Before I get on to the debris from this week, I must say something about what the Hallmark Channel did last night. My wife loves horses, so we watched a fairly delightful movie with Stephen Collins called “Every Second Counts” about a young woman and her horse.

The movie was fairly complete when, at 45 minutes past the hour, an ad came on that said something like, “To see the rest of the movie, go to our Website.” A very old “Murder She Wrote” then abruptly started.

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that when a viewer invests in a movie, withholding material and redirecting to another medium doesn’t sit well with me. It reminds me of a not-so-funny event years ago when a TV industry spokesperson said that skipping commercials violates the implied contract between the viewer and the show. No one took that seriously, but in this case, there was an implied contract.

The contract goes like this: “We schedule the show, arrange for a listing, and run the show to completion.” That’s unless, of course, the show is clearly marked Part I. Even a “to be continued” is accepted and legitimate in the TV industry.

In this case, however, there was a 2-3 minute snippet that showed what happened when the young veterinarian grew up. It was short, essentially a tease, but the viewer doesn’t know that. They just know that content has been interrupted and they’ve been redirected to another medium, the Internet, to see what followed.

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that kind of puerile shenanigan, and I wrote the Hallmark Channel about it. The next time I think about the Hallmark brand, I’ll remember that dirty trick.

End of rant.

I noted on Wednesday that several sources were reporting a downturn in NAND flash memory prices. I really believe that NAND memory has been a game changer in the industry and has enabled all kinds of neat products.
What I have been calling the “iPod supertouch” is now being called the MacBook touch, and it won’t be long before we’re all toting around a modest-sized flat screen chock full of the Internet and gigabytes of NAND flash. Is the notebook computer, as we know it, about to come to and end?

Speaking of that kind of thing, I have to go back a few weeks to a David Sobotta blog in which he lamented the current state of industrial design of Macs. The current Mac Pro design dates back to the PowerMac G5 from the fall of 2003. The MacBook Pro design dates back about five years.
Mr. Sobotta hadn’t been in an Apple store for some time and was appalled at how little things had changed and how uninspiring the designs are.

I note that BMW keeps its designs stable for a long time too, making only tweaks below the hood (ahem). That keeps customers from being annoyed with new designs too soon and serves to protect their investment. Also, these days, there are a lot of switchers, and it probably comforts them to see both good design and stability in the Apple products as they periodically check in and make plans for the switch.

That said, I think Apple has gone too far. Has the company lost interest in futuristic Mac designs? Do they feel that with soaring Mac sales, nothing further need be done? Do they feel that Very Soon Now, SSDs and gestures will make the notebook computer obsolete? I don’t have the answers, but I sure would like to feel that Apple is moving ahead soon with designs that have been five years in the making.

As a testament to Apple’s ability to engage the customer at the retail level, it was reported this week that Gateway is exiting the direct PC sales business. I believe that when people have confidence in a product, they’re willing to purchase a commodity via mail order. But when customers are increasingly aware of problems, they want to touch and feel the product before they buy it. Maybe that’s not technically enough to make a valid decision, but who said that a lot of these PC purchases are devoid of emotion.

Gateway’s bad fortune may also have something to do with all those Internet and print ads for pretty PCs that show a blank screen. “Here, buy our pretty hardware. The OS? Oh. Ahem. We don’t want to talk about that. But, isn’t that notebook pretty?” That kind of game just makes the buyer want to touch and feel before buying a computer even more.

Finally, I note that another company has jumped into the fray with a Mac OS X compatible PC. They think they’ve found a loophole that inoculates them from action by Apple. Namely, you install Mac OS X yourself.

Apple can probably devise ways to have the OS “phone home” with a report that it’s not running on Apple hardware. I hope Apple’s attorneys will figure out better ways to deal with those obnoxious, pirate-happy customers than the RIAA has.

I can see a day, forced by by these so-called entrepreneurs, when we won’t be able to buy a boxed copy of Mac OS X. It’ll be available pre-installed on a Mac and only updatable via the Internet.

Sigh.

Because I write about what’s going on with Apple, most often I have to jump in and experience what the readers are experiencing. So with some trepidation, on Friday July 11th, when all hell was breaking loose, I went ahead and updated my iPhone 2G to the iPhone 2.0 software.

That’s when the trouble began.

The update appeared to go well with no error messages, but when the iPhone 2G finally rebooted, I had no icons on the home screen. The text under the icons was there and gave hints about where to touch, but the icons themselves were gone. I tried making a call, and I found to my surprise that as I touched each key on the telephone keypad, that key would completely disappear.

It’s not often one makes a call in which every number is different.

There are several things one can try in this case. My initial update was through a USB 2 powered hub and a standard iPhone dock on a PowerMac G5. I had some problems in the early updates of the iPhone, but they disappeared in the recent updates. But just to be sure, I used only the cable and connected the iPhone directly to the USB port of my MacBook Pro.

Same result.

Since the iPhone was under AppleCare, I called AppleCare support. They told me something which, in hindsight, doesn’t sound right. The technician told me that the software update on Friday was having some problems and I should try later, maybe Saturday, to update again when perhaps a later version of the software would be available.

On Saturday, I opened iTunes and clicked on the Restore function.
To my dismay, the Restore seemed to be pulling the update from somewhere on my hard disk rather than downloading it from Apple. I rummaged around and found some stuff in

/Users/john/Library/Caches/Cleanup at Startup

but that didn’t seem to be the source of the file — just a temporary holding spot.

I searched the Apple forums and Internet in vain for anyone who had the same problem. No luck.

On Sunday, with a completely hosed iPhone and armed with my Applecare paperwork, I went to the Aspen Grove Apple store in Littleton, Colorado, expecting to get the iPhone repaired.

But that wasn’t enough. The store was fairly crowded, and the Apple salesman told me that I could get immediate attention if I had ProCare ($99/year), but with merely AppleCare, I would have to make an appointment. The earliest appointment was Monday evening at a location closer to my house, Park Meadows Mall. But the salesman did give me hint. The iPhone software downloads are located in:

/Users/john/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates

[Replace "john" with your own user name.]

If I delete the file inside that folder, that will force iTunes to download a fresh version. On Sunday evening, I tried that and got the same version of the file, iPhone1,1_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw — and the same result. Hosed up iPhone.

I also discovered that if you hold down the CMD+OPT keys when clicking Restore, you’ll see a navigation box that shows the previous updates. I tried to back up to 1.1.4, but that failed. Some people in the forums suggested that backing up the firmware from 2.0 to 1.1.4 would not be possible.

On Monday, July 14, at 5:30 pm I went to the Apple store at Park Meadows and waited for only a few minutes before “Tim” saw me. I showed him the problem, and he didn’t even try to run diagnostics. Tim said that I won the award for the most spectacular iPhone failure of the day.

For a second, I thought he was going to invite me to take an iPhone accessory off the wall as a prize. No such luck.

After looking up my AT&T phone number, Tim said, “I see the phone is over a year old but you have AppleCare. Would you like a new phone?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thank you.”

Tim pulled out a refurbished iPhone 2G that looked good as new, swapped the SIM card, connected the new iPhone to his Mac and activated it. Then he started an erase function on the old phone that writes all zeros to memory. (I didn’t have any personal data on the phone anyway thanks to all the update attempts but no backup completed.)

In five minutes I had a new working phone, but with OS X iPhone 1.1.4. Tim said I’d have to do the update myself, but if that didn’t work, bring the new phone back. Or wait for the next update after 2.0.

I went home, downloaded a fresh copy of the 2.0 update (but same version # again) and conducted the update. Voila! The update took, and the phone was working perfectly, just as before the whole adventure started.

Observations.

1. I have no idea what deep, lurking secret caused my fresh-as-a daisy iPhone, bought on July 1, 2007, to work perfectly up to 1.1.4, then fail spectacularly at 2.0. I’ll never know, but hopefully some Apple engineer who plays with it might figure it out.

2. I was frustrated with how long it took to get the iPhone repaired on a weekend when there was pandemonium in the Applesphere. Indeed, it might have been wise to release the iPhone 2.0 software a week earlier than the iPhone 3Gs.

3 When I finally got to see an Apple Genius, it was a great experience. Tim was sharp, smart, courteous, and fast. He had my iPhone replaced and working in no time at all.

4. Finally … if you don’t believe it yet … get AppleCare on your iPhone. Don’t even think about not buying it, even on the cheaper, subsidized iPhone 3Gs.

I learned a lot about the iPhone update process, painfully. But, hey, that’s what we do here at TMO.

This was a significant week in Apple’s history. In the past, Apple’s well tuned marketing engine worked just as well, but the Mac faithful just weren’t present in sufficient numbers to jar the Applesphere. However, the decisions Apple made regarding the secrecy of the iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G rollout may have come back to haunt them.

It was Tuesday before Apple even acknowledged that the iPhone 3G would even go on sale at 8:00 am today. Casual inquiries with Apple and AT&T store personnel suggested that right up to the last minute, they didn’t really know what was going to happen.

Then, today, servers crashed, activations were held up, and things didn’t go quite as well as planned. I noticed in my RSS feeds that the PC community was all over this story, detailing how Apple and AT&T had months to plan for this event and didn’t bring sufficient resources to the party.

I sensed a certain amount of glee over that. Of course, those writers won’t be so gleeful when Apple, in a few years, is selling US$15 billion worth of iPhones each year.

Is it possible that Apple’s hype machine and resources have come up against their limits with the popularity of a consumer electronics device like the iPhone?

In my case, wanting to stay on top of events, I upgraded my iPhone 2G to OS X iPhone 2.0. It seems to go okay until I noticed that, after activation, all my icons on the home page have disappeared. I’ve tried some tricks, but to no avail. Worse, the iPhone can’t be restored. I’m sure, in time, it’ll get fixed.

Particle Debris

I was off for a few days this week with company in town, so I don’t have too many particle debris stories.

On Tuesday, Google announced that Gmail is now blocking fake eBay and PayPal e-mails. They’ve invoked the DomainKeys technology to authenticate the sender of e-mails. It’s high time this happened, and I can’t believe we’re half way through 2008, and it took this long to enable that kind of technology.

Back when I was at The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the 1990s, we had a vision that every e-mail sender would be (carefully) issued a public and private key and e-mails would be authenticated against that key. As expected, however, greed and a lax attitude by the government about all this has led to a Wild Wild West approach to the Internet. The toll has been high in terms of stolen money and identify.

Speaking of Oak Ridge, there was another story in the news about them: the supercomputers of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As our desktop computers move slowly into teraflops and terabytes, the supercomputers at the various National Laboratories are easing into the petaflops and petabyte phase, the so-called petascale projects. These computers are put to good use for various national security projects, and they’re fun to read about.

At one time, Apple thought it wanted to play in this arena, but found out that the level of commitment was too high a price to pay. Apple still sells some very nice workgroup clusters, but a full scale corporate commitment is required to build, in partnership with the federal government, these kinds of computers.

Apple is facing that kind of challenge now with the iPhone. Runaway success is great fun for a time, but one has to wonder how the company will have to change to manage worldwide rollouts of successors to the iPhone 3G. It’ll be interesting to watch — and report on.