Closed source - think I'll give it a miss.
You could do a lot worse things with your time. It's a shame because the technology really is accelerating away from the understanding or interest of most competent and bright citizens. And where the US Tech giants are taking it, really isn't a place that has your best interests at heart. They want to squeeze the $$$ out of you.
The technology is now so deeply complex and fragmented, just to get involved in iOS7 or KitKat you sign up for a quite sweeping loss of privacy and unintelligable legalese, melded with rather sharp practice. It's all motivated by share price and the web is actually becoming the very opposite of what the internet pioneers recognised as the true potential for the internet to empower the human condition. And i'm not referring to the NSA or GCHQ here, i'm talking about the way Microsoft, Google and Apple have more recently behaved without really applying due care and consideration for the inhabitants of planet earth.
I know it's always been a battle for market share with these US tech giants but I really am completely underwhelmed and saddened to see where we have arrived with these companies and what their revenue based philosophies for the internet have delivered to us in 2014.
Whenever someone talks smartphones, I now feel just slightly sick. It's a worry.
The web was a great and woundrous thing 10 years back,
it's a different animal these days, caged and piebald like a sad old Lion in a zoo. As users we really have been witnesses to an increasing and gradual year-on-year moral and cultural failing that has ended up in you and I being regarded as "earning potential" - simply unimportant and disrespected enough to have our privacy invaded through deep data plundering, all going on without anyone actually being sure what it is that we are getting involved in, and with the companies themselves dressing it all up as
web based convenience.
That's not really emerging as a decent way to think about fellow citizens, let alone behave in this enlightened world. Well it was enlightened, but it's not so easy to get the honest and truthful answers that we all loved about Google, just a few years back. It's being stage managed i'm afraid.
Somehow, we crossed a line a few years back when the hardware started to become so powerful and Google started imagining a company that limitless power in numbers
and the potential in those numbers to generate revenue for shareholders, and more recently to govern and monitor, ultimately to control. Take a look at the number of former Google founders and Directors now permanently installed in the Whitehouse. Whilst I don't essentially have a problem with the US, the Whitehouse or former Google employees, i'm not so sure that Googles vision for the future of all mankind is all that it's cracked up to be.
I keep thinking that there has to be a better approach, one that won't drive further chasm's of division on this planet, between the haves and the have nots.
Whilst Google's shareholders have been very pleased with their investments, it's been a slow, shallow downhill journey for the rest of us web users, but hey! Left unchecked, that's where capitalism ultimately takes us, and I really don't know what can be done to fix it. And make no mistake, we are all heading into a future that's already mapped out for us. A future that has it's roots in, well...not being terribly honest about it's past, it's a place where huge control and hugely important societal decisions are being wrought by a tiny minority of individuals, who really do wield far too much power.
I'd urge anyone to think carefully about your next smartphone, tablet or laptop purchase. There really is significantly more going on inside and around those really sexy gadgets than we are all so taken with.
As I mentioned, I got banned from the iOS App Store for 90 days because I changed my Apple ID twice...
That renders the device useless in Apples walled garden. I couldn't even download the Apps I had already purchased over the years. After finally coming off the phone to Apple "support" for 3 hours, with them basically unable or unwilling to do anything, even though i've been a loyal Mac customer and a company director which used Apple Mac's exclusively (when they could actually do something that nothing else on the planet could), I was incandescent with rage, I felt totally betrayed. I grabbed the the fucking idiot thing and bent it round my knee, with shards of Gorilla glass popping and cracking, I dropped the useless knee-curved bastard into the wastebasket in a single fluid move and ventured off to the pub.
It's now Day six
sans iPad and i'm still feeling very liberated by the whole experience, oddly,
without any remorse whatsoever. True, everyone else thinks i'm a complete psycho, i'm not, really i'm not. We don't actually need these machines to do all the things that we don't use them for. There are some genuinely useful apps about, that's true, but ultimately a smartphone, iPad is really just your personal statement of modernity, and we certainly should not covet the device itself like raging hairdressers fighting over the last pair of £300 gold Gucci slippers. I'm no Luddite but give me a bag of Cheese and Onion crisps or a plank of hardwood to look at, full of detail and character, any day of the week.
Me and Apple finishing will certainly be quite a surprise to anyone that knows anything about me. It's also been six months since I stopped carrying my £12 Tesco mobile too. I don't miss it, and nobody has complained that i'm uncontactable to date. Not one single person. Funny that.