• Tim Cook tours iPhone production at new Foxconn plant
• Tim Cook Tours Foxconn’s New Zhengzhou Plant During Trip To China
• Glorious Apple Leader Surprises iPad Minions with Foxconn Visit and Smiles
• Apple CEO Tim Cook visited new Foxconn iPhone plant during China trip
• Apple’s Tim Cook Visits Foxconn IPhone Plant in China

Gizmodo: the source for important Lego-related news.

On Today’s Episode of Spot the Linkbait… originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on March 29, 2012.

Looking back through the roster of shitheadedness that is Douchebag’s Row, I’ve noticed a trend that may explain my particular level of contempt for its inductees: all of these guys are old enough to know better. By my logic, once you’ve been banging a keyboard on the tech scene for awhile, ignorance is tantamount to trolling. The latest bust to be carved is that of Jesus Diaz, Senior Contributing Editor for Gizmodo and a person who proves that experience does not necessarily require advanced age when it comes to being an asshole.

Diaz represents the next generation of blogger, one who has consistently shown that he’s learned much from his elder hit-whores. In addition to a less-than-perfect grasp of English diction and grammar, Diaz’s prose is possessed by the slap-worthy self-righteousness common to countries that lie between the Prime Meridian and the former USSR. His ubiquitous presence in the comment sections of not only the articles he writes, but on most of the articles on the site, throws the window into his douchebaggery wide open. So much so that the site actually banned him from commenting temporarily because of how abusive he was (“no link for hit whores” policy suspension due to sheer hilarity of the incident).

No DBR induction ceremony would be complete without a sampling of Diaz’s stylings, so here are some of my favorites:

About the decline in Steve Jobs’ health being the reason for his cancellation of a Macworld appearance in early 2009:

“According to a previously reliable source, Apple misrepresented the reasons behind Macworld and Jobs’ keynote cancellation. Allegedly, the real cause is his rapidly declining health. In fact, it may be even worse than we imagined”

The source, of course, was anonymous, but it didn’t keep them from dolling up the entry with some classy artwork to go with their unsubstantiated story:

Dicks...again

About the tight security surrounding Apple’s products, likening their tactics to those of the Nazi Gestapo (an excellent critique – and use of TMA’s douchebag trademark – from DED here).

“No, Tom (the story’s source) never lived in Nazi Germany, nor in East Germany, nor in the Soviet Union, nor in Communist China. He lives in the United States. For sure, he has never been scared of losing his life nor the ones he loves, like thousands of millions in those countries. But he knows how it feels to be watched, to always be considered guilty of crimes against another kind of state. He knew how it felt to have no privacy whatsoever when he was working right here, in a little Californian town called Cupertino, in a legendary place located in One Infinite Loop.

Tom knew about all that pretty well, back when he was working at Apple Inc.”

Lesson for junior link-baiters: few things bring in the link love better than comparing something trivial to the greatest atrocity of the 20th century.

His objective review of iPad app ecosystem:

“The iPad app store is now showing more than 100,000 apps available. That roughly means about one hundred apps that are actually awesome. Which, mind you, it’s about 97 more than everyone else. I don’t give a damn about the rest.”

To give you a sense of the kind of respect that Diaz’s posts elicit, the post was promptly followed by a flood comments listing awesome apps. Even now, Apple’s lame app store continues to hinder the iPad, evidenced by the fact that the company can’t seem to make enough of them.

His scintillating review of Apple’s latest OS, Lion:

“It breaks my heart to say this, but Mac OSX Lion’s interface feels like a failure.”

Another critical mistake on Apple’s part that has crippled Mac sales – oh wait – I mean the mistake that’s encouraging Macs to sell like crazy in a PC market that’s turned to shit. Almost had me there, Diaz.

His continued work reviewing the developer preview of Mountain Lion, an OS that won’t ship until this summer. That didn’t prevent him from giving it 3 stars, or for continuing his whiney detractions summarized thusly:

“It’s the antithesis of Jon Ive’s minimalistic design, all essence devoid of artifice.”

Maybe you meant “substance” instead of “artifice”? Or maybe your incorrect sentence structure mangled your point and you meant Ive’s design was “essence devoid of artifice”? Maybe I fell asleep 3 times trying to decipher the shitty writing that is your trademark.

And his latest contribution, a questioning of Apple’s tactics in acquiring the trademark for the iPad from a bankrupt troll:

“Proview—the former owners of the iPad trademark in China—is suing Apple in California for “fraud by intentional misrepresentation, fraud by concealment, fraudulent inducement, and unfair competition.” Are they right? This is how Apple tricked them. You be the judge”

If you were at all concerned that based on “You be the judge” that the evidence presented would be balanced, you need only look to the piece’s graphic – and the fact that the words were written by Jesus Diaz – that the facts would be somewhat tainted with an already-drawn conclusion.

Diaz does away with any illusion of objectivity in his summary: “Oh Steve, you dirty rotten scoundrel. How much I miss your ways (seriously). Between this and Mountain Lion’s Don Corleone approach to App Store features, you keep stealing my heart even after you are gone.” The practice of having a third party secure trademarks to prevent no-worth companies like Proview from milking the value of words is common, but don’t let a well-known business tactic jam the gears of your hate machine. That last sentence had a chance at some resonance if people didn’t already know you sold your heart for pageviews, just another Gawker whore holding onto his post at Gizmodo in the face of withering unpopularity (check the number of banned comments accompanying anything he writes) long after his co-contributors realized that there was life after penning lopsided anti-Apple screed.

So after what seemed like an eternity watching Jesus Diaz peg Apple for hits, TMA welcomes him into the hallowed halls of Douchebag’s Row, where Luddites and petulant children are embraced with equal warmth. Perhaps some day, during one of his SEO tantrums, Diaz will hold his breath long enough that we’ll all be free from his mangled, amateur, straw-man prose.

Douchebag’s Row Welcomes Jesus Diaz originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 28, 2012.

“It was obvious they were angry with the company about not being invited to some press conference or some big Apple event…We expected to see a certain amount of professionalism-this is like 15-year-old children talking.”

Unsurprisingly, Gizmodo also reads like 15-year-old children writing. So why would the highly-esteemed Gray Lady share anything with populist hit-whores more interested in pageviews than actual journalism?  For acting like populist hit-whores more interested in selling copy than actual journalism. That’s right: it looks like the New York Times has been Gizmodoed, which can either mean having Apple bitch-slap you with your press card or having your trade show pranked. I’m sure there’s a bunch of other things it could mean, but I’m only halfway through my first cup.

The real victim here is Times tech guy David Pogue, who was locked out of the Mountain Lion preview given to dozens of his tech press peers, and – how do I say this kindly – some people that were not. He was reduced to pulling impressions from other writers before he could get his hands on the developer preview, which was made available to all the unwashed through Apple’s Developer Center yesterday ($99 annual membership to ADC required). The shame is that Pogue’s reviews do right by Apple and he had enjoyed a Mossbergian level of access prior to the hilariously unsourced singling-out of the company for its labor practices with Foxconn in China. He should check in with those Business Section guys and thank them for “breaking out the gimp” on his career.

Update: Gruber confirmed what commenter Spade mentioned: Pogue had the same level of access as the rest of the technorati. Apparently he was next in line for an interview with Schiller.

Gizmodo Finally Has Something in Common with the New York Times originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 17, 2012.

RantSS for 2-15-12

Your iPhone’s Privacy Sucks Because of Apple—and Even Steve Jobs Agrees – Jizzmodo

We’re taking the address book permission issue and blaming it on Apple, because Google Analytics tells us that baiting people in possession of common sense accounts for 93% of our traffic. We even found a video of the brilliant dead guy who ran the company being quoted on a somewhat similar issue out of context.

Did Samsung just reveal a Galaxy Note 10.1 for MWC? – The Verge

Samsung makes a 5.3″ Galaxy Note, which is a giant phone with a stylus; they also make a 10.1″ (7″ and 8.9″) Galaxy Tab, which are tablets. The “10.1″ Galaxy Note” is either a PR screw-up created by the confusion inherent in maintaining a product line consisting of a bajillion undifferentiated knock-offs or of jamming a phone into a 10″ tablet is sheer deperation. Both possibilities are even money.

How Realistic Would a Robot Have to Be for You to Have Sex with It? – Jizzmodo

Read about the trending topic at all the Jizzmodo IRL meet-ups.

Apps uploading address books is a privacy side-show compared to DPI – TechCrunch

Deep Packet Inspection is a lot more intrusive than what Path did. Here’s a bunch of companies that do it now! Did we mention that more than 50 other apps do what Path did? Have we covered how Apple’s address book permission policies allow Path and others to do these things? Did we mention that TechCrunch enjoys 100% editorial independence from potential influencers like CrunchFund?

Video: Photoshop CS6 Content-Aware Move, Extend Makes Us Drool – Mac|Life

Here’s one feature that you can use to justify spending $600 on a program that’s now 90% feature redundant with programs costing 5% as much. Remember to fasten your bib prior to buffering.

News: Realmac Software releases Clear - iLounge

Absolutely every other tech site has reported on this app and I’m stumped as to why this is. It’s maybe the 12th most useful and 3rd prettiest app in the most crowded category of the App Store, but I predict it will be upheld as an example of app excellence because you can pinch, spread and pull to manipulate the UI. For this reason it will also be a deserved object of competing platforms’ ridicule.

FLA head describes Foxconn plants as ‘way above average’ – MacNN

/cue Change.org response about 1. the FLA being paid plants with no objectivity, 2. use of the term “average” and a warning to guilty westerners that “average” in Chinese means life-threatening and/or soul-sucking. 3. Apple having too much money, gotten through arbitrary means and compounded at an interest rate derived from the value of the souls and backs of cheap, exploited labor.

Congress Wants Answers From Apple On Apps Stealing Address Book Contacts – Cult of Mac

Dear Mr. Cook:

I really don’t have a clue about technology, but I do know that your company receives the vast majority of technology coverage in the media today, which means my political future could stand to benefit from your answering my questions relating to an ongoing issue that has only recently been getting media attention. Apple has a track record of answering inquiries issues from elected officials, so I have a better than average chance of being able to parley this letter into some future favor among this country’s younger voters.

I’ve cut and pasted something taken from various blogs across the intertubes that I think frames my inquiry, and juxtaposed it against an excerpt from your own developer guidelines in a way that I think makes it look like something important. The following is a list of questions, most of which overlap each other, that I will have a young person on my staff, Felipe Mendoza, to translate the answers to in “elected official speak” for me. I’ve added a respond-by date, because I want it to look like I mean business.

Sincerely,

Some generic politician

Some trumped-up title

Some subcommittee that does nothing

Apple: iOS update to require user permission for apps to access contacts – Macworld

Last call for all editorializing about Apple’s contacts permission policy, 7 day extension granted to all blogs who want to bitch about how it should have been done sooner.

To Read, Or Not To Read – parislemon

Sigh.

TMA RantSS: Because Long-form Writing is Hard originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 15, 2012.

Mat Honan’s “If Apple Wins We All Lose” is an archtype of this kind of rhetoric, and it’s no surprise that it came from Gawker Media’s Gizmodo. It’s surprisingly worse than most of the word count published on this topic, which makes it kind of fun to take apart.

Yesterday’s news that courts had ruled against HTC in favor of Apple was a tidy little victory for Apple. But HTC is just an initial skirmish in a much larger fight. The real war is against Android, and if Apple wins that, we’ll all lose.

Apocalyptic topic sentence echoing apocalyptic byline: check.

The iPhone was like nothing that came before. And Apple should be able to protect its innovations and intellectual property. But the Cupertino Crew doesn’t just want to do that; it wants to kill Android. It wants Google’s mobile OS to go away. No settlements. No licenses. Dead. Jobs said as much, very explicitly.

This philosophical “middle ground” between the ability to protect one’s intellectual property and not having a patent system has to be restated several times throughout pieces like this. It’s what I like to call the “standard disclaimer”. Even though every other word in the article is going to be a slam against both the patent system and of Apple’s claims within the system, because the author doesn’t want to come off as a (bigger) moron, he’s obligated to it pay lip service.

There are two avenues Apple can take to achieve this victory: the marketplace and the courts. I’d be all for Apple winning fair and square in the marketplace. It’s okay for consumers to decide the victor in this fight. But it’s not okay for a handful of judges and lawyers to dictate the direction of technology. For Apple to win in the marketplace—and I mean total dominance here, the kind of thermonuclear war that an apoplectic Jobs described in Walter Isaacson’s biography—it would require both innovation on a massive scale, and real price competitiveness. Realistically, that’s not going to happen. It’s already impossible, at least in the next three years. Android’s foothold with consumers is already too strong. Its phones are too inexpensive, and Google and its device manufacturing partners are too committed to Android for it to fail completely.

So the marketplace and the courts are mutually exclusive venues–the only 2 options for companies wanting to display market dominance. Interesting. I always imagined the marketplace as a complex organism subject to many axes of competition, both quantitative and qualitative – price, quality, design – to name a few. Some of these axes can be protected by intellectual property law. The “how and why” of how this property is protected is always up for debate, but you can’t make an argument that no system is better than a broken one. Apple is a company with a history of being fucked over on the intellectual property playing field. The mistake was entirely theirs, it was exploited in the absence of their leader and it factors largely into how Apple perceives the value of its IP and the lengths it is willing to go to protect it.

So that leaves the courts, where Apple keeps pressing its case—largely against device manufacturers. That’s not okay. The patent system is broken. Deeply, and profoundly so. The system that was created to foster and protect innovation, now serves to strangle it dead. Apple has real innovation. And real invention. So why act like a cheap patent troll, taking advantage of a body of under-qualified legal professionals to make decisions about which technologies consumers will be able to use? Does that bother anyone else?

Again, Apple is not responsible for how “broken” the patent system is in this country. Its only choices are:

1. To defend its intellectual property.
2. Not to defend its intellectual property.

If Apple does not defend its patents, it forfeits future rights do so. This is common knowledge in all businesses that are subject to patents, and it’s certainly not “trolling”. It seems as though Honan saying that because the system is, in his opinion, broken, that Apple has no right to defend its innovations. This rhetorical masturbation has become the trademark of Gizmodo’s writing.

Granted, the iPhone was a sea change. So was the iPad. And Apple ought to be able to protect the innovations and intellectual property that set those devices apart. If Apple was only competing on iron-clad patents—if it was just forcing its competitors to think way out side of the box, that would be great for innovation. But it’s not. Apple is playing the same stupid games everyone does in the patent wars today.

Here we go again with the Apple deserves to defend property/Apple doesn’t serve to defend this property. Apple subjected 10 patents – patents that were granted by the USPTO – for consideration by the ITC. One of them was found to be infringed upon. Is Honan’s stance that none of these patents merit protection? Apparently they don’t rise to the “iron-clad” standard that is the foundation of…oh, I guess this “iron-clad” proviso doesn’t exist in any of this country’s current patent law. Could it be that Mat Honan is making up legal terms in an attempt to generate interest on a topic that has been beaten to death, resurrected and beaten to death about 500 times?

A little bit about patents: For something to be patentable, it must be (or at least it should be) novel and non-obvious. You should not be able to find existing examples of it in prior art—in other words, when you look at the history of similar products, whatever you’re patenting needs to be unique.

I admit I laughed out loud at that. Mat Honan, obviously an officer of the USPTO, is going to educate us about patent law. Allow me to secure my bifocals and Number 2 pencil.

Now, certainly, some of Apple’s good stuff is novel. No one had ever seen anything like the iPhone prior to 2007. Yet clearly some of the things Apple is gunning to protect are, well, obvious.

Oh wait – you mean that’s it? That’s your entire lecture? Jesus and I thought I needed to go to school for this. I thought there was an entire government agency dedicated to this – one which apparently didn’t share Dr. Honan’s opinion about what’s patentable.

What Apple won the rights to in this most recent HTC case, was basically a patent on the act of recognizing patterns and acting on them—like when you tap on a phone number in an email to launch your dialer and make a call. Thing is, Google was recognizing numerical strings (including phone numbers) and tailoring search results to them long before the iPhone came out. Dating back to at least 2006 (maybe earlier) you could enter a UPS tracking code into Google, and it would parse that number, ping UPS and return tracking information at the top of the search results. It would do the same thing with phone numbers. It basically did everything the iPhone did, short of make calls. Was it non-obvious for a mobile phone to do what a search engine was doing? I don’t know. I certainly think it’s debatable, yet this is the issue that Apple just beat HTC on.

Actually, some people that know what they’re talking about when they get behind a keyboard provided a concise history of the ’647 patent, one that predates whatever Honan thought Google was doing with UPS tracking codes. As a matter of fact, it was granted in 1999. If journalistic integrity was valued in the blogosphere, this catastrophic misstatement of fact would put a site like Gizmodo out of business. Sadly, the “durrrr Google did something like this first” smoking gun is as factual as the author gets.

Likewise, the iPad also had many novel features—like that genius subtle backside curve that makes the device so easy to pick up off a flat surface. But if you look at what Apple wants to get Samsung to drop—the bezel and the rounded corners and the rectangular shape and even the color—it’s clear that Apple wants Samsung to try to make something that goes against good design principles established well before Apple rolled out the iPad.

This is not what Apple did. It is what your site’s flametarded editor said, illustrated by flametarded Photoshops that he made to put Apple in the worst possible light at the expense of the facts. If you’re interested in what Apple was actually trying to do when it made recommendations to Samsung about how it could change the design of its tablet so that it didn’t infringe on the iPad, you would know that if Samsung had decided to do one thing differently, it would not be infringing. The Xyboard? Not infringing. Apple did not say “do all of these things at once”. I swear Gizmodo is trying to make the internet stupider one post at a time.

I think a lot of this can be blamed on Apple’s past history. It lost big in the courts once before. And it’s determined not to do so again. In some ways, Apple is becoming the George Wallace of technology companies. In 1958 George Wallace lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Alabama to his opponent John Patterson, who campaigned on a more virulently racist pro-segregation platform than Wallace had. In response, Wallace said he’d never be out-segged again. Nor was he. In 1962, Wallace stormed into the Governor’s office and national stage on a campaign of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Apple’s Wallace moment came in 1994, when it lost a massive legal battle after the courts ruled that it could not prevent Microsoft and HP from shipping computers with graphical user interfaces that used the desktop metaphor. Apple argued that its copyrights were being violated, but the court decided Apple’s copyrights weren’t afforded patent-like protections.

This paragraph actually elicited a verbal response from me. That response was “Wow”. It’s like the entire universe of comparative anecdotes compressed into an infinitely small point and then exploded with the intensity of a billion novae. What the fuck does a racist politician’s segregation platform have to do with a company defending its IP? The best I can come up with is that Apple is supposed to be riding an unpopular practice (defending Honan’s “softer than iron-clad” IP) harder the second time it had the opportunity to do so (the iPhone) after not having the opportunity the first time (against Microsoft).

(Of course, it didn’t help that Apple wasn’t the first company to ship a computer with a graphical user interface, mouse and a desktop metaphor. That was Xerox, which had all that on its Alto. In fact, the original plan for the Macintosh business unit was written surreptitiously on a Xerox Alto during off-hours at Xerox PARC. So it goes.)

It’s curious how, after claiming to have read Steve Jobs’s biography, Honan could misstate the Xerox PARC anecdote so egregiously. Misrepresenting the PARC story is fundamental to those wishing to dismiss any claims Apple may have on its intellectual property. After all, didn’t they rip off poor Xerox?

But something changed in between the time the Macintosh was released in 1984 and when the iPhone rolled out in 2007: software patents. They weren’t widely applied until the 1990s. This happened to co-incide quite nicely with Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. And by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was game on. And so, in 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, after scoring big points with the crowd on the iPhone’s features, he did a little endzone dance for the competition, crowing that the company had patented the Bejesus out of its fancy new phone. It had learned its lesson in fighting Microsoft on copyright rather than patents, and was clearly determined to out-patent anyone else in the then-nascent smartphone market. Now we’re seeing the fruits of those patents. They’ve afforded Apple some significant victories. But if you look at the past as prologue, as Apple seems to be doing, I don’t think it’s so clear that it would ultimately be good for Apple to kill Android in the courts. And it certainly won’t help consumers.

In other words, Apple felt it had been duped and out-maneuvered by Microsoft, so it wanted to take whatever legal measures were available to defend its intellectual property with the iPhone in 2007. I guess Honan gets paid by the word. At least I hope he does.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine Apple had been successful in its suit against Microsoft. Imagine Microsoft had been prohibited from shipping Windows 2.0 or Windows 3.0—or, by God, Windows 95—without licensing the hell out of it from Apple. Where would we be? Without Windows there to pressure Apple to Build Something Better, things would be very different in Cupertino today. After it lost its case with Microsoft and saw its market share dwindle to nothing, Apple had to innovate like crazy. Had Apple won, it never would have had to transition from the System 7-era to Mac OS X. It never would have had to buy NeXT. It never would have had to bring prodigal son Steve Jobs back into the fold. Without Mac OS X, there would be no iOS. And without iOS, no iPhone, no iPad.

/takes massive bong hit

So you mean, like, intellectual property rights actually kill innovation? I mean, that’s like totally the opposite effect of what the people designing the system want it to have, maaaaaaaan! Imagine that…under my fingernails…a tiny universe might exist! Thought experiment maaaaaaan!

George Wallace used segregation as a bludgeon, quite effectively, to win elections. But today, it’s clear that he ultimately injured himself, Alabama, and the nation as a whole for very many years to come.

Keep banging that drum, Mat. I know your totally relevant recounting of an obscure southern election jammed into the mold of IP defense tactics is going to make the Harvard Business Review any day now. Or Worst Fucking Analogies Ever Quarterly. One of those two.

I’m all for seeing Apple defend its intellectual property. But Android is a healthy force in the marketplace. If Apple can destroy it there, more power to Tim Cook and company. But if Apple beats Android in the courts rather than the marketplace—if it out-segs Google instead of out-innovating it—that may be great for Apple, but it will be bad for society, bad for technology, and ultimately bad for Apple.

Third time’s a charm, I guess. You’re not for Apple defending its property, Mat. You’re for a generalized defense of intellectual property based on some criteria you don’t even define very well. But please, feel free to squawk like a racist Eric Schmidt with your “patents are the antithesis of innovation in the marketplace” horseshit.

And of course, the great irony is that so much of the amazing innovation that Apple pulled off over the past three decades can be traced back to its willingness to swipe ideas from Xerox. Steve jobs was fond of quoting Picasso, saying “good artists copy, great artists steal.” If Apple does succeed in crushing Android in the courts, where will it get its next great idea? My guess is that it won’t come from a lawyer.

So there’s your wrap-up, which touches on the mandatory “iron-clad” talking points present in any piece that slags Apple for defending its patents: a misrepresentation of the Xerox PARC story and the standard out-of-context quote from Jobs about Picasso, wrapped up with a quip about how ironic it all is.  Where will the next great piece about Apple, Android and the intellectual property landscape in this country come from? My guess is that it won’t come from Mat Honan.

OK Magazine: Culture :: Gizmodo: Technology originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on December 20, 2011.

It’d be cooler if Gizmodo had this kind self-deprecating, whistling-past-the-graveyard humor, but we all know they’re not really that self-aware.

Someone Should Have Gone to Jail… originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on October 24, 2011.

In addition to all this iPhone cosplay, a second device emerged: the “iPhone 4S”. It was hypothesized that the 4S would attack the low-end market, would share some traits of current iPhone 4, but would also be “enhanced” – something I dismissed as ridiculous. The 4S was viewed as sort of like the 3GS – a phone that in retrospect got a bad rap – mostly because it looked the same. Even though it was markedly faster and had a better camera than the 3G, because it didn’t look different, it didn’t represent a significant improvement over the iPhone 3G.

Now that the announcement is over, we know that the 4S is it. There is no iPhone 5. But why am I getting such a whiff of disappointment? Let’s think about what the iPhone 4S turned out to be from a hardware perspective:

• A5 processor
• 8MP camera
• Intelligent switching antennae
• Siri intelligent personal assistant

Now what isn’t it?

• A wider, (maybe) higher-ppi screen
• A new case design

So what was the iPhone 5, really? It was an over-piling of the least plausible, least corroborated rumors about the 4S piled onto some mythical device. So why all the hate (AAPL is down 3.75% as of 3:00 EST)? Because we bought into 2 things: a device called the 4S that would be a “bargain device” – a fucking ridiculous premise to begin with – and the fact that Apple “had” to do something radical over and above it – whatever that something radical was. What we got was a cheaper iPhone 4 to chip at the low-end market (which I, and a lot of other people, called) and almost all of the predicted device improvements included in the new 4S (and at least one no one called – the smart antennae).

I expect the hate to flow into the comment sections of Gizmodo and Engadget articles on the 4S like the Dark Side through Anakin. I may have spent some time in the fantasyland of the iPhone 5 as well, but I have no one but my irrational self to blame for it.

The iPhone 4S: What’s in a Name, Really? originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on October 4, 2011.

“This just in.. Ford sues the whole motor industry for copying the Model T. 4 wheels.. Check! Steering wheel.. Check! Combustion engine.. Check! I know.. Crazy huh?”   –Some Engadget douchebag

“Clearly subjective. The “user interface” is nothing like IOS outside of the square app options. This suit is rediculous and I hope Steve Jobs dies already.”   –Classy Gizmodo commenter (currently “unstarred”, but with SJ comment and rediculous spelling, it’s only a matter of time)

So why does Apple continue to fire lawsuit salvos from behind its “walled garden”?

Because you didn’t design the iPhone. Neither did Samsung (LOL@the Samsung fantards, BTW). Apple did. And the way the intellectual property protection system works in technology, if you invest in something, you patent it. It could be highly technical and difficult to reverse-engineer or not so technical and trivially easy to rip off. Sometimes, the “easy to rip off” stuff is harder to get right than the components that support it. The particularly uninformed have a hard time grasping this. Someone had to do more than think of this stuff. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t you. That’s why you’re not bringing products to market and “trade dress” is a part of what’s protectable.

*ahem*

Like any system designed to protect, the trademark and patent system in this country can be abused. TMA isn’t claiming to agree with the specifics of every Apple claim with regard to “look and feel”, but the overarching rationale behind them is hard to knock. This isn’t about Apple trying to extort annuities in the form of licensing agreements from companies, a strategy that dying whales like Microsoft and Nokia are clinging to. This is about protecting the enormous investment Apple made in developing a product that was unlike anything before it, but is serving as the copy-glass original for everything since.

You Couldn’t Design the iPhone originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on April 20, 2011.

“For lucky individuals, the process merely hangs on step seven (out of ten); rebooting the phone resurrects it, albeit without the upgrade. For a minority of unlucky users, the process fails at step six, and corrupts the phone’s firmware. What’s worse is that for some of them it appears to be bricking the phone completely, rendering it useless.”

I also found this bit about how to find out if your smartphone is going to implode when updating entertaining:

“Figuring out which firmware version you have is a somewhat awkward procedure. From the phone’s dialer, type ##634#, then press the call button. This will start up Samsung’s Diagnosis application.

In the Diagnosis application, type *#1234#. This will show a screen of detailed version information. It’s the first three version numbers (for “PDA”, “Phone”, and “CSC”) that are relevant here. If the firmware versions are older (JIx, JJx) then the update probably won’t work; if they’re newer (JKx) it probably will.”

Sounds a lot like a troubleshooting procedure for a certain desktop OS. To all you IT dickheads who stood by your man and sold this bag of turds as the enterprise solution to your company, please commence sucking it.

In a way, I wish Microsoft would throttle back on the cock-ups, lest parties concerned about the direction of the company become alerted and attempt to seize control. To date, it appears that investors and the all-star board of directors are content to watch this flaming car wreck unfold in slow-motion frame by hilarious frame.

Windows Phone 7 First Update: Bricking Phone, Corrupting Firmware is a Feature, Not a Bug originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on February 22, 2011.

Oh. Well, it does explain a lot. And a brother’s gotta eat, right?

Anyway, I give stuff and I get stuff. I have WordPress and a keyboard, so that qualifies me to make a tech gift guide. Let’s start with things you shouldn’t think of giving someone, or should give if you want the message to be “I loathe you intensely”. 10 sounds like a nice round number. Because I don’t hate you like CNet or Silicon Alley Insider does, I’m not going to try and artificially inflate my pageviews by extending the list to 10 pages. That’s not entirely true. Since I don’t know how to extend the list to 10 pages and haven’t figured out how to put ads into my content in a way that doesn’t look retarded, you’re getting the list all on one page.

10. Digital Photo Frames Nothing says “Home” quite like a picture frame surrounding a shitty LCD display with an AC adapter tail, cycling poorly-lit cellphone pics of your kids. Place one on a doyley for added kitschy charm.

9. Wireless Charging Bed Jamming an adapter into my iPhone so I can place it in a specific location wirelessly is the same as jamming an adapter in to my iPhone and tethering it to the wall. And about $90 cheaper.

8. Netbook Stab at some undersized keys on an underspecced laptop with shitty but relatively operable Windows XP, less shitty but stripped to the asshairs Windows 7 or some Linux distro (for those you truly hate or the neckbeard that hates himself) and watch your productivity soar! /cue sarcasmmetershatter.mp3

7. Windows 7 Phone Contrary to what the Gizmodo Tit in Redmond wants you to believe, this app-less exercise in UItardery is a 3-year-too-late and several-dollars-short death rattle from Ballmer’s asphyxiating Borg.

6. Bluetooth earpiece Attention soccer moms and pinstripe gelheads: this ear apparatus (earparatus: judges?) dismisses any doubt that you are a douchebag. Buy a rig for your car and put the phone to your head when you want to yap on about your thoroughly uninteresting lives outside of where it’s appropriate – namely your house and out of earshot of TMA.

5. Tilt to Live for the iPhone or iPad A former friend recommended this game to me. 24 hours later I woke up having topped 5,000,000 points, but divorced, bankrupt and packed in a bathtub filled with ice. Inflict this game upon those whose productivity you aim to destroy.

4. iPad Case I’m sure you mean well, but do you really know how someone works well enough to choose from the 3 billion iPad cases on the market? Spare the person for whom you are buying from having to make the lose-lose choice of not using your gift and having you resent them and using it despite the fact that they don’t want to and having them resent you.

3. Anything involving physical media CD, DVD, BluRay: it doesn’t matter. People shouldn’t have to put a disc into a reader to consume content. Yea, yea 1080p yadda yadda. If the difference between 1080 and 720p means that much to the person you’re buying for, they’ve probably already got something 10 times more expensive than you can afford to give them. And they’re probably uppity and shallow to boot. Find a new friend.

2. Nook Color or Kindle DX What’s not an entry level e-reader, definitely not an iPad and is likely to be the last nail in the coffin of at least one major media retailer? Something you’re hopefully not buying for someone that you care about. If you’re cheap and they’re nerds, get them a Kindle. If you care: iPad.

1. GoogleTV device One of the most influential players in technology decided to release a family of devices running a version of Android that sits atop your TV and lets you take in all of the networks’ online content for free…uhhh…let’s you watch YouTube for free. For $300. From the UI geniuses behind Wave. C’mon, people: there’s enough hate in the world.

The TMA Holiday Gift Guide: Crappy Gifts Edition originally appeared on TheMacAdvocate on November 29, 2010.