At first glance, it seems like another typical Mac tempest in a teacup — a “helpless indie developer being ridden roughshod by the big bad monolithic control freak Apple.” Like Macworld media blacklisting and the Proteron LiteSwitch and Konfabulator incidents before it, it’s a cause celebre that unifies the Mac web, but makes them look [...]

In what may be the most pretentiously titled session yet, I joined a great panel of Mac and technology pundits for the latest installment of Chuck Joiner’s MacJury podcast. We discussed Apple’s financials for a bit, then launched into our thoughts on what should be next on the feature list of the iPhone. (Voice dialing [...]

I use a VoIP service from AT&T called CallVantage for my home phone. One of the services features is that it sends voicemail as a .wav attachment to my email address. Unfortunately, my iPhone could never play the type of .wav the service creates, meaning I could see that I had a voice message, but [...]

MobileMe customers are getting a note from Apple regarding the shaky transition to MobileMe services. As an apology for the transition trouble, the company is extending all MobileMe subscriptions by one month. I love the straightforwardness of this line, the second sentence in the letter: “Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we expected.” The [...]

After finally getting my iPhone re-activated (thanks to the free WiFi at the Livingston, NJ public library), I spent much of yesterday examining the new features of iPhone 2.0 and happily downloading apps from the App Store. The new iPhone OS is impressive, full of wonderfully polished touches and new features. One that I didn’t know [...]

I was too busy patting myself on the back for realizing I could update my iPhone’s firmware from my company Mac (rather than my home machine, where the iPhone is “registered,”) that I completely missed the possibility that my corporate firewall might block access to the Apple servers necessary to re-activate the phone. (It did.) Until [...]

It's starting out as a day of fits and starts for Apple's new mobile computing-related releases. The company's Mac.com service went down last night, as scheduled and it's replacement, MobileMe, has poked its virtual head up a few times, but was not up as of this writing. Also out: iTunes 7.7, which enables the Apps Store, and the iPhone 2.0 updater -- but not officially. (Don't worry, we'll tell you where you can find it.)

In a post for TUAW, Erica Sadun focuses mostly on the unlocking prospects of the iPhone 3G, but comes to the same conclusion I did. "The 3G iPhone that goes on sale Friday, represents nothing more than last year's iPhone--that finally got delivered a year late." Shawn King also nails it in a post on Twitter: "I think 3G is for those who don't already own one. Next model for those of us who own the original." Amen to both.

Spot on analysis by Macworld’s Peter Cohen about what’s likely to happen to iPhone developers who think just putting their software on the iApps store will magically make everyone flock to it.

I wrote an article for The Mac Observer and iPod Observer today that points out that if you don’t live in an area served by AT&T’s 3G network, you’ll wind up paying extra for service you may never enjoy. The bottom line: if you already have an iPhone and you don’t live within a 3G [...]