Still Waiting
April 20th, 2011 - 10:51 am
BlackBerry PlayBook — sleek hardware… and that’s about it.
No native mail, no native contacts, no native calendar. And it’s supposed to be aimed at the enterprise user. If you want to do basic business stuff, you must tether it to your BlackBerry. No, I’m not making this up.
Where is the legit iPad competitor?
Macbook Air?
Seriously, what is the point of a device that doesn’t fit in a jeans pocket and runs a ridiculously stunted closed OS? For a little more money and heft you can get a device that runs yesterday’s Unix with a marginally useful, if downright uncomfortable, interactive shell out of the box and presumably could be tricked into running Ubuntu. I have almost sold myself on buying one while I was typing that message
I just love people telling me what I can’t or shouldn’t do with my tablet, as it continues to take up more and more jobs from my desktop machine. And forget the laptop — it hasn’t been used for anything other than running the TelePrompTer for almost a year now. Travel? Keep your laptop bag full of cables and converters and spare battery and whatnot; I’ve given all that up.
Sent from my useless iPad.
So you don’t enjoy pointless holy wars? Sorry then, my bad
I just thought I’d give you an entirely different prospect — from where I stand, yes, tablet with a phone OS is basically useless since it can do less for me than my phone does already. And of all the hardware Apple makes the 11″ and 13″ airbooks are the only enticing pieces as I simply cannot match that form factor and weight elsewhere, money be damned.
I have not bought an iPad yet because I don’t have a good enough use for one. Several of my coworkers own them and they’re impressive but not enough for me to buy one yet. An iPad certainly won’t be good enough to replace my work laptop. The software I have to run (IBM Rational Software Architect) greatly exceeds anything you could do on an iPad and the screen is way too small. RSA runs on Windows and Linux but no native Mac version exists. So, for the time being, I’m stuck lugging around my laptop.
Now, I’d love to hear Steve’s opinion about the iPhone and 3G iPads logging location data. Why would they do that and can it be disabled? If my company wins this new contract, I’ll be doing a lot of traveling and would have a good enough reason to get a smart phone. Verizon’s iPhone was the leading contender but this article makes me question whether I want to buy one or not. Don’t give me any of that “if you have nothing to hide…” crap, either.
Here’s Gruber:
And Levinson:
Strikes me as a whole lot of nothing.
If it’s a whole lot of nothing, why does Apple bother to collect the data? Why is it get called out in the user’s agreement permitting Apple to collect the data? From the linked article:
Apple can legitimately claim that it has permission to collect the data: near the end of the 15,200-word terms and conditions for its iTunes program, used to synchronise with iPhones, iPods and iPads, is an 86-word paragraph about “location-based services”.
It says that “Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.”
Is this data collection in any way related to this story?
Even if there is a perfectly innocent reason why Apple is collecting this data on the phone and synching computer, why are they stealing system resources to collect and store this information without a user being able to disable it? If I bought an iPhone, why are they wasting some of the storage on these data files? I have better use for that storage than keeping track of everywhere I’ve been. And it’s no one else damned business.
The data is being collected as a means of tracking and triangulating recent connections with cell towers. It’s used to give better signal for the phone.
They’re not intending to “collect” this data for long-term usage, and it’s not in any way precise. If they wanted precise location data, they could just use the GPS, for God’s sake.
There’s no real point to the data being kept long term. Occam’s Razor supports Gruber’s take on this. It’s a bug.
And to extract a salient point specifically from your quoted passage above:
“For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.”
The GPS data is collected. But it can’t be used by any particular app provider without the user opting in. This is iron-clad. I know of what I speak. I, as a developer, simply don’t have access to this information if the user doesn’t opt-in. If they don’t opt in, iOS keeps me locked out of that data.
Final point: If you’re looking to avoid having your location tracked, then you should probably just convert to Luddism and be done with it. There isn’t a smart phone out there (and plenty of feature- and dumb-phones also) that doesn’t keep GPS-based location data on its user. If it has a GPS, then you’re being tracked.
Now, to turn myself completely around, and support what I think is a larger unspoken issue being raised: Apple, as a private corporation, has the right to put anything into its contracts that it wants. If we accept them, that’s on us. We don’t have to. At this moment, I’m basically trusting Apple to do the right thing. That doesn’t mean I’m going to blindly follow their every lead and not question what is going on. It’s fair that you’re raising these points.
My BIG issue with this, however, is government access to the data. What is to stop local, state, or federal government officials from grabbing this data? What rights do we have, in our relationship with Apple (or Motorola/Samsung/Google/etc.) in having this data protected from prying eyes? I’m guessing, the way the courts have been leaning of late, that we basically have none. There are already cases where smart phones are being confiscated from people during arrests and information is being downloaded off of them. Several courts have ruled in favor of the police. I have an enormous problem with that. And I don’t really see what’s to prevent the courts from honoring a subpoena for this type of information that may, in fact, be collected and centrally stored by the phone hardware/software manufacturers. In fact, I think Google’s been forced to give up search results, if I’m not mistaken.
Big problem. No easy solution, short of packing the courts with Constitutional Conservatives. And I don’t see that happening any time soon.
There are plenty of examples that show data collected quite easily becomes data abused. Why would I trust Apple or any other company with that kind of data? It’s none of their business where I go. What makes Apple so trustworthy? They’re a major corporation just like Microsoft, Google, and hundreds more. I’m not bashing the company but I refuse to put them on a pedestal, either.
Other phones may keep track of position data but do they synch the files on other computers? Do they turn the information over to other companies? Does Apple give users the ability to opt out of the data collection? If not, then I won’t be buying one of their phones. Pity, it looks like a really good piece of equipment.
Larry, right now Apple is losing content deals with newspaper and magazine publishers because Apple refuses to share private customer data with them. For years, publishers have sold your info to other publishers, catalog companies, etc — and they don’t like losing easy revenue. But Apple refuses, time and time again, to sell (or in this case, give away) your private info.
So take a deep breath and relax — this is most likely a bug, and almost certainly unharvested data.
The only competitor on the horizon for the iPad2 is the iPad3.