Here’s an Apple iPhone question for you: How does the iPhone charge?

I know I connect it to a dock that is connected to my computer, but can I charge it without it being connected to my computer? Can it be plugged directly into a wall like a “normal” phone? Because having to walk with a laptop when I’m on a road trip just to charge my phone seems like a slight inconvenience. And if (as you would hope) there will be a wall-charger, will it be a small travel charger that just plugs into the phone, or will it be a bigger dock-style charger that takes up space in my travel bag?

This is why announcing stuff six months in advance can a problem: sure all your hopes can be poured into the device, but so can all your fears, and without information to confirm or deny the issues, you end up with wild-ass speculation.

Update: Companies are already advertising “iPhone chargers”. One company has an entire line of non-existant products, including car and travel chargers and cases.

Update 2: Not just chargers, and not just one company. Looks like “iPhone accessories” are going to be as hot a cottage industry as the iPod accessories is today.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone

Have you ever felt burned out? Like you just can’t stand to get out of bed to face one more day at work? You don’t hate your job, you just don’t know why you’re doing it, or what the benefit is (beyond the financial). Perhaps you fantasize about quitting, cashing out, moving to a little town in the midwest and raising cattle.

Yeah. Me too.

A recent New York Magazine feature on burnout got me thinking about it again. I’ve experienced job dissatisfaction before, and have even quit jobs without having something to go to. (Not a wise choice, generally speaking, unless you come from money or can go back to mommy.) I was just burned out. The mere thought of going into work made me want to crawl under my covers and never leave.

Burnout made me leave New York. I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

I’ve been at my job over five years now, more than twice as long as I’ve been at any other job, ever. That’s twenty years of work, fifteen of which I’ve been at jobs two years or less. (About eight of those fifteen years have been consulting or freelancing, so one could (generously) say I worked for myself for longer. One would have to be feeling very generous.)

After more than five years, I think I’m beginning to feel the first symptoms of burnout. I still love the idea of what I do, and I generally get excited about doing the primary part of my job, but I don’t have much influence over what we do. My team is, for the most part, very talented, and don’t need a day-to-day manager, so much of what I do is more cross-functional planning and thinking.

But since I don’t have a team dedicated to helping me implement my plans and ideas, much of what I come up with ends up in a void, and the stuff I can get done is incremental and derivative. It’s slightly improved versions of the things I was doing three, four years ago.

One of the people in the New York Magazine feature describes his feelings:

I felt somewhat bored, and somewhat depleted. I’d said all I wanted to say. I guess I lost the sense that it was important.

It can be tough to keep doing the same stuff every day. How did our parents do it? How did they stay at the same job for fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and I can’t stay at one for five without feeling I need to be doing something different?

Heck, how do some of my co-workers do it? There are folks in my department who’ve been there for fifteen years. Most people have been there at least ten. Just a year or two ago, one retired after being at the company almost twenty-five years. I suppose it’s generational. Everyone I work with who’s been there longer than me is in their mid- to late-fourties, at least.

Part of this feeling of burnout is, I’m sure, the cost of living in the Bay Area. When you make the money I do, you expect that you will have more chances to do stuff that’s just fun, but instead I worry about owning a house and buying a new stove and putting in new toilets and the squeaking floor and noisy pipes and I think, damn, this would be so much cheaper to deal with in North Carolina.

I’ve idly thought about taking a month off from work, living somewhere other than here for that time. Somewhere very different. Spain. Australia. Italy. Then I think about how much work being in a foreign country would be, and I think… San Diego? Santa Monica? Miami? Would that be different enough?

My company used to offer sabbaticals. No longer. And, of course, I don’t quite have four weeks of vacation saved up (nor would my job let me take them at one time even if I did, I’m sure).

The New York Magazine feature opens with this:

People who are suffering from burnout tend to describe the sensation in metaphors of emptiness—they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, a drained battery that can no longer hold its charge.

I am in definite need of a recharge.

A few months ago I wrote about Washington Mutual’s banking site asking me to give answers to questions I couldn’t give answers to, like my “oldest sibling’s birthday” when I’m an only child, or my “youngest child’s middle name” when I have no children.

It appears that’s not enough of an annoyance, so companies may start asking you questions about items they’ve learned about you from various databases. MSNBC reports,

Instead of using information you give to your credit-card company—your pet’s name or favorite movie—the new type of verification uses personal information gleaned from databases without your knowledge. London-based data broker Experian, for instance, culls information from hundreds of sources—including court records and electoral registries—to supply its 200-plus British clients with so-called challenge questions. If a customer arouses suspicion, the credit-card company sends the name to Experian and gets back, seconds later, a list of questions that can be put to the customer.

So on top of annoying you by asking you questions about things you may not even remember, they’re annoying you using information that may not be otherwise public.

Privacy issues, anyone?

The amount of information about us that’s floating around is truly a scary thought. American Express knows my spending habits better than I do. They know when I’ve taken a vacation, which gas stations I stopped into, which restaurants I enjoy.

I long for the day, in the not very distant past, where I payed cash for everything because I didn’t own credit cards. Now I put everything on a card, and I can be tracked, analyzed and profiled.

1984 continues to arrive, incrementally.

Technorati Tags: Privacy, Security

If you saw Apple’s iPhone announcement, you’re no doubt already thinking of ways to justify a $500-$600 purchase. I know I am. The Apple iPhone is beautiful, the interface looks amazing, and it will definitely be the “status item” of 2007, the way the Motorola RAZR was a few years back and the Motorola SLVR was for a few months last year.

But I have concerns with the Apple iPhone, things that might be showstoppers. In no particular order:

Cingular only
I left Cingular a few years back, even though I get a discount on service through my job, because I couldn’t deal with their customer service, and I’m not looking forward to returning. I’m on T-Mobile, and have had near-zero customer service issues with them.

Two-year contract
A contract for cellphone service is saying “we don’t think you’ll want to stay with us because we suck or we’re too expensive or we’ll piss you off enough to want to leave, so we’re going to force you to stay for a long time”. (”Two-year contract” is much easier to put on a brochure.) I don’t get how a two-year contract provides me with any value: it only benefits the cellphone company.

Phone cost
Whoo boy! $500 for a phone? Even a “smart” phone? I certainly don’t need a smart-phone; of course, “need” has never stopped me from buying cool toys before. But parting with $500 or $600 to get a phone that’s bigger than I like a phone to be, even though it has all that cool multitouch stuff? That’s tough. If I lived by a smart-phone, I may see this as a great upgrade, but I gave up on Palm Pilots five, six years ago.

On the other hand, I am considering a new full-sized iPod, even though I don’t carry my current “big” iPod around with me everywhere (it mostly stays in the car). A worthwhile replacement, and I get the phone “for free”?

Battery
You can’t have a phone without replaceable batteries. You just can’t. And the Apple iPhone doesn’t have replaceable batteries. Real road warriors—those most likely to spend $500-$600 on a phone with an expected $80/month service fee—expect to carry a second (or third) battery for when their extended phone calls and email jaunts drain the primary battery while on a cross-country flight. Pulling out a laptop to charge the phone will be unacceptable.

Monthly cost
Although no pricing has been announced from Cingular, their basic voice service starts at $40 for 450 minutes, and doesn’t include internet access. If you’ll only ever use 802.11 wireless for your internet access, that may be all you need. If, however, you want to go online in locations where there isn’t free wireless, you’ll need either their Smartphone Connect ($20, unlimited), Data Connect ($45, unlimited) or (Wi-Fi) Laptop Connect ($80-$100, unlimited).

Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if Cingular prohibited voice-only plans for the iPhone. More likely they’ll introduce an “iPhone plan” that combines voice with internet for somewhere around $80 a month. That’s a lot more than my current $40 for 1000 minutes. Moving to Cingular for voice alone on a plan similar to my T-Mobile plan would cost me an extra $480 over the two-year agreement, and I’d lose 2,400 minutes in the process. Add another $960 for the data plan over that term, and suddenly we’re looking at real money.

No 3G access
If you’re not using 802.11 (i.e. Airport) for your internet access, you’ll be using Cingular’s EDGE network; that means those Google maps will be extremely slow to display and downloading email will crawl. The lack of 3G (aka HSDPA) access from the iPhone is supposedly due to lack of 3G coverage across the U.S., but 3G is exactly what the iPhone needs.

Scratching/Fingerprints/Breaking/Lost/Stolen
Devices like phones, iPods and PDAs get used and abused all the time. They’re tossed into jackets, purses, pockets and glove compartments. They are handled several hours a day. That means they will get scratched, have fingerprints all over them, and they might break or be lost or stolen. I hate that my $80 iPod shuffle is already scratched, and that my black MacBook shows marks from handling it. How bad will the iPhone get, when you’re supposed to be rubbing your fingers all over it?

And I hate the idea of losing a $500 product. I don’t tend to walk around with $500 products in my pocket. I’d be so paranoid about it being lost or stolen, I may never want to leave the house with it.

Perhaps now is a good time to invest in Chinese case manufacturers.

4GB memory (iPod nano size)
The $500 model comes with 4GB of flash memory, which holds the operating system, music, address book, and so on. 4GB is what you’d get with an iPod nano, for $200; an 8GB nano is $250. And not all of that memory will be available for music on the iPhone.

$250 also gets you a full-size iPod capable of holding 30GB of music.

The iPhone’s memory seems chintzy in comparison. I’m sure future devices will benefit from lower flash memory prices, and, just like the iPods, we’ll see more memory for the same (or lower) prices. But the opening salvo just seems too low.

So that’s my list of issues with the Apple iPhone. What about the phone makes you want to wait for the next revision?

Note: I first started writing this three or four days after the announcement. That’s how long it took for Steve’s reality distortion field to wear off, even 50 miles away, via satellite.

Technorati Tags: Apple Keynote, Cingular, iPhone, Macworld Expo, Stevenote

Apple, as you no doubt know, held its annual Macworld Expo Keynote today, and if you’re reading this, you already know about the iPhone and AppleTV. You probably also know that, historically, Apple’s stock runs up before the keynote, Steve Jobs comes out and announces a bunch of cool new products, and the stock promptly takes a dive. It’s pretty much a given: everyone buys AAPL until just before Steve walks out on stage, and then they sell.

I decided to track Apple’s stock today throughout Steve’s keynote to see how things went this time around. No need to keep you in suspense: AAPL had a huge day, up $7.10 (8.44%). But that’s not the interesting part.

What’s fascinating is watching the pattern of rises and falls as various announcements and events occur. Here’s how I saw things, with a chart of the day for easy following. AAPL opened at $85.60. This is our baseline. All times below are Pacific Time; pricing and times are approximate, and based on E*Trade’s charts and my notes.

Pre-Keynote: The stock is generally rising. At about 8:42 AM (about 20 minutes before Steve is scheduled to come on stage), AAPL is up to $87.75. This is the high-point prior to Steve’s expected appearance.

9:08: Steve walks onto stage, “We’re gonna make some history together today.” $87.68

9:22: Steve says “This is all we’re gonna talk about the Mac today”. Stock price plummets to $85.52

9:26: New iTunes commercials finish. $85.58

9:28-9:40: Apple TV (nee iTV) introduced, demoed. Price bounces around. High $85.78

9:40: Steve shows Apple.com teaser image, talks about a “revolutionary” new product. $86.03

9:42: “iPod with touch screen; Phone; Internet Communicator”. $86.72

9:48: “Get rid of all these buttons, just make a giant screen”. $88.25

9:50: “iPhone runs OS X”. $87.56

9:52: Steve starts his description of iPhone in general. $88.20

9:56: Start of iPhone “iPod” Demo. $87.96

10:04: Start of iPhone “Phone” Demo. $87.88

10:16: Steve starts his description of iPhone “Internet Communications Device”. $89.62

10:18: Start of iPhone “Internet Communications Device” Demo. $89.67

10:26: Prank-calls Starbucks, orders 4,000 lattes to go. $90.00

10:32: End of demos; Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt makes “applegoo” joke. $90.49

10:48: Pricing and Shipping information. $92.35. Stock price generally drops from here until the end of the keynote.

10:54: Cingular Wireless CEO reads from index cards. $90.99

10:56: Market for mobile phones is “just about a billion”. $90.64.

10:58: Renaming company to Apple Inc, no more “Computer” $90.64.

11:04: Steve ends, no “One more thing…”, introduces the musical guest. $91.40

The stock price then continued to rise for the rest of the day, with a few dips. Know who I feel sorry for? All those other “smartphone” makers, like Research In Motion (Blackberry), Palm and Motorola. Here’s why: a chart showing AAPL, RIMM, MOT and PALM. The Blackberry folks took it especially hard on the chin.

That’s an $11.16 (7.85%) squeeze for the Blackberry makers. Palm got a 5.69% ($0.84) spanking. Motorola survived the best, losing only $0.34 (1.83%).

And this is just the first day.

Technorati Tags: AAPL, Apple Keynote, Macworld Expo, Stevenote, stock price

Macworld San Francisco 2007 is here! The Mac community is excited. The anticipation of new hardware, software and unexpected news has everyone on the edge.

I won’t be working the San Francisco show or the Keynote for the first time since I started at my job, a significant disappointment to me. My only involvement this year will be staffing the Apple Consultants Network booth on Thursday afternoon. I expect I’ll wander around the show floor Thursday morning and see what the buzz is this year.

Only a few more hours and we all know what Steve & Co. have been hiding these last few months.

I can’t wait!

I’ve been a devout TiVo user for years: I’ve owned a TiVo since 2001, currently own two, have purchased TiVos for others, and have recommended them to dozens of folks. Now I’m considering whether there are alternatives for my TiVo. You must understand, this is like me looking for alternatives to the Macintosh. It’s such a heretical idea, I’m thinking of flaming myself.

All this because TiVoToGo is finally available for the Mac.

How can this be a bad thing, you ask. After all, we Mac users have been waiting for years for TiVoToGo. We were promised it for January 2006. Then mid-2006. Then we were told it’s “too expensive” to do for us. So you’d think having it available would make me positively giddy.

But no.

See, after waiting all this time for TiVoToGo, TiVo has decided they won’t be releasing the software as a cheap or free download, but instead will distribute in partnership with the Roxio Toast disc burning software.

Which isn’t cheap.

Or free.

It’s $100.

And, even worse, it means buying Roxio Toast, an application I have absolutely no need to own. After waiting two years for TiVoToGo, this is how we’re rewarded?

Bah.

For now, I’ll continue to use the free TiVo Decode Manaager wrapper around the open source tivodecode. If I find Toast for less $50, I’ll consider it.

My current stove is electric, 15 years old and long due for a replacement. I’ve been meaning to upgrade it, to gas or dual fuel, from the second I bought my home, more than a year ago. I finally made the jump: when I got my toilets replaced a few days ago, I had a gas line installed, then, after a bunch of research, went to Sears to buy my new range.

The buying experience was fine: since I’d done most of my research online (Consumer Reports, etc.), I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted, and had narrowed it down to two options (a GE Profile and a Kenmore Elite, in stainless steel, of course). I chose Sears because they had both choices in stock at a reasonable price. When I went in, the sales guys were helpful in answering my few remaining questions, and they matched a 10% off coupon I had if I’d bought online, and then offered an additional 10% off for putting it on a Sears card.

The problems started with the first call from Sears delivery services. The call indicated the range they were delivering had “minor scratches and marks”, they would be unlikely to be noticed when the range was installed, but they’d deliver it and let me make the call on keeping it, returning it or getting a discount of some type.

Today, delivery day, I received six calls in a row from the same number (while I was in a meeting); I finally succumbed and answered the call; it was the delivery guy saying he was at my house (90 minutes earlier than the earliest scheduled time; since when do deliveries happen early?) and that the scratches were more than just “minor”. Since I couldn’t make it there any earlier than the original scheduled time, they sat around waiting for me.

When I got home, I took a look at the range while it sat on the trunk. It took all of 15 seconds to know that I wasn’t going to accept delivery. There were dozens of scratch marks on the top rear of the range, another couple of scratches across the face of the (stainless steel) control panel, and another gouge on the bottom kick-plate. Plus, a piece of the side casing was coming loose.

The range was clearly not an acceptable delivery, and the delivery guys seemed to know that was coming. It was so bad, the only way I would have accepted delivery was if I had bought it used at a significant discount. I can’t even begin to understand why a range in this kind of shape was even sold as new and sent out for delivery.

I called Sears Delivery to deal with it. That’s when I entered Customer Service Hell.

First, I tried calling the deliver number on my receipt. I was only allowed to confirm that a delivery was scheduled for today, with no option to speak to a customer service representative. I called four times, trying each option, and eventually managed to navigate to an actual person.

Over the next 30 minutes, I was transferred to five or six different “specialists”, asked the same questions (my “phone”, “address”, “name”) five or six times, each time being told they weren’t the right group to speak with, as they weren’t the “right” specialist. I had delivery specialists, damage specialists and stock availability specialists; the only specialist I didn’t seem to find was “solve my problem” specialists. I eventually had to put a stop to the transfers and demand a supervisor.

I was so frustrated, I was ready to cancel my order. In fact, the only reason I didn’t do so was that I had gotten the discounts I mentioned (an anticipated 20%), and that other places didn’t have the item in stock for immediate delivery.

The supervisor, at least, was somewhat helpful. She took my information, checked the availability of my range, checked the delivery availability, and scheduled that delivery.

When I asked that my delivery charge be waived, she offered to send me a $50 gift card for Sears. I, of course, balked at that: it was less than the delivery charge, and, of course, gift card only helps them, not me: they keep the money either way.

Of course, she “couldn’t” refund the fee to my credit card (she “didn’t have access to that”), but eventually offered to send me a check for the full delivery charge.

I’m still leery of the upcoming delivery. They ship the product from some central warehouse to the delivery warehouse the evening before delivery, so until they inspect it at that delivery warehouse, they don’t know what shape the product will be in. This, of course, disturbs me, since it is highly likely I will have to go through this all over again in a couple of days.

By the end of the series of calls to Sears, I was ready to scream and swear off Sears forever. I’m still waiting to see what happens during the forthcoming delivery, and to find out if they’re willing to do more than waive my delivery fee.

Technorati Tags: bad customer service, sears

It’s been quite a while since a video game caused me to lose time. Because I’m not much of a video game guy, I don’t tend to get sucked into a game very often. The last time I can remember it happening was Diablo, some seven, eight years ago. Back then, I would regularly stay up until 2, 3, even 4AM, slashing my way through dungeon after dungeon, gaining experience points and doing everything I could to level up.

I think a new obsession may be forming: The Legend of Zelda for Nintendo Wii, or, as I’ll be calling it, video game crack. Tonight, I played for the first time since I got the game. I was having a great time exploring the first couple of levels, going through the “training” missions. I started to get curious about the time, as it was starting to feel late, and I figured I should probably go online, as I hadn’t been on since I got home about 7:30 or 8pm.

It was 2:30am.

I’d been playing for some four and a half hours, never once feeling like I was tired.

Turns out my cellphone had been chiming because I’d received a message. It was Y, telling me good night. It was sent around 11:30pm. I didn’t hear when it rang the first time, and I’d somehow missed the subsequent beeps (every minute or two for three hours).

Yeah, I think I’m in a bit of trouble….