Lost along the way

I consider the new Iphone a huge disappointment.

Well, kind of.
Ok, let me explain this one.

In all these years of innovation Apple has always presented the customers a line of products that had 3 main purposes in mind:
1. Ease of use
2. Innovative Design
3. New functionalities

The Iphone has without any doubt all three. So why consider it a disappointment?
How would you consider a product, no matter how great, that forces you to buy and use it according to seller's best interest?

You buy it with your money (a lot of them given the price of the contracts and the length of it) but you use it as Apple wishes.
1. You cannot pick an operator, they do.
2. you cannot buy one for a friend or anyone else but yourself (immediate in-store registration is required!), to prevent you doing what you want.
3. you can only buy programs through Apple's site, you think they'll charge for that?
4. You cannot use your MP3s as ringtones, you have to buy Apple's ringtones.
5. etc... etc... etc...

Would you really buy a product like that? I doubt it.
When I spend money on something I want that thing to be mine. Free to do anything I want with it. Make sense eh? I'm sure you might agree.
So the 3 major points for an Apple product are there, they just forgot that their interest cannot be put above the consumer's.
If Apple doesn't wake up and realize this, they may loose some of their fans along the way and TurtleNeck (pictured above), that now could even sell people their own mothers, could loose some of his charm and we all know that would not be a good thing for Apple.

I hope they'll wake up soon. Could you guys just go back to make great products and forget world dominance ideas for a moment? That's why you became so famous after all.

V

ATOM - "The next Big thing" is Tiny, by Intel

At the beginning of this month Intel introduced ATOM (and ATOM Centrino), a new line of processors aimed at portable devices.

Intel is usual to introduce "One new processor a day" that usually represents a small step forward in terms of performance if compared to the predecessors, thus loosing the interest of the end-users.

Of course though, the reason why I'm writing this post is clear, what Intel has done this time deserves some of our attention.

To understand better what we are talking about, here are some specs:

Dimension: less than 25mm²
Transistors: more than 47 millions.
Idle power: 30mW
TDP: 0.6 - 2.5 W
Speed: up to 1.8Ghz

This sounds extremely interesting if considered that today's lowest consumption processors run at 1.2 Ghz max, with a TDP of 10W (4 times more power!). A comparison of the two products done this way of course doesn't tell us all about the real differences, but it helps getting a clear idea of what a big step this was.

if you want to know more: Intel's ATOM