Are my eyes really blue?

In the dark days before the Second Coming of Steve, when Apple fans tried to defend a company that was inevitably referred to as Beleaguered Apple Computer, the argument for the minuscule market share of the Mac was that Apple was like BMW: making a premium product for a premium price, and eschewing mass-market lowest-common-denominator for quality instead. (To which I would say, Power Macintosh 4400.) It was…an opinion.

If that was the case, Apple under the returning reign of Himself was less BMW and more Volkswagen: definitely an upper-end product, certainly a little bit of yuppie/hipster sheen, but an attainable product. Instead of being asked to pay $2500 for a computer that was hard to pitch as worth the money in a world of cheap Packard Bells and E-Machines running everything on Windows like everybody else, it was $1299 for an easier-to-use-than-anything iMac. Or, as the prices started to come down, $199 for an iPod mini that was indisputably the best digital music player on the market. Or, eventually, a base $199 for an iPhone that kicked the very shit out of all the other “smartphones” that were at the same price point at your Verizon or AT&T store.  It might still be a premium product, but it was value for money and it wasn’t outrageously more expensive and you could see the difference between having an iPhone 3GS or a Blackberry Storm.

Now?

After looking at the event yesterday, I’m not sure anyone ever outright named the price of the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. They referenced the “typical installment plan” and Apple’s own “pay monthly and replace every year” gimmick, but I don’t think anyone came right out and said “this phone will cost you $700 cash on the barrelhead.”  And yes, it’s got the best camera any phone has ever had, and it’s mostly reached gimmick-parity with the top Android devices on stereo speakers (my MOTOFONE F3 was using the earpiece as a speaker in 2007, but go on) and dust/waterproofing and OOOH MAXIMUM SHINY GLOSSY, but…my cousin is currently jetting around the world from Central Asian Republics to San Francisco to the Emerald Isle packing a third-generation Moto G. It does everything he needs it to, from maps to music to WhatsApp to perfectly cromulent Instagram-grade photography. And that phone could be had right now on Amazon for $180, unlocked and off-contract.

You see the problem. Ed Earl Brown may not want to splash out $700 for an iPhone when he can get 80% of the way there and good enough for a third of the price. And maybe he doesn’t get security updates on time and maybe he doesn’t see a new point release of Android, but guess what: he can dump that phone after eighteen months and buy the Moto G-5 or whatever and still come out a couple hundred dollars to the good relative to buying an iPhone 7 that he needs to stretch for three years. And that’s before taking the headphone situation into account…

I can see why they did it. I see the justification for it, in terms of being able to move things around so they can improve the camera and get real water resistance good enough to advertise publicly and increase the size of the battery 14% (a desperate need after the 6S made it SMALLER). But in all the time I can remember, for years and years going back to that first fateful iMac in 1998, Apple has only once EVER replaced a standard port with a proprietary solution. When they dumped 8-pin serial and SCSI and ADB and that wacky hi-density video port, it was for USB and VGA and the open 1394 FireWire standard (which they invented but opened, and which other companies used). When they went down to having Just One Port on the MacBook, it was the emerging USB-C standard, not something they whipped up themselves. They’ve replaced proprietary with proprietary, certainly, as when the 30-pin was replaced with Lightining, but that was a legitimate improvement: a smaller reversible port.

Oh, and that MacBook had one port other than USB-C…a 3.5mm headphone jack.

You have to go back to the oldest iPods to see the only other time Apple did this. Sometime between the second and third iPod model, they dumped the classic six-pin FireWire jack in favor of the 30-pin connector going to FireWire. And then to FireWire and USB. And ultimately, just to USB 2.0. And then they rode with that 30-pin connector for almost a decade, carrying it through every iPod model and onto the first five iPhones. And that 30-pin port was in the service of moving the iPod from depending on FireWire to being USB-capable instead, and getting it compatible with PCs.

I don’t think this was the time to do this. If anything, I think maybe Apple should have telegraphed it a year: bundle Lightning-based earbuds with the 6S and 6S Plus while it still had an analog audio jack, and demonstrate that Lightning was a good alternative without shoving people into it. As it is, Apple got rid of the floppy or the internal CD-ROM/DVD at a time when people realized once it was gone that they weren’t going to miss it. I don’t think the headphones are at this point, and $160 EarPods aren’t going to get Ed Earl Brown onto wireless if he’s used to losing his headphones and scooping another pair at the gas station for $10.

I say all that to say this: the VW days are over. Apple has changed its metaphor again – never mind BMW or VW, they are going all-in on being Tesla. Luxurious, cutting-edge, expensive, and just trust that the infrastructure will be there to support it as you go forward. Oh, and be prepared to plug in everything every night.

Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. For me, I’m going to cling to this iPhone SE as long as I can and hope that popping sound in the distance isn’t the Monster of Cupertino disappearing up its own ass.

I didn’t take my Apple Watch to London. I’ve forgotten to wear it more than once at work, and almost as many times I’ve put it on only to find it dead an hour later because it failed to charge. That, right there, is the biggest impediment to using the watch. I had a Pebble, the first-gen model. It was limited and limiting, but it only needed to go on the plug every five days or so. When my wife had a Fitbit (before it went walkabout in the business-class lounge at Heathrow) it was similar. My regular old tell-the-time watch doesn’t need a battery at all – wind it once, put it on, leave it on for the rest of your life barring daylight savings and time zone changes.

I suspect the newer version of the Apple Watch hasn’t really licked that issue. Yes, it was overbuilt before, but it was also deadly slow. WatchOS fixes that, but the new hardware – even if it’s more efficient – is adding real GPS, which isn’t exactly cheap on battery life. Once again, we’re back to the same problem: a smartwatch means you have to charge your watch every night just like your phone. And here’s the kicker: the watch doesn’t do that much you couldn’t get from another fitness device that relays notifications. The Pebble does that. The Fitbit does that. Hell, your phone itself can do a huge chunk of that, and it’ll respond to your voice commands these days as reliably as the watch does if not more so.

So now comes the real trick. Does the Apple Watch, take two, provide enough of an improvement to make it worth wearing all day and charging all night? Or am I properly suited to have my automatic steel-cased 12-hour dial watch? After all, that’s the aspiration: only needing to tell the time, and never having to worry about notifications or fitness or even what day it is. The Apple Watch right now mainly serves to remind me we’re not there yet.

Walking through London, especially close to a train station or even just a tube stop, you sense a diesel-and-cigarette quality to the air that lets you know straightaway you aren’t in California anymore. Even on a hot muggy day where the locals are boggling at temps over 30 in August, something about it suggests the gray haze of a London Particular, a psychogeographical climate phenomenon worthy of Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd. It’s an air that suggests, as much as the weight of a pound coin in the hand or the sight of a black cab trundling up the left-hand side of the road, that you are Somewhere Else.

No grids anywhere, not even a little bit. The roads are tarmac over the cobbles over the dirt tracks that were pathed out hundreds or thousands of years ago. Our cabdriver said he took three and a half years to do the Knowledge, and I believe it, because learning the ins and outs of the London streets is far tougher than the mere nooks and crannies of the human cranium. Citymapper is an indispensable app, the 21st century answer to the old London A To Z, the only way of plotting the easiest route from here to there – and the amazing thing with the Tube is that you never have longer than a two or three minute wait and you never seem to have to make more than one change or go more than four or five stops per segment to get most anywhere. If you can set aside the warmth in the hottest week of the year in an unconditioned set of tunnels, it’s damn near teleportation.

Because it’s the only way to go fast. Even with the congestion charge, a bus sits in the traffic for twice as long as the Underground takes to go the same distance (not to deny the pleasure of the view from the front seats of the upper deck of the old Routemasters). Walking takes forever – the psychic density from point A to point B is even greater than in San Francisco or Manhattan; there’s so much stuff that it takes twice as long or more as the same distance on a flat track would. And then there’s the mystical quality of going under a bridge and seeing the front of a public house, almost like something that wouldn’t have appeared if you’d approached from the other side or failed to describe a figure 8 through the overpass before coming to the door. Ackroyd and Gaiman were right: there are pockets of lost time in London, places that have moved more slowly or more quickly. The top of the Shard is a seventy-story garden party from some oligarchian future, just as the streets from Kings’ Cross up towards Camden Lock have only slowly drifted from Victorian toward early-Thatcher.

It felt far less alien this time. No more stooging into an Internet cafe to keep up with friends or ducking into every cellphone shop to marvel at the things that hadn’t reached America yet, if ever: the iPhone SE in my pocket was the best phone available on this continent or theirs and the SIM and service could have been as easily acquired from a vending machine as from the airport kiosk we used. (For the record, 10.5 GB of data for a month, for EACH of us, set us back all of $65 prepaid – easily half what we’d pay AT&T in the US for even less data. Prepaid only in future for me.) We could walk around checking Slack and posting to Instagram just as we would in the States, with the only difference being that GMT rather than PDT allows you to tell the order in which your friends wake up and look at their phones. Transit is a doddle; the trains work like BART or DC Metro and the buses work like VTA or anywhere, really. Only the TV experience was still a little alien: turn on the set in the hotel and be presented with an Apple TV-esque grid where every channel is A Channel rather than a series of local affiliates. BBC London is just something that cuts in on the regular BBC One news.

Well, that and the trains. A day trip to Cambridge was only marginally more complicated than a Caltrain ticket from San Jose to San Francisco, and about as fast. This is what comes of a country that builds a national rail infrastructure decades before the internal-combustion automobile even exists – and then sticks with it through the years. It also doesn’t hurt that the isle of Britain is about the size of California. Brexit notwithstanding, it’s hard not to get a sense that part of the American dysfunction is that we’ve scaled beyond what works for a contemporary nation-state.

I didn’t make it to a single service of any kind. There was always Evensong somewhere in 2007, but this time I only ever set foot in one college chapel once – I don’t know what profound statement that makes, but that’s how it went down. Although I still maintain that I might be Anglican in a very ‘religious but not the least bit spiritual’ sort of way. On the other side of my religious pursuits, there was football – of the second division variety. Craven Cottage, the home of Fulham FC, sits right on the river and looks to be the English spiritual cousin of Fenway Park: a century old and largely not upgraded. We were sat on the original wooden seats in front of a row of old age pensioners, drinking Bovril on a dreary gray summer afternoon – far closer to the real traditional English football experience than the modern NFL-ized Premier League.

And then there was the water. We spent a surprising amount of time on it – whether a commuter boat on the Thames, a punt on the river Cam with someone else pushing the pole while I sipped my plastic-cup pint, or a classic canal boat going between Little Venice and Camden Lock. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the presence of moving water has somehow become what coffee was for me in the NGS days: calming, civilizing, guaranteed to ameliorate the mood. There were crowds stood outside pubs every day – probably for the heat, as no place in Britain seems to be air-conditioned enough even if they have it. I don’t recall seeing that before. I also don’t recall the complete absence of urinal dividers (odd when every toilet is in its own closet). I dimly recall the greater prevalence of suits, in lighter shades of blue than the United States finds acceptable in the modern workplace. I was reminded just how few public trash receptacles there are – and not nearly as many recycling bins as in California or even Birmingham.

One other thing I don’t remember noticing – maybe my ear wasn’t attuned to it, maybe we spent more time outside London, who knows – was the proliferation of accents that weren’t British. You could start to see how a certain sort of Englishman would begin to lash back (and how his American counterpart wouldn’t last a day in NorCal). And yet, even the pro-Brexit cabbie thought Donald Trump was the express ticket to World War Three, which shows you just how far beyond the pale we’ve gotten here.

The line more than once has been ‘we need to stop going to London unless we’re just going to move there.’ We couldn’t afford to, any more than we could afford to go up to the city from here, or to New York or Tokyo. But if we could…pervasive transit, half pints in a pub on every corner, politics without holy rollers and the promise of a clean escape from college football and its discontents?

Maybe it wouldn’t be any better, but I’d love to make them prove it.

And here we are. Ten years of this blog. Damn near a quarter of my life. If you dig around in the darker corners of the Internet, you can go back even further, to 1999 or so. Most of my adult life after leaving college and coming to DC is documented for historical memory. This is an incomplete record, obviously, because I haven’t put everything in here by a long shot, nor would I. But I at least have some points of reference, some places to think about what I used to say or think or do.

I don’t know if anyone is still reading this. I think sometimes I write as if nobody is, which is incautious at best and stupid at worst. It’s unconnected to anything else, certainly to any of my social media, and I think the RSS feeds into previous blog solutions are long since broken, so I sort of feel like it’s all right – I certainly wouldn’t do the same with the Twitter accounts or the dummy blog attached to one of them. Wheels within wheels. Erase a dot and it’s gone…you don’t think about what’s under the dot.

It hasn’t always been cheerful, this blog. It went along with the collapse of my time at Apple and the corresponding collapse of Cal football, from which it has never quite recovered. It began with saying that 5-6 wasn’t going to be good enough for Vanderbilt and arrives at a time when 5 wins is a consummation devoutly to be wished. It’s gone through three Presidential elections, each more apocalyptic than the last in importance.

And yet, it all seems to boil down the usual stuff: endless wankery about this phone or that gadget, bemoaning terrible sports, lashing out at a broken political system and more broken society around me, and of course the endless timeless woe-is-me sad-sack reminisces of days gone by as if somehow I can rearrange it in a way that forms a sailboat. Or a schooner. Or a worthwhile outcome. (It’s not lost on me that this blog has also quietly seen three different antidepressants and four different mental health professionals, none of whom was ever able to do more than stop the bleeding for a while.)  I’d like to say that in the new season and the months and years to come you’ll see better and more interesting content, but you’ll get exactly what you paid for and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

Onward, then.

It’s football time again. Time for the new year to start, fresh beginnings. all that. Except it’s not really like that anymore. Partly because autumn doesn’t exist out here, partly because I can’t care about college football anymore, and partly…

Ten years ago, I had a long drawn-out think about college and who I was and what I could claim from my past, largely because my undergrad institution had done a thing that caused me to sever ties with them once and for all. I made the conscious decision that I was going to identify with Vanderbilt to the exclusion of where I’d gone to undergrad or Alabama for that matter (except when playing Tennessee). I bought some extra stuff from the bookstore, changed the wallpaper on all my phones (at the time I think there were four), and settled down to actually be a Vanderbilt fan in a way I hadn’t since leaving Nashville under a cloud.

I had a really bad day in Cambridge last week. Much of it was the 90 degree heat, but a lot of it was also down to the fact that walking around a 700 year old university in England was like one big taunt from God about things that I could have possibly done had I been smarter. Or more aware of my opportunities. Or something. There is another edit where there’s a junior year abroad that sends me to a place like this – maybe in Edinburgh, maybe in Dublin – but it didn’t happen in this world.  Instead, there was the worst choice of my life, leaving me with four years at the worst place for me and then three more trying to make up the difference. I’ve largely decided to punch out of Vanderbilt alumni activities here, because I’m of an age and a situation where I have nothing in common with people who went there as undergrads in the last ten years. My experience of Vanderbilt is not theirs.

And then you have the pincers I live in now. On one side of the bay is an institution that I would gladly have substituted for my undergrad experience and then been spared the need of grad school – the best public school in the world, one of those rare places that doesn’t have its academic excellence hitched to a history of elitism and general assholery. And while everyone has been very kind, I don’t have those experiences there either. I can learn eighteen fight songs (even if I’ve forgotten half of them), I can have the football tickets, but I can never be from there or claim it as my own any more than I could dress up as a Jersey cow and give milk.

Then, on the other side, there stands the sine qua non of that elitism and general assholery, the wellspring of everything wrong and bad and toxic in Silly Con Valley, a place I am catastrophically and painfully bound to and unable to escape from –  I hate it here, I will never be able to claim it as my own even if I wanted to, and I can’t fathom ever wanting to. And yet,coupled with that is the uncomfortable awareness that were I in Nashville and not an alum, I might just feel exactly the same way about Vanderbilt.

So what I’m left with is a void. So much of how we define ourselves comes from our accomplishments or our associations – and that seven-year hole in the past leaves me without the memories I wish I had. It makes me almost think that I need some sort of process with electroshock and MDMA and extreme cognitive behavioral therapy that will implant some kind of replacement memories – or else burn it all the way out of my mind and establish a permanent Somebody Else’s Problem Field around 1990-97 so I can’t think of it or care about it.

Or maybe what I really need is a fictional alma mater. Not like the two (yes, two) I invented during my undergraduate days as a distraction from the ponderous real, but something in common with other people, secure in the knowledge that because it’s fictional, nobody actually could go there, so my claim on it is as solid and respectable and valid as anyone else’s.

Maybe it’s all in on Ravenclaw.

* I really don’t need my public-facing Twitter accounts. I have a handful of Internet friends to keep up with plus actual people I know in reality, and they are all covered under my private Twitter, so the public-facing ones can go scratch esp. with the coming of football and the homestretch of the worst election ever. 

* I didn’t miss the Apple Watch once. Right now it’s so sluggish and unreliable that you’re better off with a fitness tracker that can scoop notifications – and those cost half the price. So much of what the watch was meant to do is handled by the newest phones, including lift-to-see-notifications and much MUCH more accurate text dictation and speech command. More and more the Apple Watch seems to be just an extra-posh Fitbit. 

* In the U.K., you don’t much need to have your passport on you and you can use Apple Pay off the phone at fully 75% of vendors. (Including the Tube.) And the chip card works just as fast as the swipe in the US, which proves where the problem is. 

* Half pints are brilliant. Best bitter at only 4% ABV is also brilliant. A public house around every second corner you pass is awesome. There’s always somewhere you can go and have a quick one. 

* A heat wave in the UK leaves me no less bitchy and irritable than one here in the Pacific Empire.

* I will probably never come to grips with The College Thing.

In a move that should surprise precisely no one, Donald Trump is on this third showrunner of 2016. By naming the editor of a famously bigoted and wildly inaccurate website to the post of campaign manager, Trump is nailing his colors to the mast. This is not a shuck, this is not a gimmick, this is who he is and these are who his fans and supporters are. It’s the distilled essence of what the GOP has been running on and refining itself into for decades: white, rural, aging, male, uninformed, and hardly enlightened on race or gender. From Gerald Ford who supported the ERA, to Ronald Reagan who was willing to regularize the status of illegal immigrants, to George W. Bush who actively pushed for immigration reform and a GOP outreach to Latino voters, we’ve come around to “build the wall and Trump the bitch” as the whole of the Republican platform.

I have exactly zero sympathy. I’ve limned in excruciating detail before how the Republican party got itself into this situation, how they built their base in talk-radio listeners and message-board trolls, and they are hopefully getting what they deserve in November.  My problem is with what happens afterward. Michelle Cottle has already explained it, in the Atlantic, but it’s worth paying attention to:

Nothing is getting any better.

There’s not going to be any remaking of the GOP. A bad enough blowout, with Trump going his own way, will allow GOP leadership to shrug and dismiss it as a one-time fluke event – and in the meantime, they’ll gladly pull on the same ideas and memes and sloganeering for 2018 and 2020. If the money’s in the chase, then this is a golden opportunity to cash in by weaponizing twenty-five years of anti-Clinton conspiracy theory and propaganda. Get ready for at least four full years of nonstop hearings, impeachment demands, and media caterwauling that will make the entire birtherism debacle a longed-for memory.  After all, Trump won’t have anything else to do with his time other than to use his new-best-friend media outlet to keep peddling his “stabbed in the back” routine to the halfwits and race-baiters who got him to the nomination in the first place.

It may sound harsh and cruel and partisan, but at the federal level it is a fact and it is indisputable: Democrats now govern and Republicans stand back and throw shit. It has not changed in the eight years of the Obama administration, and it will not change one whit under Hillary Clinton, and it will not change until the Republican party ceases to function as currently constituted. It’s a teardown, but it’s going to do its best to tear the country down first.

A side note about packing. This time, instead of the Ecco shoes I bought for the honeymoon and repurposed in 2010, I’m wearing the Clarks loafers I bought back when Valley Fair was an interesting visit on my spring break away from DC. I would have taken them in 2005, but I couldn’t find them and thought I’d donated them. Instead, they’ll be the only shoes I take, because I’m planning on loading the suitcase with others. Not like Japan, when I brought a second pair of shoes just for the sake of a change (wearing those same Eccos for two weeks in 2010 was nightmarish down the stretch). I think a comfortable pair of slip-on shoes that don’t even necessarily require socks will cover me for a week.

No, the interesting thing to me is the phone. Like Japan, I’m only taking the iPhone and the Kindle. No Apple Watch, no Pebble, no iPad, and – surprisingly – no Moto X. I genuinely thought it would be the travel phone when I bought it, but travel didn’t work out quite like I expected, and if I’m going abroad I need the best possible camera I can have in a device. Unlike Japan, though, this time we have the opportunity to get actual SIM cards instead of a shared wireless hotspot, and we’ll each have something like 12 GB of LTE data to get through in a week for less money than most prepaid services in the US that offer less than half the data.

I’m taking the Kindle, of course – largely to see if the much-vaunted free lifetime 3G actually works the way I was promised all those years ago, but also to spare the iPhone battery on the flight over and have a reading option that doesn’t have to be flicked every 100 words the way the 4-inch iPhone SE screen does. But the daily loadout will be just the iPhone SE, the earbuds, and a lipstick charger – no Bluetooth headphones, no smart watch, nothing to require Bluetooth to stay on or prevent leaving the phone in low power mode the whole day, and we’ll see how that works out. I suspect pretty damn good.

Not only did I think I would take the Moto X on some notional future trip, I thought I would take the iPad mini – light, unlocked, data-able and virtually a full laptop replacement for me now. But in August, with no jacket, it’s too much to carry. I won’t need a bag at all during the day, I won’t want a bag at a soccer match or on the Tube or in the hustle and bustle of the CIty and the markets and just running through the streets with my sweetie the way I’ve wanted to for years. Just a phone in my pocket, and we’ve reached the point where that’s plenty.

it’s been way too long. I’m ready to go.

That number is following me lately. The old highway I grew up on, California as the 31st state, and Vandy’s Festus Ezili wearing 31 with the Warriors until they decided they could use a mop bucket at the 5 instead. And now, the games of the XXXI Olympiad, happening in Rio after years of drama and malfeasant planning and God knows what else.

It’s a marker. 12 years since I got here. I watched the Athens olympics in my sister-in-law’s house. They don’t own it anymore because they’re divorced. I saw commercials for and coveted the new 3G phones AT&T was advertising – but they got eaten by Cingular, which took their name and promptly kicked the can 2 years down the road on 3G. And I lusted after that Nokia 6620, a Symbian Series 60 smartphone from the leading manufacturer with EDGE speed…and now I have the long-desired iPhone SE, personally owned and never locked, and ready to go abroad at the end of the week…to London, ironically the last home of the summer games.

A lot of time gone by. A lot of years under the bridge. I’ve been here longer than Nashville and Arlington put together, even if I still emotionally identify at some level with the DMV – although I hear it’s changed a lot and not for the better, and that my old stomping grounds are a lot more like what I don’t like about here than what they were when I was walking from Glebe and taking the Orange Line from Virginia Square. The Vanderbilt phase that started ten years ago seems to be coming to a conclusion – I was looking for a Premier League team to call my own in 2006 and instead I wound up reclaiming Vandy just in time for baseball to become a big deal and for football to hit its highest point in decades. But now, going to Vanderbilt events in San Francisco means a bunch of folks ten or twelve years younger than me at least, without the commonality of shared experience because I was in grad school all those years ago instead of the typical undergrad Vanderbilt four years.

London will also be strange – haven’t been in six years, since before the family meltdown and before the job turned to shit and before I turned forty and watched my body and mind and soul do like the car at the end of The Blues Brothers. This isn’t a tourist excursion, we won’t be queueing for the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace or the London Eye – it’s about boots in Camden Market and a canal boat to Notting Hill and a restaurant in Covent Garden that’s 100% gluten-free everything and no one noticed for months. It’s about a Fulham match at Craven Cottage, years after I kept coming back to them as my Premier League team and years after they crashed right out of the Premier League. It’s about Costa and Pret and Sunday roast at the pub with friends. It’s about a personal Three SIM in my personal iPhone and not having to squat outside a closed shop trying to steal their open wi-fi to update my RSS.

It’s about the most bulletproof way of escaping from an industry and a politics and a place that isn’t particularly pleasant to be around right now. And seeing if it really is what I said six years ago: a place that we may as well just move to if we’re going to keep visiting.

It’s staggering to think that Verizon now owns AOL and Yahoo for the combined sum of nine billion dollars. I don’t know why they want to corner the market on the 1998 Internet, but that’s not really my problem. I come here not to bury Yahoo, but to remind people who it used to be.

One of my friends once said, circa 1999, that he automatically disrespected anyone who didn’t just have Yahoo as the startup page. I concurred. The personalized portal at My Yahoo was my homepage for years, just for the sake of the instant dashboard for ball scores, weather and at one point even TV listings. Now all that stuff is on the phone, which probably explains why Verizon bought it – it’s a content provider of sorts for a company that is at its root a dumb pipe and wants to be more.

Thing is, I often wonder why Apple didn’t just buy Yahoo, as an instant user base for services that Apple has struggled to provide. Yahoo’s weather (itself sourced from God knows where) was the back end of the Weather app in the iPhone for time out of mind anyway (not to deny Yahoo credit for a very nice free-standing weather app themselves). Yahoo was the first and at the time only provider of push-enabled mail on the original iPhone. Everyone in Gen X has a Yahoo account, even if they haven’t logged into it in years. Yahoo was perfect Google insurance for Apple, at a time when the name still had a little cachet. But Apple apparently isn’t interested – the service offerings are still only what’s necessary to sell hardware, and search isn’t their thing, so Yahoo winds up under VZW.

But Yahoo let itself get lapped by Google, mostly because of AdWords – the one true innovation on which Google is built is better and more precise advertising than anyone else was able to muster, and it let them club Yahoo to death with simplicity. Meanwhile, Yahoo struggled to provide meaningful content – it wanted to be a media company but couldn’t produce any media people wanted to consume. That’s where Tumblr came in – but that wasn’t nearly enough. Millenial Livejournal wasn’t going to save Yahoo. Maybe if they’d bought Twitter instead…but that didn’t happen either. They could have turned their guns on trying to be the Facebook alternative that offered granularity and didn’t gorge itself on your personal information. Instead, we got Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Meme and Yahoo Buzz, and unlike Google Buzz or Google Wave or Google Latitude or Google Reader (still mad) or Google+ or half a dozen other things, Yahoo didn’t have the cash cow and resources to keep throwing unlimited shit at the wall until something stuck.

So here we are. They’ll still exist – hell, AOL still exists and by some accounts is still clocking two million dial-up users a year, probably accounts that never got cancelled by people who never look at their credit card statements – but Yahoo isn’t going to be around anymore. One of the last major stalwarts of Web 1.0 is going down at last. They aren’t where the future comes from any more, which is about as Silicon Valley an epitaph as you could ask for.