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Apple Product Launch Starring “The Men Who Would Be Jobs”

Apple without Steve Jobs at the core is not Apple.

The consumer electronics business seems to have run out of road, as far as cool new ideas. This is apparent in the troubles Apple is suddenly facing. It makes a cool looking toy, but there’s nothing unique about an iPhone. It does what all the phones do now. The gap between it and the low-end brands is not enough to warrant a premium. This is an issue turning up all across the consumer electronics space. There’s just no new technology to make any of it “must have” or any brand unique. — The End Of The Line 

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  • Anon January 14, 2019, 9:51 AM

    A friend of mine always had to go buy the latest version of the Apple phone. He had also declared bankruptcy and today is retired with nothing but SS. I have a cheap “smart” phone, a Phoenix 3. It was free from AT&T (no really free not paid for over a year or two years but free.). I don’t use it for much. I do use the tethering ability (and that is why I wanted a smart phone). I do use it’s GPS sometimes and I do rarely go online with it. So I like the “advanced” features. But I would never spend $100 or $200 or more for a smart phone and I suspect at some level those who do insist on the bestest and smartest phones at any price do so to look cool to their friends. My friend probably spent $6-$8 thousand over the years for his phone fetish I bet he would love to have that money today. But he fails to make the connection between what he did and where he is.

  • jwm January 14, 2019, 10:27 AM

    The smart phone is digital heroin, and the streets are crawling with electronic junkies.
    Just like the powder, I won’t get near it.

    JWM

  • JiminAlaska January 14, 2019, 10:39 AM

    I enjoyed a lot of good years with Apple, starting with the Apple II +, sticking through a lot of Mac iterations, but 10 or so years ago shut down my last Mac & moved over to Linux & android devices.

    No regrets.

  • Eskyman January 14, 2019, 12:17 PM

    My smartphone is a OnePlus One from about 5 years ago. It’s running Lineage 15.1 OS, which is Android 8.1, so my old phone is right up-to-date; with the added attraction that I don’t have any apps that I don’t want. I can update to Android 9, Pie, but I’ll wait a while until the bugs have been sorted out. The iPhone can, I’m sure, do things my old phone can’t do; so what? It’s certainly not worth the price they cost, for me anyway, and I don’t have to put up with their restrictions either.

    These days I don’t call many people, nor do I get many calls; my smartphone is very handy in lots of other ways though, since it’s a computer that’s always with me and it does all the things that a computer can do.

    When driving, it lets me know the prices at nearby gas stations, and navigates me where I want to go. It even tells me if the police are waiting just up the road! When shopping, it lets me read barcodes & check prices & availability. While at the doctor’s office, I can read a book, surf the Web, check my appointments and listen to music. If I’m staying overnight somewhere and CNN is all that’s available, I can get real news or even watch a movie on my phone (though I’d usually also have a tablet with me, which is far superior for movies.) If I need to I can show my doctor my blood pressure readings, as they’re also on my phone, as are many other records.

    My children & grandkids live in Australia; it’s nice to have a free video chat with them, which my smartphone lets me do, and it’ll even tell me what time it is there, not to mention the weather.

    So I agree with the zman here, there just isn’t sufficient reason to “up”grade my phone to the latest whizzbang whatever, and I don’t plan to do so. Who knows? Maybe my old OnePlus One will be the last phone I ever buy!

  • Roy Lofquist January 14, 2019, 12:24 PM

    So I asked the kid at the phone store if they had a rotary model. He didn’t get it.

  • PA Cat January 14, 2019, 12:59 PM

    Roy–

    Being almost-but-not-quite as old as Gerard, I not only remember rotary phones, I remember when they came in only one color: Henry Ford Model-T black.

  • BillH January 14, 2019, 1:50 PM

    Roy and PA – We moved from a small town to a large city (pop. 14,000) in ’37 when my Dad took a job there (yeah, my Dad worked right through the depression). The apartment house we lived in had a rotary phone in the hallway, and I used to lurk out there and marvel when people used it. I guess it was an upscale apartment house, but I didn’t know it.

  • Roy Lofquist January 14, 2019, 2:16 PM

    I actually remember, and used, telephones with no dials. You asked the operator to connect you. The operators knew the neighborhood and asking by first name only was common.

  • MIKE GUENTER January 14, 2019, 4:56 PM

    The newest iteration of the Apple phone, and a couple of the Android products are priced around a grand each.

    My current phone cost me 500 bucks, but I really needed it for work…or I wouldn’t have it. I can read blueprints on it if necessary. I have an app where I can take a picture, use a stylus and send a redline drawing back to my project manager.

  • ghostsniper January 14, 2019, 7:01 PM

    Apple never made a red centavo off’n my ass.
    Our son was involved with the development of the Iphone in 2006 and had a dozen of em, then he dropped all of them saying they were junk and got a droid. I got my LG Tracfone off the shopping channel 3 years ago for $99 and free shipping and I’m still using the original 1350 included minutes. CAD on a phone? Please. Nothing serious gets done with a 4″ screen, ever. I have an AutoCAD phone version on my phone, tried it once, was exactly as I expected, never tried it again. Worthless. I started AutoCAD in 1994 with a 15″ color monitor and now have 2 32″ models on my desk. My first “monitor” back in 1983 was a 19″ color TV that doubled as Mr Rogers Neighborhood sometimes. Don’t make me post “Box of Colors” again.

  • Rob De Witt January 15, 2019, 6:55 AM

    My uncle Tom Scaiefe, born in the ’80s, had a standup phone on his office desk, the only one I ever saw in use. When it rang he’d answer with “It’s your nickel, commence,” apparently a wiseacre line from the ’20s. My mother’s number was five digits; my sister had a high-school girlfriend whose number was 7525, In the eighties one of my neighbors’ phone was out and she sent a silly young man-friend over to my place to make a call. He sat staring at my rotary phone and just about had a breakdown. What a long life it’s been…..

    Now I’ve been awarded an Obamaphone because of my destitution. It’s a smartphone-clone of some description, and I’m smart enough not to use it. The only reason I caved in and accepted it about a year ago is that the young 20- and 30-year-old pro musicians I work with in SF mostly can’t do business any other way. I carry a notebook instead, and the only thing I’ve used it for is a very few phone calls. Texting makes my neck hurt.

    One thing I’ve noticed is that the kids who’ve never had a landline are mostly impossible to contact. They ignore calls and even texts, and email is just too much for them. Not much fun, the little darlings.

  • ghostsniper January 15, 2019, 7:10 AM

    “…ignore calls and even texts…”

    Same here, mostly. Thanks to over the top spam.
    One spammer has been calling me for months, almost everyday.
    It’s a recorded message, all broken up, and in a female “oriental” voice and it never leaves a message on the voice mail, that’s how I know it’s a robo. The number called from is always different and I keep blocking them but they persist.

    My phone is a Tracfone so the minutes these assholes use are stolen from me. Everyone I know makes the same complaint and I read the other day there are over 15 billion robo-spam calls made every day. If Trump told the FBI to turn 100% of it’s efforts to fining the spammers and their enablers $100 per call and the FBI gets to keep $10 per call they would be too busy to dik around with all that russia nonsense and Trump would have his Wall money in a couple weeks.

  • MIKE GUENTER January 15, 2019, 9:59 AM

    GS, I don’t use AutoCAD on my phone. I have to take a lot of pictures to prove my work. Sometimes I run into a problem at work that has to be run up the line to get a change order approved. I can take a picture of the problem area, upload it to my app and use my stylus to highlight the problem and my solution to fix it.

    These new phones allow you to “expand” the picture so it’s easier to read and manipulate.

  • ghostsniper January 15, 2019, 12:38 PM

    OK, that makes sense.

  • Juliette January 15, 2019, 2:15 PM

    I am quite happy with my iPhone. It’s an older model, I don’t remember how much it cost and I don’t care. It does precisely what I wanted it to do – give me a method to take amazing, easy photos of my loved ones. That was literally the sole reason for picking the iPhone over any other phone (again, it’s an old one. The world moves on and newer phones have equivalent features now.) Brilliant editing apps put those photos and videos together into small snips of sunshine. I read books, stay current on the news, play silly games, menu plan, vacation plan, and dozens of other tasks on the phone – including talk to people. Buy whatever works for you. Use it in a way that makes sense to you. At the end of the day, it’s only a tool.

  • churchladyiowa January 15, 2019, 2:22 PM

    Back in the 1950s, we had an oak wall phone in the farmhouse. It had a “modern” receiver that enabled you to talk and listen at the same time. Previous model had been the gooseneck style—to talk, you leaned into the mouthpiece while holding a small earpiece on a short cord. My father also devised a way to “listen in” on other party line conversations without being super quiet. He installed a switch on the side; push it up & over to connect when you wanted to be talk, push it away and down to merely listen to others’ conversations. Rubbernecking was the term for what you were doing. And just about everybody did it.

    Fifty-five years later, I’m not sure where my car keys are and I sometimes blank out trying to remember a name. But I still know that our number was 3-K, and our ring was a long and two shorts!

  • AesopFan January 15, 2019, 10:23 PM

    My dad converted one of those wall phones to a radio receiver.
    No one has mentioned the really important advance: princess phones — in colors.

  • ghostsniper January 16, 2019, 6:36 AM

    My parents in the early 60’s had a light blue phone in the bedroom.
    It stood vertically and had the rotary dial on the bottom.
    Turned the right way, to the unfamiliar, it didn’t look like a phone but rather a futuristic art piece.
    Looked it up, it was an Ericofon.
    Like this one:
    https://urbanamericana.com/collections/all-decor/products/vintage-phone-by-ericofon

  • Nori January 17, 2019, 9:33 PM

    Apple’s Cook has been goosed by reality.

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