On the long Apple writing hiatus and my hatred for the world right now

Since Steve passed away, I have not found much motivation to post anything here. Furthermore, changes to various aspects of my Apple-related connections locally just made things worse.

These days, I am really more depressed than anything else to have idiots berating me every time I point out factual mistakes in their Anti-Apple rants, all while the whole local Apple scene is becoming more generic and boring. The Mac no longer matters to most, and all everyone is about are just iPhones and iPads, and how Samsung Galaxys are better simply because they have styluses and bigger (but lousier) screens.

To tell you the truth, I do not give a damn. I hate Samsung because I am disgusted by how they operate (through deceitful ways), and I hate people who defend them without any factual knowledge to back up their anti-Apple rants, and somehow thinking that if they hate Apple, they must support Samsung.

Samsung the brand and company is made up of scumbags and more scumbags, and every single person in cahoots with them by being a fan should be ashamed. Either that or they are scumbags themselves as well.

This is a fact – I do not hate Android. I just prefer iOS because Android is way too limiting for many things (yes, don’t give me all that crap about being “open” and whatever, because despite the sheer app ecosystem and raw numbers of devices out there in the world, Android and Android apps don’t do half of what iOS can do for me). I have Android phones all over my table right now, namely the Nexus S, the Nexus 4, the Xperia Z and the Sharp Zeta SH-09D (not everything is mine) and even a Windows Phone 7 phone (the Lumia 800) and I do not hate any of them.

Yet arseholes tell me that I am nothing but an Apple fanboy (including one of my old friends) everytime I point out how factually wrong their anti-Apple rants are, and either refused to give any facts to support their crap-attacks or simply do not have anything to back their shit up.

Just because I am a Steve Jobs fanboy does not mean I support Apple in every thing they do. There are more than a few things that I take issue with Apple in the past 20 months or so;

1. Firing of Scott Forstall – Just shows how ineffective Tim Cook is at managing those under him. Forstall was getting out of control and it seems that Cook had no choice but to get rid of him to keep the harmony within Apple’s executive team.

2. You think of Apple these days as AAPL and nothing else – Everything done in the past 12 months seems to be more than focused on the share price of AAPL. Is AAPL more important or is Apple Inc. more important? The board of directors seemed to be a bit confused. Almost every single comment Tim Cook makes publicly these days seems to be carefully calculated to affect the stock price positively. Whatever happened to “screwing” the stock price?

3. Wrong timing of product announcements – Seriously, what’s with the product announcements last October/Novemeber?

4. Don’t just give me iOS stuff. I want OS X and Macs.

There was a time when I relied on Apple to keep me entertained and feeling alive waiting for the next new annoucement, those days have since long passed. Every time I check RSS there’s nothing but stupid and baseless crap from analysts, or yet another report of Samsung doing something deceitful. Nothing, nothing at all from Apple.

Things may change with WWDC with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9, but until now I continue to be bored with the no-news situation from Apple that has been continuing since last October’s product announcements.

One more thing: Don’t listen to analysts. Those arseholes know nothing.

My thoughts on business analysts (and similar humans)?

Business analysts (and similar humans) are the most useless human beings alive.

Their “expertise” is to be an expert at nothing, making brief and often factually incorrect analysis on companies.

They make absolutely ZERO contribution to mankind, yet consume most of the limited resources.

In other words, they are not just MORONS, they are also the SCUMS of the earth.

If anyone has to die in a war, it’s them.

Go fuck yourselves.

Tech Review: The iBLEAH (or at least that’s what the owner calls it)

Let me make this clear – the object being reviewed is undoubtedly a SOLID PIECE OF CRAP. I am not even going to make excuses for it.

From time to time I get to see seriously weird gadgets, and by that I mean stuff that were made so badly, without any effort or thought going into the design, and probably manufacturing into a single product for sale just to get rid of unwanted, crappy parts that no decent manufacturer wants.

“Shanzai” is the chinese term for imitation products, and is often used in the tech industry to describe knock-off lookalikes of popular tech gadgets like iPhones and iPads made by disgusting Cheena manufacturers. The quality of shanzai items ranges from complete lookalike (which may cost you almost the price of a real one) or a half-fuck knock-off that only slightly resembles the real thing. One common point of all these stanza products? The software, or operating system is always SHITTE. More often than not they run some older version of Android, and since Android is free, any joker can shove Android into their crap shanzai item and call it a tablet. Where else did you think all that Android marketshare came from?

This object I am “reviewing” today, after a lot of careful inspection, seems to be a shanzai Original iPad.

It is truly the finest work of art, with “the greatest of originality and innovation”, or at least that is what Samsung will say about all shameless knockoffs anyway. Samsung’s idea of innovation has always been “look at customers’ designs after accepting manufacturing orders, copies the designs, rejects the orders, make a product based on the customers’ designs, print the Samsung badge on it”. Perfect and flawless strategy.

Specs/Details

Manufacturer: Unknown Cheena Manufacturer
Price: Unknown
Category: Shanzai Wannabe iPad Original
OS: Android 1.6
Display: Unresponsive pressure-based touchscreen, resolution unknown
Chipset/CPU: Unknown
Place of purchase: China

The display is horrible

The extremely low resolution pressure-based touchscreen display is so bad, that I am having difficulty reading smaller elements on the screen. The touchscreen part is so bad that despite frequently pressing and poking, the screen rarely responses to my touch. I guess the display is still enough for displaying low resolution photos. Oh, and the light leakage is DAMN BAD.

Speed. Or the lack of.

In other words, it took me 5 whole minutes to boot the thing up to its home screen. I’m not even sure why it is that slow. Apps open dog slow, and only after frequent pokes of the screen, even scrolling in Android Browser was extremely lagging and unresponsive.

Conclusion

I guess the item’s cheap and all, and will make for an interesting toy for a day or two, but I still cannot understand the logic behind purchasing junk. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even look like the original iPad enough to fake your tech-idiot friends. Makes for a great paper weight though – the thing is really heavy!

The Birth of the Macintosh – 24 January 1986

Insanely Great.

15 years of Apple’s Homepage

Pretty cool stuff. Have to say I missed the Power Mac era’s design a bit.

Apple posts yet another record breaking quarter, AAPL down 13%

Even more proof that Wall Street and all these analysts/investors are just idiots. On the other hand, why should we bother with them in the first place? They were not here with us when the iMac was launched, neither were they here when Steve announced the original iPod. When the iPhone was released they said it was crap and that Palm would eat us alive, and guess what? Where’s Palm now? RIM, RIM who? When the iPad was launched they told us it was stupid because it was just a bigger iPod Touch. And looked at what happened. And recently they tell us that the iPad mini is just a smaller iPad.

Seriously? If you ask me, it stands to reason that these jokers (and a lot of bizad students training to become similar jokers) are some of the idiotic people I have ever known in my life.

In other news, AAPL has just became cheap enough for people interested in the stock, and know enough about Apple to know that buying more AAPL is a smart move.

AAPL

Why is it so cheap today after the crazy spikes last year? Simple. Powerful people needed to make big money, and the only way to do it is to keep AAPL below $500.

On Tim Cook and others

Been a long long time since I last wrote here, and before I restart having more frequent appearances here I thought I will post some very short thoughts about everything happening at Apple for the past few months.

On Tim Cook:

There are men who are “leaders”, and there are men who are just “bosses”. Unfortunately our dear man Tim seems to reside in the latter camp. I’m not doubting his abilities as a CEO/manager for it has been proven that he’s one of, if not the best, operations man in the world. But a leader attracts and keeps talent through sheer charm, a manager can only do the same, much less successfully, through promises of wealth and power. While Tim is arguably one of those talents attracted to Apple, he is no Steve Jobs, and it’s apparent if you follow news of Apple’s management shifts.

Still, the guy is one hell of a CEO, having run the company’s operations during its crazy ascent in the last decade, and was the best choice that Steve had to succeed him.

On Scott Forstall:

Unlike many, I am quite a Scott Forstall supporter. I don’t hate the look of iOS skeuomorphism at all, and while many like to say shit about the guy, you cannot deny that the guy is smart, and good at what he does. Everything iOS is today can all at least partly be attributed to him, and the so-called maps screwup was not really much of a screwup at all, no matter which way you see it.

Problem though, is that many geniuses are also jackasses, and Forstall happens to be one of them. Steve was able to “control” and keep Scott working under him for all these years, something that Tim was unable to do. I see the loss of Scott as a loss for Apple, but neither Tim nor anyone else in Apple today will be able to control Forstall, and it is best for Apple’s internal stability that he was fired. Which is why Steve’s presence is missed so badly, not just because of what he can contribute to Apple’s ideas and lineup, but also because of his influence in other areas.

Whether iOS loses direction from now on without Scott at the helm all depends on his Hair Force One successor, and I am not very hopeful, looking at his work on OS X.

On John Sculley’s remarks:

The guy is the reason why Apple almost shut down in the nineties. When he gives advice on how Apple should act, the correct approach will be to do the exact opposite of what he proposes.

Remembering Steve

Today is the day that Steve Jobs passed away, a year ago.

Steve was the only person I looked up to in this world, the one person driving the one company that made my life interesting while I wait for the next thing they dish up, every few months or so. For someone like me, that kept me going.

I love all the rumours, the stories about his personality, and while I was never trying to emulate any of that, I loved every part of it.

Can anyone imagine how I felt when he passed away last year?

To me, he was not the control-freak CEO of a powerful tech company that people loved to curse and make fun of even though he was dying.

To me, Steve Jobs was the only reason I found life interesting.

M1 and Singtel Price Plans for iPhone 5 in Singapore

Ahhhh… After a horrible day yesterday I am now sure I am switching from Singtel to M1. Why? You ask. Cause I just can’t stand Singtel’s ways anymore. Everything wrong with Singtel reflects everything that is wrong with this country.

And here are the M1 prices.

And here are the Singtel prices, sourced from Lester Chan’s site. As usual, Singtel has the HIGHEST prices with the WORSE service. Singtel’s mobile internet is completely unusable in many places in town, even if there are full signal bars being shown.

iFlexi Plans

iFlexi Lite – SGD$39.90
2GB Data
100 Mins Outgoing Voice
800 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: SGD$478
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$598
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$758

iFlexi Value – SGD$59.90
3GB Data
200 Mins Outgoing Voice
900 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: SGD$198
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$308
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$468

iFlexi Plus – SGD$99.90
4GB Data
500 Mins Outgoing Voice
1,000 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$48
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$198

iFlexi Premium – SGD$205
12GB Data
2,000 Mins Outgoing Voice
2,500 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 32GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$58




Steve Jobs, 1955-Forever

About MacRyu.com

MacRyu is the Mac Blog by Singaporeans and for Singaporeans. It was started in April 2007 as a side project of the then President of the Official Mac User Group of NUS, Ryu, and grew to become possibly one of the most popular Apple-related sites based in Singapore. MacRyu hopes to provide you with more Mac-related info, thoughts and stuff, from the Singaporean perspective.

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