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First to ditch legacy keyboard/mouse ports in favour of USB.
First to ditch parallel and serial ports.
They've ditched processor architectures, not once, but twice.

Now they're the first to ditch ethernet.

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Once I got over a burst of Jobs fanboyism, it makes perfect sense. The only reason I use ethernet any more is because large file copies are faster - but with N, that's not relevant any more. My N800 and iPhone both have no ethernet ports.

Looking at the specs, it looks like it's not going to be most peoples primary machine - but as a portable terminal to view the content on your network, it looks gorgeous.

I've had two of the new-generation iPod Shuffles now - the ones with the integrated clip. I won't be getting any more.

The old-style Shuffles were a masterpiece of design. Small enough to carry with you everywhere, yet large enough to hold comfortably. The supplied neckstrap was fantastic - having it hanging under a shirt meant it was invisible, yet the controls were easily accessible. The inbuilt USB plug made recharging trivial - where can you go where you don't have access to a USB port? It also made syncing trivial, and made use as a thumb drive painless. It had no moving parts (except the little ball bearings that held the cap onto the box).

The new-style shuffles have given me nothing but grief. They're too small to hold comfortably. They're so small it's easy to miss them when checking pockets before a wash - fortunately, they also survive being washed quite well. The built-in clip is just a bit too small and a bit too powerless to be useful - it'll clip nicely to a belt loop on a pair of jeans but that's about all. They don't clip well to waistbands, they don't clip well to anything at all, really. Mine was usually clipped to pockets or waistbands or to parts of my bag - and constantly falling off, or being bumped off, because the clip didn't hold very well.

The most fatal flaw of the design was exposed last night. Unusually, I'd actually put it onto a belt loop, so the clip was holding well. At some point, I must have brushed past a wall or something. It clearly wasn't much of a brush, as I don't remember feeling anything - but it was enough to pull the body of the Shuffle back as far as the spring would allow - and then further, bending the back of the clip, and eventually ripping it off my belt loop entirely.

Because this model doesn't have an inbuilt USB port, I need to put it in its dock to charge or sync it. This has always been a pain: I've had to carry that bloody annoying little dock with me everywhere, just in case I want to change the music on the iPod. It's now even more of a nuisance: because the clip is bent out of shape, the Shuffle won't fit in the dock, so I can't sync it or even charge it.

So, my first shuffle got washed, then later got lost, both times because it was so small and light that it's amost impossible to tell whether or not it's in a pocket, even when you're specifically checking pockets to see if it's in there. My second one got its integrated clip bent out of shape, and now can't sync or charge.

I won't be buying another.

Dave Winer advances a theory on why there's no SDK for the iPhone right now:

There's one application, for sure, that could mess up not just Cingular's West Coast network, but the whole idea of an Internet-capable PDA with wifi that wants to be a conventional cell phone. It's called Skype, and it really worries the phone companies. So much so that they might have made the closedness of the iPhone a condition of working with Apple. Permalink to this paragraph

Shortly after Apple opens the iPhone, if they ever do, expect a compatible version of Skype to follow shortly after.

During a conversation with Daniel Miessler, it occured to me that:

There’s at least one VOIP provider who could still happily have an interface on the iPhone, despite the lack of an SDK: JaJah (http://www.jajah.com/)!

(yes, I corrected a typo I made when posting the original comment. So sue me.)

JaJah provide a service whereby you specify both the number of the person you want to call and your own number; it then calls both ends and joins them together. In effect, you have to pay for two VOIP calls - one from JaJah to you, one from JaJah to the other end - but that's usually cheaper than paying for one non-VOIP call from you to the other end.

JaJah are the only VOIP provider I know of who provide this functionality. It's almost too good a deal for them to ignore - They'd be insane not to have a nice interface ready for the iPhone as soon as they can.

PS. Can anyone tell me what unit of time JaJah's rates are based on? The rates page happily tells me that to call the US from my mobile will cost me 17.9 cents, but it doesn't tell me what unit of time that rate is for - per second? Per 30 seconds? Per minute? I'm assuming it's one of the latter two options, but I have no idea which one. Either way though - is the billing per-second, or per-[30,60] seconds? I can't find anything on the rates page, nor anything in their FAQ, that covers this.

Update: Question 11/15 in the Billing section of the FAQ does answer part of this: JaJah bills in one-minute increments. Still no word on whether the quoted rates are per-minute or some other unit though.

A while ago I responded to Steve Jobs' Open Letter.

At the time, I wrote:

I stand by what I wrote in that email; Steve's letter is FUD and nothing more. Well, except maybe it's good marketing as well.

Well, I don't stand by that any more. I just read this article (found courtesy of Schneier), which has changed my mind.

It explains, very well, why adding DRM gives no value to Apple, but does give lots of headache. It explains how their deals with studios put them in the unpleasant situation of being on the losing side of an arms race. Even more convincingly (for me, at least) - it points out the limitations in Apple's DRM: they've made no attempt to stop a user from being able to decrypt the music they legitimately purchased.

So, I stand.. well, mostly corrected. I'm still not entirely certain that Jobs' letter wasn't FUD, but I'm at least convinced that Apple really would prefer to be able to sell music DRM-free.

Now, back to talking about Twitter and IRC...

Update: Apparently not everyone is convinced: the FSF is composing an open response calling on Jobs to back his words up with action (found via BoingBoing)

Update: No, I don't buy the arguments in this page about "the basic concept of interoperable DRM makes no sense". The Coral Consortium's site has convinced me that that argument is meaningless; it might be a technical issue, but there are business process that can make that go away. However, my original post was stating that that I didn't believe that Jobs really did want to get rid of DRM - whether interoperable DRM was an issue or not was only one part of his letter, and only part of my response. This new page has made me think that whether the DRM is interoperable or not is mostly irrelevant - Apple would benefit from having no DRM at all even more than they would from interoperable DRM.

A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to no-one in particular, proclaiming that (loosely paraphrased), he really wished he didn't have to put DRM on music in iTMS, but the big labels made him do it. He also said that he wished DRM schemes could be interoperable, but they can't.

At the time, I had a rant on a mailing list, but didn't post here. My major point to the rant was that it's *not* the labels who force DRM on the iTMS, it's iTMS forcing DRM on the labels.

In particular, I cited Naxos, who quite happily sell their music without DRM on emusic. Since then, various other labels have openly given Steve/Apple permission to sell their music without DRM - but Apple's only response has been silence, and the continued forced adding of DRM to all songs they sell. So, that takes care of that phony claim.

The other major claim, that interoperable DRM is impossible, has been shown to be just as phony. The Coral Consortium have written an open letter back to Steve, in which they state that:

We have been wrestling with the issues around interoperability for some years and have concluded that it is not so much a technology problem as a business problem. We have completed the development of a suite of technical specifications for interoperability and these can be downloaded from our website, http://www.coral-interop.org/. We think that your engineers will find it very straightforward to integrate this framework into your iTunes service. This technology would enable you to interoperate immediately with Microsoft based Janus devices and services, and with OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) based devices and services. Of course the secrets in Fairplay remain safe - adopting the Coral technology does not require you to share them with anyone else.

Of course, it's very easy to write off the Coral Consortium as being some small group making grandiose claims they can't back up. It's easy to assume that Apple might not have heard of them, that their technology is perhaps not quite as good as they claim, or that maybe they don't have support from industry players. I can't comment on any of the rest, but the latter isn't true: their membership page lists Sony as just one "Promoter Member" of several, and EMI, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Sony BMG are just some of the "Contributor Members".

So, in summary: Steve claimed that the labels force him to use DRM. Possibly true for some - but many have requested that he doesn't put DRM on their songs, and he still does. Steve claimed that interoperable DRM isn't possible - but not only is it possible, it has the backing of the same major record labels that Steve claims force him to use DRM.

I stand by what I wrote in that email; Steve's letter is FUD and nothing more. Well, except maybe it's good marketing as well.