OK so you can buy a whole song for $.99 from the iTunes Music Store. But for the privilege of using 30 seconds of the same song as a ringtone? Another $.99… Weak, very weak.

Oh and those of you who just had to have an iPhone in June, July or August, or even yesterday. The cost of that “gotta have it” comes out to about $200. Even worse, there are those who bought an iPhone, hacked out the phone features and just used it as an expensive ipod with wifi and web browsing capabilities. Could have saved $300 if you’d waited until today.

Add it all up and I see many signs of arrogance in the Applesphere. I say this as a huge Apple fan, but they are not treating their loyal customers right. This will come back to bite Apple.

Oh and the new Ipod Nano is ugly. I smell a bait and switch scheme.

UPDATE

Bizzyblog (link in comments) points out that if you bought the iphone in the last 14 days, you can get your money back. 15 days ago: So sad for you.

Fixing computers, however, was not fun. Heres how it usually went:1. Decode the symptoms from the users terrible use of computer terms. I pity anyone who performs this step over the phone.
2. Fight with hordes of spyware apps, viruses, and shortcomings in Windows to restore the computer to a clean, usable state.
3. Talk to the angry user 3 months later when the system is back to an unusable state, and convince them that this is not my fault and I am not obligated to come fix it for free. Or, if Im lucky, the customer will be nice and Ill just have to feel guilty accepting their money again to fix the same problem.
4. Go to step 1.

Boy does THAT ever hit close to home.

And that is why the unofficial motto of datapoohbah:  No, we won’t fix your computer!

Read the whole thing, you have to be in IT to understand why it’s depressing, but trust me.  It is.

The reason is that Treo’s and Blackberry’s suck.  But people buy them because the alternatives suck worse.  Text input on a Treo is painful at best, but it’s the best option that anyone has come up with so far.

A Treo, when you come right down to it is a heavy ugly kludgy compromise of a machine.  But it beats the hell out of everything else because it’s the best compromise between a phone and a handheld computer anyone has yet come up with.

Enter Apple and the iPhone.  Right off the bat it looks better than a Treo and a Blackberry and a Q.  Right off the bat it has more memory and media capabilities.  If it works half as well as it looks, it’s going to kick ass.
Winners

Storage: 4gb of Data is not much in mp3 and PSP world, but it’s huge in smartphone world.  The Treo 700p comes with 128MB for example.
Price:  $499 is killing people who are not familiar with what things cost in smartphone world.  Treo users shrug and say, whatever.

Don’t know yet

Screen:  Bigger and sharper than anything we’ve seen so far.  How will it handle smudging and scratching?  Did Apple learn from the Nano gen1?

Usability:  Text input from the screen has the potential of being better than teeny-tiny buttons, but it’s wait-and-see for now.

Enterprise Access:  They say it works with Exchange, but if it’s imap that’s probably not good enough to counter Blackberry and Treo/goodlink, but that’s a wait and see too.
Losers

Network:  Exclusive deal with Cingular?  Boo!  Cingular coverage blows and EDGE is not better than EVDO for Data access.  The deal should not have been exclusive and Apple should have a multi-carrier phone.  Palm did it.

If any of the carriers were dragging their feet, just release it with all the capability and let popular pressure force the carriers hands.  But too late now for that.
Around the Web:

Engadget takes a look at the Apple stock vs. RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo).  Wow.  More pics.
Bizzy wants more business support.

Spacetropic has ilust.

I think Lou Minatti nails it:

Apple will gain a huge chunk of the market. Surely not 80%, but they will become a dominant player. Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Blackberry, all of them will struggle to come up with something competitive. They’ll probably throw some clunky feature-packed designs together in a hurry, much like Microsoft did with the Zune. No one will want them.

Actually it’s annoying, but fun for, oh about, five minutes.

Click OK on this button and your computer freezes. Seems to be a pretty common problem, see here and here.
The procedure to fix this is

reboot

immediately open a command prompt

run “net stop wuauserv”

run “net stop bits”

run “del /q /s %windir%/softwaredistribution

If that doesn’t work, option 2, sell to Google or Yahoo.

Now we have Option 3:

The company recently became talk of the blogs, when the founders decided to cut their losses, and put the company on sale on eBay. Niall and I devoted a big portion of our latest podcast, Snakes on a Business Plan to the Kiko affair. Well, the auction just closed and brought in $258,100. A tidy sum! This explains why Paul was smiling today at The FOO Camp Apparently, Kiko’s angel round was $50,000 in convertible debt, and this sale should cover that. Graham’s YCombinator which did the seed round could come out ahead as well. Kiko founders’ new idea has already been funded by YCombinator. Greg says eBay makes close to $3800 on the deal. A new floor for the ibanker fees? Just kidding… nevertheless, it makes you wonder despite all the hand-wringing about too many calendar companies, and presence of Google, there was after all a sucker buyer. Especially is you look at Skobee’s slow lingering slide to nowhere.

has the new MS Exchange 2007 Management Console. Looks like a dose of sanity and common sense has infected them after the nested folder madness of the exchange 2003 admin console.

In exchange 2003 there was no clue as to whether a property page needed to be accessed by right clicking for the properties menu or to keep digging deeper.

I have severe doubts that Microsoft can make a go of this.  Apple knows what it’s doing and has a clear focus and vision about consumer products that so far we haven’t seen from MS, xbox notwithstanding.

But Microsoft could do well with this if they show they are serious in these areas:

1.  Kill the Windows Media Player.  It’s way too cluttered.  And Ugly.  Compare media player and iTunes side by side.  See what I mean?  Your stuff looks more like RealPlayer than something I’d actually want on my desktop.  Cool kids hate RealPlayer.
2.  Whatever you replace the media player with, make it cross platform.  not that many mac buyers will buy a zune, but it will show the market you’re serious about the new platform, and that this is not just about extending the windows alien face hugger farther into our life.  Nothing would shock people more (in a good way), than having an MS application run natively on linux and mac)
3.  Resist featuritis.  iPod is good not because of the many features, but because the few features it does execute, it executes flawlessly.

I doubt you’ll get these details right, but what the heck, you have money to burn right?  At least we’ll spin up a few more flash memory fab plants and probably cause memory prices to drop.  That’s gonna be a good thing.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (“DBAN”) is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

OK this tops my list of extremely annoying. Trend Officescan implies that superscan 3, the supereffective fast and highly useful network scanning utility is ‘grayware’.

Well, yes, I suppose it could be used for nefarious purposes.  Just like a brick could be used for nefarious purposes.  As an example, we make houses out of brick, but if I took a brick and dropped it on the heads of the idiots who did this at Trend, they would probably recommend a law to outlaw bricks.

thanks to officescan a 15 minute task to scan a network looking for hardcoded ip addresses turned into a 45 minute task of trying to configure officescan to allow me to use a great piece of software.

Note:  Superscan 4 is out, but it sucks.  Superscan 3 is all you probably need and it’s not bloatware.