Are my eyes really blue?

I can’t stop thinking about the similarities between the Moto X and the iPhone 5C.  Brightly-colored polycarbonate cases around last year’s top-of-the-line internals.  And the iPhone still undercuts the Moto X by half price on contract.

As predicted, Wall Street is savaging Apple’s stock – but then, nobody goes to a stockbroker for anything more complicated than rape jokes and tacky accessories (of which more later).  Certainly not for actual insight on technology.  The fact of the matter is this: the modern smartphone is good enough already.  Thus Motorola’s willingness to ship the Moto X as equipped.  An 8-megapixel camera is plenty good.  300dpi on the display is plenty good.  16 GB of onboard storage is enough for most anyone in a world where people are migrating to Spotify and Rdio and Netflix.

In the past, Apple would always use last year’s model as the $99 phone, and the two-year-old model as the free-on-contract phone.  This time, there’s a new device in the $99 spot – and it’s basically an iPhone 5 that costs Apple less to make.  The $99 option has a much higher profit margin for Apple than previous iterations of the one-down phone.  So it sort of boggles the mind that the stock would slump…but then, it’s all about Wall Street’s expectations, not those of customers or tech specialists, isn’t it?

Everyone keeps crowing about how Apple needs to produce a dirt-cheap phone for developing markets – conveniently forgetting the fundamental truth of almost forty years of Apple Computer – they don’t do dirt-cheap. Period, paragraph.  So are they just abandoning that space?  No.  Why do you think they’ve launched a trade-in program? Why do you think the iPhone 4 (not the 4S) is still on sale in China? Why do you think iOS 7 still supports the iPhone 4 with every feature that doesn’t require specialized hardware (i.e. Siri and AirDrop and parallax view)?  Because the refurb iPhone 4 is the dirt-cheap phone for developing markets.  Save the bits, replace the battery and the cracked front glass, and boom, ready to go and for far less than building a new phone.

Don’t let the Auburn degree fool you, folks: Tim Cook is smart.  And like God, or the Cylons (but unlike Ronald D Moore as it turns out), he’s got a plan.  Look back at what a “disappointment” the iPhone 5 was last year and decide who you’d rather bet with.

We’re still in the shadow of where those towers ought to be.

If you want proof, consider what President Obama was pushing for until last night.  A Middle Eastern country with chemical weapons, using them against a civilian population, with documented proof, and an extremely limited response involving virtually no risk of American life.  Hell, even the French were on-side.  And yet, overwhelmingly, the country says no.  Part of that is down to Obama Derangement on the right, which even now is pivoting back toward “ATTACK NOW” ever since the vote was put on hold in favor of the Russian initiative.  But part of it is just war fatigue – we’ve been down this precise road ten years ago.  With more boots on the ground and less proof of the weapons.  And it came an absolute cropper.

I don’t think we could have gone into Iraq without September 11.  Afghanistan was necessary – we were attacked, the leadership of our attackers was in Afghanistan, the Afghan government wouldn’t give them up, and quite frankly we should have been arming the Northern Alliance long before the Taliban took control of the entire country in the mid-90s.  I remember hearing about their final push on NPR and thinking “this cannot possibly end well,” and I was right.

But once we broke the seal, there was no stopping Team Bush from trying again.  I don’t know how much of it was some sort of Freudian fixation to out-do Daddy, but we dropped everything in Afghanistan to hit Iraq, which is why we’re still in Afghanistan and why it took until 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden.  And by the time it was over, the public didn’t want to go to war ever again.  It’s not the best reason to be anti-war – because you’re tired of doing it – but it’ll do, by and large.

Because that’s the other legacy of September 11: because of Iraq, we’re sick and tired of intervening in the world.  Guilt over inaction in Rwanda spurred action in the Balkans, but very few people were behind our air support of the revolution in Libya, and nobody has said a mumbling word about involving ourselves in Egypt, and it’s been two years of looking anxiously at Syria but Ed Earl Brown sure as hell doesn’t want to send troops.  Pundits talk about “neo-isolationist” Americans, when in fact they probably just want to shut the window, pull the blinds, and stay out of other people’s business for a while, for better or worse.

The one reason this would change is if we got hit again, on our own soil.  And Obama knows this, and this is probably why the NSA chugged right along uninterrupted, doing the same thing they’d done ever since Rob Watson was interviewing me on a Georgetown street corner for BBC’s coverage of the Total Information Awareness initiative.  And Obama let it go on, because he knew that some people will piss and moan about privacy (in some cases, even rightly so) but that another September 11 would be catastrophic, so best not to take the chance.

Twelve years on, that might just be the legacy of September 11 and its aftermath: “best not to take the chance.”

Very little in the NFL is new.  The much-vaunted Wildcat was basically a re-engineering of the single wing, the oldest “offense” in pro football, and you can see some of its concepts in the zone-read as well. The concept of a fast offense in the NFL is not new either. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sam Wyche in Cincinnati and Marv Levy in Buffalo and Jerry Glanville in Houston and Atlants were all experimenting with no-huddle offenses predicated on the quick pass.  And when the Buffalo Bills were going to four straight Super Bowls and winning game after game, it was routine that they would lose the battle for time of possession.  The offense would only have the ball 29, 28 minutes – but they would still win, because their possessions were quick and ended with touchdowns rather than punting the ball away.

Last night, in the first quarter, the Philadephia Eagles held the ball for eleven and a half minutes.

Think about that. Even a bad Redskins team playing a sloppy first quarter would still be expected to have the ball for 5 or 6 minutes.  Instead, the offense got the ball for three and a half minutes out of fifteen, largely because they turned it over three times in the first seven offensive plays. Ironically, the first Washington score of the game didn’t do them any favors – a peculiar pick-six that gave the Skins a TD…and sent the defense right back out on the field.  The offense didn’t even get a crack at the ball until halfway through the quarter, whereupon they shat the bed as described.

That’s why I’m having a bit of a tough time buying all the way into the Eagles’ exciting new offense.  They were handed a gift: a team with an offense that couldn’t shoot straight and a defense that started the second quarter pre-gassed for convenience.  A more able defense, especially one not starting two rookies in the secondary, might not struggle the same way.  It’s going to be interesting to see how it looks going into the teeth of a motivated and aggressive Chicago defense, for instance, or taking on the Niners or Seahawks (who may be playing their own game of keep away).

But even correcting for the ineptitude of the opponent, it’s pretty obvious that Chip Kelly’s Oregon blur is going to be just fine in the NFL, at least at the beginning.  As tape accumulates and teams get accustomed to the offense, professional defenses will almost certainly start to catch up – walk the safeties up a little, play a hard nickel, everybody stays in their lanes and exploits the fact that every NFL defense has lateral speed that many if not most college teams don’t.  Offenses like this will ultimately live or die on the quality of personnel – Lesean McCoy and Desean Jackson are the real deal and no fooling, but whether Michael Vick is prepared to take a regular beating over the course of seventy offensive snaps a game – at this point in his career especially – will ultimately dictate how far it goes.  I’m sure Chip Kelly is looking back toward the Pacific Northwest and wondering whether Marcus Mariota might be prepared to go pro after this season.

But for connoisseurs of Washington pro football, last night was yet another ridiculous disintegration under the lights of Monday Night Football. The closest thing to a positive you can take away is that Chris Cooley sounds fresh, polished and professional on the radio broadcast team.  He’ll be fine – and I know that Sam Huff basically can’t go anymore, and it’s for the best, but it was like knowing you’d lost your grandpa. The absence in the booth was palpable, and it’s lost on no one that Sonny Jurgensen is the last man standing from the WJFK glory days of “Sonnysamanfrank”. And another piece of the past recedes in the distance…

Pretty much every single rumor spot-on. The only real eye-opener was the move to a 64-bit processor in the A7 and the addition of the M7 “motion co-processor” – other than that, the rumor blogosphere pretty much hit it out of the park. The days of surprise and “one more thing” have gone by the boards, not least because of a supply chain to China that leaks like an incontinent Fox News viewer.

Thoughts:

* Apple will get slaughtered in the press, because the things I mentioned above are the only things nobody knew.  Hell, we could extrapolate price points and ship dates from the moment the announcement was made.  People want amazing new magical surprises and are taxing Apple for not pulling a rabbit out of a hat (or more likely, a big-screen TV or smart watch or Google Glass competitor).

* The fingerprint thing could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, but if it actually works, it will be very attractive to businesses who want to enforce handset security on users who would rather die than put a passcode on their phones.  I’m willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on being able to take a gimmick and make it non-gimmicky.

* The iPhone 5C is plainly meant to shore up some of that lower-end market where Android has gotten fat and sassy, whether abroad or in the prepaid space.  It’s an attractive enough phone, but the story will be whether the unsubsidized price is $400 or below.  If it’s not, it’s the same sort of pricing decision as the Moto X, which I have my doubts about.

* Speaking of, Apple now joins the Moto X and Microkia/Nokiasoft on the “colorful polycarbonate” bandwagon. Nokia had a snarky tweet about this, which might have a little more cut to it if there were ever going to be another Nokia-branded smartphone, but garish plastic is apparently the new brushed metal.  The premium space is shrinking, as Android turns the consumer smartphone into a commodity product, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can carve a midrange niche instead of relying on the “affordable luxury” market.

* Also speaking of the Moto X, Apple’s A7 processor includes the M7 “motion coprocessor” – in short, a Fitbit in your phone.  Two makes a trend: the next big thing in phones is apparently highly-specialized hardware to do one specific thing while consuming as little power as possible.  In a world where phone battery technology hasn’t progressed beyond “cram a bigger battery in there” for about eight years, this may be the only way to significantly stretch battery life while still allowing always-on sensors to function.

As always, if you have last year’s new iPhone, there’s probably not enough here to justify upgrading.  If you have a phone more than one version behind, you need to run right out and place your order.  The jump from the 4S to the 5S is phenomenal, and I’m positive ‘er indoors will be placing an upgrade order on September 13.

This is everything we more or less expect:

 

1) New iPhone 5S (or similar) – basically the 5 but with a dual-LED flash, a fingerprint scanner, probably a bump in RAM and processing/graphics power and possibly a gold/”champagne” option.

2) New iPhone 5C – basically the guts of a 5 or maybe even a 4S, but with the 1136×640 4-inch display and Lightning connector in any event, and with polycarbonate cases rather than metal/glass, probably in multiple colors.

3) Maybe iPads, maybe Apple TV, but not tremendously likely.

4) At least one of the phones, probably the 5S, to be released in the US on Sept 20 – and iOS 7 to be publicly available Sept 18 or so.

 

Let’s ride.

Maybe.

Today Yahoo released Yahoo Screens for iOS, a streaming video app that puts all Yahoo’s video in one place for easy access and playback through the phone.  Right now it looks like mostly clips, but between SNL and Comedy Central, they have plenty of attractive stuff right off the jump.  Which makes for a nice app on top of the completely-reengineered Flickr app, and the excellent rebranded Yahoo Sports app (formerly Sportacular), and a best-of-breed Fantasy Football app, and a Yahoo Weather app so good that Apple basically lifted 85% of its UI wholesale for iOS 7, and…

Hm…

Don’t look now, but Yahoo is quietly salting a mine over there in Sunnyvale.  They’re turning out some very good mobile apps, they’ve apparently administered Tumblr with a light touch (and are dogfooding it for their own product blogs, apparently), and they just poached a deputy editor of the New York Times to run Yahoo News.  And for all the hype and opprobrium about the new logo, people are talking about it – and the very clean modern white-and-purple suggests a grown-up company with serious ambitions.

See, Yahoo was Google before Google.  Not just in terms of search, where Yahoo was the search engine from the days of being hosted at akebono.stanford.edu – Yahoo had a meaningful presence in chat, in portals, in all-in-one Internet content like scores and stock quotes and weather.  And in mail, where they were an original part of the iPhone launch and the only provider of actual push-style email. There are plenty of people who are still using a Yahoo email address to this very day.

In short, Yahoo is ideally positioned to be an alternative to Google, because they already have millions of potential users who already have accounts, because they were Yahoo users ten years ago.  All people need is a reason to take a second look, and a lot of people are finding one – whether over Google paranoia, or from intrigue over interesting new phone apps, or just because it looks new and fresh and still has everything you need for fantasy football except a way to keep Victor Cruz from only making catches in the end zone.  They’re still a built-in option for mail and search on every iOS device, and unlike Microsoft or Google, they’ve never competed directly with Apple in anything Apple sells for money…which makes them an ideal partner going forward.

And let’s not forget who’s in charge at Yahoo – the former Google employee number 20, the one who probably wouldn’t mind laundering the title of Queen of Silicon Valley that Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman managed to drag through the mud and taking it for herself.  On present form, you have to think that resurrecting one of the grand old names of the dot-com boom era would get that done – and it looks like she could very well pull that off.  I’d love to see it happen.  We need another superpower.

This month is my career anniversary. On September 15, 1997, I left behind the world of political science and embarked on a new job adventure in the lucrative and exciting field of high-tech.  That my salary has doubled in the ensuing sixteen years is more a tribute to inflation and how little I was raking in at the beginning.  And the enthusiasm of those early days (in which I commented to some unwitting Iowa undergrads in email that my job was “as simple, easy and rewarding as picking up free money in the street”) has long, long, long since gone by the boards.

Sixteen years, man and boy, as the Cockneys say.  In theory and on paper, I should be halfway to retirement.  But the notion that I’ll get to retire before 60 is risible in the extreme, things being how they are.  That’s another post. This is more about what happened in those sixteen years.  When I started, my company had Ethernet, Token Ring and LocalTalk all in use, and whether you could get onto the Internet or whether your Mac could print was a function of what floor of the building you were on.  There was actually a modem pool so you could connect over the network to a 56K modem and dial into Erols or Heller or whoever was your ISP.* (And I had to do this, because at the time, the firewall blocked IMAP.)  We had Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 4, Novell-based file and print services (at a time when FAPS wasn’t as giggle-inducing as now), and the phone in my pocket was a Motorola Piper that I couldn’t afford to turn on.

Things have changed a lot.  Apple stopped dying and took over the world in some non-PC markets that didn’t exist back then. Nowadays it’s all Ethernet connection, except when it’s all Wi-Fi.  I literally cannot remember the last time I had to use a model to dial in, but it must’ve been a while, because I don’t remember when I last had a computer with a modem built in.  The vast array of Zip disks, Jaz disks, and even CD-RW went by the boards in favor of USB thumb drives – when physical media was used at all, that is. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a DVD to install software, but extrapolating back I can only assume it was to install OS X 10.6.  Setting up printers remains as annoying and ignominious as task as ever, but the vast majority of my support tasks can be handled remotely.  The landscape of IT support, in short, should be completely transformed.

And yet.

I was having a conversation with my boss, who independently gave voice to something I’d been thinking for quite some time.  Generation X has by and large spent its entire office career working on computers.  Millenials don’t know anything else.  The baby boomers – the last generation to know routine office life without a PC on every desk – are starting to retire.  In theory and on paper, then, IT support should be trending away from “how do I do that” and more exclusively focused on “this doesn’t work,” because the user base as a while should have become more computer-literate and adept at handling the machine.

And yet.  The boss concurred completely: this hasn’t happened.  The new crop of users produces no fewer ridiculous questions, no less fodder for the Twitters and blogs and websites detailing the follies of help desk callers.  So if it hasn’t gotten any better – why the hell not?

My theory was this: as with most things in the tech world, the blame belongs to Microsoft. Windows was a mess until the release of Windows 95 – and then it was a slightly fancier-looking mess.  But all the old DOS problems remained and new and exciting ones were developed; Win98 was a kludge and WinME a disaster area.  Not until Windows 7 were the more robust NT underpinnings available at the consumer level – and by that time, the forced integration of Internet Explorer (as part of Microsoft’s effort to fend off the Netscape challenge) had opened the way to a whole new world of viruses and malware, made worse by the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing and high-speed home networks.

In short, Windows kinda sucked.  And it continued to kinda suck. People rebooted every day whether they needed it or not, and some folks prescribed a full OS reinstall every six months just to try to speed things back up.  Entire businesses grew up around consumer IT support – the Dell technician on the other end of a phone line in Hyderabad, the stereotype-bedecked Geek Squad at Best Buy – and people just accepted that the computer did weird things, bad things, performed poorly or oddly, and it was beyond their control.

It’s pre-Enlightenment religion, is what it is. You don’t know why your child is coughing and can’t stand up, you don’t know why the crop is withering brown in the middle of the season, you don’t understand why the sun is suddenly being covered in the middle of the day – and so you run to the village shaman or medicine man or whatever, and he sacrifices a chicken or something, and suddenly the sun comes back out or the kid gets healthy or, more likely, it goes on being shitty…and that’s just the way of the world.

Windows gave the computing public learned helplessness. People just accepted that the computer was beyond their comprehension, and gave up trying to understand or solve it.  Better to let the computer wizard do it, or the computer guru, or the computer magician – even the terminology suggests a primitive tribe throwing itself on the mercy of the supernatural.  And IT departments gladly indulged the peasants.  Maybe out of a need to get more budget, maybe out of a need to feed their own egos, whatever.  Personally, I think they did it because they wanted to guarantee that when sacrifice time came around, the peasants would look upon them as the priests…and not the chickens.

 

 

* I had the good fortune to have used two small business for my Internet access for a continuous stretch of about 13 years: Heller for dialup and Speakeasy for DSL.  Both are outstanding, and dearly missed.

Samsung did what they wanted to do: they got a watch out the door faster than Apple or Google.  Unfortunately, it seems a very Samsung sort of watch: all kinds of features,  a slightly clumsy UI, and a battery that may not make it through the day – and right now, it only works with the two new Samsung devices just announced.  Ultimately I suspect this was launched more for the sake of “FIRSTIES” and not for the sake of an optimal product.  Say what you like, but when Apple ships, the thing will be ready…for what it does.

See, that’s the thing: a watch is going to have to start at the bottom and scale up.  The tablet market wasn’t cracked until Apple chose to scale up the phone OS rather than cram down the desktop OS.  Similarly, someone like Pebble has a much better grip on the smart watch: what do you NEED it to do?  Shoot pictures? Probably not. Hell, you probably don’t even need a color display at this point.  What you DO need is not to charge it every night.  We’re more or less accustomed to that with phones at this point – the days of plugging my SonyEricsson Z520 in twice a week are long past – but to have to do it with a watch, to take it off every night and plug it in?  Pebble sorted that by focusing on battery life – still the most important trick in mobility computing – and for their trouble got a watch that could go for a week, can be worn in the shower (assuming it’s not too hot) and can be charged with a MagSafe-type cable.

Then there’s the other thing: the fitness monitor. Many of my friends have latched onto these, and the wife has started using the FitBit One – pedometer, activity tracker, can even tell whether you were going up stairs.  Easy to quantify and easier to monitor from a phone app.  No reason it couldn’t all be rolled into a watch; after all, the Fitbit Flex or Jawbone Up or Nike FUELBand are all on the wrist.  So there’s that – take your time-and-date and pop your Fitbit on there as well, and there’s your smart watch.  What else do we need?

Well, notifications. Apparently notifications are a big deal, as evinced by the attention given to the power-sipping active notification mechanism of the Moto X.  Presumably any notification you can get on your wrist is one less time you have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open an app or pull down a windowshade panel, all while burning through battery with that big bright screen.  So notification triage, and maybe even the ability to read text messages in full, possibly with some canned replies.  Throw that in there.

Now…each of the Big Two mobile operating systems has its specific party piece.  For Apple, it’s Siri; for Android, it’s Google Now.  Each represents a potentially useful way of interacting with the phone via watch.  With Siri, you do it all via voice.  Talk to the watch, hear the phone speak back via the watch or show you what would be on the phone screen on the watch (which probably mandates a color display or else some rejiggering of the UI).  With Google Now, it’s the constant push of cards to the watch (ditto re: the UI) and the ability to flip through traffic conditions on the way home or weather or flight tracking or what have you.  Each is potentially useful but would require some extra work from the OS side to make it function easily.

That’s the trick: it’s going to be difficult to come up with more than a bare-bones device that isn’t inherently tied to iOS.  Or to Samsung. Or to Motorola, or HTC, or just Android.  Pebble is way ahead of the curve on a genericised interface, but to really get use out of it may entail a bigger commitment to one manufacturer or another.  Which brings us to the Google Now problem generally.

See, I’ve done everything I can to try to make Google Now useful for me, but it doesn’t do much.  Weather report (of varying quality), commute directions (kinda sorta), transit info (when close to a stop), and to be honest not very much more.  Why?  Because I don’t use Gmail for anything. If it doesn’t have your email to mine, Google Now can’t offer you very much in the way of scheduling or prediction or “hey, leave now if you want to make your flight.” And even the notional alternatives (thinking of the slightly-stale Osito here) need to have Gmail access to do much more.

The problem, then, is that if you want the benefits of something like Google Now, you have to commit to Google for your services.  Which is asking a lot (which I’m sure is what Google wants). The “Today” view in iOS 7 will give you a little of this, supposedly, and apps like Donna are already trying to replicate some of the functionality with your calendar by rolling travel and weather and even car service via Uber into the package.  But it’s not all the way there.

Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology.  In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email.  Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago  – can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar.  So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or  the like.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit.  And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves).  Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.

So now we wait.  Every man his own Big Data.  It’s coming.

Lunch was late today, and in close proximity to a couple of cellphone purveyors.  Having satisfied myself on tacos and Coke Zero (note to the young man at Chipotle: the taco does not traditionally contain beans nor rice of any variety), I decided to step into the AT&T store and see for myself what the Moto X is about.

First caveat: I know damn well that the phones will all have those bulky alarm tethers on the back, making it impossible to get a good sense of hand-feel.  Second caveat: I know that the primary party pieces of the Moto X are voice control and its battery life, neither of which will be possible to test in a retail environment.  So with that in mind, I activated my personal psychic cloaking shield, made a saving throw vs. retail solicitation, and marched in to see what’s doing.

From what I can tell, here’s the story on the X: the gesture-based camera activation works right up until it pulls the alarm tether out of the base.  So much for cloaking.  The screen looks just fine, certainly no worse than the plethora of other phones stacked up alongside.  It doesn’t feel unseemly big on the x-y axes either. The woven back is a visual texture but not tactile.  Taps and swipes seem quick and responsive and natural.

More troubling is that there were two (2) devices in the store.  One by itself amid a sea of HTC and Samsungs (including the risible Galaxy Mega – is anyone really going to buy a 6-inch phone?) and one on the side of a display that included samples of the customizable colors.  White and black fronts, all the color accents and all sixteen color options for the back.  Most of which look like they could be really dated really quick – the resale value of your Miami Dolphins-colored phone is not going to be great.  But then, this is a smartphone for people who may not necessarily be upgrading every two years, for better or worse.  The crimson option would be nice for Tide fans. I kind of wish the navy was darker, but pair it with a white front and the metallic yellow and any Cal fan would be satisfied.

But that’s the thing: this is Moto’s hero phone, its cross-carrier flagship device. And it has less presence in this AT&T company store than you would expect.  Were it not for the customization console (which is not active, apparently), there would be nothing to promote this phone any harder than the free-with-contract Pantechs on the next counter over.  Maybe the big marketing push will come when the phone becomes available on all four national carriers, who knows.  But Motorola was allegedly preparing to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on promoting the Moto X – and right now, the budget for in-store promotion looks like about $3.50.

So on the way back to the car, I stepped into T-Mobile to enquire about the prepaid options for a notional unlocked iPhone 4S.  Not the contract-free options, mind you – the legit prepaid stuff, the sort of thing you’d have in the UK.  Add dollars, etc.  And right now, from that standpoint, the only real plan is a pay-by-the-day offering.  It’ll cost you $3 a day, but that comes with unlimited calls and texts plus 200 MB of data at full speed (LTE where available, HSPA+ otherwise).  That works out to $90 a month for unlimited calling and messaging plus an aggregate 6 GB of data.

Which might sound outrageous, until you look at a 2-year contract with AT&T through my employer and see that unlimited calling and messaging plus 5 GB of data per month will cost you $110 a month after the discount.  Verizon’s “Share Everything” seems somewhat more reasonable – $80 will get you the same unlimited everything plus 6 GB data – until you factor in the $40 for “Monthly Line Access.”  So you end up with $120 a month, essentially the same as the un-discounted AT&T plan.  And then throw in all the usual taxes, fees, assessments, blah blah blah…

Basically, as long as the network is sufficient, you can undercut AT&T and Verizon by 25% without any commitment at all beyond paying every morning when you turn on the phone.  If you were some random European popping over for a week – let’s say one of those British cabbies who always told us they were going to Vegas or San Francisco soon – seven days of service will only set you back £14 or so, and you can use your own UK phone into the bargain.

Now, the wild card in all this: AT&T is about to go national with their captive-brand AIO Wireless (pronounced like “A-O River!!”, Portlandia fans) which is also geared toward bring-your-own.  It’s not got pay-by-the-day, but its contract-free offering – on AT&T’s network, apparently – will cost you $70 a month for unlimited talk, unlimited text, and 7 GB of high-speed data.  All in one, no fees – flat $70.  Which is the same $70 that T-Mobile will charge you for unlimited everything – including data, although you have to think they’re throttling past 5 GB – if you bring your own phone and have no annual contract.  

By contrast: that same $70 is what I used to pay AT&T on a deep corporate discount inherited from Cupertino Hexachrome Produce, Ltd.  For that $70 I got 450 minutes, 1000 texts and 2 GB of data.  And if I still wanted that, I could get the unlimited text and talk and the same 2 GB of data for a slick $55 a month.  No hidden fees, no contract, and savings of $180 a year – on the exact same network.

I mean, what’s the catch? There’s got to be a catch. And in a way, there is: this is what happens when you take the phone subsidy out of the equation.  The European approach – and if you’re willing to stick with your own device, that’s $50 in your pocket every month.  The savings on service are enough that you can buy a new phone every year contract-free if you feel like it.  You’re buying a phone when you want or need a new phone, not when the window opens every other year and you have your one chance to take advantage of having been roundly rogered the past 24 months.

This is what I wanted when I switched to GSM a decade ago.  The promise of being able to move at will between carriers (well, between two carriers) without having to indenture yourself for years, of divorcing service from device and gaining the natural benefits of a real marketplace.

It’s coming.  And as soon as work stops providing me with a phone, I’m going straight there. Believe that.

So a couple weeks or so ago, I decided that since I didn’t have kids, I might as well take the case off my iPhone 5.  Nobody else handles it, I’m reasonably sure-handed, why not?  Sure enough, I’ve only dropped it once and not in a particularly harmful way, so now I have the benefit of it being light and slim and such.  And then, a couple days after, I did what my wife had done to her iPhone 4S with no regrets: pulled the screen protector off and left it off.

This was a huge leap of faith. After all, I scratched the screen of my iPhone 4 within a week of receiving it, and I’ve been paranoid about it ever since.  To take this fragile aluminum-glass iPhone 5 with no case, no screen protector, nothing at all – it feels akin to whipping off my trousers and Porky Pig-ing my way around Plato’s Retreat in 1978 or so. I mean, it may feel great and look very sexy, but before long, I’m going to wish I’d never done it.

But so far, it hasn’t been much of an issue.  And the thing is – it’s like getting a brand new phone. I don’t think I appreciated just how amazing the screen is, after months of having it covered by a scratched layer of polymer. I certainly didn’t appreciate just HOW thin and light it is on a day-to-day basis, or how the chamfer between glass and aluminum looks if anything even more high-tech than its Dieter Rams-influenced predecessors.  And given that right now it will support every known feature of iOS 7, it’s going to feel like a whole different phone again soon – probably by mid-September, given the Great Mentioner’s announce date of September 10 and the likelihood of sales on the 20th.  It’ll almost certainly feel like the biggest shift in the iPhone since it first shipped.

And that’s important. Apple is getting clubbed pretty good in the blogopshere by people who look at the evolving state of Android, or the new design of the Moto X, or the prospect of Google Glass, or just the fact that most Android phones have upward of 5-inch displays, and want to know why Apple isn’t doing anything wildly different.  And this betrays a couple of fundamental misconceptions about how Apple works and how things are in the world.

For starters, Apple tends not to test things out in public. The first iPhone and the first iPad had months to build buzz, but since then, new versions tend to be on the shelves within a couple of weeks of announcement.  The rumor mill goes berserk, always, but Apple themselves never let the cat out of the bag early. The notion of a Google Glass-like approach where an unfinished product is released to a handful of randoms is unthinkable in Apple World.  Sure, Siri has been “beta” since it launched, but how much of an outlier is that? By contrast, how long did it take for Gmail – for GMail – to drop the beta tag?  Siri’s ongoing beta status jumps out because it’s unusual that Apple would go to market with an officially unfinished product.

The other consideration is that of the delta. The first iPhone lacked a few things, but within three years, the iPhone 4 was essentially what we have now.  By contrast, the first Android phone worth criticizing – the Nexus One – only shipped in 2010…a few months before the iPhone 4.  Apple hasn’t had nearly as far to come over the last three years as the Android ecosystem, which itself made a virtue of necessity by producing ever-larger phones to accommodate the ever-larger batteries required to carry them through a full day.  The result, with half a dozen manufacturers, was a plethora of choice and the appearance that the Android world was somehow advancing further and faster than the Apple one.

In the end, a lot of what people wanted from iOS 7 was change for the sake of change.  Something new, something fresh, something different and exciting. That’s only been made worse by the features Motorola has rolled into the Moto X’s hardware, features that are almost certainly going to require new hardware to emulate and which Apple may not be able to match in 2013.  The iPhone 5S, so-called, will almost certainly be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and will as such feed the inclinations of a tech press that at some level has never really been able to shake the “beleaguered Apple” meme.  “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”  “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. None.” “iPad – failure, joke or fiasco?”

At some point – probably in 2014 – Apple has to do something to increase the delta.  Slow and steady may win the race and fatten the wallet, but it’s just not sexy enough for Them Asses.