O come now! Surely you are not that obsessed with Apple? I swore black and blue i would never buy an ipod. Till my old Mp3 player died and the only thing with high capacity, was an ipod. I bent over, took it and you know what. I know why i hate them still.. But again its all they got. Why not wait until Google releases its phone?

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JB: Why not... (splutter) why... (blurble)... ARE YOU INSANE!!!!!

Apple is such a cult!

It's like Scientology, except people on the internet like it.

I have a boy at home who is not a massive Apple fan (he owns an iPod, that's about it), yet he's still bewitched by the thing.

It truly does sound like an underwhelming phone - what's so good about it?

----

JB: (splutter) whats so good... (choke, gargle) what's.... nnnnyyyarrggh... UNBELIEVER!!!!!!!!

Good Morning Everyone. I too would like to let everyone know I too am Steve Jobs Bitch.

As I sit here Typing on my DuelCore MacBook listening to my iPod on my sick Bose Docking station I realise that I was always going to get an iPhone. I never really had a choice. The Marketing guys at apple have instilled in us the desire, nay the need to have EVERYTHING in your life powered by a device that doesn't know where to put capital letters in its name.

They have cleverly made sure that when you plug your apple device into something thats not apple it has limited functions so to frustrate the Sh*t out of you. Then when you get used to using only a 1/4 of the functionality you see your mate decked out with all his apple gear and the possibilities unravel before your eyes. So soon your going out and spending squillions of dollars on stuff that won't work with anything that you currently have thats not apples, and the cycle just perpetuates itself.

Don't get me wrong I love my laptop. Its the best thing ever. I just need help to break the cycle of buying all the other craptastic stuff. Like the iPod and all its incarnations that I seem to have, AppleTV, and every other accessory that goes with these devices. This is a serious addiction. Where is the self help group?

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JB: I know I know. I finally lt a windows machine into the house the other day. For my wife, who uses satan's own operating system at work. I felt... dirty.

They do have their marketing down don't they? I was looking for a new mp3 player recently, and was astounded that for reasons unknown, I really really really really wanted an ipod. But I like the radio as well, and didn't want to have to keep buying bits for it, so I got a samsung. All built in, and 8g of fun. But I still covet that damn ipod....

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JB: And the ipod covets you LJ. It wants to be your new best best friend. A friend who never let you let down. A friend who will make you look good, and fetch your stuff, and hold your hair back from your face when you're throwing up. It wants you LJ. Why wont you let poddy in? Just for a little taste. Just a little taste. It couldn't hurt.

"with eyes glazed and mouth slack, drool pooling at your feet"
not to worry birmingham, there's always this
a mackmoment
(if that hyperlink doesn't work try this)
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/jko/lowres/jkon529l.jpg

to look forward to :)

pz
v

Apple sucks big-time. Specifically Apple after-sales service is the worst in the known universe AND Ipswich. Your iPod doesn't work? Tough. Send it to Ulaan Bator in Mongolia and we'll start losing it/ignoring you/abusing you immediately.
They are good at one thing only - looking cool. Features? Forget it. Price? Add 30% for living in the colonies, even when dollar differences are accounted for. Have you seen that Vaio "home entertainment PC"? What genius designed that - oh yeah, the ones who gave us the "G5 cube", the Newton, the Apple TV which plays almost no codecs, doesn't record and requires the evil iTunes. Let's see, every other piece of AV gear is in a silver or black box, often of a standardised 19" width from rack-mounting days. Sooo, how 'bout we make ours a white plastic cylinder that looks like a mutant yoghurt container. Mmmm, STYLE! Form ignores function doesn't it?
My wife & mistress has a Creative Zen M which has about 642 albums on it. Three years, no battery problems, has FM, plays movies (including thru the TV) has a bucketful of features the stinking equivalent iPood doesn't have. AND it was cheaper.
Anyone who wants to sell me an iPhone can iRack off.

You poor , pppppooor bitches...slaves to the man hey!. NO I don't own an IPOD, yest the ferals do.

No I do not own an MP3 player,

Yes I have an old phone for work.... Lifes tough at the top of the ladder , but I shall bare this cross for you all..

Ooopppsss...Shit sorry convicted..I own a I-MATE JASJAM.. Great portable calculator it is, and the pool games good for when ya is bored stupid.

I'll wait till the monsters want the newbie...perhaps then I shall get one. Now if you will excuse me I have to go and find my cassette carry case for the utes cassette player.

what the hellare you on about.. appoles are fine as a semisolid fruit,
as a computer choice

they suck donkey bollocks

The following image (you'll have to follow the URL) sums it all up perfectly

http://orinthomas.com/img/iproduct.gif

As an aside - the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley is pretty fun (the founding of both Apple and Microsoft) and Steve Wozniak's Autobiography "iWoz" is worth a read.

Before there was Mac there was SAAB.
Because there has always been elitist wankers.

Damn Apples

Hey JB - if you've got an old G4, I need the motherboard. Gman has been making music in one for the past 7 years and finally it died. It was never connected to the web, and so never got any updates. Now the platform is all changed, even if he got a new computer, the software that drives his music files won't work on it, so I am left trawling around for old G4s to keep in the tractor shed along with rusty old bits of corro and iron, to be able to keep replaceing the thing as the motherboards wear out, or all the music is finished and extracted from the old system. Whichever is sooner.

Don't know why I'm surprised though - there was an apple in the garden of eden, and look what happened there.

---

JB: It's yours hughesy. I'll bring it up for the Noosa gig.

3G:
had the telsta techies out in mulesville the other month (when the cdma went west)
sweet FA
like nix
nothin' doin'
not one goddam bar
unless you did a hike up mount mule and held the piece of shit up to god.
told them to shove the 3 year contract up the back end of a CEO.
THEN
they called back last week (on the length of twine and twin PMU(G?) tin can unit) to "upgrade the new service" & "is there anything else we can do for you", "we don't seem to be able to digitally track your whereabouts"
is it just a qld thing or what?
(insert string of expletives here)
pz
v

You still can’t send MMS messages on the new iPhone, you still can’t copy/paste, it only supports a bluetooth headset for phone calls, no stereo-bluetooth or the ability to sync it wirelessly to your bluetooth computer. The iPhone still can’t record video like most junk phones can. Unlike every other phone on the market the iPhone is stuck with a built-in, non-interchangeable battery. I’ll wait for the 2009 model that will be $99 (or less) which fixes all the shortcomings of the new “business” iPhone.

We're also in danger of outstocking Magnum Mac in town - an ancient Powerbook G3, two iBooks, the still-smouldering remains of a third (to be fair, none of which owe either me or Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo a cent courtesy various previous research jobs) and enough iPod paraphernalia to sink a Dick Smith shop. Plus a lab full of the stuff back at work. You have to give them credit though - they've come a long way from making austere beige boxes with a postal slot in the front and a screen the size of a Blackberry to being in the position to sell an overhyped, undercooked bucket of arse like the iPhone to a desperate, clawing, adoring public. It wasn't so long ago Macs were used only by eccentrics, creatives and the terminally odd - they had a lot of the same deliberately obtuse user base that the Commodore Amiga (RIP) enjoyed in the '80s and '90s - and in the face of ubiquitous dirt cheap PC clones in the mid 90s the Mac could have gone the way of the Amiga very easily, if not for the 'Think Different' PR spin and the first fruit-flavouted iMacs. Apple saw the future, and lo, it was encased in quasi-translucent white plastic with the edges smoothed off. Unthreatening. Engaging. Different. And most importantly, shouting itself from the rooftops as an aspirational premium product which differentiates the buyer from the clone-buying herd. You don't lose money selling aspirations to wannabes.

Actually the SAAB analogy is quite apt, except in their case reality has caught up with perception with them and their market share's disappeared. Reminds me (not sure why really) of the 'Log Cabin Republicans' episode of American Dad where all the gay Republicans drove matching SAABs.

---

JB: I loved those beige boxes.

The Leyland P76 with legs is all I've got to say.

But hey Dr Yobbo - you are correct - creatives found them a whole lot better interface than PC for running inline music and film editing - and it was heaps better for image manipulation. The OTHER crew has caught up, but if your reason to be computered is creative, MAC is still a better platform. Or is that just habit? Who the frack knows. I'm now hooked on its functionality in those realms.

As for the gimmicky gagetry - sucked in. Who needs a phone that does all that shite anyway? It's for talking on guys! And as for music appreciation - Ipod? You do know that Mp3 is the shitest format for listinging to actual music, don't you? (unless it is Brittney and compressed to the extent that what you hear sounds like a million squeaking mice amplified to the max and fed through a blender.)

Of course you knew that.

I want one, have done since a brief play with the first model last year.
Can't believe Telstra aren't going with it. They're going to lose a heap of business, including mine, until they inevitably renege, but I guess they're big enough not to care.
What better way to introduce the world at large to my fine collection of finnish-metal rock videos.

----

JB: I had a nervous call from telstra this wek, asking me if everything was 'all right?'

Hi Birmo, I'm an applehead.

(echo of everyone saying "hi")

I'm an old-timer in the computer biz, and only recently converted to appledom. I remember exactly when it happened - I'd been using PCs for a while, and this was around Windows 98 days. My mother wanted an apple laptop, and since she lived in another country, I agreed to buy it, use it for a while to make sure it worked, and take it down to her.

After a couple of weeks, I noticed something strange. The Apple laptop simply worked. I wasn't spending my working hours fighting the OS, trying to untangle some idiocy with the registry, or fighting some 3rd party vendor's drivers. So, after delivering the laptop to my mom, I bought myself another.

Then, I started representing my employer on an industry committee, and ended up being the note-taker because I'd take my laptop out, open it up and start typing. Everyone else would be mumbling at variable rates waiting for Windows 98 and NT to finish booting. And occasionally cursing as they fought the blue screen of death or their anti-virus software froze their machines.

It's been a decade. I'm on my fourth apple laptop. They get rough usage - about 12 hours a day and I'm not gentle with my briefcase. I'm well aware that I've paid at least double to apple what I'd pay to any PC manufacturer for equivalent equipment. But apple's stuff works without my having to fight it.

The same with an iPod. I bought a 30g iPod some years back. It simply worked. It still does (I must not abuse the battery as much as other people do. Or I got lucky).

---

JB: Hi Tarl. We're here for you.

I've had an O2 Atom for the last two years.

Serves me well and does a fair bit of the stuff that the iPhone offers without any of the stigma.

Apple zealots are just empty vessels...

They're like geek wannabe's that can't be bothered actually learning the stuff that would make them real geeks.

I know many people with iPhones and they generally seem happy with them.

The conundrum of course is that all these people that are enthusiastically happy about their current iPhones are first in line to replace the less than 12 month old gear with a new one - repeat ad infinitum ad absurdum. They must be deliriously happy with the product if they feel the need to turf it the moment that something slightly more shiny comes along ...

Stinky Pete you can create your own bar codes on the nokia site. they are not your typical product bar codes but more 2d cubes. you can then have these put on your business cards and any one with barcode software (on thier phone can scan your detail and add you to their contacts...sorry for more off topic talk but at least we are in the geek blog?
http://83.145.232.112/index.htm

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JB: It's all good.

The Herald ran this fab little piece today about iphine killers.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/attack-of-the-iphone-killers/2008/06/15/1213468214435.html

Better get cracking then, bondiboy66..... I got $550 for mine this week on eBay. I only paid $500 for it new.

Bring on iPhone 2.0! :)

Kevin

Ha ha Verti is that the kettle calling the pot black?

I noticed you didn't answer my question, but i guess you'd forgotten it.

It's a plot, if my experience is typical.

Several years back, I owned a fantastic mp3 player - A Toshiba gigabeat, had 40GB capacity and user-friendly software. Did everything I wanted it to. Once, it broke down, and I was able to get it fixed by Toshiba themselves - here in Brisbane!!!

They released a new model, and with mine wearing out from a compination of overuse and being regularly dropped off my pushbike, I bought one.

The new software? Crapola this time, no longer brand-specific, but you had to use the sucky windows media player, and it had a habit of arbitrarily deciding that certain albums of mine should just be deleted from the hard drive.

Upgraded home PC to Vista (yes, I know, only got myself to blame there). Well, no Vista drivers being written by Toshiba to support the gigabeat! Thanks for nothing.

Looked around for a new one. Saw the Microsoft Zune, thought it looked good, but it has no local Australian software support or store. Anything else around? Nope.

So I caved, and bought a friggin' iPod. It's OK, but I feel like I've been violated.

Gates and Job are in cahoots together, I reckon.

Um... hey Greybeard..

Have you seen that Vaio "home entertainment PC"? What genius designed that - oh yeah, the ones who gave us the "G5 cube", the Newton, the Apple TV which plays almost no codecs, doesn't record and requires the evil iTunes.

The Vaio people would be Sony. You know, the genius that gave us the Walkman.

JB, the news is out. now you can stay with your beloved telstra, as i know i will be. the iphone has so much more to offer on telstra's superior network

I had an iMac deskstop for six years without a glitch, until it died due to an electrical storm.

I now have a 23 inch desktop. Why would you buy anything else?

Rock solid operating system, easy to use apps great display and brilliant built in speakers...

And why would you support Bill Gates? His numerology is just too wierd man!

I recently did a small business IT course on PC, it was like living in the stone age.

I await the arrival of the new mini iphone on January 5 with baited breath

Go Jobsy!