Some, like TechCrunch, suggest that AT&T is behind this.  Others like Om Malik think AT&T has nothing to do with it, since they allow similar apps on Blackberry devices.

I’m not sure who to blame, and it really could be either.  AT&T surely doesn’t like the idea of you having access to unlimited SMS (that, via Google Voice and the iPhone’s push notification API, could work exactly like real SMS – where your friends can’t even tell the difference).  I bet the SMS fees they charge are just pure gravy.  I’m also not convinced by Om’s argument that the existence of Blackberry GV apps is sufficient for ruling out AT&T as the decision maker.

But let’s say Om is right and they don’t really care.  Why would Apple block Google Voice?  I can think of a few possibilities:

1. Someone at Apple thinks AT&T cares, and doesn’t want to strain their relationship.
2. Apple is afraid that Google might establish a beachhead on the iPhone and in the future use it to steal customers away to Android devices.
3. Or maybe, just maybe… Apple has plans to offer Google Voice-like functionality in the future, and doesn’t want to have to compete on their own platform.

I have no idea if Apple is even capable of that, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me.  Apple is smart.  They know this is just delaying the inevitable and that eventually we’ll have seamless integration between normal PSTN voice service and VOIP service.  Or we’ll just have VOIP and nothing else.  If Apple doesn’t drive this, someone else will, whether it’s on their platform or another.

Update:  Apparently I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.

Update 2: Or maybe it wasn’t Apple’s call after all. John Gruber claims to have confirmation that AT&T was indeed behind this.

Now I’m aware that most 3G users aren’t getting the discounted $199/$299 pricing that new subscribers are getting.  Though apparently some people are getting that deal.  Most others are paying $399/$499 depending on the model.  But $599/$699?  That’s ludicrous.

What’s more, I actually bought another iPhone 3G from the AT&T store at FULL PRICE in February, after my original iPhone 3G was stolen.  Apparently, even though I paid full price, they extended my contract and upgrade eligilibility from that point in February.  I asked very specifically, and was told by the AT&T store staffer, that replacing my iPhone 3G at full price would not affect my upgrade eligibility. 

Well, apparently that’s not true.  Even though I paid the full $399 price for an 8GB replacement phone, I’m now listed as not eligible to upgrade until 7/15/2010.  Seriously.  If I’d been told that buying that full price replacement would extend my contract and upgrade term, I obviously wouldn’t have done it, and would’ve just bought one on eBay or Craiglist.  In retrospect, I probably should’ve done that anyway.

So this afternoon I spent a good 20 minutes going over this with a customer service rep who insisted that I had never bought an iPhone 3G last summer and that I “upgraded” to the 3G from an original iPhone in February at an Apple Store.  The account summary she forwarded me indicates an upgrade and new contract in February but doesn’t indicate what I “upgraded” from or where I did it, so I think she was just making that up.

I told her I wouldn’t care about the contract being renewed if she could just fix my upgrade eligibility, since it should be based on the last time I got a discount on a phone, not the last time I paid full price for a replacement.  She said this couldn’t be done, and refused to transfer me to anybody else.

The best she could tell me was that I needed to take any paperwork I had to the AT&T store in Bellevue and try to convince them to fix it for me.  This means rummaging through boxes (since I just moved) to hopefully find at least the receipt for the new phone, and taking at least an hour out of my time, with very little promise of actually achieving anything.

I’m going to try that tonight or tomorrow.  If they can’t help me, I may have to go take a look at the Pre.

When I bought my new car last year there was a car salesman at one dealership who only seemed concerned with what other options I was looking at.  He tried to tell me that I shouldn’t buy an Audi because they’re unreliable.  And so were BMWs.  His friend had one and a wheel fell off.  The engines “explode” sometimes he said. 

And you know what?  Maybe he really did have a friend who had a wheel fall off somehow, maybe he left a dealership or a mechanic and they’d forgotten to properly reattach one of them.  I know he didn’t like it when I mentioned I’d heard a similar story years ago from a friend with the brand of car he was trying to sell me.  I also know there were a tiny handful of people who did have problems with the old BMW M3 engines breaking on them (“exploding” being a technically correct, but incredibly misleading characterization).  Years ago I saw a website devoted entirely to people who’d experienced the problem.  There were about 60 of them, who all posted various pictured of their damaged engines for all to see.

There’s also a site like that for TTs.  And one for Mercedes SLs.

The thing is, he was never going to convince me that Audis were “unreliable” since I’d already owned 3 of them – each of which worked magnificently, and the ownership experience was always a great one.  Of course, I never miss any scheduled maintenance and always have any warning lights checked out immediately, which I’m sure greatly reduced the chances I’d have a problem.  He told me, “Well you must be lucky.”  I nearly told him to shove it.

What I really wanted to know when I went there was why I should buy the car he was trying to sell me.  Not why the other ones I told him I liked were bad choices.  It’s strange, but John Hodgeman is starting to remind me of that guy, which is funny because he plays the role of the PC.  But he’s really the only one of the two that even talks in the ads anymore, and he’s always going on about problems “he” has running Vista that I have never seen on any of my machines.

Just like that salesman, these ads are having the opposite of the intended effect on me.  You see, I’m planning to buy a new laptop in the next month or two.  I was waiting to hear what Apple is going to release.  But Dell’s recent announcements have had me start to seriously consider their new machines, like the new Latitude models – and I’ve seen some really nice lightweight Lenovo models recently as well.  So I’ve been torn… do I replace my trusty Macbook with another Mac?  Or do I save money and get a better system from Dell or Lenovo?

Watching these latest Mac ads is actually pushing me even more toward the latter.

Here is my response to this effort:

You guys are showing the FSF’s true colors with this action.  It is bad enough that you wage this campaign of lies and deceit against the iPhone (half of the reasons on your “5 reasons” list are blatant lies), but now you’re taking action directed specifically at hurting users who have chosen to support a product other than yours.

And as much as you may deny it, that is exactly what you are doing – advocating products and services that fit your particular (and greatly skewed) view of how the world should be.  You aren’t revolutionaries out to overthrow the draconian monarchy.  You’re more like Jehovah’s Witnesses coming to my door to peddle your own obscure brand of morality and a book that’s kind-of sort-of like a more popular one but supposedly better because it’s “free,” but not actually free just free in some pedantic sense using your own book’s definition of free.  That is, you still want me to pay you for it.

Well guess what, protesting against consumers for choosing another product is about as productive as a 5 year old crying at the grocery store because they want a candy bar.  You’re just going to piss off everybody else in the store, and embarrass the only people who have a vested interest in seeing you succeed.

As I read the initial details about Apple’s “Snow Leopard” release (ostensibly called OS X 10.6), I got to thinking… What do they mean that they’ve taken the focus away from new features?

From Apple.com:

Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard’s enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality.

One word was striking to me, not for its presence, but for its absence.  That word is “security.”  A few years ago Microsoft was more or less caught with its pants down when it came to the wild world of the web.  But a couple years after Windows XP was released, Microsoft “got religion” on security and made some deep changes.  Those culminated in the release of XP SP2 – which consisted of a top-to-bottom review of the XP code and a major security-focused overhaul of its code.  It’s been said many times that certain high-level Windows execs thought XP SP2 should have been an entire OS release instead of a service pack.  That’s how big the changes were.  But who would ship a new OS with basically zero new features?  Well, now we know.

That has me wondering… why is Apple taking the focus off of new features for 10.6.  Especially when Leopard wasn’t exactly brimming with new hotness.  I think there are three reasons:

1) iPhone.  Jobs has shown a great ability to focus the entirety of Apple on a “north star” and drive toward it full-steam-ahead.  That’s what the iPhone is doing now, and to great effect.  However, this is not without cost.  Apple’s focus on the iPhone has left it with fewer resources to devote to other projects, particularly when it comes to software development.  Thus I have a feeling the crew working on OS X these days is a good deal smaller than the group that worked on Panther and Tiger.

2) Embedded devices.  Apple says they’re going to slim-down OS X in 10.6.  That makes sense, especially when you consider their affinity for flash-based devices.  If we’re going to see a Mac sub-tablet / super-sized iPhone device, this will be the OS for it.  It’s also likely a way to leverage some of those iPhone-focused resources in order to ship a version of OS X timed to counter Windows 7.

3) Security.  Apple’s PC marketshare is growing.  This is great for them, but only if they can hold onto it.  An onslaught of security nightmares, like those suffered by Windows XP a few years ago, would be disasterous.  They can’t afford to risk it.  Apple knows that they won’t be spared by attackers for much longer, not when their market is growing.  The untested nature of its software (untested by the “hacker” community) and its increasing prevalence on machines will make it a very tempting target soon enough.

So why is number 3 so important?  Because Apple can’t keep claiming that gaping holes in their software aren’t important.  They have an opportunity to have their XP SP2 without having their MS.Blaster / Code Red / Slasher / etc.  They can do something now to prevent malware from becoming as rampant on Macs as it was on Windows XP systems.  If they aren’t doing this, they’re being foolish, and they’ll get little sympathy from those who keep telling them to get their act together.

So how much time does Apple have left to figure this out?  I think not long.  Heck, the first shots may already have been fired.

Consider the following paragraph and tell me that bias and sensationalism haven’t taken over tech “journalism.”

With last year’s arrival of Vista, Windows has swollen to 1 billion bytes (a gigabyte) or more of software code. The “Mach” kernel of the Mac OS X, however, requires less than 1 million bytes (a megabyte) of data in its smallest configuration, expanding modestly with the sophistication of the application.

So the iPhone kernel is smaller than all of Vista and its included applications.  Sound the alarm, get the president on the line, this is huge news.

What Gary forgets is that the CPU of my Dell workstation is hundreds if not thousands of times smaller than an entire Mac Pro.  I think, advantage Dell.

Of course I’m joking, these comparisons are absurd.  Yet in the very next sentence Gary piles on the bull crap.

This bloating has saddled Vista users with increased costs and poor performance on average computers.

If you look at Apple’s own website, they state that Leopard requires 9GB of available disk space to install.  Not surprisingly, this is almost exactly the same amount of space required for Windows Vista.  But how can that be?  Windows is bloated!  OS X is not!  We know these things, and working backward from this knowledge we can’t possibly come to the conclusion that they’re both just about the same size.  So why bother with the facts at all when you can work backward from what you want to be true?

The facts, in fact, are even worse for Gary’s argument than you might think.  You see, while Leopard and Vista require about the same amount of disk space to install to, one of them does have a far larger kernel image than the other.

The more portly of which is by far OS X.  I just rebooted my Macbook into Leopard to see just how large the kernel was.  The Mach kernel alone, which is only part of the OS X kernel, is 10MB in size.

So how big is the 64-bit Vista kernel on my desktop machine?  4.5MB

But this is hardly a fair comparison.  After all, that’s the size of a 64-bit Windows kernel.  We can’t reasonably compare it to a 32-bit Mac OS kernel (there is no 64-bit Mac OS kernel at the time of this writing).  So what about the 32-bit Vista one?  That weighs in at a massive 3.4MB.

Alright, the sensationalist “journalists” have won me over.  Come on NT guys, 3.4MB?  In 2008?  What’s with all the bloat?

1)  That post, and its title, are mainly about the outrageous ways in which people are jumping to Apple’s defense… not Apple’s action itself.

2)  If your argument is that user’s read the dialog and can uncheck the Safari box if they don’t want it, you are delusional.

Consider the recent report that 24% of internet users can’t find Google.  Now think about this from that user’s perspective.  They see a dialog that says, very clearly, “Select the items you want to update.”  Do you really think those users are going to know what Safari is?  Do you think they’re going to know that they don’t already have it installed?

I bet you way more than 24% don’t even know what “Quicktime” is.  I can promise you my sister, her roommates, and my mom all don’t.  They sure as heck don’t know what Safari is.  If they see it in that list, they are going to assume it is something they already have.  Probably something that came with their computer. 

If they’re “good” users, they will know that keeping their software up-to-date is important, so they’ll choose to update everything they possibly can because they don’t want their computers to be hacked, and we keep telling them that the best way to do that is to keep their systems up-to-date.  Apple is manipulating that to their advantage.  That’s exactly what John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, said yesterday.  He is right.

You can argue that it’s their software, and they can do with it as they please.  I will agree with you, actually.  However, just because I believe they can do this, and support their right to, doesn’t mean I have to like it.  I think it’s a shitty practice, and if we don’t make a big deal about it right now, it’s only going to get worse.

In response, lots of Apple fans have jumped to their defense.  They say that users read the dialog before clicking “update.”  They say users will welcome their new Apple overlords.  They say it’s okay because ”Microsoft is worse” – they make me reboot after installing updates!

Some nutjobs are even saying that Apple distributing new software through the updater is the “cost” of using their product – akin to ads in Messenger or fees for anti-virus software.  I don’t remember signing up for that cost when I bought my iPhone.  That same wacko makes a bunch of other outrageous claims about how it is a glorious achievement that Apple is assimilating your Windows machine without asking first.  You should read it, if only for the comedic value.

I think the disconnect here is simple. It’s just like the disagreement that arose over Apple’s font rendering when they first released Safari to Windows. And that is:

People like the way things work on their Windows PCs. They don’t want one app to have different, blurrier font rendering. They don’t want Apple installing apps on their machines without consent.

Apple and their fans don’t understand this, because they believe they are partaking in some sort of “holy crusade” and “bringing the light of Apple to the underprivileged in Windows land.” It’s an absurd mindset, but that hasn’t stopped them having it. They just can’t understand why Windows user’s wouldn’t welcome Apple’s software and UI.

They’re like the borg, “Why wouldn’t you want to be assimilated – we bring perfection!”

Maybe not, but close enough.  Anything that leads to users unintentionally taking an action is a flawed UI.  That could mean this is a design flaw – but Apple doesn’t make those =)  Besides, the intent is obvious – to get more people to install Safari whether they want it or not.  Rationalize it all you want, but you can’t deny the game they’re playing.Is it working?I’m a software developer, and probably one of the most generally computer savvy people I know. I got very used to clicking “Update” button on the Apple Software Update dialog so that it would keep iTunes and Quicktime up-to-date (along with the BootCamp software on my Macbook).I came very close to installing Safari by accident because of this, and would not at all be surprised to see lots of others clicking it without looking.

The right thing for Apple to do here would have been:

1) Don’t check it by default. You’ve gotten people trained to click “Update” since you don’t have an automatic update system, and now you’re abusing that.
2) The text in the dialog is inaccurate. It says “Select the items you want to update” – but Safari isn’t software on my computer, so how can I update it?

I had Safari installed on one of my machines to try it out when they released it. So it was normal for the updater to want to update it there.  Then when it popped up in the list on a different machine I was confused, and thought I had mixed up which machine I’d installed it on months ago. But I had not. They were trying to trick me.

Oh sorry, they were trying to “show me the light.”

Update:

I just posted a follow-up to this entry.

Like the Japanese car in the Dearborn auto plant parking lot, Macs and iPhones must create problems for switchers working at Apple competitors as well as companies with a PC-or-die IT policy.

He then goes on to link to this very blog!

However, Microsoft appears to be okay with at least one of its employees running Vista on a MacBook in the office. Blogger Chris Pirillo pointed to Brandon Paddock, a self-described geek who works on search technology at Microsoft (but not in the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, where it’s okay to show up with Mac hardware and software, or at least it is at the “SVC,” the Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, Calif.).

It’s true, I’m a Microsoft developer (on Windows no less) with a Macbook.  And an iPhone!  I’m also rather fond of both of them.

I’m not the only one, either.  I see as many iPhones as Blackjacks these days, maybe more.  It’s really an awesome device and it doesn’t surprise me at all that geekier folk would pick one up.

I also wasn’t the first on the shell team with a Macbook.  My friend David used to be an SDET on the team, but is now a PM.  His primary machine is a first-gen black Macbook.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one Macbook Pro in a nearby office, and my boss has an iMac at home.

Many of them are like me, and run Vista pretty much exclusively on them.  I know some didn’t even keep the OS X partition around when they installed it.  It’s neat to play with once in a while (and the VMware Fusion and Parallels stuff is getting really impressive), but not terribly useful for practical purposes, especially if your life revolves around building a competing OS.

If you do run OS X, you can even get it on our network, although some things like getting on the WiFi take a fair bit of extra work.  Luckily there’s an IT help page that walks you through it.

But as I said, in my case it’s pretty much a PC.  A stylish, well-put-together PC.  I even recently put a Vista orb sticker on top covering the backlit Apple logo (which likes to shine through while it’s running, creating an eerie, ghostly effect).  Not because anyone ever cared that I carried a Mac around, but because I’m very proud of the team I work on and what we do there.  And it fits perfectly =)

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I love working at Microsoft.  I love that I can carry a Macbook around to every meeting and have others think nothing of it.  I love that others on the team are willing to look at, use, and sometimes even live with our main competitor’s product.  I think it’s important to know what “the other side” is doing, and to understand what users are talking about when they make comparisons.  I think it’s also important that we respect the great things they’re doing down there, and strive to do better if we see some area where they’ve got an edge on us.

Little tidbit on that note:  One day a friend of mine on the team printed off a couple dozen screenshots of Leopard, showing off various tasks the user can do in OS X, and hung them on one of our hallways.  Across from it are pictures of the same tasks in that incredibly well-kept secret of a project that we’re working on.  There are post-it notes and markers next to each wall where passersby leave comments / questions.

I wonder if any hallways in Cupertino have something like that?

Just as I predicted

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

It redirects you based on your OS, which is kind of annoying if it doesn’t happen to properly detect you’re on a 64-bit version of Windows.

Update: Sadly it isn’t actually a 64-bit binary.  Lame, but what do you expect from Apple, who seem to be pretty stuck in a 32-bit world.  At least it includes a 64-bit iPhone / iPod Touch driver, which is all that was really needed.

Update 2: As of late 2008, Apple has finally put up a 64-bit landing page with a direct download link for the latest 64-bit installer.

It’s a real shame that the iPhone launched without a 64-bit driver.  Even worse, 6 months later and it’s still nowhere to be found.  At least this is a sign of hope, though, when compared with the previous error (seen below).  Then I can finally sync with my desktop instead of my laptop.

Just like previous Start++ customizations, these can be exported and shared on BrandonTools.com – in fact, I’ve already created a place to share them with others (and you can subscribe via RSS to see when new ones are added!).  Setting one up isn’t too difficult if you’re familiar with how these kinds of web apps work.  Below is what the gadget building UI looks like:

(Click to enlarge)

Note that Start++ is still in beta, and that the capabilities of Start++ Start Gadgets will continue to grow.

So what are you waiting for?  Go grab the download.

What’s great about this update is that it fixes every issue that I wanted them to fix (in terms of bugs, not features like EAS support which it still needs).  Here are the major ones for me:

1. Bluetooth to my car no longer drops out if it’s not plugged into power.  From what I read on forums this seemed like a specific interaction between the iPhone and Audi’s handsfree system.  Because of that I was afraid it wouldn’t get fixed.  But it was!
2. IMAP folder support works now.  Previously I could only sync my “inbox” folder.  At one point I managed to get the IMAP Path Prefix thing to work and could see my folders for about a day, but then the mail app started crashing whenever I tried to run it, and I had to reset the account.  Now it just works – no fancy configuration steps needed, the other folders just magically started showing up after the update.
3. Album view UI bugs are gone.  It used to be that if you went into Album view, selected a specific album, and then hit the “home” button, when you went back to the iPod app you would still be in Album view inside the album you’d selected, but without a “back” button to get back to the main Album list.  Also, hitting “Album” again at the bottom had no effect at all.  So you had to switch to another mode like Artist and then back, if you wanted to change albums.  Now it’s doubly fixed – because not only does the “back” button show up as it should – but tapping “Album” at the bottom also takes you back to the top level view.  Sweet.

 I’m really glad they were able to fix these things so quickly, as well as the security vulnerabilities reported.  When the patch was first announced, it sounded like that was all they’d addresses.  I was extremely happy, then, to find these other issues fixed – and fixed well.

My previous phones (BlackJack, PPC-6700, PPC-6600, Treo 600) all had issues and quirks that were never fixed.  Thus, I was actually prepared to live with the above annoyances because that’s what I was used to doing.

To the iPhone developers / PMs / QA people – thank you for working so quickly to address these real customer issues and not putting them off because individually they only affected a small subset of users.  My impression of Apple (a company I quite honestly disliked a great deal until a year or two ago) just keeps getting better.  I can only hope that competitors (in the form of Microsoft, Samsung, HTC / UTStarcom, Palm, Motorola, etc) take note.

iTunes and the iPod both work fine, and the iPhone is recognized and shows up as a disk / camera.  But iTunes refuses to see it and sync.  Why couldn’t they get this right?  I hope they fix it soon… having to sync through my laptop (32-bit) is kind of annoying.