Tequila Fish

So today Apple unveiled iPhone 2.0. The whole Internets is abuzz about how much it sucks or how much it rules or how we wish technology could improve faster or how we hate it when it does. For some reason, my mind wasn’t really on iPhone 2.0 today. It was on something that went completely unmentioned on the Internets, but was subtly referenced to in the keynote today. I normally don’t write this kinda stuff on this blog, but it’s late, I’m tipsy, and I wanted to put my thoughts down on the record so that I could come back 10 years later and see how right or how wrong I was. I’ll laugh either way. So what is this mysterious item I’ve been thinking about all day?

The 4th leg.

The Jobs likes to talk about Apple’s 4 legs. He’s mentioned it a couple of times in prior keynotes - how Apple desires to have 4 legs. The Mac platform was 1 leg. You know, the hardware. Computers. Oh and the software that runs them - OSX. The 2nd leg is iTunes and the mighty iPod - generally speaking, Music. The 3rd leg is iPhone - headliner at WWDC today. In the past, The Steve called AppleTV the 4th leg. The coveted living room. Wars for control of your living room have been waged since the beginning of living rooms themselves. AppleTV was to be Apple’s front-line assault on your living room, but so far has been kept back as a “hobby,” in Jobs’ own words. Disrespectfully, today Jobs all but disowned the 4th leg - instead showing in his slideshow a 3-legged stool sans AppleTV.

So where did the 4th leg go? It hasn’t really gone anywhere. It’s been incubating as a “hobby” while the 3rd leg finishes getting sanded and polished, prior to its final coat of lacquer. I own an AppleTV and have a love/hate relationship with it. Its potential is the most frustrating thing. It has so much potential and would revolutionize entertainment if Apple would put as much into it as they have the iPod and iPhone.

My theory is that Apple is, in fact working on AppleTV, but in a roundabout way. All evidence points to an easy installation for the 4th leg when it is ready. Why? Because the majority of the work is being done by the prior 3 legs.

1. Leg 1 - Mac Platform - Guess what all 4 legs of the chair run? OSX. Guess what’s coming in Snow Leopard (also announced today) sometime next year? A smaller OS. How did they do this? Apple engineers learned a lot from leg #3 (iPhone) by trying to cram OSX onto a computer that fits in your pocket. Who else benefits from these improvements to the OS? AppleTV.
2. Leg 2 - iTunes/iPod - iTunes and its vast distribution network was built to support leg #2 (iPod). It is still being refined and improved, and guess who is in line to reap the benefits of a sleek, optimized, well performing distribution network? AppleTV.
3. Leg 3 - iPhone - Not only did iPhone bring optimizations and improvements to Leg 1, it has also given cloud computing the shot that it needs to become a reality. Mobile life spawns too many headaches revolving around syncing data, losing devices containing all of your contacts, and incompatabilities between formats. In comes MobileMe (me.com) to save the day! But wait, there’s more! You know how annoying it is to type in a movie title with the little AppleTV clicker thing? Apple TV needs a keyboard, but nobody wants to tarnish the elegant design of the Little White Box. Why not use you iPhone’s touchpad typing abilities to control your AppleTV? While you’re at it, use your iPhone to set up your AppleTV to download the latest episode of Planet Mars from your desk at the office. So what do the past 2 years of development for the iPhone and neglecting of the AppleTV directly benefit? AppleTV.

AppleTV will neatly slide in as the 4th leg. All 4 legs will work seamlessly together, thanks to the newly launched MobileMe service. All of our data, and essentially our lives, will someday live in “the cloud,” the ever-present virtual storage space in the sky. The MP3 you purchase from iTunes will be saved into the cloud where it is automatically pushed out to your other devices - your work laptop, your home laptop, your home desktop, your phone, and yes, your AppleTV. All of your emails, your contacts, your calendars, photos, bookmarks, maps, and movies, will always be present on all of your devices at all times. No longer will your laptop/desktop/phone be storage devices for your data, they will merely be interfaces to it. And your iPhone will be the interface to the interfaces!

Nobody seems to be noticing the forest because they’re too focused on the trees. Nobody is noticing the chair because they’re too focused on the legs.

The worlds of separate computers, phones, music players, televisions, living rooms… hell, even life itself, will be merged into one, and Apple (and it’s soon-to-be-polished AppleTV) will be at the forefront of this revolution.

Buckle up.

My 3G iPod got stuck with the Apple logo on its screen. The way to fix this is to put the iPod into Disk Mode and restore it from there. Here is how:

1. Reset the iPod by holding down the Menu and Play buttons simultaneously.
2. As soon as it reboots, hold down the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons simultaneously.
3. Your iPod will now be in “Disk Mode” and you should be able to plug it into your computer, open up iTunes, and restore your iPod.

I have an old 3G iPod, and all of a sudden it would not show up in iTunes when connected to my computer via Firewire or USB. It did show up in Finder. After some research, the only way I found to fix this is to format it using Apple’s Disk Utility. WARNING: Doing this will wipe everything off your iPod. You won’t be able to recover the files off your iPod, but at least you’ll be able to use it with iTunes again.

1. Connect your iPod you to your Mac.
2. Open up Disk Utility (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).
3. Select your iPod in the left-hand window pane.
4. Click the “Erase” tab, accept all defaults, then click the “Erase” button.

Your iPod will now be re-formatted, and you should be able to plug it into iTunes and Restore the updated iPod software.

UPDATE: For PCs, you may be able to do something similar with Windows’ Disk Manager. I haven’t tried though, so I can’t verify, but I bet it would work on Windows too.

“New Macs will come with Leopard Pre-Installed…” - Apple’s Leopard Guided Tour Video

So today is the release of Apple’s next generation version of OS X: Leopard. I had planned on purchasing an iMac a couple months ago, but decided to delay my purchase until the release of Leopard. So I go down to the Apple store (which was PACKED) and proceeded to purchase a shiny new iMac. Excited to try out Leopard, I rip it out of the box and turn it on. And to my disappointment, it boots into Tiger. WTF!? I delayed buying a new iMac for Leopard and I get… TIGER?!!? Turns out Leopard isn’t pre-installed on my iMac. Apple simply threw a Leopard DVD into the box expecting me to sit through a manual upgrade. At the end of the day I don’t really care, but here I am ranting on my blog (from my Windows machine) instead of playing with my brand new Leopard-powered iMac. Ugh!

I always thought that Macs were supposed to just work! What’s with all this manual tinkering and upgrading and waiting and slowly-moving progress bar watching? For a minute there I thought I had bought a new PC running Windows… Shame on you Apple.

One argument I see people using against the iPhone is the cost. Granted, $499-$599 is a bit pricey, but what really gets me angry is when people use the flawed argument that the total cost of owning an iPhone is “$2,600-$3,200″ if you factor in the cost of the service contract. While that may be true, so what? Lets use some analogies:

• That new car you bought wasn’t $20,000, it was $200,000. You forgot to factor in the cost of fuel and insurance over the life of the car!
• That new computer you bought wasn’t $999, it was $10,000. You forgot to factor in the price of your ISP and electrical bills!
• That new flat-screen TV you just bought wasn’t $1,200, it was $8,000. You forgot to factor in the price of your cable box and service over the next 2 years!
• You really should stop drinking beer, it’ll cost you $5,000 over the next couple years!

See how ridiculous those arguments sound? Arguing that the iPhone will cost $3k is just as ridiculous. While the claim may be true, no one truly considers ancillary costs when making a purchase like this. It’s a disingenuous and dishonest argument used by people who are trying to find fault with this wonderful new device.

Not to mention the fact that no one is producing similar costs for rival phones in their arguments. I wonder what the TCO for a Crackberry is? I’d like to see that number compared to the iPhone’s. Maybe then we can start a decent dialogue about the iPhone vs. its rivals when it comes to cost.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, paralyzed by Lou Gherig’s disease, floats during a zero-gravity flight; an apple, a tribute to Isaac Newton, drifts along with him.

A couple years ago I posted about a fix for Delayed Write Failed errors when updating an iPod on Windows XP. While my suggestions in that post worked for the most part, I still encountered the error from time to time.

So it’s been a couple years and now I NEVER receive this error. Here’s how I did it:

I used to connect my iPod to my PC via USB. However, I had purchased an external Firewire hard drive which required me to install a Firewire card into a PCI slot on my machine. The card had 4 Firewire inputs, and I needed to free up a USB port for some other peripherals that needed them. So I decided to move my iPod connection from USB to my new Firewire card (Koutech KW-582V2 - cost me $21 bucks from NewEgg).

Ever since then I have NEVER received the Delayed Write error. So if you’re having trouble updating your iPod and get the “Delayed Write Failed” error, perhaps it is your USB connection. Try moving your iPod to another USB port, and if you’re using a USB hub, try bypassing the hub and plug your iPod directly into your computer’s USB port. If THAT doesn’t work, try a Firewire port. If you don’t have one, grab yourself a Firewire card. You can get them cheap and are much more valuable than all the hair you’re pulling out trying to fix your Delayed Write Failed.