Skip to main content

Typical Fall From Grace

I have had an Apple device in my life since 1990. My first Apple computer was a Mac SE which was my second computer, the first being a Commodore 64. The Mac SE was a beautiful design, smoother, encephalon like form that was entirely contained. It was the second generation of Apple's unified hardware design, something copied only in the mid 2000's by Hewlett Packard. When Steve Jobs left Apple in the 90s we saw a diversion in Apple's aesthetic designs. They moved away from the unibody computer and moved forward with the pizza box architecture that plagued the IBM PC/x86 world. They still had the characteristic platinum coloring of their units, but now you had a bunch of boxes that ran Apple software. It all stopped looking like Apple.

Jobs continued with his own aesthetic designs at NeXT, but that did not go well. While he tried to realize the greater encephalon design (that's a computer that looks like a head, by the way), the software didn't have the stability that Apple had to offer. Jobs needed Steve, and Steve needed Jobs, and together they needed Apple. This was all too obvious when Apple started producing new computer models twice yearly, each more competitive than the other, but each competing with its siblings.

When Jobs returned to Apple we didn't see technology innovation. That was already done by the likes of HP, Compaq, Microsoft, and Symbian. What those innovators all lacked was the aesthetic genius that Steve Jobs saw in the world. So when Apple released the iPod and then iPhone, it wasn't a technical innovation, rather it was an aesthetic innovation in technology. It was then in 2007 that technology needed to be more pretty than functional, and that's what Steve Jobs knew how to do.

That's why today I am writing this fun opinion piece about my iPhone 6 Plus. I have just about every kind of phone, from a Samsung Galaxy generation 1, to a new Galaxy Note 2, to iPhone 4, iPhone 5, HTC Windows Phone, and Nokia Lumia. These phones are all smooth bricks with shiny OLED screens. The Nokia phones were the most stylish of the non-Apple phones, and they all had a very common feature. The phones didn't have warts.

A wart is anything that sticks out from a surface. On the back side of these phones there is a nifty camera lens that is hidden in the surface to keep it safe. That countersink on the lens also causes flash glare and can disrupt the quality of the photos taken by the device. That's why the original iPhone was white, and always white for a long time. A black shiny surface causes a nasty lens flare from the flash and results in junk pictures. Steve Jobs knew that was important as a mission critical feature of the mobile phone. Even my Qualcomm Brew phone (Kyocera) got that right, with its recessed lens for photographs.

Today, though, I noticed that my iPhone 6 Plus does not have a recessed lens. Rather, the lens sticks out like an ugly wart. it has a metal ring around the lens to protect it, but that still it's a wart. Warts always snag on things, and the wart on the iPhone 6 will not disappoint in that regard. Furthermore, the wart causes the iPhone 6 Plus to never rest level on any surface. Now the iPhone only has three contact points with its host surface, which means less friction to keep it on a slanted surface, and a higher likelihood of it slipping off a closed laptop and falling onto the floor.

Some may argue that this was Steve Jobs' design idea, or that he approved it before his passing. I doubt that argument's validity having seen Steve Jobs' unique approach to aesthetic technical design. The device is a failure in my opinion. The sales of the iPhone 6 Plus should be halted and the lens should be recessed. Every mobile device should lay flat and stable on a flat surface.

Popular posts from this blog

THE RISE OF FASCIST SOCIAL MEDIA

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control .  The phrase "dictatorial control" is important for the case that I am going to make about fascism in social media. The word "dictatorial" means "of or relating to a dictator," and a dictator is "one ruling in an absolute and often oppressive way." In 2020, social media has seen a rise in the number of autocratic events of censorship. The two social media outlets that I am going to focus on are Facebook and Twitter.  Background Facebook is a semi-private curated blogging platform where you, the user, share information at your leisure. The public part of Facebook is in Facebook Groups. With a group, outside people who are not privy to your "Facebook Wall" will join your group and establish a communal discourse. This can be private, by invitation only, or public. The Facebook is auth-walled so that you must ...

Clustered Foolishness

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...

Trademarks In The Dark

If you have a business, then you know that filing for a trademark is pretty easy in the USA. You just go to the USPTO web site ( www.uspto.gov ) and start filling out the form. The cost is significantly less now, nearly a third of what it was a couple of years ago. That's great news. What you don't know about your mark, though, is that there is a plethora of common law that dictates whether or not you can file with your specimens. The specimens are documents that clearly show your mark being used in commerce. Well, my last mark registration came back to me with the examiner asking for a better specimen that places the mark in closer proximity to evidence of commerce. Closer proximity. Yeah. Right. Apparently Lands’ End, Inc. v. Manbeck, 797 F. Supp. 511, 514, 24 USPQ2d 1314, 1316 (E.D. Va. 1992); In re Dell Inc., 71 USPQ2d 1725, 1727-1729 (TTAB 2004); In re MediaShare Corp., 43 USPQ2d 1304 (TTAB 1997); TMEP §§904.06(a) and (b), establish some common law that determines an acce...