CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Verizon iPhone — Dear Apple

Dear Apple,

AT&T sucks.

That’s really about the length and breadth of the dis­cus­sion, isn’t it? I could stop the open let­ter here, couldn’t I? We all know that the cov­er­age is lousy, we all know that the ser­vice is also weak, if pleas­antly deliv­ered (Jane the oper­a­tor says, “I’m sorry you’re hav­ing trou­ble with your phone ser­vice, have you turned your iPhone off and on again?”), but the real­ity is the joke is over.

With an econ­omy lag­ging, peo­ple won’t burn money for sport for­ever, and well, Apple — your stuff has become about burn­ing money for sport.

Apps are neato, but after a while, we’re just down­load­ing mon­ster hunters and new ring­tones — not any­thing that’s help­ing pay for the kids’ col­lege or mak­ing work more efficient.

That means you’re run­ning out of time, Apple — you need to present a true VALUE ADD to your prod­uct line that doesn’t involve eso­teric OS upgrades or “more super RAM and cores in your CPU.” Nobody cares about that.

We want a phone that works. Period.

I went to Kent School in Kent, Con­necti­cut, it was a board­ing school.  The “secret motto” of Kent for stu­dents was “Kent Sucks!”  It was like a secret hand­shake (“You went to Kent?  Kent Sucks!  Hi!”).

While that school has made leaps and bounds and the secret motto has since changed to some­thing more pos­i­tive, the real­ity is that AT&T users, and iPhone users in par­tic­u­lar have taken up the motto.

AT&T Sucks!  Hey?  You have the iPhone too?  Wow, that’s so true, isn’t it?  Let’s talk about how much AT&T sucks and bond over the expe­ri­ence of lousy ser­vice — share war stories.

So, you have a grow­ing cadre of point­less­ness to your con­trolled app space, a mar­ket that is con­tin­u­ing to cut back, and will do so even more when the great tidal wave of Com­mer­cial Real Estate debt crashes into our bro­ken levy of an econ­omy — and well, you have no value add, Apple.

Fix this.  Release the news on Ver­i­zon.  Do it now.

The last thing you’d want to hear is that all the die hard fan­boys (like me) start muttering:

Apple sucks.

I have become one with the Kool-Aid

It’s offi­cial, I have moved my real phone num­ber over to the iPhone. There were a few near misses on com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Fri­day that made me real­ize it was time to join or leave.

I also real­ized that I’d been unin­ten­tion­ally enjoy­ing the arti­fi­cial silence of not hav­ing my nor­mal phone num­ber reach me, which was caus­ing me to miss turns at work.

In any event, I’m offi­cially on the iPhone now, and since I am a man of extremes and con­vic­tions, I hereby deem it the best solu­tion in the uni­verse (which actu­ally isn’t say­ing much).

I don’t think I’ll stop let­ting the world know it’s flaws, but now that we’re mar­ried, I might extol some of it’s virtues.

For exam­ple, I can now see who has left me voice­mail mes­sages with­out dial­ing in (we call that “Visual Voice­mail” here in iPhone land), so I don’t have to waste a lot of time actu­ally lis­ten­ing to peo­ple before I ignore them and delete their mes­sages. Some­how, that’s got to make the world a bet­ter place, no?

I think I may learn to like the iPhone, it’s designed by lazy, tal­ented, self-involved peo­ple who care about the value of form WITH func­tion, just like me. Power to the bored elit­ists! More money for my toys! I think I can prob­a­bly down­load an app that tracks world star­va­tion on Google Maps, so I know what areas to avoid while I find the near­est latte stand and order my Net­flix. I don’t even need to inter­act with the poor, they don’t have cell cov­er­age in their area for the iPhone, I’m guess­ing. I’d prob­a­bly NEVER get 3G in Darfur!

I’m so proud of being a mem­ber of the tech­no­rati “in crowd”, it makes me a bet­ter (and more beau­ti­ful) per­son. Thank you For­bid­den Fr– I mean, Apple.

My truck doesn’t care about my iPhone

I drive a long-bed Ford F150 truck.  It’s a pickup, it’s got a tire that has a slow leak, a long dent along the side, and most small peo­ple can’t get into it with­out huff­ing and puff­ing.  It can go 4-wheel drive because I’m an Amer­i­can.  It gen­er­ally grows a sort of green lichen on it because I’m in the Pacific North­west.  My truck doesn’t have a blue­tooth inter­face to its Bose stereo sys­tem, but it’s not so dumb that it doesn’t have a CD player.  When I climb into it with my iPhone, it just turns a dis­in­ter­ested eye over its shoul­der like a tired ele­phant and flicks its tail to acknowl­edge me — it doesn’t even reg­is­ter that the thing in my pocket is awe­some, hip, and beau­ti­ful.  It just burps and offers me a cir­cu­lar cupholder as the most rea­son­able place to put the thing.

My truck doesn’t even con­nect to the Inter­net at all.  It just drives

Apple — you’ve let me down again

Still sweat­ing and blood­ied from my most recent broken-bottle swamp brawl against the iPhone — I dragged myself to the shore — sting­ing, bruised, and almost $1,000 poorer — but vic­to­ri­ous. (Shoutout to Matt — lookit all the em-dashes, woot).

But, just as I was retch­ing up my last lung­ful of bog-water and tying a firewire tourni­quet around my iPhone bit­ten leg, Apple came out of the brush like an inbred hill­billy and smacked me upside the head with another design disappointment.

You see, ladies and gen­tle­men, at the same time that I was pur­chas­ing the iPhone, I relin­quished and bought a new Mac­Book Pro — the kind with the glossy screen and all that.

Well, since it was such a pro­tracted war (police action) with the iPhone (use­less busi­ness toy), I didn’t get around to acti­vat­ing my new lap­top (mean­ing­less non-upgrade) until yes­ter­day (unre­cov­er­able per­sonal his­tory, wasted time).  Today, as I got home, I fig­ured I’d go ahead and take the next major steps towards mov­ing the cen­ter of my online being to this new plat­form — when what should I see — but the absence of an Express­Card slot.

What’s that you say?  You’re wor­ried I’m about to Geek out on you?  Well — I will slightly — but the rant is still acces­si­ble to the masses.

A PCMCIA card (Geeki­est acronymn in this post, I promise) is an older for­mat that allows you to slot exter­nal cards into your lap­top (like wifi cards, before all lap­tops came with wifi built in).  Well, about three years ago — Apple made the brave and dash­ing move of drop­ping the PCMCIA stan­dard which resulted in some inter­est­ing responses from the peo­ple (shock, awe, grov­el­ing, ado­ra­tion, fear, loathing, kisses).  They decided to offer the Express­Card for­mat instead — which is a slim­mer line, smaller inter­face, smaller slot, etc.

Insert manda­tory grum­bling here — gotta go out to Ver­i­zon, buy another cel­lu­lar card for my account because the “geniuses” at Apple need to change for­mats on me.  Jerks.

Ok — I adapted, I got the right Cel­lu­lar card — I moved on.  Every time I get on the Ferry, I pull out my cel­lu­lar card, slip it into the Express­Card slot, and presto — no prob­lems — I’m online, the masses (that’s you, Brett) are amazed at the speed and ease with which I get online — joy abounds.

But on the NEW, manda­tory glossy, stu­pid “zero but­ton” moused, black-keyboarded lame lap­top line that they’ve come out with now — Apple has removed the Express­Card slot on the 15-inch model.  So, I’m now the happy owner of a use­less Ver­i­zon card, unless I want to spend MORE money mod­i­fy­ing my life to adapt to Apple’s limitations.

I’m tak­ing the stu­pid lap­top back — I’m gonna ride this sad, worn-out old one into the ground — and maybe just give up on com­put­ers com­pletely or something.

Apple, yet again, has failed its cus­tomer base — and the chil­dren with money (what’s that?  Apple’s real mar­ket is just spoiled col­lege kids with money?  How DARE you admit that in pub­lic) — the chil­dren embrace what­ever Apple tells them they like because the chil­dren are too dumb to look up from their key­boards and real­ize that they’re not being allowed to think anymore…

“Hello, I’m a PC … and I’m a Mac… and I’m a con­sumer that feels it’s too much to ask of me to take a day off from work in order to buy your lap­top on the other side of the state, and stand in line so that some­one who knows less than I do about com­put­ing can smile, call them­selves a genius, and then go pale when I flex brain at them.”

Shark, Apple, Jump.  I think I’ll get … who knows … a pen?

The iPhone relented, I win

So, it was the last moment of our rela­tion­ship, iPhone and me. We’d had it with each other, we were just tired of the whole thing.

She just wanted to pack all her apps and leave, I was look­ing to help. We were done.

Then, on a goof, I tried one last thing… I turned off the 3G (to his credit, Brett had made men­tion of this at one point).

As with any pre­cious girl­friend you want to keep, I’d already learned all her con­trols and con­fig­u­ra­tion but­tons (aside from the stan­dard ones like “yes dear”, “you can’t look fat”, and “women are so much smarter than men”, she also had “turn off 3G”). So I gave it a whirl. Now every­thing is fine.

She’s a bit of a Step­ford wife now, only doing what I want when I want it and being beau­ti­ful all the time, but I think that’s ok.

She doesn’t com­plain about any­thing any­more. Isn’t that right, dear?

[This mes­sage posted using the iPhone]

My iPhone is like an abusive girlfriend

I’m los­ing it with the iPhone.  I mean, yeah — she’s hot.  She’s absolutely gor­geous, with those amaz­ing but­tons, and her shape — it’s unbe­liev­able.  She’s also not com­pletely vapid, the way so many other beau­ti­ful phones are — she actu­ally tries to lis­ten and often keeps up with what I have to say.

When she’s with me around town, man!  I feel like I’m on top of the world — she pays all her beau­ti­ful atten­tion to me, she makes sure she’s seen and all the other guys can lust for the babe on my arm — I just can’t keep my hands off her.

She’s even play­ful — we’re always down­load­ing games together, when the day slows down, I sit with her and we whis­per silly things to each other about our favorite pas­times, like cross­words and texting.

But I get her home, and she turns into a night­mare.  She ignores me — inter­rupts my con­ver­sa­tions — refuses to do any­thing I ask if it involves con­nect­ing me with other peo­ple.  She iso­lates me, and turns her back on me.  I don’t know what to do.

I tried to get her a nice antenna for our 2 week anniver­sary — but she just ignored it — said it was stu­pid — said she didn’t “con­nect” with it at all.  So now I’m tak­ing it down and send­ing it back.

I have to admit, I’ve called her fam­ily a few times to see if they’ll take her back — they pre­tend that there’s no prob­lem — they tell me that when they look at where we’re liv­ing, it looks fine to them — I think they just don’t want her back — I think her mother, AT&T is maybe a psy­cho.  Her father, Apple, is really great — smart, funny, artis­tic — a lit­tle full of him­self, granted — but over­all pretty good … but I think she’s just a bit of a spoiled brat.

All day long, I find myself tend­ing to her — try­ing to fig­ure out what I can do to make her happy — to get her to talk to me at home … I’m begin­ning to real­ize that her pos­i­tive regard for me when we’re “out on the town” is likely just a facade.  I think she hates me.

I’ve bought her things — I got her a beau­ti­ful case to keep her safe, and a nice, no-stick screen cover to “make her face up”, as girls like to say — but even that doesn’t sat­isfy her.

Frankly, she’s just a petu­lant b**** … I’m get­ting sick of her — please don’t tell her that.

Secretly, on the side, I’m dat­ing my Ver­i­zon phone … she’s more down to earth and kinda stu­pid … but I can always rely on her.  She’s pretty homely, but when I call, she answers.  Granted, the other pretty girls around us mock me for going with her — but she’s reli­able and I think I may actu­ally love her.

I just hope my iPhone doesn’t hear about it — there’s no telling what she would do to me.  Recently, she started delet­ing apps I’ve paid for… with­out telling me.

Iphone schizophrenia

So I got the Word­Press plu­gin so I can do my own blog­ging directly through an app. This makes me like the iPhone. But then I want to use this app to write about how I hate the iPhone. I’ve gone iPhrenic.

Because AT&T hates me

Check out this cov­er­age map:

See all the rich deep orange indi­cat­ing BEST cov­er­age?  That’s the island I live on.

See that dia­mond of medium orange indi­cat­ing Good cov­er­age?  That’s my neighborhood.

See that one, tiny lit­tle dia­mond of light orange in the very cen­ter indi­cat­ing Mod­er­ate (which really means use­less) cov­er­age?  That is, essen­tially, MY HOUSE.

It even cov­ers my dri­ve­way, it doesn’t bother the neigh­bors across the road.  Just MY HOUSE.