Apple, why can't we just be friends?
Oct 3, 02:06
I’ve been using the fancy iPhone for about a month now, and at this point I think I can make some knowledgeable observations. Please prepare yourself, as a conclusion may be drawn near or shortly following the end of this article.
Like the iPods that came before it, the iPhone is a device defined by it’s simplicity- minimal controls, clean interface, and most strikingly for a cell phone, very little extraneous crap (with Firmware 1.1.1 this has somewhat changed; that issue is addressed below). One of my favorite things about the iPhone is how it doesn’t have a T-Mobile or Verizon or AT&T button smack in the middle of its controls. That most wireless phones can sacrifice an entire key to unwanted corporate tie-ins and garbage stores is, perhaps, the strongest evidence that we really do need fewer buttons in phone interfaces.
But minimizing the interface does have a price: flexibility of use1. Building a device that could be considered elegant (and I believe the Phone qualifies) requires the ability to say no to unnecessary features. On the iPhone this means you can’t copy and paste text. Or send text messages to more than one recipient. And multiple inboxes (the only area of MobileMail I imagine anyone actually uses) are many more taps apart than they ought to be. But none of these are show stoppers, at least when seen in the same light as the iPhone’s browser, contact management, and overall interface.
The strange thing about Apple’s devices is their greatest weaknesses and are almost always due to design decisions made for reasons other than usability. These are the things that drive users mad- and usually for a good reason.
With my previous iPod I only had one issue I would categorize as ‘user-unfriendly2‘: the read-only nature of it’s music storage. If you’ve ever had the time to poke around on an iPod, you’ll discover that unlike the iTunes Music folder in a user’s home folder, the audio files on an iPod disk are arranged in a bizarre manner– renamed to ‘AEE48549DDF9945DFDF45Q223132.m4a3‘ and randomly strewn throughout directories named similarly. Why this was done is fairly obvious- it was to prevent users from removing the files easily from their iPods. Over the course of using that iPod, various software solutions to allow copying music off an iPod were released. Many of these were disabled by iTunes updates, updated to avert the iTunes patch, and then disabled by Apple again. Or the sites distributing the software were taken down by Apple. Eventually, the company seemed to have given up as there are currently many current programs that can preform this utility4.
I consider that situation a strike against Apple. They spent a lot of time and effort designing a system that would make it harder for a user to use the device. I would not consider this a good investment from any standpoint, technological, financial, or ethical.
Since the iPhone (and now the iPod touch) runs on a new OS X derived OS and a new suite of applications, everything has been designed by Apple with knowledge of what did and what didn’t work on the previously released iPod models. Unfortunately, the lessons learned seemed to be that users need to have less control over their devices and data.
Here is a list of things I cannot do on the iPhone due to design decisions made by Apple:
- Set any audio file as a ringtone
- Easily copy music off the iPhone
- Add music to the iPhone using any computer other than the one it syncs with (syncing with multiple computers is really, really broken)
- Send instant messages (it’s an internet device, remember?)
- Use the iPhone in disk mode
- Use a standard set of headphones with the iPhone
Regardless of the ancestral cause of these issues, to the user they seem to be and very much are cases of poor design. These are the kind of things a Microsoft device would get ridiculed for. Any time a company uses its efforts against its customers should be a cause for concern. It’s too bad Apple’s buddies in the recording industry didn’t clue them in on this, although for that to happen they’d have to recognize it themselves.
I’ve been getting asked a lot if iPhones are ‘worth it’. Each time I’m asked, it takes a little longer to answer. My response for the last week has been “I’m not sure.”
1 Please see exhibit A, the external-volume-control-less iPod Touch.
2 Or perhaps ‘consumer-unfriendly’ would be more with the times?
3 This isn’t an actual file name from any system, but it’s close enough to illustrate the point.
4 Although with the newest round of iPods, Apple started scrambling the music database file on the Pods, making it harder to use the devices with third party music software such as Amarok, a replacement for iTunes that runs on Linux. This has since been worked around by the open-source community.