Author: The Macalope

Passive/aggressive iPhone bashing

InfoWorld blogger has it down.

InfoWorld’s Bill Snyder has it down.

So, let’s see if the Macalope has the story straight. Tremendous douche makes questionable iPhone app, screws up the implementation, spamming his customers, and the conclusion we’re supposed to draw is “Don’t believe the iPhone hype! It’s a bad platform for developers!”

Until you get to the end, of course, when Snyder makes sure to note:

Don’t mistake this post for a knock on Apple or its platform.

Oh, Bill, how could we possibly do that?! What with a title like “iPhone apps: Fool’s gold for developers?”?! And a subheading like “Selling mobile apps on Apple’s iPhone App Store may seem like a surefire recipe for success. It isn’t.”?! And a section heading like “Lots of iPhone users, but no revenues”?! And another one like “Limitations in the iPhone make great apps harder to deliver”?!

Instead, see it as a cautionary tale and adjust your expectations and strategy accordingly.

Uh-huh. Basically, just ignore the title and headings of this story. I don’t even know why they’re there! They were just in the template I use!

Don’t bother emailing Snyder or commenting (or, really, even clicking through) to complain. The Macalope already knows what his response will be: “Sorry if you got offended.”

Piling on

OK, there’s bitching and then there’s primo grade-A bitching.

Macworld Already a Bummer, With or Without Apple.

“Worst. Macworld. Ever.” said one attendee after the Tuesday keynote. “This sucks.”

This displays little more than a lack of proper historical perspective. Gil Amelio ring any bells? Please, let’s not review the tape, people. It could get ugly.

It also displays a lack of proper verbiage. More correctly, the attendee should have said “Worst. Macworld. Expo. Keynote. Ever.” as he or she could not have been to the showroom floor yet.

Also, there’s all the drinking. We’re not nearly done with that.

This year’s keynote was an epic yawner.

Personally, while the keynote obviously lacked the big announcements of recent years, the Macalope found the iLife demonstration to be awesome, and the crowd seemed to agree.

No new iPhone.

Please. No serious analyst thought there would be a new iPhone.

No new iPod.

iPod? Nobody at all thought there would be new iPods.

No new iMac, and — despite lots of pre-show hype, rumor and buzz — no new Mac Mini.

Yes. A bunch of people thought there might be a new Mini and maybe a new iMac. But did Apple in any way shape or form lead anyone to believe there would be? No. This kind of sentence construction is designed to make you think that it’s somehow a failure on Apple’s part that they didn’t deliver an iMac or a Mini. It’s not.

You can be disappointed that Apple didn’t announce more (and, don’t be mistaken, the Macalope is) but you’re just being a tool if you’re claiming to be disappointed because Apple didn’t announce specific items “everyone said they were going to announce”.

The keynote also ended with a thinly veiled insult: Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — surely a goodbye middle finger to International Data Group, which owns Macworld Expo.

Of course it seems to be a middle finger if you’re the kind of person who sees everything through the prism of motives that appeal to your high-school Heathers mentality. The horny one actually thought it was a nice send-off.

Was it a great keynote? Well, no. Phil Schiller actually did a great job delivering it. Has anyone watched CEOs from other companies? They’d be lucky to have their keynotes delivered by Schiller, let alone Jobs. Apple followers are spoiled.

The problem is he just didn’t have that much to announce. But expecting pie-in-sky items like new iPhones and iPods is just jackassery in the third degree.

The Macalope will have some more thoughts on the keynote in his piece for Macworld on Thursday.

ADDENDUM: The Macalope, while not shy about profanity, doesn’t usually point it directly at a silly pundit, but in this case he’s going to make an exception for this:

Topping it off was Tony Bennett, who came onstage and belted out a couple of songs nobody under 60 knows.

Well, a pleasant fuck you to you, Mathew. The Macalope is well below 60 and was utterly thrilled to see a legend like Tony Bennett singing classic songs. Unless you go to Vegas frequently, this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see someone whose name will go down in history as one of the greatest performers. And so far everyone the Macalope’s talked to has raved about it.

Don’t be a dick.

Let the stupid begin!

BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows jumps on Jobs’ health right out of the gate. Maybe Jobs is sick, maybe he isn’t. The truth of the matter is that Macworld just doesn’t make sense for Apple anymore. Burrows doesn’t get it.

Here we have a company with $27 billion in the bank, that gets massive, global exposure from a talk that rarely lasts two hours. If Apple can’t see the ROI in Macworld, what company can justify the tradeshow bill?

Apple gets “massive, global exposure” when it sneezes. They’re the perfect example of a company that doesn’t need a trade show. Why go to all this trouble when all people have to do to learn more about your products is wander into one of your stores or open up a newspaper?

It’s still a sad moment for the Macalope. Macworld has been the place to get to know other Applephiles for 20 years. He won’t miss the conference, but he will miss the partying.

Unicorn chaser

Michael Gartenberg, quoted in this Macworld piece by Jim Dalrymple, provides a good tonic to the nonsense in the previous pieces:

“Economic slowdowns don’t stop spending, but it means people will be more careful what they spend their money on,” Michael Gartenberg, vice president of market research firm JupiterMedia and editor of the MobileDevicesToday blog, told Macworld. “In many cases they will spend their money on premium products that represent good value for the dollar—for many people that’s not necessarily the cheapest product.”

No, no, no! They’re going to buy cheap crap that doesn’t do what they want and breaks all the time!

And they all agreed it was the merriest Christmas ever

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Flash and Java won’t run by Christmas day

No Java, Flash for iPhone this Christmas

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
COMFORT AND JOY!
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

Ah, InfoWorld’s Paul Krill. You’ve got it backwards.

But no one seems to know why Flash and Java aren’t available for the iPhone.

Ooh! Ooh! Pick the Macalope! Pick the Macalope!

Uh, because they blow?

There has been some conjecture that the intermediary nature of Flash and Java, which lets applications run in the Flash Player and on the Java Virtual Machine, might stifle Apple’s control over what goes on the iPhone. But an industry analyst offered a less cynical theory:

C’mon, Paul. Bring it on home.

“Part of the problem, as I understand it, is the ARM processor” that powers the iPhone, says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

YES!

WE HAVE ENDERLE. REPEAT: WE HAVE ENDERLE.

Although the processor has the advantage of low power consumption, it also has slow performance. As a result, “neither Flash nor Java work on it very well,” Enderle says.

Rob is an obfuscation machine.

An ARM representative declined to comment on the iPhone but did note that the ARM processor can run Flash.

An ARM representative declined to comment on the iPhone but did note that Rob Enderle was dropped a lot as an infant.

iPhone developer Christopher Allen, founder of the iPhoneWebDev community, concurs that full Flash support on the iPhone “probably is beyond what the processor can do.” He notes that the Flash Lite runs on less powerful processors than what the iPhone uses but on those slower processors does not run most Web content.

But Allen believes that the iPhone could run Java today.

And here we have the real issue. Sure, the iPhone could run Flash, but — particularly given the already unoptimized state of Flash on OS X — it would probably have to run some stripped-down, crappier version of Flash.

Wait, there’s a crappier version of Flash? Dear god.

And Java? Well, Java’s just more about security, marketing and asthetics.

But who’s the loser here? Apple’s customers? The ones lining up to buy iPhones? Somebody should alert them because they don’t seem to know.