Apple's curiously uninteresting iPhone 3.0 announcements

I love the constant digs at Apple on this "Windows" blog. The title "uninteresting iPhone..." Yet we just had a post about Windows 7's logon screen. Now /that's/ uninteresting.

Subzerohitman721- As stated above I am a hardcore Mac fan and if you can find the incident where I called you or anyone else names I will give you five bucks. You can't because I didn't and I am sorry that doesn't fit the narrative of Mac fans being zealots. Per your points: 1. Apple does some things incorrectly. Yes. The sky is also blue. 2. You can call it a "non-story" but an update to the fastest growing mobile phone platform is a story. If you think updated APIs are no biggie then that pretty much excludes any OS update as being a big deal as the real meat of an an OS update is in the APIs. 3. You can call it journalism, being critical, or a duck for that matter. This blog post is not journalism. Critical? Yes. A duck? No. One out of three isn't even good by Meatloaf's standards. 4. A basic logic class would teach you that hypocrisy doesn't make a person wrong. Secondly, I don't think you or anyone else has shown how other people in the "industry" fail to be objective. 5. Your point is clear. Your point is also factually suspect and lacks merit.

"This isn't Supersite for Mac, this is the Supersite for Windows. If you guys can't hack it, go somewhere else." I strongly suspect that of the 30 million iPhone/iPod Touch users, the vast majority hook those devices up to Windows machines. So explain to me again why this story is irrelevant to Windows users. Oh, that's right. You can't. You need to separate "Apple" from "Mac". Apple is a consumer electronics company that produces a computer line called "Macintosh", among many others.

@ModernDislocation - "I am not sure who said voice memos are "revolutionary" but a quick search of this page..." They did not use the word revolutionary, so in that matter you are right. But, there are at least 2 people that spoke of Voice Memos as not being part of the catch up, though...lotsamystuff and DavidR9. I had Voice Memos on my old standard phone before I had my Omnia. So yes, that is a catch up feature. Regardless, the iPhone/iPod Touch is pretty cool. My kid just bought a Touch to replace her Zune, so I have had a chance to play with it a bit. Not bad....when I did my side by side between an iPhone and an Omnia, I chose the Omni for 2 reasons...Verizon's network and the iPhone was way more sluggish than the Omnia. The scrolling worked better and it had the feaures that I wanted. You seem pretty decent; and unlike the regular iCabal on this site, understand the difference between preferring a product and an unhealthy obsession with one. Welcome to the fray! --tayme

"....all I hear is the sound of crickets....and daisies being pushed up." Yes, "Waethorn", you've been proclaiming the death of the iPhone since before its introduction. Give it up. You were—and are—wrong. "Dead Steve Walkin'" You really are an a$$, Wae. You have absolutely no class whatsoever.

"Is there anything that says that there cannot be more than one port?" Ask Apple that one. "You have a financial stake in it and were willing to sell Macs, if only the price was right." The price wasn't the only thing. The contractual obligations were the other. Dealing with Apple's arrogance was a deal-breaker, as it is with most private resellers. That's why private resellers around here don't last very long. That, and I can't stand OS X, but I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Then there's the fact that they don't use desktop components in their "desktop" computers, making it a lesser value for the customer. Oh, and then there's the fact that there's no really no demand around here. In the last 4 months, I had exactly 2 people that I can remember, come in saying they had a Mac. One is a repeat customer that also buys PC's (including an $1800 workstation-grade graphics system for CS4 that's a much better value than the low-end Mac Pro). The other was that uni student that spilled pop on his MacBook, effectively frying it beyond repair. "It's been iPhone OS since the beginning. You're wrong." So you're contradicting Steve "bag-o-bones" Jobs? He stated it was OS X on the phone back when 1.0 was being released. "Yes, "Waethorn", you've been proclaiming the death of the iPhone since before its introduction. Give it up. You were—and are—wrong." I was talking about Jobs. You are clueless. "You really are an a$$, Wae. You have absolutely no class whatsoever." That's hilarious. Calling someone names and then declaring that *THEY* have no class. Hilarious!

"I was talking about Jobs. You are clueless." Ah, so your "daisies being pushed up" was a reference to your prediction of Steve Jobs' imminent demise. And then you defend yourself as NOT being a classless jacka$$? I'm sure the stunning irony is lost on you, "Waethorn".

Waethorn, I find it hard to believe that you ever looked into carrying Macs in your store. Just from your own post where you say you, "can't stand OS X" and iMacs, "a lesser value for the customer." In my experience good salesmen believe in the products they sell. You don't believe in Macs so you shouldn't sell Macs. The other thing I find it hard to believe is that an Apple rep ever actually came into your store, given Apple's arrogance and yours how could both egos fit in the same room? The funniest comment you make is, "the fact that there's no really no demand around here." How would you know? You're like a horse salesman in 1917 saying there's no demand for cars. Of course there is no demand for Macs in YOUR store because you don't sell them. Regards Joe

"I find it hard to believe that you ever looked into carrying Macs in your store." I look at carrying many products. "In my experience good salesmen believe in the products they sell. You don't believe in Macs so you shouldn't sell Macs." I don't. "The other thing I find it hard to believe is that an Apple rep ever actually came into your store" They don't usually. Most resellers never see a company rep unless it's at a trade show or something, but I can tell you that I have NEVER seen Apple at any trade shows put on by their authorized distributors either. I even talked to a reseller in Toronto in the last month. He no longer sells Macs. "How would you know?" Considering there are so few customers in a computer store looking for Mac help, I'd say it's an accurate assessment. There are also no local Apple stores. If there was demand, Apple probably wouldn't be so stupid as to not put up one of their own stores. Or would they?

"OS X is the name of the desktop operating system as a whole. He was asked what OS was running on the hardware. He said it was OS X. OS X is the name of the operating system that includes the Core framework API's, the Mach kernel, Quicktime API's, Aqua interface, etc." Yes, well done. In the same way MS can say Windows is running on mobile devices - that does not mean it is exactly the same OS. It means they are related to each other - either via the framework or the frameworks on top of the kernel. It's also worth noting that the phrase OS X is just referring to a collection of technologies - if he was trying to imply a specific OS X operating system, he would have said it ran on Tiger / Leopard. As it is, he didn't "He didn't say it included "components of OS X", or "the kernel of OS X" either. So it was a lie. Ask losta about grammatical semantics." It's implied. If you understood anything about operating systems, or developing for embedded systems, you'd realise that's it's quite blatantly obvious they cannot use the _exact_ same operating system, due to hardware and space constraints (and in some cases pure impracticality/pointlessness). But being based predominantly upon the same technology, they expected the readers to be intelligent enough to fathom that it is not exactly the same. "They refer to it as "OS X on iPhone". It isn't, of course." That's entirely subjective. It has Cocoa, it has the same UNIX base, and presumably a lot of the same core functionality. What's your rationale for it not being OS X on iPhone?

Waethron, the douche, shows his lack of general knowledge shown in this comment from a different thread "Really? I like to think that spec sheets are as objective as you can get. That's probably why I don't buy into Apple's marketing, claiming that their products are the newest thing since sliced bread. The spec sheets show otherwise though." He thinks that SPEC SHEETS alone explain performance of a computer. He may have windows knowledge, but he certainly doesn't have computer science knowledge! LOL.

Uh, what about third party accessories? That is something I haven't see anyone else do yet. Any third party hardware maker can build and app and take full advantage of the 30 pin input and bluetooth connectivity. Again, I haven't seen that on anyone else's phones. To me that seems like the biggest announcement today. And you can bet that this is more meaningful than a simple sound controls on a stereo. As an experimental physicist, I can see using a few dozen Touches as wifi connected sensors. Sounds expensive, @ $300/ touch, but the development time would be lighting fast and simple enough for any technician to adjust and monitor.

I have to agree with Paul on this one... Apple has always had us used to important major version updates whether on OSX or on iPhone. iPhone OS 2.0 was a major jump in functionality compared to OS 1.0 that settled the iphone dominance in big part thanks to the AppStore. I was expecting a revamped UI to address the pain of people like me who have tens of apps installed on their phones and for whom it's a pain to go through pages of icons. Tethering seemed like a no-brainer and copy-paste should have been included long time back in a minor update even though I don't miss it, but it's a good thing it's here. Ditto for bluetooth headsets. So now there's just a new business model to help partners reep a bit more $ from us... not revolutionary but typical Apple. For me it seems now like Apple is just trying to keep its iPhone afloat against the wave of new devices coming (including the Pre) but rushing to include the things that should have been here long time back. Apple is not doing leaps anymore vs. the competitors in order to keep its dominance. That's a bad sign. And related to that, the brain behind the iPod/iPhone Development has jumped ship a while ago to develop the Palm Pre... So it's no miracle if Palm is in that situation now and Apple playing catch-up !! http://www.palm.com/us/company/management-team/rubinstein-jon.html

"Apple is not doing leaps anymore vs. the competitors in order to keep its dominance. That's a bad sign. " They're DOOMED! One step away from being "beleaguered"!

"And I can't run a lot of Windows programs on a Windows mobile device, so therefore it isn't Windows. You argument holds no water what-so-ever." There is only one OS X product series aside from what's on the iPhone. Since the kernel in OS X is Mach, and the iPhone presumably includes it according to Apple, it wouldn't take much to port everything over, considering most of OS X is open source. I even remember reading somewhere online that the "OS X" that's on the iPhone 1.0 was based on a late build of Tiger since Leopard was still in beta or something like that. It doesn't have a complete feature set of Cocoa though, nor does it include Aqua, so it isn't OS X anymore. It's something completely different. OS X is Apple Mac OS 10 for desktop (and laptops, and servers, etc.). That's not what's on the iPhone. Apple's marketing gets a failing grade by calling it "OS X". At best, they can say it's "based on subset of components of the full set of features of OS X". They didn't though. That's the problem. Windows CE, by comparison, is a completely different OS from Windows 9x & NT series OS's. Windows Mobile isn't called "Windows XP for Pocket PC" either. "Windows Mobile was originally called "Pocket PC"." I had a Casio E125 when they first shipped. That's wrong though: see below. "Since it lacks all the features of a PC, and doesn't actually fit in your pocket, Microsoft was lying." Wrong again. It had Outlook Mobile, Excel Mobile, Word Mobile, and Internet Explorer Mobile, much like a desktop PC. They aren't called "Outlook 2007" etc. So there isn't a misunderstanding with the moniker. Also, I could easily fit my Casio into a jacket or shirt pocket. "Pocket PC name was the original name of Windows Mobile" No actually it wasn't. "Pocket PC" was the name of the hardware platform. "Pocket PC OS" was the nickname of the operating system but wasn't made official until 2002 models. It was previously known more technically as just "Windows CE x.x Pocket PC Edition" prior to the Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 platform.

Here is the end of all this discussion: *****Did Apple do what they needed to do to fend off challengers and furthur cement their ascendant role in this part of the cell phone market?*****

>>The 10-inch device, be it iPod "mano" or Mac tablet? Lower- and higher-end iPhones?>> Has Apple ever done this at a software event?

"And guess what the Compact .NET framework is colloquially referred to as by MS?" "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework". It's also not listed anywhere on this website: http://www.microsoft.com/net "Being based on the same technology does not quantify as "completely different". By this logic, Windows XP should not be called Windows because it is different in technology from the 9x series" 9x software runs on XP though. OS X software on the desktop doesn't work on OS X software on the iPhone. "Yes, the original OS X is an OS, but the generic term OS X is supposed to refer to the technology" Technology which is missing in the iPhone. Not to mention, software support. "it is a 'line' of operating systems" Yes - for the desktop. "Get a copy of the 2000 version and read the name" Been there, done that. I still have that E125 by the way. "Windows CE 3.0 Pocket PC Edition". It was the first release of Windows CE on devices that were dubbed "Pocket PC's". They didn't officially change the name of the operating system to "Microsoft Pocket PC OS" until 2002. This argument is getting stale. I congratulate Apple for changing the name. (See that losta? You won't see that happen too often) Calling it OS X in the first place was a mistake. They only changed it when they decided to release the SDK, which would've seen the same sort of fury from developers that I brought about. Apple deserves applause for correcting that. *golf clap*

"I think that with the developer momentum that Apple has that its closer to being over." No more so than the developer momentum MS Windows has over OS X. The iPhone has 3 things that developers are attracted to and will continue to be attracted to. 1. Lots of users that are willing to pay extra for phones and plans. 2. Every iPhone has the exact same features. Android and WinMo phones are to varied in features for developers to spend much time on. 3. Bloody simple development tools that come free with every Mac. A child could write code for the iPhone. The I might be wrong, but I don't think Palm has even released an SDK yet have they?

@dallasmay - You should have left the grammar thing alone...there are some real grammar nuts that post herre...they are sure to point out the ironic value of this sentence - "Ok, I hate being the grammar guy, especially since I suck and[SIC] grammar." "lotsamystuff will pull out his enormous [SIC] hammer and bonk you on the nose with it. ;-) --tayme

I think he meant tons, instead of tens. "A child could write code for the iPhone. " Which you actually don't want. Then you get poorly written apps and the iFart. That doesn't help the platform at all.

http://theiphoneinsingapore.blogspot.com/2009/02/basic-steps-to-writing-... "A child could write code for the iPhone. " and did.

@lotsa, The story is irrelevant to Windows users because virtually many phones had these features already. Just because iPhone is finally catching up to these features almost 2 years later? Many of the bluetooth features we had on much less feature laiden phones in the past. So Windows users would most like know about these features or would adapt to them. None of this stuff is evolutionary or revolutionary. iPhone finally gets featuers other phones have had. @modern, Did I refer to you by name? No. I'm refering to the regular hardcore fans who do not have your temperment. As for your points, let me go through them. 1. Apple does some things incorrectly. Yes. The sky is also blue. It is the because what they do incorrectly in terms of lacking a proper security development lifecycle that not only threatens Apple users, but all computer users. It many not be an urgent threat today, but threats against OS-S are maturing rapidly. Eventually this will come back to haunt users and the company. 2. You can call it a "non-story" but an update to the fastest growing mobile phone platform is a story. If you think updated APIs are no biggie then that pretty much excludes any OS update as being a big deal as the real meat of an an OS update is in the APIs. The entire mobile phone platform is a growing. Versus the entire population of the planet, only a small amount actually own mobile phones/devices. Just because one phone is better than the other, that happens in every single industry. Wouldn't be more effective to cover the entire industry as a whole? If the story was put in perspective with the entire industry that would have made sense. But API's are developed, changed, and redeveloped on a daily basis. Sony Playstation 3 has new API's, but that didn't help it against the Nintendo Wii or the 360. Its what you do with those API's that make it spectacular. 3. You can call it journalism, being critical, or a duck for that matter. This blog post is not journalism. Critical? Yes. A duck? No. One out of three isn't even good by Meatloaf's standards. A blog post based in fact. Covering a day's event interlaced with personal commentary. Thats really no different than what hapens on any news program. Paul reports what happened and gives his take on it. Thats really not much different than opening a news paper and reading editor's comments. 4. A basic logic class would teach you that hypocrisy doesn't make a person wrong. Secondly, I don't think you or anyone else has shown how other people in the "industry" fail to be objective. Logic also is deeply rooted in common sense. Where is the logic in making a major press release of a software update that adds nothing new? Adding features that other phones in the past already had. Where is the logic in wasting bandwidth, energy, resources, and time on already available information on such features? A simple internet or paper document to the press would have been sufficient. As for lack of objectivity, the consensus amonst readers conclude that Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, Randall Kennedy, and other clearly lack objectivity. These writers tend to be biased to a specific company. Just reading a sampling of their published writing can prove that. I believe your emotions are getting in the way of your logic. 5. Your point is clear. Your point is also factually suspect and lacks merit.. None of my points lack any factual basis. All of it can be found with a simple web search. The merit lies in the fact that this was on CNBC, Fox News. Yet updates to other phones did not garner the same attention from the same media outlets, yet containing similar pertinent information to users. Recently the Samsung Instinct had an MR5 update in February. Not one media outlet covered it, but its Sprint's best selling phone. Millions of Instinct users are less important than iPhone users? Logic would say otherwise.