Month: January 2016

You can tell by the headline that the banjo-playing donkey is striking up in my wife’s head as we speak, because it’s time to talk about phones again.  And this is a germane topic because we are setting off to London in August, for the first visit to Europe in six years, and not a moment too soon.  The problem is, last time I went to the old continent, it was in 2010 and unlocked smartphones weren’t really a thing as such – unlocked iPhones from the United States definitely weren’t – and I was packing an iPhone 3G in Airplane Mode and my trusty old SonyEricsson Z520 alongside.

That Z520 is no longer a going concern (but has a space of honor in my box of memorabilia) and the Virgin SIM it relied on is defunct. So it’s time to consider what to carry with me. Normally, this is where that Moto X goes, but there are two issues. One is that the camera on the first-gen Moto X is not suitable for any photography greater than Instagram; it certainly isn’t a point-and-shoot replacement the way the iPhone 4S and later have proven to be. The other is that it only supports four LTE bands, all of which are North American – LTE in Europe was barely a thing when the first Moto X shipped, and it doesn’t have the plethora of options the wife’s unlocked iPhone 6S has.

So that brings up the next point: when we went to Japan, I had my iPhone 6 in Airplane Mode with wifi turned on, and we had rented one of those portable WiFi hotspots, and we were largely able to get by (except in the Japanese Alps where coverage was splotchy at best). Since ‘er indoors can pop any old SIM into that phone, by virtue of having bought it unlocked at full price to keep her old data plan, she could very easily fit it with a SIM from Three, the UK provider that offers service at rates that are insanely cheap by US standards.  Three also allows tethering, which means she would have unlimited data on her own device and could use it as a hotspot for me to burn up to 12 GB.  Setting aside for a moment the notion that this would absolutely destroy her battery life, it provides another option that would be just fine under the circumstances.

But then there’s a wild care, and it is the notional much-rumored iPhone 6C, so-called. The Great Mentioner is convinced that sometime in the first half of 2016, Apple will release a new iPhone out of band with the regular updates, much as they did with the Verizon-capable iPhone 4 or the white models. The general consensus around the rumors is that the body will more or less resemble the iPhone 5S, with a 4” display, but slightly rounded glass more akin to the iPhone 6 series.  It will feature the processor of the 6S but the camera of the 5S. And critically, it will feature a battery slightly larger than the 5S, driving a display 30% smaller than the 6 series, without 3D Touch circuitry taking up space inside the phone.

The implications of this are significant.  If the screen is consuming 30% less battery power, the expected battery life should be a third longer than on the 6 series.  Add to that a camera lens that would be flush with the body of the camera rather than protruding, and the performance gains of the faster (and presumably more efficient) processor, and it’s just barely possible that we might – might – finally have an all-day iPhone that only requires you to carry a battery on days when you’re in full-on tourist mode.  It will be genuinely one-hand-usable again. It’ll disappear in a front jeans pocket again. It will, in short, be precisely what I want from a new iPhone.  And at that point, it would be possible to splash out on it, straight cash, and just make it my regular everyday phone. Leave the 6 in a drawer at work in case of emergency, put the Moto X in the drawer for Android compatibility testing only and be prepared to pull its SIM if I leave this job, and boom, I’m set for the next couple of years. And between an aging Apple credit and a little bundle of cash unlooked-for from Apple under different circumstances, it’s already paid for.

The downside of this is that I’ve done what i decried in this very space eight years ago: I’m attempting to will a new iPhone product into existence on nothing more than my own desires and hardly-disinterested say-so. And given that any such device will be pitched as entry-level, and possibly have as little as 16 GB of storage, that could be an issue. I really need this thing to be a 32 GB phone at a minimum and I’d prefer if it were 64, although I recognize that’s highly unlikely – but then, the iPhone 5S that’s currently the entry device still has a 32 GB option, the only iPhone that does.  So that’s nice.  Rumblings also suggest NFC support and 2 GB of RAM – ironically both features of that first-gen Moto X.   

That unlocked 32 GB iPhone 5S, right now, costs $500 – bring in a 32 GB phone with those specs as the iPhone 6C and I’m all in.

It doesn’t even have to come in gold. Of which…

I was in Los Angeles for New Year’s Day for the second straight year, attending the Rose Parade again – this time in the company of my mother and my mother-in-law. Our total traveling party was five, and we had to negotiate trains and subways and buses and taxis and light rail with a mobility scooter and a lack of speed appropriate to a pair of septuagenarians. Union Station to downtown LA to Pasadena and all around in between, for four days.

And almost without fail, nearly everyone we encountered – from white-suited volunteers guiding us between floats to homeless people on 7th and Figueroa – was unfailingly polite, helpful, and friendly, in a way that recalled the Portland minibreak of 2014. The only person I wanted to punch the whole time was one we brought down on the train from north, a cranky old dude who got mouthy as my wife attempted to help him find his bag (which was in a completely different car altogether). Once we were actually inside the Los Angeles perimeter, it was surprisingly pleasant – and I know we were at the Rose Parade, but we were also in the busiest train station in California and on a transit system that basically didn’t exist 25 years ago. And everyone was nice.

And I returned home to yet another bout of digital diarrhea from a big-money Silly Con Valley player – this time it was Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator I’ve already taken to task once in this space. His blatherings have already been dealt with elsewhere, but they are of a piece with similar screeds from the likes of Marc Andressen or Jason Calacanis or Peter Thiel any number of big-money finance types who think that because they’re putting their money into companies that rely on apps or websites, they’re technology moguls, rather than the same sort of banking assholes that ran the economy on the rocks years ago. Paul Graham’s assertions are particularly risible, considering how Y Combinator has become the new Stanford for an industry that brags about ignoring traditional credentials – and how few Y Combinator companies have yet to brave an actual public market for their exorbitant and unrealistic valuations. Or given how its ducklings get a golden net under them when they flame out.

The three counties of Silly Con Valley – San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, the latter of which has by some measures the highest per-capita income of any county in America – have all bought into the smell of their own shit. Everything should be like Silly Con Valley. Everything should be a startup. Everyone should move fast and break things, and if you’re not an entrepreneur, then you’re a barnacle on the exciting high-tech future and you’re a Morlock only fit to drive and house the Eloi. And any regulatory interference – indeed, any attempt to hold a light up to these exaggerated claims – is second only to an attempt at collecting regular non-confiscatory 1990s-level tax as a impingement on the freedom of great minds to do as they will.  Which is why people are flipping out at the fact that the FDA dared point out that Theranos, the current darling of the “biomedical revolution”, has yet to demonstrate valid results from its much-vaunted blood-test system and is neck-deep in regulatory arbitrage to hide their alleged product from prying eyes that might ask them to prove it works.

That’s the biggest problem with Silly Con Valley, 2016: this is where your future comes from, and the future is based on using tech-washing to bring back the Gilded Age. Underneath the whizzy apps and buzzword compliance, the mission is the same as it was for the likes of Leland Stanford: consolidation of wealth and power, full stop.  It’s past time we told the truth: Uber is a taxi company, AirBnB is a hotel company, and “empowering” people to take in others’ washing so they don’t lose their home isn’t innovation, it’s the perfect expression of the “I Got Mine Fuck You” mentality of an industry that lost its way once it decided the most important goal was to let the Eloi abstract away the Morlocks once and for all.

It’s not that Portland was nice, or that Los Angeles was nice, though they were – it’s that in the last five years, this place has become Not Nice. These three counties aren’t Florence during the Renaissance, they’re Wall Street in 1986. And when the crash comes, a lot of these “entrepreneurs” are going to be dangling on the cliff by their fingertips. And at that point, it is incumbent on us as Californians and human beings to lace up the steel-toes and stomp. Hard.