Police Commissioner (Norman Matlock): The walls in the 53rd precinct were bleeding. How do you explain that?
…
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
So, I bought an iPhone.
Those of you who have known me for a while might be surprised by this.
My history with phones is long and detailed and very, very idiosyncratic. I do not expect my reasons for wanting a thing to apply to anyone else. Don’t see this as a prescriptive essay telling you what you should do, because it isn’t. End of caveat.
After some considerable time using various phones I think I’ve defined the criteria, the things I want from a phone, as three: beauty, vitality, and openness. Beauty is about the software and the hardware together: does the thing feel pleasurable to hold, to use, to work with? Vitality is about the community: are there loads of apps? Is there competition so individual apps get better? Do bugs get fixed? When new things arrive, do they arrive on this platform? And openness is about stuff that the platform prevents you from doing: are there things that only certain magic anointed apps can do? Can I use this device from Ubuntu? Can I build apps without buying the one specific choice of IDE which doesn’t work on my laptop? Are there things which ought to work but don’t because they compete with the platform vendor’s business model?
This, in the words of the old joke, is one of those “three things: you can choose any two” situations.
Android, and Android phones, have vitality and openness, but not beauty. (Idiosyncratic definition, remember. If you’re just about to tell me that you think the Nexus 4 is beautiful, I don’t care; I don’t think it is. Disagreeing here is like telling someone you don’t think their husband is attractive; they’re not interested in your opinion.) I find Android to be inconsistent, incohesive, and annoying (with more detail 9 months ago if you want to read back). You are welcome to feel differently; you probably don’t share my taste in clothes either. (Hardware beauty is achieved in Android phones solely in my opinion by Sony with the Xperia range, but that doesn’t help the software. And Sony have a long-term record of unopenness, which is why I don’t buy their stuff.)
The Nokia N9… openness and beauty, no problem. I loved, and still love, the N9 hardware, and I love the software too. Swiping to switch between apps, that’s great. Three home screens, great. The feed, great. Applications that background explicitly rather than the phone thinking it knows better than I do about when to kill an app, great. Accessories that fit with the device and share design themes, great. But vitality is not with the platform. It’s decapitated upstream, and half the community don’t want to build great things on it; they want to build it itself. So there are not many apps, and there’s not much competition. So you don’t get Shazam. You don’t get Google+. The web browser is mildly deficient but more importantly isn’t tested, so things like Grooveshark’s HTML5 version don’t work. There are great apps for N9 (most of which are written by Thomas Perl 
), and there’s nothing technical which stops it from being great. It just didn’t take off. You can name reasons for that until the cows come home — it wasn’t supported right by Nokia, it’s too difficult to write apps, it wasn’t available in the right countries, being open-source actually turns people off, the community are too busy hacking the OS to build great things — but the reason doesn’t matter. It didn’t take off, and so the limitations I find in it are very unlikely to be fixed.
And the iPhone… that’s beauty and vitality and no openness.
Well (as I hear voices clamouring that I’m being unfair to the iPhone), I can’t create apps for the iPhone with Ubuntu. (You may be thinking that I’m wrong, that I can make PhoneGap apps with build.phonegap.com, or that I can do it some other way, and you’re as far as I can tell incorrect, and I spent a long time looking into this. You need a provisioning ID, and you can’t get one without a Mac. No, I’m not interested in buying a Mac, nor am I interested in having a friend with a Mac do the packaging for me.) My existing micro-USB chargers don’t work and Apple adaptors cost fifteen quid each. I can’t sync with iTunes because I don’t and won’t have iTunes. How can I even consider a phone which doesn’t let me do this basic stuff without locking me in to Apple’s ecosystem? What am I, some sort of traitor?
The three things I want: beauty, vitality, and openness. They’re all important. Having a phone where I can’t make apps, where I can’t sync, where it’s surreptitiously an upsell for the company’s laptops, is most certainly a compromise of my ideals, and I’m not totally happy about it. However, and this is the point, having a phone where I can’t do what I want with it (the N9) or one where I find it unpleasant and unbeautiful (Android) is also a compromise of my ideals, and I wasn’t happy about that either. It might not be a compromise of your ideals — you’re not expected to have the same goals as I do. You might not have those three goals in balance: perhaps beauty’s more important to you, or perhaps vitality is, or perhaps openness is. For me, they’re roughly in balance. And no-one provides them all. So I’ve tried two sides of the beauty-vitality-openness triangle; now I’m trying the third side. Nine months ago I said that “no-one can convincingly say that I will never, ever, ever need iTunes“, and “I’ll doubtless be looking at a new phone again in a year; convince me then.”. Thanks to popey and rockstar I’m now reasonably convinced that I in fact do not need iTunes to use an iPhone 5 with iOS 6. So far that’s been the case. I cannot write apps, this is true, and that by itself might annoy me so much over the next year that I get some other phone a year from now; we’ll see. I can write web apps for the things I want, and maybe that’s good enough. I don’t know. I certainly don’t need iTunes to sync: that’s what Ubuntu One is for, and so far that’s working excellently: the first three apps I installed were Ubuntu One Files, Ubuntu One Music, and Bluefire, and now I can read all my ebooks on my phone and that’s about 40% of what I use it for taken care of right there.
So, I’ve got this iPhone. Niamh is properly annoyed that I have one and she doesn’t, to which I say: unlucky, darling daughter. Wait a year and you might inherit it when I move on again.
Meanwhile… anyone have any recommendations for cool apps?
Ahhh, I wish I could have shown the Aq from Season 1 of LugRadio this blog post. Would have made some of those earlier debates easier.
Seriously though, I think you might the right decision based on my knowledge of how you pick phones. Sure, it is a bit of a comprimise, but in think that overall you will be happy.
He was a bellend, that bloke, although he was doing the best he could with the knowledge he had at the time.
At no point during your phone dilemmas have you (iirc) considered windows phone. *ducks*. Far be it for me to try and encourage you to go down that route, however as I see it, it could fit in with your remit, and possibly be more open and dev friendly than iPhone!? *plunges dagger into chest*
He was a bellend, that bloke
I disagree, he was wrong, a lot, but always had interesting reasons for his opinions. Those were the glory days!
Acesabe: I seriously considered it. I like Windows Phone. However, it will not work with Ubuntu; not only can you not write apps, but you can’t even copy files onto the phone, because it uses an undocumented MTP extension called “mtp-z” which MS won’t tell people about and needs to be reverse-engineered. I am not interested in compiling a library out of Github in order to put files on my phone. This isn’t a problem for the iPhone because I have Ubuntu One there; there’s no Ubuntu One client for Windows Phone. There wasn’t one for N9 either, but I could (and did) write one. I can’t write one for Windows Phone because I can’t write apps without Windows. So, no Windows Phone for me.
Oliver: well, hopefully I do still have interesting reasons for my opinions
I’d like to have the chance to talk to me-in-2004 and explain how my views now differ from my views then, and see if I could persuade me-back-then.
I’m not too surprised; there are people in the Ubuntu community who are interested in Freedom and there are people who aren’t. I’ve never thought of your good self, Stuart, as really too concerned with any of the social, moral or political concerns regarding the Free Software movement. As far as I can gather and Jono can chime in if he’s not a member of the same club; there’s no outrage regarding Apple, and maybe a mild concern instead. Which is fine, different concerns for different friends.
So buying an iPhone isn’t our of character in that regard.
Now if I bought an iPhone… that would be quite a heel turn. Possibly a prank.
I just switched to an iPhone as well. I’ve gone through phases of caring about the politics of Free Software. I can’t fully escape non-free software. I work for a software company developing non-free software, using a non-free OS (I run Windows 8 at work, and not it’s not *that* bad), using Visual Studio and deploying to Windows servers. I enjoy .NET, and the C# Language, and I’m really looking to explore Mono on Linux more as time permits. That being said, I use Free software where I can, and where it makes sense.
I also like having the *personal* freedom to use the software (and hardware) I like and not worry about the social concerns of free software politics. The general Ubuntu community (both the true ‘community’, and you guys, the Canonical Employees) seems a lot more “free-minded” to me in this regards than the communities surrounding many other distributions. I now know of 3 Canonical employee’s with iPhones, You, Popey and I believe Mark himself revealed he preferred the iPhone once. The only other big-name iPhone using Free software person I can think of right off is Jan Wildeboer. Sure I love Free Software and everything it supports, but I also love being able to use a phone I enjoy (like you, all of the Android offerings felt cheap, plasticy and like toys). I bought (and sold) a Galaxy Nexus before purchasing a used iPhone 4S from a friend, and I couldn’t be happier with my purchase.
This is great for me, I automatically get to win any argument with you!
http://kryogenix.org/days/2010/06/23/on-annoyance-and-free-software, Martin.
So, I read that as “I value beauty more than I value openness”. There was other stuff, but that’s how it boiled down. Which is incredibly shallow and a huge shame given your celebrity status in the land of Ubuntu but, hey, it’s just a phone, no-one has died here.
But why did you feel the need to advertise this on Planet Ubuntu? It sounds like a cry for help, man. It sounds like you already feel guilty about your purchase.
You know, you could have just bought the phone and /not/ blogged about it.
Neil: I write down the stuff that I do because I think people find it interesting. If you don’t, no problem. I obviously didn’t explain myself very well if you think that I now value beauty more than openness, since I said a few times that I value them equally; I’ll take that as a decent critique of my ability to convey information and try harder next time.
I hope you’ll enjoy your iPhone ! And just wait a few month, you will be able to throw it away, in favor of a brand new shinning Jolla phone. Beautiful, open and alive. Unlike ! For those who don’t know yet : http://jolla.com/
(well, I hope I’m true, as the hardware specs are not known yet, but I’m faithful it will be beautiful.)
Franck: I’m not sure how Jolla will fix the issues I mention with the N9, and I was hugely disappointed that it will require new hardware, although I understand why. How do Jolla plan to create vibrancy?
Sil: what do you mean by vibrancy ? Do you mean a full enthousiastic community that produces great apps ? I think Jolla do understand that openess is a must for them. And I think this is the way to get a vibrant community. Maybe you won’t get Shazam, cause Shazam is not free. Certainly, you won’t get the advertising app from the Mall next door. Or maybe you will, as they are planning on integrating stuff from Myriad to be able to run Android apps.
So will it really take off : I can’t. Does it seem like a promising platform and one I would want to develop for. Definitely… Until then, I’ll probably stick with my N9 and toy with Qt, just to get ready (I’m a java server guy, and I must admit developping mobile app in C++ has a steep learning curve
Franck: roughly I do mean a full enthusiastic community that produces loads of great apps, yes. What I’m not sure about is what Jolla will do that Nokia didn’t; I mean, the N9 is open, and it didn’t get a vibrant community. What are Jolla doing that’s different? And how will they build a community of app-makers, rather than a community who want to hack on Jolla itself rather than build great things on top of it? Forgive me my scepticism, but I had the N9…
Stuart: you’re deflecting there a bit. If you value three things equally, but can only get two, you chose “beauty and vitality” (iOS) over “vitality and openness” (Android).
Since both have vitality, you chose beauty over openness. As I say, that’s how I read it, certainly no critique on your ability to convey information – it was a cracking, well written post on a Planet I love (Ubuntu) about a technology company I passionately despise (Apple).
Just saying. I mean, I’m no angel – I use proprietary stuff an all, maybe even stuff people hate too. But I do try not to advertise it too much.
Neil: I think you’re seeing this move as me finally arriving at a conclusion. What it actually is is me trying another alternative. I’ve tried vitality+openness; I’ve tried openness+beauty; now I’m trying beauty+vitality. Each equal. So far I’ve come to no conclusion about which, if any, of those three sub-par choices I prefer; in order to come to that conclusion I need to try them all, right? A year from now I’ll have some idea; perhaps at that point I’ll have decided that I like the iPhone more than Android or the N9 and then I will indeed have chosen vitality and beauty over openness. What you seem to be suggesting is that if I know ahead of time that the iPhone isn’t open (which I do know), I don’t need to try it… and that, to me, is putting openness above the other two things, not on a par with it?
I’m like the donkey in Shrek: I believe I believe I believe
An interesting article about Jolla here : http://qz.com/32922/here-comes-the-first-real-alternative-to-iphone-and-android/
@Stuart – Your link wasn’t answering much. Your blog post here is interesting in that it talks about your character.
You say you see openness, beauty and vitality as all equal; but freedom, fairness and progress are not mentioned. that’s because they’re all social concerns involving what we as a society do and not what any one person does. buying an iPhone is good for you and bad for society; you’ve made that choice because principly speaking, the tiny damage to society just isn’t a priority over a nice working phone.
Unlike the tactical actions of including binary drivers and using non-free flash where the argument is clearly a social net positive. There is no such tactical action here, because if everyone did the same thing, we’d be in a far worse place. Retrospective self deception cat make one feel better about such decisions though.
I don’t blame you for being selfish and lacking character. We all have our vices and we all have our priorities. Although it’s generally considered good decorum not to boast about it and that, right there, is why your blog post is interesting. and I suspect not for the reasons you believed it to be.
Yep, I make choices which benefit me, sometimes. That’s selfish, right enough. I fear you may not have understood the earlier blog post, though; apparently all the rest of the stuff that I do is worth nothing in your eyes, because I bought a phone and therefore I’m selfish. Not “occasionally selfish”, not “selfish about some things”: I am selfish and lack character because I did one non-free thing. When I compared that free-software-advocacy attitude to the one-drop rule: this is what I was talking about. I think it’s bad for advocacy of open source to vilify those who aren’t doing it. I think good advocacy is to not shout at people; it’s to explain how things would be better if they cared about open source software. If someone has an explanation as to why things would be better if I still had my Nokia N9, I’m interested in hearing it. Calling me names only counts as an argument if you’re six years old.
“I don’t blame you for being selfish and lacking character”.
That is not fair.
Stuart is one of the most selfless people I know and has tremendous character. Just because he uses an iPhone now doesn’t change that. Not everyone defines their value structure by software.
Let’s keep things in perspective.
Wow. I really hope Martin is using one of those FIC Openmoko phones. Because anything else would be selfish and damaging to society.
I remember you from the first lug radio season. To me you’ve come a long way in becoming openminded about tech, and I find it a win that you’re willing to try the iPhone. I like the fact that a fierce open source advocate is realizing that you shouldn’t exclude tech just because you don’t like some/all behaviour of the producing company.
I always support the tech choices of people, because they are trying to make the best of their situation and try to fit the new piece of tech/software into their own ecosystem that they have built over the years. Some choices by coincidence, others based on belief, others based on external factors. For each individual every one of these factors have their own weight in the decision making process for any new tech purchase.
To you the iPhone was the right decision. Mostly from an inquisitive perspective if I understand correctly. Have fun with it, and I look forward to read about all your adventures with it.
To all the moaners, it’s just a freaking phone!
Disclaimer: I’ve used nokias, a bunch of androids, some Windows 6, 7 and 7.5 phones, and run windows and Linux on several pc’s. Whatever works.
I could care less which phone you chose, I just dig that trianglegram you made there. I will definitely use that in future presentation! As for the Windows Phone, I thought they dropped the Zune Sync (MTP-Z) in favor of the USB Mass Storage stuff.
nixternal: I’m not sure, and it’s hard to tell without buying a phone
Glad you like the diagram.
@Jono – I didn’t demonise Stuart, I make my own vices, I do bad things to get by. Just like you and everyone else does. It’s very hard to talk to people who always want to be virtuous and can’t stand being naughty in any way. Please peeps, keep in mind that I still consider Stuart a friend and I like the work he does on free software; both paid and volunteer work.
But vices are vices and adding one’s tiny weight on the ledger of social harm is what we all do from time to time. I don’t begrudge people having iphones, but I don’t see why I should not call people out when they brag about those vices on the planet as if they were virtues.
If your issue with Android is that it lacks beauty, maybe you should have looked into the custom ROMS (most popular probably being Cyanogen and MIUI), I think they both look beautiful, and if the style isn’t to your tastes, they both boast high customisability.
pyrokinetiq: remember that half of my desire for beauty is the hardware. Secondly, I don’t want to have to install custom ROMs, to understand what a bootloader is, to care about the radio version. And thirdly…why, if the alternatives are so much better, is stock Android AOSP not using them? I mean, HTC Sense is also an alternative UI, right?
Martin, I think you’re mistaking suffering for your art for propagating your art. Perhaps I need to write something longer about this. In the meantime, flagellating myself like a thirteenth century ascetic for little to no benefit does not appeal.
I am not denying that you may feel you are ” being selfish and lacking character” if you use an iPhone, but accusing your friend of the same based on your own values is just a little…mean and tactless.
Oops, that comment was for @Martin.
(Disclosure: I owned TWO N900, and then switched to iPhone in early 2011.)
It’s peculiar that you switched to iOS about the same time Google released their most popular phone ever (Nexus 4) and basically every indicator shows Android is the new Windows of mobile. From a distance, the whole mobile scene now looks exactly like the late-80s/early-90s OS scene: Apple were still making lovely PCs, but Microsoft changed paradigm by working with basically everyone else and “out-ecosysteming” any competitor. Google/Android followed the same blueprint, and they’ve basically won: Apple (and RIM, and Nokia) are one bad handset away from extinction, while the Android ecosystem simply cannot be killed. For my next handset, it’ll be really hard to ignore a good Android model, and I say that as somebody who has bought quite a lot in the Apple walled garden (got a MBP etc).
One question: if Google were to gift you a Nexus 4, would you switch back? I know I would.
GiacomoL: an interesting question. If Google sent me a Nexus 4 in the post, I don’t think I’d be inclined to switch: my objections to Android are long-standing and well-documented. (See earlier posts, linked above.) I think that Google themselves are doing a reasonable job of defining a design aesthetic, but they’re doing a horrible job of convincing anyone else to adopt it, and Android’s inconsistency thereof is what annoys me. That isn’t fixed by Google releasing new hardware and new releases of Android; they need to come up with a way of convincing Android developers to fit their overall design vision, and/or Android users to reject apps that do not conform to that design vision. That won’t happen while half the Android users I know consider the ability to make a shit app part of their birthright as open source developers, because making something consistent is somehow caving in to the Man.
My *GOODNESS* there are some self-entitled so-and-sos in the F/OSS-is-sphere, many of whom feel that because they read a Planet, they own it. I’ve seen the same nonsense on Planet Debian. Sorry you’re at the sharp end of them. (which reminds me: we need a more PC term to mean the same thing as “freetard”, I’m uncomfortable using that)
I remember being embarrassed to admit to owning an iPhone 3G in F/OSS circles until I was in a pub with Matt Garrett once and he pulled an iPhone out. I asked him about it and he summed it up better than I could: “It’s a UNIX-ish phone that actually works.” Some time later I tried desperately hard to use a Samsung Galaxy S2 as my phone, but it let me down once in an emergency situation (totally locked up and required a hard reset to get working again, several days later). That simply was not good enough for me, on a device I need to be reliable in emergencies. I’m now on an iPhone 4. I do love Android on tablets, though.
Ah dear, got to say little disheartened by this. But then I get more and more disheartened with a lot of tech folk these days. I know it’s a rather futile stance but I see the purchase of anything Apple as funding what has essentially become a hostile law machine bent on suing everyone (perhaps a little bot of an exageration.. but really rounded corners..). Right now most FOSS communities have escaped but it likely won’t always be the case. I know Apple are not alone in this, but they are a fairly big bully. Perhaps that was due to Jobs, guess we’ll have to see.
The whole buy a Mac and run Linux on it, what is the point. You are supporting a closed eco-system, Apple have already made their money and you’ve supported their legal fund while promoting their hardware with their obnoxious glowing logo (no one is likely to know you are in fact running Ubuntu on it), I doubt they care if you run Linux on it. Ok that’s laptops, but still, the phone is an extension to that advertising.
Anyway I’m glad you found something to try and maybe you’ll like it (I actually hope you don’t in a schadenfreudich way!). As a matter of interest if you don’t use iTunes etc. how will you apply security updates? Apple are pretty lousy at disclosure so you won’t really know how vulnerable your phone is to make a choice on what updates you need.
Right well thanks for leaving me with a depressing start to the week!
PS: I bet the touchscreen is just as sh*te as every other one
PPS: Yes of course everyone is entitled to use whatever the hell they want, I don’t doubt I use some closed stuff, and I don’t think everyone should live that way etc. etc. yawn… I jsut stating how this has made me feel…
PPS: I don’t hate you popey in case you read this and think I’m mocking your laptop !
… but Microsoft never really persuaded developers to fit their overall design (or at least went nowhere near Apple’s notoriously-strict HIG), and still ruled the desktop. In fact, they probably won not by coercing developers into a particular vision, but rather by making it very easy to have a File/Edit/Help menu (and so on) so that users weren’t completely lost when switching apps. Outside of that menu bar, people were free to roam.
I don’t expect the mobile world to be much different: the higher you set the bar for overall consistency, the less “development mindshare” you’ll eventually get.
GiacomoL: yep. I personally am of the opinion that Microsoft dominated the desktop in the early years through smart business practices, and then in latter years through inertia, combined with a passionate dedication to backwards compatibility.
Stuart isn’t bragging, here, or on “the planet” as it is. Planet Ubuntu (which I presume you’re referring to), is simply a dumb script which aggregates several blogs owned by other people. People who are aggregated on that planet do not think to themselves, “oh, I know, I’ll make sure this goes to Planet Ubuntu, but not some other planet that might also be aggregating me” or any other incantation of that. They simply post to their own blogs. Stuart is certainly free to post to his own blog any content which he wishes to post to it (so long as the content is legal).
Complaining that someone’s post on their personal blog, which is aggregated to some planet site which you read, doesn’t somehow meet your ideological moral view of what belongs on that site, is inappropriate; particularly when you’ve likely shared several posts that do not fit someone else’s ideals about what should be on that site.
@felim I have a thinkpad x220.
Also the iphone does OTA updates now so iTunes isn’t needed for security updates.
@Jon – I too hate the word “freetard” and have opted for FOSSholes instead
I just need to totally remove the freetard word from my language, as well as purge a few other that I just can’t seem to shake.
@popey oh alright then, I’ll let you off.
Ah OTA… that took them long enough, good stuff so.
Nothing to add to the discussion, just posting here to archive this, OH on a call today:
“I heard Stuart sold out as fast as the new iPhone.”
Thanks for the reply, Stuart, puts things into perspective for me. I think you can see how I arrived at my initial conclusion though. And of course, your decision still depresses me. Just a phone, as someone else pointed out, however.
One minor item you complain about on Android – a lack of visual consistency in apps. That struck me as an odd stance to take given that Ubuntu is pretty much all over the place in that respect itself! Glass houses and all that! I’m certain both will improve in time however.
@Rodney Dawes : I was under the impression that blogs aggregate to Planet via tags in each post. I think, at least with WordPress, you can chose which posts will arrive on Planet. So, yes, when rape was being discussed last year, a few bloggers ensured that their posts didn’t aggregate in order avoid triggers.
@Felim : everything you said, I agree with. Well put.
SIL,
Have a question about your sorttable code, from back in 97′, and have a question… but don’t know how to get ahold of you (contact on website broken)… help?
Russ
Russ, drop me an email as per the address on http://kryogenix.org/contact.html.