EGOPOLY

(Sorry, this is biased towards boys. If you aren't a boy, it might be totally wrong.)

My pals and I were very excited to go to the talk and hear the founder of Apple speak. He was kind of a mythical figure to us. The Mac had just launched the year before, and about half the computers on campus were Macs. Back then, not too many kids had computers of their own, and there was no network available in the dorms in any case. There were public computer clusters around campus, and they were of three kinds: PC, with real IBM green screens; Macs, the kinds with a single floppy drive and no hard disk; and Unix workstation clusters, usually HP or Sun. Anyway, Macs were pretty popular, and a big deal. And we saw Jobs as this young guy who had made it happen.

So we were kind of hanging around the amphitheater, so we could score a good seat when the talk started.  Somebody came out and told us that Steve wouldn't be coming. He had resigned from Apple that day, or maybe the day before. 

(I actually can't remember the date. It was a nice day, so it probably was September or October 1985. Many sources on the Internet say it was May 1985, but I'm pretty sure that's not right, because I was not yet in college then. I think May 1985 was when Steve failed in is attempt to ouster Sculley, and he finally resigned/was fired in the fall. None of us really had any idea about all the boardroom stuff that was in the news probably all that summer; we were just kids starting college, and had other things on our minds.)

The first thing that struck us was this: how could Steve Jobs be fired from Apple? Wasn't he the boss? Didn't he make Apple? It seemed completely unfair, and we had no shortage of comments for the "suits" that must have done something tricky or underhanded to seize control of Apple.

What strikes me now is something I only really am able to understand 25+ years later, after seeing his vision unfold. I wonder now if my life might have been different if Steve had shown up on that sunny day. If he had been at Apple for just another week or a few more days. What kind of impression would he have made on my young mind? Would I have dropped what I was doing and moved to California? Or, less radically, would I have tried to get involved in startup companies at a much younger age? I didn't really get that fever until almost a decade later.

1. There will be a new iPhone, and it will be called "iPhone 5."  

Why? They've been working on it for over a year; there's no way they'll come out with an "iPhone 4S" after all this time. Also, if they release iOS 5 but not iPhone 5, that will just confuse the heck out of regular people. You know, the people who go to the Apple store and buy iPhones.

2. iPhone 5 will look visually distinct from iPhone 4. I love the iPhone industrial design, and can't imagine how it could become more elegant, unique and iconic. But Apple will come up with something, and I have little doubt that my precious, beautiful iPhone 4 will seem a little dated and clunky by tomorrow afternoon.

3. iPhone 5 will have a number of better specs: faster CPU; more available storage; probably a better camera.  Everybody I talk to hates how slow the iPhone camera is to initialize, and Apple is certainly aware of this annoyance. The biggest improvement to the camera that they will talk about will be 1-second startup. 

4. They will have figured out radio and antennae stuff so there is one and only one model of iPhone (albeit in different storage capacities.) You'll be able to buy one phone and activate it on either AT&T or Verizon (or Sprint, eventually). In nerdy terms, this means the phone will support both CDMA and GSM phone networks. It will no longer be carrier locked, since there are no longer any exclusivity arrangements with carriers. 

Why? While most consumers could care less about being able to switch carrier to carrier, it vastly simplifies the choices presented at the Apple store or on the Apple store web site.  Right now (in the US, at least) you have 2 carriers, 2 colors and 2 sizes: eight possible phones to choose from.  Apple (and anybody really clever about closing a sale) wants to reduce the number of choices.  This will cut the choices to size and color only.  And maybe they'll drop color out of it for a while: only black?

I can't wait to see what they come up with.

I am still going to buy one, of course. The camera startup alone is worth it to me.

But Wordpress makes all the pages slow, since it's all dynamic, and the supercache breaks every few months when an upgrade comes out, or if I switch hosts or mess with my apache config. 

I decided I don't really want comments: they are 99% spam, and anybody with intelligent feedback can email, tweet or publish on their own blog.  So I'm back to Movable Type, which publishes the entire site in "baked" fashion as it is now called, all static HTML.

So if I ever write anything interesting enough to get fireballed, it hopefully won't be an embarrassing outage.