Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: A Mighty Fortress is Our Jobs

This article wasn’t written for Dethroner, but several of you have been asking me when my next column would run on Gizmodo. The answer is “never.” I submitted this column, about Apple’s iPhone, and was told it was “not fresh.” I informed them they could run it unedited or not at all and they chose the latter. Rather than let it go unpublished, I have decided to put it online here.

I do not intend to continue writing this column, on Dethroner or otherwise. It was fun while it lasted!

And another thing! Don’t buy the iPhone.

Jobs wants you to believe he’s nailing reformations on the cellular carriers’ door. But the only thing he’s reforming is who gets your monthly tithe.

Out of love for the iPhone yet a desire to bring its failings to light, the following propositions should be discussed, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Fucking Me, Master of Dogmatism and of the Sacred Sophistry, and Lecturer to the Ordinary on the same at this place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate electronically with us may do so by shutting the fuck up forever.

i. Cingular will share subscriber revenue with Apple. – According to the Wall Street Journal, Cingular was begging for the iPhone so vigorously that they conceded Apple a portion of subscriber’s monthly fees, despite that Cingular may already lose money on each subsidized iPhone sale. (Cingular knows deep inside its aching genital cavities that it made the right choice; it’s wasted the last ten years gorging on mergers to bother keeping itself technologically pretty. Cingular is still flattered that Jobs would even ask them to dance.)

Did I have a point? Oh, yeah: How the fuck does Apple sharing our revenue help amid the flood of noxious service? Now there will be two companies supporting our iPhone; two companies fighting for our subscription dollars. Lo, our doom is sure.

ii. Carrier subsidy lock-in remains. – Carrier locking is the DRM of the cellular world. It only helps the carriers selling you the phones—the ones you bought for a ridiculous discount; you’re not entirely off the hook, here—and make it impossible to hold the carriers to any semblance of good customer service. You can’t leave, because you signed an unfair contract. (Then whine because your loan shark doesn’t ask you which kneecap you’d like to have shattered first.)

Every time you get blown off by a $7-an-hour customer service agent armed with cruel hate, pull your “free” phone away from your ear, cover it in kosher salt and pickle juice, and corkscrew it into your urethra. (Your screams tell you the status quo is working!)

You’ll not only have to pay full price for the iPhone—and I’ll bet you anything that $600 is going to be a break-even price for Apple by the time it launches—you’ll have to sign up for a two-year contract just to get the privilege of giving them your business. Don’t do this. One little word will fell them: resist.

That reminds me: Didn’t Congress unlock all cellphones? What the fuck is the hold-up?

iii. No user-installed applications. – People used to ask me all the time, back when they were desperate to get a quote to pad out a column, “What makes a smartphone a smartphone?” It took me a little bit of fussing, but I finally decided that a smartphone is any phone on which you can install your own applications. Not just download little widgets from a carrier’s walled shopping garden, but anything from the far reaches of God’s Great Internet—a program that might even break your smartphone, but that’s okay, because that’s what computers, big or small, do: they break. And by breaking they get stronger, until we whimper under their plasma-whips eating books.

So fuck you, Sir Jobs, for claiming that user-installed applications could break Cingular’s network. That is exactly the sort of horseshit statement you trot out that reminds me how you think of your customers: salivating money nozzles too encephalopathic to acknowledge how the big scary world of technology works. (Of course, he’s right: you guys make Helen Keller look like the Silver Surfer.)

Jobs only wants the iPhone closed to protect his revenue streams, both by selling you new applications and maintaining the video and music DRM. (I’d also hazard a guess that the “It’s really just a tiny OS X-running Mac!” illusion would start to crumble as soon as non-Apple-optimized programs started shoulder-checking each other for the iPhone’s needfully anemic processing power. Oh, and Cingular is afraid of Skype.)

But whatever Apple’s rationale, who cares? If you’re going to buy a smartphone you should be able to install whatever you want on it—that’s what makes it “smart.” Sure, someone will figure out how to hack their way into the iPhone within weeks of launch, but that’s not the point. If Apple really gave a shit about the rights of their customers, there would already be an SDK online. They didn’t open up the iPhone because they think they don’t need to give their customers complete respect. The sad thing is, they’re right. Most people aren’t smart enough to know they’re being screwed.

…

xcv. Stop letting Apple off the hook just because they are better than almost everyone else. That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? Apple does a lot of stuff right, including throwing out just enough bones like “Thoughts on Music” to entice us into believing that they’re looking out for us when they’re really just trying to make money. (Steve Jobs’ craft and power are great: looking like Martin Luther but maneuvering like Henry the Eighth.) Yet at the end of the day, what’s best for a corporation isn’t always best for its customers. Often what’s right isn’t always what’s most lucrative.

I’m not blind. What Apple has done right with the iPhone platform is exciting. It won’t surprise me if the iPhone eventually ends up being a success, just like the iPod. But for the next year or two, before the iPhone hits the mass market, early-adopting gadget nerds actually have a chance to influence the company. Don’t just give your money away. Let shiny goods and jealous kindred go. Make Apple earn it.