely sophisticated stuff you get “for free.” Matt Gemmell’s blog has a post about all the stuff that’s included with Leopard that developers formerly had to do “by hand,” and it’s pretty astounding. It also makes me wish I weren’t in the middle of deadlines, so that I had some time to play around with it. I wrote a simple image editor a while back, and it looks like Apple has included all the functionality of my editor in a simple widget that you can drop into any app.

Speaking of unnecessary flair and not having enough time, another of my favorite features of the new OS X is a screensaver. You can now choose any of your iPhoto collections, albums, folders, or events, and have it generate photomosaics using all of the pictures in your iTunes library. It’s really cool, and I must have spent an hour today just staring at it.

The iPhone may not have a GPS, a camera flash, an audible speaker, or a mail app that doesn’t annoy, but I’ve been really impressed with one undocumented feature: it’s a flawless choad detector. The thing’s only been out about three months, and it’s already revealed more dicks than a frat house hazing ceremony.

I already talked at great length about the counter-complaints surrounding the $200 price drop, so I won’t say anything more about that. Except to say that it sucked, and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong. But whatever, maybe it was the notion that anybody who was an early adopter of the phone was overly trend-conscious or over-privileged, or maybe it was just your basic garden-variety schadenfreude.

But what I don’t get, on any level, is the fallout from Apple’s version 1.1.1 firmware release for the iPhone, which bricked phones that had been hacked to work with non-AT&T carriers, invalidated custom ringtones not created with iTunes, and made all third-party apps inoperable.

For a reasoned and temperate response to the closed nature of the update, there’s an editorial from Rob Griffiths of MacWorld. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he hits on the key problem with the company’s positioning of the phone and their relationship with their customers. For a drooling, half-witted twat’s response, there’s this load of crap on bynkii.com.

And that, unfortunately, is the attitude that is becoming more and more prevalent whenever anybody on the internets starts talking about Apple. Any attempt to point out, “Hey, you know, this kind of sucks,” is immediately countered with 100 name-calling accusations of “WHINERS!” It’s gone past typical Apple-cultish annoying and crossed over to being downright creepy. How did people get so beaten down that they believe “That’s the way it is because that’s the way it is,” is an intelligent response at all, much less that it’s in any way keepin’ it real? That doesn’t even qualify as cynical; it’s naive in its blind defeatism.

Set aside Apple’s decades of aggressive branding, that have tried and mostly succeeded at painting the company as the plucky-yet-arrogant underdog fighting against corporate drones; anybody with a lick of sense can recognize that as simple (but effective) marketing. But even without that, the fact remains: the company has built its reputation and cult-like levels of brand loyalty by cutting through convention. By making products that are like a direct line of communication between the corporation and the consumer.

The only thing that all of Apple’s successes have in common — from the Apple II to the original Mac to the iPod — is that they’ve started by looking at what people want to do with technology, and building something around that. Not just by looking at how things are currently done, and making that smaller, slicker, flashier, or more expensive.

I say that that is exactly why the iPhone is so remarkable, and why idiots were willing to pay over $500 for it the day of its release. It’s gotten criticism for being an under-powered smartphone, and it’s gotten criticism for being an over-priced consumer phone. (And I don’t have any sympathy for Apple on that front, since in his initial announcement Jobs put up a slide basically describing it as a smartphone and an iPod duct-taped together, in a lame attempt to justify the price). But the beauty of it is that it’s got most of the features of a smartphone that the typical consumer would have use for, all presented in a simple and easy-to-use format that should be the way consumer phones are designed.

Dismiss all the hype as much as you want, one thing is clearly true: at some point in the iPhone’s gestation, the intent was to cut through the way things are typically done, and present something that would be useful to the average person. (And it should go without saying, but somebody invariably brings it up: make Apple a ton of money in the process).

And yet whenever anybody says that they’re on board with the concept and they want to see the thing developed to its fullest potential, the response is always: “You bought the phone, you knew what you were getting into! I say, let ‘em crash!”

The funny thing is that I’m usually moderate-to-fascist when it comes to open technology. Most of the money currently resting in my bank account comes from (and typically goes back towards) evil giant corporations. I had to stop reading BoingBoing because of their constant anti-DRM propaganda. Whenever I hear or read someone go on about open source or copyright law or say “Information Wants to Be Free!!!” I immediately zone out and hear everything else they say as if it were coming from Beaky Buzzard.

So when people claim it’s their “right” to unlock the phone to use with a different carrier other than AT&T, I’m right there with everybody else asking them to kindly shut the hell up. Like it or not, AT&T provides a service, and they’ve got an agreement with Apple and an agreement with the user as soon as you buy the phone.

And the whole ringtone situation is just a blatant example of crappy business practices on Apple’s part. Charging customers a dollar a pop to copy part of a song from one folder to another is just simply no way to build a good relationship with them. But I see that as a case where if you’re dumb enough to pay for it, then you deserve what you get. Especially if you’re dumb enough to pay $15 for an opportunistic hack to copy the files for you, since there were free utilities that worked just as well. (Neither of those work with the new firmware release). And still, like it or not, Apple has provided the “service,” such as it is, so they’re entitled to clamp down on attempts at competition. Stupid to do so, but entitled.

What makes no sense at all, though, is to clamp down on third-party development altogether. And it makes even less than no sense to accuse those of campaigning for third-party development, of being “whiners.” In the short time since the phone was released, we saw dozens of apps, many of which were as slick and polished as anything that came installed. It’s been proven that people can develop useful apps for the thing that won’t break the phone or bring down the cellular network. And more importantly, that there are plenty of people who recognize the true potential of a device like this, and how it’s so much more than a clumsy mail reader and Apple’s insulting web-development non-SDK.

I’ll bet you anything that Apple will never release a text adventure interpreter. I’m skeptical we’ll ever see a first-party eBook reader. We still don’t have a To-Do list. This is all stuff that even if Apple wanted to do, they shouldn’t be doing, because their resources are better spent elsewhere. Even if they insist on clamping down the software market for cheap third-party knock-off games like they have for the iPod, they’ll never be able to duplicate the amount or variety of software that hackers can come up with. It’s simply not competition.

Maybe Apple does have an open SDK for the iPhone in the works, who knows? At this point, I’m a lot more skeptical that we’ll eventually see one, than I was when I bought the damn thing. Because it’s clear that Apple only needs to put one out only if it wants to be purely altruistic, and that’s not really what they’re about. As it stands now, anybody who comments, “It’d be kind of cool to play Zork on an airplane” or “I just want a simple damn To-Do list I didn’t have to visit a web page to access” will hear the response, “Shut the hell up, whiner! The thing’s just fine as it is. DAMN I cannot get over how much this thing lets me check my e-mail!”

Today Apple demonstrated its love for the early adopters and hard-core Apple fanatics who’ve supported the company by announcing a 200-dollar price drop on the iPhone.

The best part, if you’re the type who reads the internets, is that it opened the door for all those who didn’t already buy an iPhone (you know, poor people) to jump on the various message boards and comment threads and shout “Suckers!!!!” So as if it weren’t enough to have Apple giving us the metaphorical kick in the nads, we’ve got the typical internet yabbos coming along and kicking sand in our faces.

It is to those fine yabbos that I offer the following retorts:

You know electronics are going to quickly drop in price.
Of course. Apple in particular is known for releasing new iterations and dropping the price on the new versions. But one third of the price after only two months is extreme. That’s not expanding the installed user base, that’s just saying “Screw you, suckers! Ha ha!” to the people who respect your company enough to give you money for version 1.0 of your product.

If it was worth that much money to you when you bought it, a price drop shouldn’t change that.
And if people could just be nice to each other, then there wouldn’t be war. Sure, I was willing to pay an obscene amount of money for a damn cell phone two months ago; that doesn’t mean I was happy about it. When are the doctors going to stop going on about videogame addiction and start looking into a cure for compulsive consumerism?

You paid $200 for bragging rights.
Who was bragging? Were people really going around saying, “Ha ha I just paid too much money for a cell phone! Suck on that!”

So my warning/advice still stands: if you want the phone but haven’t gotten one yet, wait for the next iteration. Sure, they’re cheaper now, but the cost was only one of the problems with the thing. It’s still buggy as hell, it doesn’t have enough software (although the third-party stuff is surprisingly sophisticated and easy to install, another “screw you, consumer!” from Apple), it doesn’t have enough storage, and will undoubtedly have improved features like GPS and the like in a future version.

If you just wanted the fancy iPod and portable web browser, I don’t know what to say about that; I needed a phone and didn’t want to carry around two devices.

A lot of Apple’s promotional stuff about the iPhone mentions all the ways you can communicate using only one finger. Which, of course, is appropriate, since what I have to say to Apple only requires one finger.

P.S.: Another one of the awesome announcements Apple made today is that they’ll be offering ringtones on the iTunes store for the low low price of two bucks each! That’s right, you get to pay them 99 cents for the privilege of copying a file from one folder to another! Go screw yourself, Apple!

I’ve already confessed on here that when it comes to Apple products, I’ve got less self-control than Eve, Snow White, and the guy from American Pie put together. So the day after they announced the new iMacs, I made the pilgrimage to the local Apple store just to feel of them. (Key finding: the 24″ iMac looks to be the best desktop computer they’ve ever made).

I would’ve gotten one of their new absurdly thin keyboards, but they’re not selling those individually yet, so I was lucky to make it out of there with just a copy of iLife ‘08.

And that’s where I just don’t get Apple anymore. On the hardware side, it’s been easy to see the trend: they’ve got a bulimic’s obsession with getting thinner and thinner. But on the software side, they’re sending mixed signals.

As far as I can tell, the philosophy for Apple-supplied software has been the same since the days of MacPaint and my beloved HyperCard: supply a full suite of creativity software for free with every new computer. Programs that any user can pick up and start using immediately, and then discover more powerful features as they get more familiar with them. It was excellent branding, building Apple’s reputation as the left-brain computer. And it was practical — with fewer third parties developing software, it was necessary for Apple to provide it themselves to keep Macs from getting a reputation for being unsupported.

But the last few iterations of iLife have been all over the map, when it comes to functionality and ease of use. Some of the additions are clearly welcome and downright ingenious. Others are just baffling.

The only iLife program I use consistently has been iPhoto, and that’s basically just as a glorified file browser. All the keyword and album stuff has been too clunky, unwieldy, and tedious to use; I use flickr for all the organization, picture naming and keywords, and sharing. The new version centers everything around Events, one of those things that you can tell is ingenious because it seems obvious in retrospect, but never occurred to me before. Apart from that, there are some genuinely improved editing tools, but nothing revolutionary. The other big batch of “new” stuff is all about .Mac photo galleries, and new publishing and printing options.

Which means templates. Back when iWeb was first announced, my initial excitement faded to disappointment as soon as I realized that the fancy show they put on at Macworld was the limit of what the program can do — it does allow you to set up a nice-looking web page just by dragging and dropping, every bit as quickly as they do it in the demos. But there’s nothing behind the curtain; once you’ve filled in their stock layouts, that’s the limit of what you can do. The company stresses how these programs allow you to express your creativity and individuality, as long as your creativity and individuality fit within their predesigned constraints.

GarageBand’s biggest new feature is a Microsoft Bob-like interface that lets you lay a single track on top of one of their prerecorded songs. iWeb promises greater control over your websites, but it’s really just a couple of new widgets and a way to insert a small bit of HTML on a page; nothing’s really been fixed in the inherent limitations designed into that program. And iDVD only adds more new templates and overall, feels like an afterthought — at least they’re prescient enough to realize that DVDs are on the way out and publishing via the web is the way things are going. (And they’re still trying to push the overpriced and limited .Mac service throughout, of course).

The standout for me has been the new version of iMovie. With earlier versions, I never saw the appeal. Like iWeb and GarageBand, it was a case of playing around with it for a few minutes, getting frustrated with the limitations, and never touching it again. Trying out the new version, though, was actually fun. I threw some clips together, added transitions and titles, and put it up on YouTube, all in about 30 minutes.

It’s a lousy, boring, and amateurish video, but that’s not the point: the point is that I enjoyed making it. I felt like I knew what I was doing the entire time. I tried things, and they worked. I scrubbed the mouse back and forth over the clip and could see exactly how it was going to turn out in the final, at any point. I understood how my clips were organized, I understood the effect most of the buttons and drags were going to have, and I felt encouraged to experiment. I wanted to put it online, as boring as it is, just to say, “Hey, look at what I made.” And I was encouraged to go out and shoot more video.

For all I know, it could very well be another case of iWeb syndrome: it seems powerful on the surface, but the more you try to play with it, the more you run into limitations. More than a few other Mac zealots were immediately incensed that Apple had “dumbed down” iMovie from its previous version (and Apple has made the previous version downloadable for those who don’t like the change). But based on what I’ve seen so far, it does what it’s supposed to do, and it actually makes it enjoyable. And it seems to be designed exactly like they claim: somebody started not just by looking at what other video-editing programs do and iterating on that, but by stepping back and saying, “I want to edit a video. What do I need to make that easy to do?” There are plenty of built-in transitions and titles and sound effects, but it still doesn’t feel like being locked inside Apple’s predesigned sandbox.

Then again, I’ve never tried to do much with flickr’s default layout. And I am completely at a loss to explain the popularity of myspace. Maybe people do like being constrained to templates and told what to do. I still can’t help but think that we’re taking a step backwards, though, trying to make computers easier to use by limiting what you can do with them.

This is going to be the last I’ll talk about the iPhone on here, at least until the next major software upgrade. Frankly, at this point, talking about it anymore would be just like, well, cuddling.

My buying advice, for what it’s worth: if you don’t already have one, don’t buy one. You’ve already survived the opening weekend hysteria, so you’ve got the willpower to wait until all the kinks are worked out. There will be a slew of point releases, followed by hardware releases, and version 2.0 will undoubtedly be better.

I still think the thing is plenty cool, and I don’t regret getting it at all. But I had the perfect storm of buyer incentive going on: the Apple monkey on my back, it came out a couple days after my birthday, the price worked out to be 7 shares of Apple stock, my contract on my old phone just ran out a couple of months ago, the battery had already run out, etc. If none of those apply for you, I suggest you wait.

This is definitely a version 1.0 device. “It just works” doesn’t ring true like it does with Macs; there’ve been plenty of occasions when it just doesn’t. The iPod and web browser and mail app crash pretty frequently — it doesn’t harm anything, it just stops playing music, or takes you back to the home screen. When you sync up again, iTunes presents your crash logs and the now-standard “would you like to send valuable feedback to Apple?” dialog box.

You can’t use it for more than a couple of hours without coming up with a list of improvements. It’s neat, but it would be even better if….

And have I mentioned that Apple doesn’t support third-party development for it? Because they don’t. One trivial app that is far from necessary but would be really convenient to have: an equivalent of Vince Lee’s LunchMaster, that could bring up a list of restaurants in a neighborhood, filter them by price and food type, and even choose a random one for you if you wanted. With the iPhone, it could even jump to the corresponding yelp.com entry if you wanted more info, let you call the restaurant, and get a map. But to do any of that, you’d have to have an internet connection, and it’s just not worth it.

On every single one of the ten billion blog posts, message board discussions, and articles written about the iPhone, there’s always, always has one of these comments:

My [existing cellphone type] didn’t cost that much, and it does everything the iPhone does! It’s not as pretty, but it’s functionally the same. There’s nothing revolutionary about this!

Which is completely missing the point. My RAZR phone had a web browser, camera, and media library. I never used them, because they were such a pain in the ass to deal with. A feature that never gets used is not a feature.

That’s why Apple keeps winning and gets away with charging so much for their stuff: because they’re one of the few companies that understands that. It’s not just translucent window borders, and it’s not a GNOME or KDE front-end on the UNIX filesystem, and it’s not Windows Mobile or, God forbid, the Motorola cell phone interface. It’s knowing how people use a device and then making that easier.

When you go to the settings menu on the iPhone, there’s a button that says “Phone.” Press it, and there’s a screen that says “AT&T Services”. And then there’s a screen that shows you all the different kinds of billing and usage information, as well as the corresponding dial code. Apparently I could find my used minutes at any point, even back when I had a RAZR, by dialing *646#. I never knew I could do this, so I never did it. That’s exactly where Apple wins.