Dear AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department,
Mrs Fogey, bless her, has just bought us a Macbook Air and an iPad mini for our birthday. How lucky are we? One day this century TF will get all its stuff transferred from the PCShort for personal computer. Most commentators use the term as a shorthand differentiator between Windows-based computers and Apple devices. But an Apple computer is still a personal computer. we used to run to the Mac. Given that the flavours of USB on each device don’t like each other that much and that our wireless upload speeds are, thanks to Talk Talk, glacial, we hope to complete this task, to paraphrase Basil Fawlty ‘before one of us dies.’ No breath is being held. Instead this Apple deluge has got TF to wondering about a couple of other items of Cupertino cock that are kicking around the office; specifically a first generation iPad and an iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged. 3. Scoff not, children. Whereas 2010 and 2007 might seems aeons ago to some nappy-wearers, they do not to any Fogey. Neither device now supports Apple’s latest mobile operating system (iOS). Consequently many apps no longer function. TF could use the iPhone 3 as a phone/text/email/web surfing device but what fun that would be not having the relevant apps and so having to try and get into everything via each service’s website via Safari. We cannot, for example, use the appFrom Wikipedia:
A mobile application (or mobile app) is a software application designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. They are usually available through application distribution platforms, which are typically operated by the owner of the mobile operating system, such as the Apple App Store, GoogleStarted life as a mere search engine; now hell bent on world domination. More PhDs work for Google than any other single organisation and they're determined to know everything about everyone. For some reason Google thinks this inside info will help them and their chums sell us more stuff. Play, Windows Phone Store and BlackBerryOld fruit. Smartphone, most often with qwerty keypad that can only be operated by those with the fingers of an anorexic pixie. Mostly a business device that's good for emails but not much else. A misser of many boats. App World. Some apps are free, while others must be bought. Usually, they are downloaded from the platform to a target device, such as an iPhone, BlackBerry, AndroidAn operating system for mobile devices developed by Google. It is now the principal competition to Apple's iOS (i operating system). It has gone through several versions, all of which have been given wacky nicknames. The latest is known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Those Google geeks are sooo hilarious! phone or Windows Phone, but sometimes they can be downloaded to laptops or desktops. For apps with a price, generally a percentage, 20-30%, goes to the distribution provider (such as iTunes), and the rest goes to the producer of the app.
The term "app" has become popular, and in 2010 was listed as "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. In 2009, technology columnist David Pogue said that newer smartphones could be nicknamed "app phones" to distinguish them from earlier less-sophisticated smartphones icons to connect to: the iTunes store, Spotify, SkypeService that allows cheap and/or free voice calls, instant messaging and video calls via a broadband Internet connection. Great if you have relatives living miles apart or if your phone chats go on and on and on and on and on... In May 2011 Skype was purchased by Microsoft for .5 billion. Skype has 663 million registered users as of September 2011., Instagram, ShazamFrom Wikipedia: Shazam is a mobile phone based music identification service. Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user., BBC iPlayer, Sky Go – you know, those obscure apps that no one uses any more. Even Angry Birds won’t play. The iPad isn’t much better, because even though it is much more recent, it too doesn’t support iOS 7 or any of its variants. And it crashes constantly, in spite of having plenty of available RAMStands for Random Access Memory. If your computer's processor is the conductor, RAM is the orchestra. It dictates the speed at which stuff happens on your computer. Older PCs with 512 megabytes of RAM will seem ploddingly pedestrian compared with newer machines with 4 gigabytes or more.. The iPad and iPhone 3 are stuck with versions of iOS 5 and 4 respectively. You may say, ‘well, upgrade, you geriatric skinflint’ but you’d be missing the point. Imagine your TV suddenly stopped working because all the broadcasters had colluded with your TV set manufacturer to stop that set from being able to display any of their programming once your set was, say, five years old. You may well stamp your foot. And then take your still lovely TV to the tip and shell out for a new one. Because what else can you do? This isn’t so much built in obsolescence we’re talking about here, rather a deliberate and unnecessary removal of functionality from an otherwise perfectly serviceable device. That we paid good money for. And is now worthless, in every sense. By the end of next week we suspect our shiny new MacBook Air and our oh-so-cute iPad Mini to be similarly obsolete. It’s the joy of tech.
So, Apple, enjoy the fruits of Mrs Fogey’s generosity and while you’re doing that, go fuck yourselves.
All the best,
Fogey T.