09 June 2010

The Devil Strikes Again - Apple iProblems


Oh not a great day decidedly mixed for those of you who sniff the Apple glue, and a salutatory warning for those of you who don't.

First off - I have to tell my loyal readers that I purchased a Macbook today. It is for a family member. I felt like I had sold my sold to the devil..... and probably did. As a result I ended up with a 32GB iPod Touch. It came free with the Mac. As did the printer... they must really want to off load these things.

On the positive side - the iPhone OS will go out starting probably 21st of June and this includes the OS4 for the iPad. I suspect that even before that there will be hacks on bit torrent out there. But wait till its official. Trust me on this one - not a good idea to mess with this stuff.

On the iPhone upgrade - AT&T have loosely said they will expand the pool of people who are eligible for the upgrade. I foresee that Apple will bring its policy of full price upgrades rather than discounting upgrades to the iPhut market.

A further piece of good news yesterday is that those of you who signed up for unlimited data plans at AT&T will be grandfathered. The only downside is that ... you wont benefit from the cost reduction that everyone has. So you will have to navigate the byzantine rules for figuring it out. Ditto similar bizarre and complex rules for figuring out if you are eligible to upgrade.

Now the bad news...

Brace yourselves...

AT&T acknowledged Wednesday that a security hole had exposed iPad users' email addresses, a breach that highlights how corporations still have problems protecting private information.

Gawker Media, which reported the breach earlier Wednesday, said 114,000 email addresses were revealed.

AT&T said it had fixed the security problem by Tuesday. The company also said it would inform all the customers whose email addresses and iPad IDs may have been obtained. By my calculation that's about 5% of all the iPads sold out there. Hmmm that could be significant because it is probably a large number (read just about all of the 3G ones out there) who bought the 3G version.

Not a pretty sight!

Now for the worse news... Apple has decided to declare all out war on just about everyone. Not content to try and crush Adobe, and waving at Microsoft in its rear view mirror - now Apple wants to take on Google. At stake is the mobile ad market. Apple wants to add yet another revenue stream (on top of the 3 already it makes from its iPhones) advertising built into the OS. Well folks that's Google's purvey. They don't like competition for grand theft auto. Google is pushing back - hard.

So take that sniff now... might as well get used to it. You are officially addicted. The Apple a Day now becomes the Apple (kaching) multiple times a day. And you are not hallucinating... you will not be able to give it up either. With acknowledgment to the great Lloyd Bridges.

Cheers

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