Posted in Rants, Technology

Open Letter to John Legere and Neville Ray of T-Mobile

Dear T-Mobile and its Representatives, via Neville Ray (current CTO) and John Legere (Current CEO),

As a newer customer (somewhere over 4 years), I would like some help in this particular matter. I am a HUGE fan of your company since the entrance of your current CEO John Legere. I am writing on the basis of a small complaint and a request, as a well as a hope for the near future merger (if approved, more on that in a minute) of Sprint and T-Mobile. I am writing on the growth pains that T-Mobile is experiencing and it is painful for those of us outside of major metropolitan cities. I currently live in Cleveland, TN and I am having an issue with your coverage and it’s current solution that you provide, among many for those of us in this predicament and I appreciate it, but it needs some re-thinking in my opinion.

I want to share that as I stated above, I am a HUGE fan (and promoter) of T-Mobile and for the first time since I left my mother’s plan, after being with At&t from the age of 18 through my early 30’s, you all provided me my first stand alone cell phone service, so I appreciate that! You can see just a few of tweets from years past here:

This is not to say, that I have not also had my complaints, as no company is perfect and we all know that. It’s part of competition and what makes the market grow and learn. Even though you charged me $150 more that At&t (and even $50 more than Samsung) was for the Galaxy Gear S3 Frontier (see tweet below)! I gladly accepted it and purchased it anyway and still wear my Gear S3 to this day.

I am coming to you now with an issue I have with the coverage in my area and the current solutions you have and the specific one that I chose. I have to point out first that I recently moved back to Cleveland, TN back in the summer of 2018 and have only been here for approximately 1 year and I am struggling to keep service here in my area of travel outside of my home. The area of Cleveland on the North side, doesn’t really have an issue, but the South side does and I hope that you can help!

I recently tweeted about this issue back in September of 2018 and ended up ordering the T-Mobile 4G LTE Personal Cell Spot that uses a small Nokia Femtocell micro tower in my house. The second version of this is what I received, since this was announced in November of 2017 and I did not set this device up until recently.

 

 

I want to explain my frustration in two areas, both your coverage vs actual coverage and the aspect of payment for this solution that you are providing for “cheap” or free in certain situations.

Coverage vs Actual Coverage

Your website is very misleading on the map’s coverage colors and how they blanket areas. I actually had sold a friend on T-Mobile and had him swap his entire business, some 13 lines over from Verizon a few years back. Unfortunately, due to your misleading maps, he got mad with me and swapped back and I believe ended up having to fight with a regional manager on getting all of it fixed.

So let’s start with my area of living in Cleveland, TN. I will show you the map that you guys provide to the public for my area:

tmobile04_tmobile

The map shows my address and even shows my verified tests that I have done. This is an average, due to the fact that I live at the top of the hill and can see for quite a few miles in most directions from our house, so this can be attributed to sea level of my house. The issue runs into the fact that when you get to the bottom of our hill, we lose signal almost immediately and I have to either travel North for a few miles before I start getting a signal and then I can start my Pandora stream (thanks for the 1 year of Premium, BTW!). You can even see in my tweet that I mentioned above, that if I travel Southward, that I lose signal for quite a few miles until I get into the Georgia area, after I cross the state line. This map makes it look like I should have Good to Fair coverage in my ENTIRE area, but this is very false.

I do understand that it takes time to grow a network, in purchasing, licensing and leasing fees to put your equipment on pre-owned towers that other companies have already put up. I even began to look deeper into the issue and see that you guys are most likely paying a leasing fee to Tillman Infrastructure for the nearest tower to me. So I wanted to look a little deeper into this and it looks like there are several customer facing websites that I can search for better understanding of the coverage issue. One of the first ones is CellMapper.net:

tmobile01_cellmappernet

So I see that there are towers North of me, but it looks like my area is just this weird area that T-Mobile does not cover for some reason. So I wanted to search other sites for more details and maybe confirmations. So I then looked into AntennaSearch.com, which is how I found out who built or owns the tower now, where you have the nearest tower to me:

tmobile01_antennasearch

You can see a confirmation that the towers available in my area are limited to the North side of town and for some reason, our little sliver is neglected by T-Mobile for some reason. Until, I got to my third site, CellReception.com and was able to understand why. Maybe, T-Mobile isn’t ignoring our area, but may be either being blocked by a competing company or may be planning to merge with this company and see if you can ‘fix’ the issue (hopefully) with a tower from Sprint. I will show you the confirmation map first, to show that there are definitely no towers “near” me from T-Mobile (I don’t know why they don’t show the others with this site) :

tmobile03_cellreption

And then, when I select Sprint as a provider, I see that there is a tower just behind my neighborhood, less than a mile:

tmobile03b_cellreption

This leads me to the fact that I hope, that this is the plan, that if (here’s hoping) the merger goes through, you can use that equipment already there or upgrade it and make my area better. I am just really frustrated with your coverage in my home area and dislike having to drive nearly 2 miles away from my house before I get a good signal and can start streaming my Pandora!

The Temporary Solution (I hope)

As I stated above, there are multiple options that your company provides, including an ASUS Wifi Router for Wifi Calling (not sure if you still provide this), a Cell Booster, that takes two smaller boxes and uses one as a repeater and one as a booster to repeat an outside signal back into the house (now looking back, I probably should have ordered this instead) and finally the LTE Personal CellSpot V2 that I currently have. Now, I do want to clarify, I have no clue how much each of these devices cost T-Mobile, but the customer is typically charged $25 for a deposit to receive these and can be refunded upon cancellation of service or return of the device. I have heard that you can get that fee waived, but in my case, they did not.

That being said, I am sure there is some cost of these devices as the initial cost of T-Mobile purchasing specially branded versions of this Nokia device (not actually Nokia, but a separate company that makes them and uses the Nokia branding). That aside, I find it odd that we as customers are not compensated for expanding your network in small cell areas of about 3,000 square feet. I have heard on some Reddit threads that it can be a few acres? (Wow if that is true!) I say that, to say, if we are “fixing” an issue with your equipment that you provide, we should be compensated a $5 or $10 discount on our monthly bills.

Here is my argument, as I have combed over many T-Mobile Support Forums and a Reddit Threads to read the complaints. Since T-Mobile does not provide any customer facing UI, GUI or CLI to be able to view or change anything with this femtocell, all T-Mobile (and I have read some At&t customers, I assume roaming) customers are allowed to use this tower, as if it were a macro tower. I understand that in both the macro and the micro towers, that it is the company equipment, but if you are using our internet connection to create it on the micro equipment, we should be compensated monthly.

We as customers are paying for our own “landline” cable, fiber or DSL internet and some of these companies still have data caps and these can be crashed through if there are neighbors or any T-Mobile customer coming through and using the micro tower. I have read some, not many, stories of since adding these femtocells into their network of them going over their data limits. This can be easily seen by jumping into Reddit or the T-Mobile Forums. So the overall thing is, that we are paying twice for internet, when it should have been provided without having to get your home solutions. In most rural areas, the cable and DSL providers do not have great speeds to provide to this CellSpot. I am a unique customer and have a 100Mbps connection behind it with no data caps, so I am a “unicorn”, I would think, but can understand other customer’s issues with this device.

I think that At&t provides a whitelist function on their Femtocells, so that only selected users can use it. Which leads me to the second issue, which is the fact that the data on this micro tower is STILL counted in our monthly counts. Why is that allowed? I understand it costs money to maintain a VPN tunnel between these devices and the T-Mobile network, but you again, are using our internet that we are being charged for. We should not be charged data counts in our monthly counts when it is STILL our own backhaul behind the microtower that is feeding the LTE signal created by the device. I believe that not only should we be be compensated a $5 or $10 monthly discount, but also given any data that we use on your microtower and not counted as “on-network” 4GLTE/4G/3G that you would provide if we were connected to a macro tower. It just seems very backwards and I think could be reworked.

I am thankful for your time and attention to this issue and hope that you will seriously consider my complaints and possible solutions. Please feel free contact me via my Twitter (@RustyG) if you would like to help!

-Rusty G

One of your biggest fans in the Southeast!

 

Posted in Technology

Apple’s Upcoming Streaming Service Theory (Pre March 25th 2019 Announcement)

AppleStream_Invite

So the invites have gone out for the March 25th, 2019, Apple event. As all of the rumors have pointed towards and now the almost cofirmed, “It’s Show Time” showing up on the invites, it can all but be confirmed that we will be seeing the new streaming service come from Apple. With the fact that Apple has stopped sharing the iPhone sales numbers last year, due to the fact that all smartphone sales have basically maxed out, and the market is basically saturated with smartphones everywhere. People are a little stressed out with the now common $1,000 entry point for some major flagship smartphone manufacturers and are now holding on to their phones for longer due to many reasons, but one being the lack of innovation in the newest phones being released. We are not seeing a lot of major changes in the year-to-year and some are waiting anywhere from 2 years or more until they upgrade now.

(I wish we could go back to contracts and subsidies, rant ahead)

I will admit to a sidebar here, as I find this funny, but with folks holding on to their phones for 2+ years now, why can’t we have the option of going back to a 2 year contract price and getting the cell phone carriers subsidizing some of the cost? I remember when T-Mobile basically set the precedent for this and killed off of the contract. This at the time sounded amazing, but basically, they didn’t “kill” the contract, they just re-labeled it and made you pay full price for your phone and they no longer subsidized the cost of the phone. I saw that as a very manipulative way of marketing, but a ton of people liked the idea of no “contract”, even though they were still in a “contract” of a different kind. Those terms aside, T-Mobile started this new way that mobile carriers do business and all the other major carriers followed suit and now, we the people have to pay FULL price for our phones now, which is vary frustrating. I personally WOULD sign a 2 year contract with my carrier of choice, to get this price back down to something more manageable if we are going to continue to this foray in to the $1,000USD+ entry point on smartphones. I was with At&t from the time I was 18 (then Cingular Wireless) until I swapped back in 2014 or 15, I believe it was. I have been with my same carrier now since that swap and have no plans to swap anytime soon, unless there are some major changes.

Now back to the regularly scheduled post.

So with the fact that people are getting phones much later and the market has been saturated, Apple has been planning for the future as people are moving to the streaming platforms in droves and the physical format may soon be dying. Even Samsung has stopped making Blu-Ray players, but this had more to do with the fact that they haven’t kept up with the trends and not updated their hardware, but that is besides the point. Apple knows that people are subscribing more to online services and want to cash in on it. They are already making it work with Apple Music and they want to expand their services into the video industry.

Netflix is the #1 video streaming service as it stands, in my opinion. Obviously, there are multiples out there, including Hulu, SlingTV, DirecTV NOW, Amazon Prime TV and many many others. I don’t want to delve into the individual services from the individual content providers like ESPN, HBO, CBS, NBC or any other direct providers, but just the overall platform providers that are “content agnostic”. I put content agnostic in quotes, because now I am going to lean towards the upcoming and rumored, but almost confirmed Apple video streaming service.

It seems that Apple will be announcing their streaming service to compete with the likes of Amazon and Netflix. I think this will be the same $10 per month entry point like most of the others out there, along with other tiers. Apple has been very good at making contracts with certain companies in the past and making services more “mainstream”. I use iTunes and the P2P sharing from back in the days of the early 00’s as my point of reference. Apple was able to make it so convenient and fast to purchase music for the first time when it launched iTunes Music store in 2003. They were able to bring most of the major labels to the table and basically take over and create the online music market.

Now fast forward to 2019 and we are about to see the announcement of Apple’s streaming service and I want to give some thoughts to what they may be working on. Beginning in January, I started getting notices from a few of my services that I subscribe to for my online digital library that I don’t normally use. Let me show you what I received:

AppleStream_Ultraviolet

This is the first email that I received from Ultraviolet and then I got another email from Sony:

AppleStream_Sony

I am just speculating here, but I am thinking that these are major movie services that are shutting down because they have been bought out by Apple. I have no hard facts or points of reference to confirm this, but I think these are good indicators that Apple may be buying up the licenses for these movie providers, and adding to their already expanding library.

You have to understand that Apple is already working pretty heavily and almost directly with Disney/Pixar/Marvel/LucasFilm and will already have the rights to those media libraries and you already see this in your current online library if you have any of these movies streaming to your AppleTV. Apple still needs to bring in some of the other major studios to round out their available movies if they want to play more than just Disney owned content. I believe that these notices I received above are the pre-cursor to seeing Apple bringing in the other names like Sony and whatever deals that Ultraviolet has with the others.

I will say that I think that MoviesAnywhere may be either their direct opponent or we may see a re-branding of it to the Apple streaming service, because they have also been slowly getting all the online digital services under one house. I say re-branding because Disney itself, shut down it’s Disney service recently as well as it moved over to the MoviesAnywhere service.

In another story that I thought I would never see, Apple also has announced partnerships with Samsung to get the iTunes media libraries on their Smart TVs starting in 2019! I think this has to do with more of the fact that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated, 1st party television set that they sell and that they need to get to the market that does not buy Smart TV dongles like the AppleTV, Amazon Fire Sticks or Google Chromecasts. If you are a TV consumer who never buys the extra STBs, but may have purchased a Samsung Smart TV, then this is another way to get you into the Apple Ecosystem.

I could be totally wrong here, but as a long time tech person, I feel like this is how it will go down on March 25th. Only a few more days away and we shall see!

Posted in Technology

UBI and the Future of Automation

 

The future of jobs is soon coming to head and the end of manual labor for the mass society of Americans as we know is coming to an end sooner than you expect.

I have had this conversation with a friend of mine and acquaintances who simply do not believe it and just want to put their heads in the sand and want to wish it all away. They think that technological advances in automation of so many different industries is “so far” away that it will never be seen in our lifetimes and they just don’t want to even face facts and numbers. It may not be the ‘Terminator’ style ending that we saw in the 80’s and 90’s from the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit movies, but robots will basically take over everything that we do.

I will point you to the screenshot above from the 2008 Disney movie, ‘Wall-E‘. As you see the movie progress, you will see that humans have evolved (or devolved, however you want to see it) to a point that robots do everything they need and there is no real need for the manual labor of people anymore. Obviously, this also shows the progression of humans getting more obese, but that is not the point of this post and I will not delve into that side of things. I want to point out, that the future portrayed in this fictional movie is really not far from us, as technology stands today.

I have shown the video of the Tesla automated semi-truck to my mother’s boyfriend, who is a truck driver and has been for multiple years. He just laughs and says “good luck”. I have shown him that his job is going to be questioned in the near future. As companies get larger and larger, they will want to automate and efficiently get rid of human workers in the process. Humans are the most expensive and least cost efficient part of any process and they can cause errors on a much higher level than robots will ever do. One of the worst economic examples of this, was bust before the millennium in 1999, when a NASA, Mars observer was burned up in the martian atmosphere, due to the translation between imperial and metric measurements. As this was obviously due to American’s stubbornness not to change to the metric system, this mistake would not have been made if a trained robot was doing the work, but I digress.

We have seen the idea of automated cars driving around and now taxiing people around cities like Las Vegas as the likes of Waymo, Lyft (aka Level5) and Uber are all working to eliminate their drivers. You can see some automated systems in cars now like lane assist and automated breaking systems that are already being sold to the public in cars from companies like Ford, Toyota and Chevrolet, just to name a few. The human driver is the worst accident causing part of the driving equation and the faster we can remove that from behind the wheel, the better off we are.

Obviously, this is not something that we can do overnight or even quickly, but will take a serious amount of time for acclimation for the society at large to accept this, but it will happen. Let me repeat that for affect here, IT WILL HAPPEN. I have already seen so many skeptics and worker’s unions fighting this, but there is no real need to fight it. Technology, no matter how big or small, has always and will continue to enrich our lives. the problem is that humans are infallible and will always find a way to make any process longer, take their time or just flat out quit. Humans are not really built for repetitive tasks and we need to understand this moving forward. There is a reason, as I write this, I begin to think of the writer’s worst nightmare, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

I am using driving cars as the example above, but it can be repeated for many, many industries across our human work force. The most menial jobs will be the jobs taken over by robots and automation, which include service jobs like fast food, hotels and even security jobs. I could take almost any industry and show you how there are, or will be automated robots take over some aspect of the job. When it comes to even more dangerous and even more skilled jobs, these are not left out either. Since most of the ‘blue-collar’ jobs will be taken first, I can see how the ‘mob mentality’ will fight this the heaviest, but do not dismay, as the ‘white-collar’ jobs are also on the way out as well.

You have to understand that automation knows no bounds and does not care at what level anything is. If a process can be eliminated or automated, robots will take of this in the future for us. This can be software robots or even hardware robots. Many robots are already out there in today’s workforce that you may not even be aware of. I currently work at a car plant that ’employs’ loads of robots to do a lot of tasks that help alleviate worker strain or even repetitive tasks that a robot that only needs light maintenance and doesn’t require a paycheck to do so. This can be seen across almost every car manufacturer today.

You may have heard of or already know about the IoT, a la the ‘Internet of Things’. This is the area of the gadgets that we have, that will be a part of this network. This can include but not limited to, things like our Amazon Echos, our Internet connected weather vanes, or just some internet connected toaster that allows us to control it via the internet in some fashion. Basically, anything that we attach an internet connection to, that previously did not have internet access, just for the simple means of having access to it remotely, is a part of, or will be the IoT. We as a society are connecting more and more things to help enrich our lives, so that we can basically control our lives from the smartphone, that the automated robot future is just an extension of the current reality that we live in today.

I could go deeper into this rabbit hole, but I just want to say this. Many of our jobs, in the next 2 decades may be all but eliminated and we need to be prepared for that. Many tech pundits of our time today are talking about the Universal Base Income (UBI) because the distribution of wealth will most likely stretch even further than it is today and the super rich will become the super super rich as they own and build the robots that will be the future we are looking at. The idea that everyone, everywhere will get the same basic income because robots and automation will most likely wipe out the middle class is not that far from the truth, if you expound upon the ideas of what I am speaking of above.

I am not here to say that your job is in direct fear of losing it to robots right now, but it is over the next few decades and I include myself. I am stating however, we need to plan now for this automated future and not try to tear it down or block it before it comes. As history has taught us, those who oppose future, always fail. We are about to embark upon the next revolution with automation, the same way we did with all the technologies of the past, being that of the printing press, the cotton gin or the airplane. The next ‘Industrial’ revolution is upon us and we must understand it now and try to begin to educate ourselves for the future instead of trying to either idly stand by or try to tear it down like uneducated cavemen of the past.

My recommendation is taking the next hour or so and reading this article from the Guardian and watching these videos below.  If the videos below interest you, I recommend heading over to ColdFusionTV on YouTube and subscribing to his videos as well. Be prepared!

 

 

 

 

Posted in Rants, Technology

Why Does At&t keep Lying?

5G is up and running and ready for 2019. Kind of. It isn’t really ready for mass market yet, but we will start seeing it come to our mobile handsets, maybe as early as March 2019 with the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S10, 5G edition(via CNet). What is 5G you ask? Just to K.I.S.S., it is the next evolution in mobile internet access via mobile devices like the smartphones and tablets that we carry with us today; though tablets may be on the way out (via Forbes). 5G will mostly likely, double, triple or even quadruple the speeds that we have with our mobile devices on 4G LTE (via PCMag). It is the next evolution in our mobile internet broadband access for the world to use. The fun part about it, is the race to be the first to have it. Well, as of recently, if you have an At&t device, you may be seeing it pop up on your phone, like this:

att-5ge

Are you able to see the difference? It’s very subtle,  but you may be used to seeing it this way. Let’s zoom in a whole lot.

att-5ge-change

Can you see it now? You may be used to seeing that 4G LTE logo on most At&t phones, or some fashion of it. It may just be the text AT&T LTE in the top left hand corner of your phone, depending on the software. As of this writing, I would say that 99.9% of At&t customers are used to seeing the LTE logo on their phones now, but as of 2019, it looks like At&t is starting to swap some customer’s icons to the ‘new’ 5G as they are touting 12 cities with 5GE capabilities available (via FierceWireless). The overall problem that I have with that is, that the handsets are not yet available that have the 5G modems that can receive the signal and most likely, won’t be available until later this year, if not until 2020.

Now this is a similar tactic that was previously used by At&t back in 2012, when they basically did the same thing and started labeling HSPA+ (a 3G .5, or 3.5G technology) as ‘4G’. I actually wrote about this when it happened back in 2012. T-Mobile actually started the whole snowball by labeling their HSPA+ 3.5G as ‘4G (aka FauxG) with their whole Carly Foulkes marketing campaign and At&t followed suit (via DigitalTrends) after finding out that no one really cared.

So now, here we are again, where companies are allowed to put labels on things that are not truly what they are. The fun part about it is, that companies are now trolling each other for the shenanigans. Check out T-Mobile’s response on Twitter:


As stated above, and linked in the Digitial Trends article, it was At&t who condemned T-Mobile for the sudden change in marketing tactics, even though the technology didn’t match up with the labels. So now, in 2019, the shoe has swapped and T-Mobile is trolling At&t for the same exact behavior. While I don’t like the marketing tactics of either, it can start to be confusing for the consumer, as salesmen at the store can start using this as a selling point, even though the phones have not reached the capabilities for 5G yet. As the Verge points out, the ‘5GE’ that is currently being changed, is really only LTE Advanced or LTE Advanced Pro in the current markets.

All of my issues aside, as this has happened in the past, even dragging Apple (via the Verge) into the mix, I am just tired of companies making things more confusing for the customers at the bottom and just getting more $$$ in their pockets with marketing jargon. I just find it very funny that all of the wireless companies are repeating past mistakes and no one is really on a national level calling them out and most general consumers will never care to be educated about the things they are being sold on past the cover of the book.

Posted in Apple, Rants, Technology

My Problem with Apple Fanboys and the Company as a Whole

 

I want to be very transparent right up front. I used to be an Apple iPhone guy, an Apple iPod guy and even now so, an Apple iPad guy. I can say without hesitation, Apple STILL makes the best tablet, as of January 2019. I have had a Samsung tablet and even read some of the most recent debacle issues that the current Google Slate is having. I still use my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 as my “daily driver”, though, not in tablet form, but in full on laptop mode, if you will, because I have FULL Windows on there, and tablet mode just seems to ‘maim’ it and I don’t like that version of it. All of that aside, let me get you to where I am with Apple and Apple products.

Way back in 2006, I was carrying the Motorola RAZR V3i. This was the variant of the wildly popular Motorola V3 RAZR phone that had iTunes on it. Apple had recently partnered with Motorola to release the Motorola ROKR(a poorly received, yet rehashed phone from 2003 called the E390) which was the first phone with iTunes that was announced a few months before the V3i, but was a HIDEOUS phone. It was the “dream” phone, because you could carry your iTunes library (albeit only 100 songs max) from your iPod and also have your phone on you at the same time! You have understand, back then, you had to have your iPod as a separate device and carry it separately (and the reason for the modern AUX jack in your radio) from your phone. Smartphones were not yet ubiquitous. Blackberry was the dominant player of the day in the smartphone market, which held the nomenclature of ‘crackberry’.

So back in January 2007, when Steve Jobs got up to announce the iPhone and that we could get this ‘magical’ device in 6 months, the world was EXCITED! (The Motorola ROKR was silently killed off.) I have to admit that the iPhone was the first of it’s kind and definitely changed the smartphone market from then on. I even video’d the event on my RAZR V3i (very poor quality) as I waited for my first iPhone to get shipped to me through Cingular Wireless.

I did several short videos on this, as back then, you could not ‘live-stream’ the way we do now. I had to do this via short clips, as the V3i didn’t have a lot of storage to store videos and I couldn’t use the live-streaming app Qik that I would eventually start using with the iPhone. As you can see, that this phone drew a lot of new people to the smartphone market, including myself.

So I had the original iPhone 2G (named because it only had Edge network capabilities on the Cingular, soon to be At&t network) and was able to sell the phone unlocked and jailbroken a year later to some guy in Italy for more that I originally paid for it! You also have to remember, this was back when the wireless companies subsidized the full cost of the phone because you were agreeing to a 2 year or more contract, so I had only paid $299 for it! You can see the video I used on eBay to sell the phone still online:

So I purchased the iPhone 3G, as it was obvious that many other phones that weren’t smartphones had 3G capabilities and was limiting the first iPhone from ‘high speed’ internet. Apple’s biggest argument was that 3G was a battery hog and could kill the performance that they wanted from their first foray into the smartphone market. As the first iPhone was such a smash hit, they pushed forward with the second iteration, known as the iPhone 3G. Then, in their 2009, 3rd generation iPhone, they released their now known update as the ‘S’ year, the 3GS. This was basically a simple update to all things on the previous version, which usually doubled all the performance over the previous version. Since this was an ‘S’ year, I skipped and held on to my 3G for the full 2 years and waited for the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 was an AMAZING upgrade and introduced us to the ‘Retina‘ display and showed to us that Apple still could hold the consumer market in ‘awe’ as they continued to innovate on the original design and capabilities of the iPhone. They had added a front facing camera for the then unknown Facetime chats, but would soon just become the ‘selfie’ camera. Even though it had been leaked ahead of it’s launch, the iPhone 4 was wildly anticipated and hyped before we were ever able to purchase it! Apple is a company known for it’s secrecy and even hunted down the people who were implicated in the ‘loss’ of it’s prototype device. All of that aside, it was an awesome phone for 2010, so I made my purchase and sold my iPhone 3G, though this time, for a little less and didn’t make a profit.

Though, I did have this weird vibrating issue with the phone when I first got it, but that ended up being a REALLY small fluke issue that only affected a small number of people and you can see that video here:

I mentioned it in passing in this video, but it affected quite a lot more people than the vibrating issue that I ran into and that was one of the first MAJOR ‘gate’ issues, known as ‘Antenna Gate’. There have been plenty over the years, but this was the first one that I became majorly aware of. It was such a pivotal moment for Apple to take a hold of the issue, but the way they illustrated it to us, was that it was our faults. Even though they did provide ‘bumpers’ or discounts on cases, with the idea that we were supposed to buy MORE items from them to fix their issue, it was painfully obvious that Apple was blaming the users. I even had a rant about it, when it all went down. You can see the full event here (sans the Q&A afterwards, which you can find in pieces on Youtube):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IorfYuF4gMM

The funny thing was, that after the press event, it didn’t take long for someone to show that their answer was a bit flawed.

yourholdingitwrong

Even though, this was one of the first ‘cracks’ in the armor that I saw in the ever growing popularity of the iPhone and Apple as a whole, it was a little disheartening to see they were blaming the users. Obviously, this was a real attenuation issue with how the antenna received signals and the human hand could kill it, but to say that it was the user’s fault and not really admit that his was a design flaw was a little disingenuous in my opinion, but I held on and continued with the iPhone 4 throughout it’s life cycle.

The same continued for the ‘S’ year cycle again for the 4S and I again, skipped; now seeing that Apple would continue this format of new design, update old phone with new specs and then redesign again. So I figured that by the time the iPhone 5 would come around for the 2012 release, I would be more than happy to upgrade and be WOW’d again. Unfortunately, this did not happen. The iPhone 5, was a rehashed version of the iPhone 4, but this time and for the first time, had the screen size increased to an almost 16×9 ratio with still carrying the ‘Retina’ display moniker. Yes the phone was thinner and faster than the 4S and even had LTE for first time, but this wasn’t as enticing as the change was from the 3GS to the 4.

Also at this time, the Android market had begun flourishing and many companies had already had their freshman and sophomore tries at smartphones and were releasing phones with better specs and features than what the iPhone 5 was carrying. So I began looking around and found a nice alternative with Samsung and the Galaxy S3. This phone had a 1280×720 display, whereas the iPhone 5 only had 1136×640. The overall screen size was larger at 4.8″ over the iPhone 4″ screen, which was one of the major reasons why I left. Apple was getting stuck in their idea that 4″ was the magic number and that no one wanted anything bigger. This wasn’t the only reason, but was a major factor in my decision to switch from iOS to Android.

Which also brings me to the idea that iOS was getting stale. No matter what Apple did to the iPhone, no matter how many times I jailbroke the iPhone, I could see more options on the fledgling Android side of things.  I was getting tired of the software on iOS and at this point, the iPhone was starting to be owned by anyone and everyone. I didn’t want to be a part of the crowd and I wanted to stand out.  I had researched phones like the Motorola Atrix or the HTC EVO 4G for quite some time, but due to network availability, I had to end up choosing the Samsung in the end and I was happy that I did. The funny thing was, that the S3 ended up being a very popular phone for Samsung as well and I was loving their bigger screens and ended up the next year, upgrading to my first ‘phablet’ phone the Galaxy Note 3. This began my obsession with larger screens.

I stuck with Samsung as they kept making things more awesome every time I upgraded and I felt like they were the company that was making me have that WOW affect every time. I followed my 2 year cycle, as I was still on At&t contract scheme and skipped the Note 4 and went to the Note 5. Even though, the Note 4 Edge was a REALLY cool design, and I seen the prototype at CES a few years prior, they only put the curved edges of the glass on the back of the Note 5. It was really cool to see the curved edges finally make it to the front of the phones with the S6 Edge, earlier that year, but I still wanted the larger screen phones. They eventually made the S6 Edge+, which was basically the size of the Note 5, but had less features than the Note series.

I won’t go much further in my history with Samsung and why I continued to stick with them, but you get the basic idea that it Apple continued to be ‘stale’ to me, even with the change to the design of the iPhone 6, which wasn’t really, all that much different. Then they continued on with that design through all versions of the ‘S’ years through to the iPhone 8 and still some of that design is in the iPhone X and XS. All the while, Apple kept cultivating a ‘fanboy’ status among their fans and was becoming of a cult status.

Over the years as issues went on and on, it was all in how Apple handled their ‘faults’. I think this is one of the biggest reasons why I continue to obstain from Apple and have disdain for their products, even though, some of their products are great. I can attest that iMessage is an awesome idea that Android still really hasn’t mirrored. AppleTV and iPad are in my opinion, one of the best products in their particular markets. I will even admit that MacOS from time to time can be quite helpful, but it isn’t enough to sell me over into the ‘walled garden’ aspect of their entire ecosystem. Especially when there are great alternatives out there, that are cross platform and don’t really care what system you are on. Web services, platform agnostic, to be honest are the best and should have always been the way, as Steve Jobs really wanted from the beginning. (Remember web apps, before we had the iTunes App Store???)

All of that aside, I think this guy kind of puts all of my feelings toward Apple in a nice 22 minute video. Thanks for reading my ramblings and rants. Feel free to comment below. I’ll leave you with the video below: