blemished apple
On Monday I received a new iPhone 4. A year or so ago I had bought a Macbook Pro and was impressed despite a handful of gripes. I’ve owned a Nokia N95 for a while and this is a good phone but I felt it was time to update. I read a few reviews and watched a few Youtube comparisons and all the modern smart phones seem very good. I did not want to spend my life comparing technical data and so, having a Macbook, the obvious choice was an iPhone 4. I thought this way I’d avoid any connectivity and interoperability issues……..
My initial impression on the iPhone was negative. After switching on it insisted on being connected to a Mac and immediately demanded my credit card details. Presumably in case I ever buy anything from iTunes. I have to say that I find this grossly invasive! I had not intended to buy anything much and I am one of the generation who grew up with vinyl and CDs and so my music consists of digitised albums, scanned CDs and downloads from Amazing Radio.
However, what’s done is done, so I synched the phone and started looking around. Weirdly the much vaunted iTunes is not the music player on the iPhone. Instead it seems to be a shop window for Apple to flog me stuff. One has to find the iPod icon to play the music which has been transferred from my macbook.
The iPhone 4 is, of course, a great phone and I am impressed but one glaring failure is that the phone will not sync with my macbook through blue tooth or Wifi. This is pathetic. Despite the Bluetooth interface on the macbook referring to smart phones when I try to pair my Apple iPhone 4 with my Apple Macbook Pro I am told that the macbook “is not supported”. What utter bollocks!
I now own a device with the specific purpose of mobile communication. It has three separate methods of wireless communications (3G, Wifi and Bluetooth). Yet the only way of synching it is to plug in a cable! Hello Apple, this is 2011 not 1995.
Further investigation revealed that a Wifi syncing app had been created but rejected by Apple and so could now only be used on Jailbroke iPhones.
I was also a bit miffed to discover that there is no obvious way of transferring general files from the Macbook to the iPhone. The iTunes application on the Mac allows transfer of music, movies, photos etc but not other files such as PDFs or Word processor docs and the iPhone storage does not appear in the Finder so you can’t simply drag and drop files across.
Another issue is the ring tones. On my Nokia I could select a track from my music collection as a ring tone or I could create a sound file myself. With the iPhone there are presets or you can “buy” a ringtone from iTunes. There’s that word again “buy”.
It’s odd that Apple users used to consider themselves as innovative free thinkers and contrasted themselves with the monolithic big business drones that used Microsoft. After a bit of hunting around in the Apple forums I found discussions going back to 2007 on Bluetooth synching including the arrogant posts by people who appeared to have no imagination and slavishly followed the Apple line even when this ran contrary to obvious user preferences. This used to be the territory of Microsoft not Apple.
The iPhone’s lack of basic functionality and the fact that Apple are so greedy that the very first thing that they need me to do is register my credit card details and then try to charge for piffling ring tones give me a very poor impression. It is interesting that Google Suggest reports the top three phrases starting with “Apple are” to be:
- Apple are evil
- Apple are greedy
- Apple are greedy bastards
I have never been a great fan of Microsoft but feel that, perhaps now that Microsoft are starting to lose their grip, they may be becoming a bit more cooperative. Apple on the other hand appear to have caught the Microsoft disease and think they will rule the world.
Apple share price
The share price for Apple continues to rise but if one looks at the chart one sees a steep rise as Apple introduced music players, smart phones and tablets. But having established the market and set the bar the competition is now replicating their products and I suggest that when you reach the top there is only one way to go. I just wish I’d bought some Apple shares as now must be the time to sell.
Am I being over critical? I think not. I have not bought a product from some minority Korean company. I have bought a top of the range product from the acclaimed industry leader. A company that is now valued at more than Microsoft.
So, for the moment I have an Apple Macbook Pro and an Apple iPhone 4 and, with some reservations, I am generally satisfied with them.
But I am now aware that buying Apple does not mean easy interoperability or cutting edge functionality. With Windows 7, Microsoft appear to have refined the user interface and there are some very nice Android and Windows phones out there. When I come to replace my Apple kit I will be very wary of Apple. Perhaps Apple’s image of innovation is now no more than a useful brand image used by their marketing department to sell to people who are more interested in “style” than substance?
Art Photography
corporate control or just nostalgia?
Tags: Cemetery Junction, Dean Bradshaw, nostalgia, Onesies, photography, photoshop, Ricky Gervais, soviet censorship, Stephen Merchant
Cum On Feel The Noise
Last night I watched Cemetery Junction, a film by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Based in the 1970s the film tells the story of three friends who handle their lives in three different ways. One has his head down at a manual job and just wants to live his life. One is trying to get on but, while he has a “white collar” job, he is disillusioned by the mundanity and inhumanity of the work. The third is a rebel who usually resorts to punching someone. Gervais plays a father and Merchant has a cameo. The bosses daughter becomes romantically involved with one of the friends and her dream of becoming a photographer and traveling the world sparks his decision to make a break. Though the plot is fairly pedestrian Gervais and Merchant adorn it with some great dialogue, vivid humour and a passable rendition of Slade’s Cum On Feel The Noise.
The backdrop is the world of my youth. Housing estates, ghastly wall paper, old Ford Escorts and overgrown foliage. This got me reminiscing. 35mm cameras, slam door trains where did it all go? Why do we now disdain that wall paper? Why are we suckers for the “new shape” BMW? Why is it that there are no patches of wild amidst our housing estates? Nostalgia no doubt but come on! In 40 years time nobody will give a stuff for iPads or Onesies either.
Browsing around this morning I came across the work of Australian photographer Dean Bradshaw. Some very impressive work. Some of it akin to realist paintings. Mr. Bradshaw is a comercial photographer who creates images for advertising and his Startrac work is amazing. These images are perfect. The lighting fantastic and the people frozen in time like manikins. The images could easily be mistaken for paintings but the accompanying video shows how Mr. Bradshaw created them. Photographing the actors in studio conditions with as much care as any Vogue shoot he deposits them onto a background with software tools. While Mr. Bradshaw’s skill with a camera is key the makeup, scene preparation, lighting and software are also critical to the final image.
The Internet is littered with references to Soviet era censorship decrying the doctoring of photographs as a sinister indication of a totalitarian regime. Here Nikolai Yezhov has been removed from a photograph of Stalin.
Nikolai Yezhov is erased from history
Yet it’s common knowledge that all magazines now doctor pictures of models to remove blemishes, enhance features and usually make models skinnier. Others have blogged about these excesses where models have lost or gained limbs through the ineptness of the photoshop operative.
a bag erased from history
There are now online tutorials available to assist the amateur and last September the Daily Mail ran an article showing how artists are modifying photos to create hybrid images; half doctored photograph and half digital fantasy.
The images created by Mr. Bradshaw show how artists and technician can control the whole environment and, even though they use real people and cameras the result is pure fantasy. In a world where these images are ubiquitous and backed up by messages exhorting us to buy associated products it’s no wonder we end up prizing stuff over the environment, people and time. I think it was Norman Mailer who observed that the Soviet propaganda machine was nothing compared to the Western marketing industry.
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