Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 17

Yet another Hitler iPhone 4S video

Why Apple is smart to play it safe

My second-day take went up on the Beast this morning. Gist is, they're selling more iPhone 4 units than ever before, so why change the design when clearly people love it? Tim Bajarin points out that a new design would have meant retooling the entire production line, which would cost a lot of money and take up a lot of time. Better to keep the shell and load it up with new guts. Making design decisions based on product line retooling costs doesn't sound like something Steve would do. It sounds more like a decision that a supply-chain logistics wizard like Cook would make. And it's probably a great move. Apple has so much momentum right now. Why mess with success? For what it's worth, Henry Blodget says he can't wait to get one. And Joe Hewitt, a former top designer at Facebook, tells Business Insider he's confident that a year from now the iPhone 4S will still be the best smartphone in the world.

Hitler is furious about the iPhone 4S

Apple's iPhone letdown

My quick take on the Daily Beast. Summing up: It's a bummer because we all were hoping for more dazzle; but the iPhone 4 is a kick-ass phone and why change the design when it's selling so well? Siri is amazing. Even more amazing, to me, is that four years after the first iPhone shipped and you had to pay $600 for an 8-GB version, today you can get one free. (With a contract.) Longer story to come later.

How soon until we see the "Hitler finds out there's no iPhone 5″ video?

Here's the one where he finds out his broken iPhone can't be fixed.

"I guess Viagra isn't the only thing that can get middle-aged white men excited"

I originally heard that in a review of a Return to Forever concert a couple years ago. But I was reminded of it when I saw the photo above on the Engadget live blog from the Apple event.

Why are iProducts selling so well despite the bad economy?

That's where we started out last week, a couple of us at NewsBeast, and it ended up here, with a story called "Broke and Buying Anyway" that touches on the psychology involved in buying and using tech products. We started out talking about smartphones and tablets but from there we looked around and found that other semi-high-end products are also selling well. One example is B&W's Zeppelin Air speaker thing for iDevices, which the company says has been a big hit (more than a quarter of a million sold) despite its $600 price tag.

Same goes at Sennheiser, the headphone company, which says sales of its RS 180 wireless headphones are up 25% this year despite a $440 list price. (Street price is lower, but they still aren't cheap.) Even the flagship Sennheiser model, the HD800 cans which list for $1,800 and can be had for $1,400, have sold way more than Sennheiser expected, according to Stefanie Reichert, who is Sennheiser's head of strategic marketing. Sennheiser introduced the HD800s in 2009, during a bad economic time, and was surprised by how well they sold, Reichert says. (She wouldn't provide numbers. But based on the reviews I read when they were introduced I get the sense that the HD800 was created as a kind "see what we can do" product that would have a halo effect across the rest of the line without necessarily being a big seller in its own right.)

Reichert says people are still buying technology during the downturn because they are "cocooning," meaning they don't want to spend money to go out so they're just bringing entertainment into their homes. That made me think of Sherry Turkle at MIT, whose book, Alone Together, talks about people using technology to create walls around themselves. I sent Turkle an email and a few minutes later we were on the phone having an incredibly interesting conversation. Turkle is a sociologist and psychologist by training, and she comes at technology from that perspective. Her method involves conducting hundreds of interviews and listening to people talk about their gadgets. She says people tell her their smartphones make them feel safe, and happy. They give people a feeling of being in control. If I get time I will write up the notes and publish it as a Q&A.

"They're watching you"

That's the title of the new podcast from the Double D Guys, available here, in which Dave Thackeray and I discuss scary scary Facebook and scary scary Amazon, and I go on a rant about the virtual Panopticon that Mark Zuckerberg is building for us before moving on to discuss my fascinating recent conversation with Sherry Turkle.

Turkle is a sociologist/psychologist at MIT and the author of Alone Together, a book about how we use technology and what it does to us. She says we're not using tech gadgets to stay connected but rather (or at least, also) to put up psychological barriers and keep the scary scary world away from us. (More on this in a later post, because I find Sherry Turkle to be one of the most fascinating people anywhere, and from our entire conversation I was able to use just one little quote toward the end of a Daily Beast article. I wish I'd just recorded it, so I could put it up online as a podcast. Next time.)

Best iPhone rumor yet: New model will come in 16-32-64GB sizes; unless it comes in 8-16-32GB sizes.

I'm seriously not making this up. It's right there on 9to5Mac.

New iPhone will be radically different, practically unrecognizable

MacRumors gets the goods, based on photos of the case for the iPhone 5 which apparently have been arriving in AT&T stores and photographed by super-spies who leaked them to the press. (Right.) As you can see in the photo, there are huge changes coming. Once again, Apple has rewritten the rules of the game. One enormous design shift: The mute button now has been moved to the other side of the phone. Also: The overall size is larger, but the phone is thinner. And it's tapered. Tapered! Business Insider has a story on this too, which actually links you to a previous BI story about iPhone 5, which links to BI's really informative 10-click slide show about what to expect in the new iPhone. All I expect is to be knocked senseless by the Zeus-like power of Tim Cook when he strides on stage next week. And I know I will not be disappointed.