Apple on Evan Hoffman

Frustrations with the iPhone, from an Apple admirer

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:44:46 +0000

I got my first “smart” phone, a BlackBerry Pearl, in 2007. I got it from LetsTalk.com for $0.00 with a 2-year AT&T contract. It was EDGE-only - no 3G - and certainly had a lot of problems, but I loved it. At some point the ball fell out of it and it became unusable. The iPhone 3G was out by that time and I ended up getting my wife an iPhone 3G for Mother’s Day in 2009 and one for myself a few weeks later. I pretty much fell in love with the iPhone, and my concern about the on-screen keyboard was negated by having a real web browser after suffering with Blackberry’s for so long. And 3G was an amazing step up from EDGE speeds.

iPad drops WiFi connection to Verizon FiOS Actiontec Router

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:19:08 +0000

I got my wife an iPad 2 for Christmas and she soon started complaining about the Wifi dropping its connection. I suggested she try turning off the “auto join” wifi setting, but that didn’t help. She’d be doing something and get the “Sorry, there’s no internet connection” error every 5-10 minutes. We’ve had FiOS for quite a while and we have 8 or 9 other devices connected (including Macs & iPhones) to the router without issue, so this seemed weird. I was starting to think it was a problem with the iPad, but we went to a friend’s house and used his wifi (with a Netgear router) and the iPad had no issues.

One reason I hate iTunes.

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:04:43 +0000

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) - it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

My Apple tablet prediction.

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:13:31 +0000

I know nobody cares, but I figured I’d hop on the hypewagon and write down my guess for the Apple tablet. I think a “big iPod Touch” would be pretty boring, and not worth making. My guess (based on nothing): the unit will be controlled by eye tracking, and it’ll be able to zoom in on whatever you’re looking at.

That is all.