OK, I’ll admit – I am an Apple fanboy. Anyone who knows me will confirm this. I have relied on Apple for my daily wage for the last 25 years, Apple has put food on my table and a roof over my children’s head. Either directly or indirectly I owe a lot to the company.

I love their products but I accept sometimes they have faults, no company is perfect and as a commercial concern they have the right to do what is best for the company but on the whole I trust Apple to sort them out.

I also trust them with my credit card, my personal data and I trust them to deal with my communications and systems. So far, to my knowledge, they have not betrayed that trust.

Over the last 25 years I have watched the company be buoyant, struggle, become beleaguered then rally and become very successful again. Throughout all this time they have been the whipping boy of the industry press, when they are down everyone puts the boot in, calling for the execution of the directorate and the sale of the company to people no better second hand car salesmen. When they are up everyone in the press watches for the slightest kink in the armour and then, when they eventually find one (or make one up) there is a feeding frenzy.

The latest ‘kink’ is of course the signal issue on the iPhone4. No-one I know who has the new device has seen the issue in the UK but still there is a massive disinformation campaign going on at the moment to label the new phone as a useless piece of junk.

When my friend’s dad comes and asks me whether he should wait before buying an iPhone4 because of the design fault and the coming “recall of all the handsets” there is time to be concerned about how my favourite computer company is doing in the PR war.

I read a troll piece on the Telegraph website earlier (which I am so disgusted at I am not going to link) that was designed to spread FUD by quoting an internal support memo that said that bumpers should not be given to complaining customers. This is entirely right if Apple don’t accept that there is a physical issue with the device, it would set a precedence so that anyone could request a bumper for free by saing they were having the issue, once that has started it would be impossible to stop.

The paper however painted that as Apple not caring about their customers and the commenters gleefully joined in. When one poor soul made the mistake of posting that all his Apple kit, including his nice new iPhone4 was functioning just fine thank you, he was verbally lynched by multiple posters who were foaming at the mouth in disgust. I am betting a goodly number of these people have never owned an Apple product and would rather nail their tongue to the table before they did.

I don’t know what Apple can do in this situation. There will always be an issue that can be picked away at like some sort of cold sore, as I said no company can be 100% perfect 100% of the time.

In my experience, most people’s experience of Apple customer service is good to great. In my experience, most people who get an Apple product fall in love with it and would never go back if they could help it.

Why then does the mention of Apple cause the ‘non-believers’ to rise in such fervent anger, Bigotry? Jealousy?

At the end of the day it is just tech. It isn’t worth wasting time arguing the toss and getting stressed nor is it worth insulting someone personally because they like a different manufacturer to you.

We live in a free(ish) world with some personal choice. I choose Apple, they choose Wintel or Linux. why can’t they be happy with their own tech and leave us to be happy with ours?

Hmm, there’s some curious parallels to religious fervour going on here isn’t there? – “My god is the one true god” / “My operating is the best operating system”.

“Why can’t they be happy with their own theologies and leave us to be happy with ours?” = Why can’t we all just get along?

In my role at the studios I quite often mix the bands when they come in, both the Sun and News of the World have music sections to their papers and websites and quite often music companies send artists to us on the promo trail that leads them from radio station to TV channels and then us.

Eliza Doolottle and her band have been to the studios twice now, performing for firstly NoW XS and recently the Sun Bizarre page.

When the bands come in I talk to them via the floor monitors from the gallery  when we are setting up and to tell them when we are ready to go etc. The first time Eliza came in we joked about my disembodied voice being the ‘voice of god (not THAT god but a god – the god of sound perhaps), they found it funny and it helped break the ice.  I was pretty jazzed when they remembered it when they came in for their Biz session and we joked about it again.

Although Eliza’s Biz session won’t be posted for another couple of weeks, this afternoon the SunTalk guys managed to get her on the phone to talk about the session for the Gordon Smart Bizarre show. There was a horrible delay on the phone from where she was, which didn’t help the flow of the conversation but this is a podcast of the show. Check out the bit about 00:58 – 01:12.

Every time I hear it I can’t help laughing. Mental

In the morning we normally have the BBC news on while we are getting ready. At about 08:20 this morning they did a piece about the iPad, well I say ‘a piece’, it was a hatchet job.

Technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones, who looked quite flustered and confused for some reason, had a bunch of pad devices in his hands (obviously to show that the iPad wasn’t the only game in town) but only talked about the Apple device and the Kindle.

Firstly he angled the device so that the screen reflected the studio lights (and all the finger prints – it looked like he had been using after eating KFC) into the camera.

He then showed an iBook on the device but slagged it off for being £15 and it not being shareable (“you can’t loan it to your friends can you?”).

Then he tried to demo the new Times app (launched today – this should be good I thought)  but after moaning that it cost a tenner a month, it crashed on launch and he ended up showing a kids book instead – oh how embarrassing, way to go guys, that was your 15 minutes and you failed. Cellan-Jones commented “well I’m sure it will get better” in reference to the Times app.

No mention of iWork, nothing on the thousands of other fantastic apps on the store.

He finally summed up by calling it an expensive useless toy trapped in Apple’s ecosystem.

Tosser.

****Update****

I was speaking to a chap in the studio earlier who is closely involved in the Times App project (he was demoing it on camera for the site) and he knew about the “crash” of the  app. Apparently it didn’t crash at all. It has been rock solid for all the time he has been using it including early betas and watching him demo the thing today it certainly looked like the onscreen graphics that I saw on the spot this morning were actually it’s splash screen with the Times masthead and then the choose and edition page – there’s only one edition in the middle of the screen because the thing only launched today!

Thinking back to the BBC footage, there wasn’t an unexpected close which the iPhone/iPod Touch does to misbehaving applications, they cut away to a wide shot before the app had started and he angled the thing away from camera. There were no blue dialog message boxes popping up or any other indications that is had fallen over.

The plot thickens – was Cellan-Jones deliberately pouring scorn on the Times App at the same time as dissing the iPad to really show it in a bad light?

As I said – Tosser

As I mentioned yesterday there is a very unfortunate soul who (hopefully) is still on the Apple Campus, one Gray Powell who accidently lost a prototype 4th gen iPhone about two weeks ago.

Apparently (according to Gizmodo.com who bought the device) someone did try to give the phone back to Apple but were unable to.

Should Gray keep his job when it is obvious the importance that Apple places on confidentiality ? I don’t think so, it may have been a genuine mistake (after all, no-one would throw their career away on purpose), but if you are in the trusted position of having something like this on your person, you don’t go to a bar and get pissed enough to leave it on the chair and not check it’s on your person when you leave.

Have your say, vote on the poll below….

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Someone will be put up against the wall for this one.

http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone

No pictures from me Steve, I don’t want to suffer the C&D letters, but it is looking really good. I’ll buy one when you release them.

Don’t be too hard on him, everyone makes mistakes every now and then and he was REALLY drunk (I would have thought any way – you know to cock up this big!).

your address doesn’t autocomplete any more.

With the ready availability of relatively inexpensive cloud storage, isn’t it about time some one (COUGHapple) had a small server for the home (COUGHtimecapsule) that had some intelligence to store just enough of your files that were regularly used to make them quick to retrieve (lets call it a cache for want of a better term) but off loaded all your files to the ‘cloud’ (COUGHidisk) automatically so you could have ‘unlimited’ safe storage that was accessible anywhere?

You know the sort of thing, the device would manage what it had on it’s local storage. Of course the online storage would cost a little bit extra on the services you already rented (COUGHwwwmecom) but a small price to pay for ubiqutous access to a robust storage solution surely.

At the same time, why not make the other devices you own (COUGHiphonepadpod) also access the data, hey it’s your data, your playlists, your music, your pictures, why shouldn’t you have (almost) instant access to it right? Would be good, wouldn’t it?

Hey by the way did you see the pictures of that huge data centre that Apple were just building and recruiting for?
Amazing. I wonder what they are putting in there, I bet that’s something to do with mobile advertising or distributing films or something don’t you?

Now where did I put the cough medicine, I have a really nasty tickle.

Thirty years after a bunch of far eastern companies (and other) got together to develop a common application platform, a bunch of far eastern (and other) companies have got together to develop a common application platform.

The snappily named Wholesale Application Community is a consortium of mobile phone manufacturers and service providers that are banding together to (supposedly) challenge Apple’s App Store control over the mobile application market.

The WAC’s current member list: América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom,Deutsche Telekom, KT, Mobilkom Austria Group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom,Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Telia Sonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint,Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone, and Wind, as well as device manufacturers Samsung, LG, andSony Ericsson.

The idea is that they will promote a common set of APIs that all manufacturers can implement and allow a common set of applications to run cross platform on OS’ like Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile.

Is it just me that thinks this utopian ideal sounds a little like the ill fated MSX initiative but with a modern, connected spin?

It is a chicken and egg situation, the only reason the App store has been successful is that there was a large user community of early adopters – rich pickings for eager developers. If the APIs ever ship (lets not underestimate the technical challenge in doing this) and it delivers on it’s promises, will there be the demand for the applications? How will the payment for the apps work, who manages the cash?

Well it’s out, the Apple device is called the iPad, is small cute and expensive enough to get some people moaning about it’s price but affordable for the devout/fashionably stupid to get one.

Looks quite nice and I’m sure it will be a roaring sucess, but why isn’t there a camera and iChat for comms? Once again they have overlooked Instant messaging/Video or audio chat for a mobile device – it is so frustrating. It doesn’t even have a mic from the look of it.

Will I get one? well never say never, it is very neat and I haven’t had the thing in my greasy mitts yet but I think I’ll be saving my cash at the moment for the next gen MacBook Pro. Sorry guys, with a MacBook and an iPhone, why do I need something I can’t put in my pocket or run any app I wan’t on.

At the end of the day I don’t spend enough time on the loo or in sitting on a train to justify it.

— update —

Ok, it DOES have a mic apparently, but still no zarking camera – really, I ask you – WHY?