iPhone 5S Release Day in Nashua & Newton

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3:01AM came very quickly. 

That's when iPhone 5S orders went live for us east coast-ers on Friday, 9/20/13. What was particularly troubling about this year's iPhone launch was the lack of pre-orders, which was due to supply issues. In years past the new model was available for free launch-day delivery, but not this year. To add insult to injury, there was no option for in-store launch day pickup when orders went live. The best you could do was show up at a store and hope they had your desired combination of color, capacity, and carrier (silver, 64GB, Verizon in my case). 

Shipping times on the gold iPhone 5S went from 1-3 days to 5-7 in a matter of minutes, then changed to simply 'October' (as of this writing, all three metal finishes are listed as shipping in 'October'). Supply of the silver and space gray finishes were tight as well, but not nearly as bad as gold, which appears to be the overwhelmingly popular choice. I was able to order a 16GB gold Verizon device for my mom (her first cell phone ever, just let that soak in), but due to a few precious minutes wasted on attempting to order my own phone for in-store pickup (fail) it will be shipping in 5-7 days.  

I knew that there was going to be high demand for the gold models at this launch, so I expected a very serious line, seriously early, and intended on getting there as early as possible. Now that the order is placed and it's 3:15AM - do you go back to bed for an hour then go? What's an hour going to buy you in terms of consciousness?  I said screw it and headed out, with the concession that I'd stop for breakfast on the way (Editors note: Arriving at a 24 hour McDonalds at 3:57AM, you will be told that breakfast begins in 3 minutes and will have to wait.).

Expecting an experience similar to the iPhone 4 launch I attended, I headed over to the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH for about 4AM (the Apple store is inside). You'll have to read about my experience during that launch that launch in the last link, but in a nutshell it was very disorganized. This year was no different, and again was the fault of some combination of SImon (the company that owns the Pheasant Lane Mall), the security company they employ, and Apple, who should have anticipated this and planned accordingly.

The crowd at the Nashua mall made a gentleman carrying a number of expensive electronic devices and about to purchase another feel, in a word, nervous. At 4:30AM there were at least 100 high school aged kids milling around a parking lot just off of the mall property (where they had been shoed by mall security and the Nashua PD). Let's just say, these kids weren't on the water polo team. There was a lot of smoking, blasting of spanish music out of old Civics with 8" diameter mufflers, and one overheard story of how this gentleman kicked another gentleman in the head until he broke several teeth for landing his mother in jail. When this group descended upon the entrance of the mall to wait in 'line', they all crowded around the door in a giant mass and continued the chain smoking. Up until mall security and the Nashua PD arrived to kick everyone off the property again, I watched as car after car came by, unloading 2-3 more teens at a time. They complied remarkably well to the police, who instructed them that they would not be receiving their phones this morning if they did not get the hell out.

Judging by the demographic and the fact that I heard zero people discussing how excited they were to get their new phones, it was quite clear that these kids were not buying phones from themselves. Instead, they were likely employed by a third party to purchase them on release day and re-sell them on the open market, getting around the 2 device per person limit. It doesn't take much more than an ebay search to see that this is a very profitable venture.  The secondary market for these phones is flourishing, especially outside the US, but at the expense of a crappy release day experience for people who are buying for themselves. I was up against a huge crowd of teenagers desperate to make a couple hundred dollars off of flipping these phones, and these weren't exactly wholesome kids.

On the walk back to off-mall-property parking lot, where a lively reggaeton dance party had spontaneously popped up with music pumping from open car doors, I decided that maybe this scene wasn't for me. There would be no line, and it would have not been smart to fight through this crowd to get to the front. And even if I did get one, would I make it back to my car without getting mugged? Luckily, I had been talking to another release-day goer who was posted up at the Chestnut Hill Mall in Newton, MA. It was a 35 minute drive down there, and a lower profile Apple store. Would they have enough phones? Would hundreds more show up before I got there? I took a similar risk for iPad 2 release day and was almost screwed out of one by calling an audible (sports reference!) and heading to a different target.

35 minutes later I was about 40 deep in a line of mostly middle aged, pleasant, Starbucks toting Boston suburbians. Not only was the line short, but I was welcomed into a small group of folks who had become quick in-line friends. Instead of mall security being upset that we had lined up outside by the mall entrance (this too was a Simon mall), they opened the doors early and let us sit inside.

Orderly line for the Apple store in the Chestnut Hill Mall

During our wait Apple employees came out and offered us bottles of water, coffee, and tea. While we were getting poured freshly brewed Pete's coffee with an array of artificial sweeteners I assume that teargas was being used in Nashua to keep the crowds at bay. The contrast between these two locations was stark to say the least.

 

Water anyone? 

Every time I tried to get a candid, she posed.

It was all fun and games until a pair of Apple store employees came by with a basket of cards representing their stock of phones. Starting at the front of the line, they worked their way back, handing out up to two cards per person. When they got to me, I asked for a silver 64GB Verizon device and they responded with "Nope, how about space gray?". They were completely out of silver and gold phones - I was shocked. In typical Apple fashion they were excellent at dodging our prodding questions but as it turned out, there was only one gold phone for sale that day (a 64GB one, I think on AT&T), and they were poorly stocked on the silver ones. Defeated, I accepted my fate but ordered a silver one via the Apple store app for delivery in a couple weeks (the idea being that I'd return the black one). 

This is not what I wanted.

It wasn't long before 8AM came and people started trickling into the store - each customer paired with an employee who would handle their transaction from start to finish. It's a nice system once you're in there and they don't rush you at all, much to the dismay of the rest of the line. Once it was my turn to have a hearty handshake with the employee I was paired with and led into the store, I was able to see the other new phones. As he disappeared in the back to collect mine, I descended upon the table of display units and poured over the silver and gold ones to see what I was missing out on.

 

The gilded beauty

All I can say about the gold one is that you have to see it in person. All the negative reactions I've heard so far have been from people who had only seen it through pictures and Apple renders. All the tech news guys who were at the hands on in Cupertino said it gorgeous, and more of a champagne color than the bright gold we normally associate with that description. I absolutely agree. Given the choice between the silver one and the gold one - it's gold all the way baby. 

After seeing all three of the phones in person I ended up sticking with black, surprisingly enough. I had originally decided on either silver or gold because my current iPhone 5 is black and I wanted to change it up. Over the course of several days I decided I wanted gold, then silver, then whatever Jony Ive had*, and then after all that I had no choice. The black with 'space gray' metal finish looks like something that does indeed belong in outer space. The metal finish is much lighter than on the 5 (presumably to make the accumulated dings and scratches less noticeable) and the much lighter colored chamfers make it look like there's a metal ring around the device when you look at it head on. In the latest The Talk Show podcast, John Gruber says that light colored chamfer reminds him of the look of the original iPhone and I totally agree. It looks like an ultra futuristic version of that phone, and I've cancelled my silver phone order.

No big rush at the Chestnut Hill Mall store

It is safe to say that if I ever have to get up at 3AM then wait in line all morning for another Apple device I will NOT be going back to the Nashua Apple store ever again. It's Chestnut Hill all the way from here on. Although it all ended up working out, I wonder if the Nashua store had more silver and gold devices in stock since that they are much more heavily trafficked. It certainly wasn't worth getting trampled or mugged to find out. 

 

* I spent a long time searching for any hint of what metal finish Jony Ive (the man responsible for design at Apple) chose for his 5S and didn't find anything conclusive. The recent Bloomberg Businessweek article features a picture of Federighi, Cook, and Ive diddling with the new phones and it's easy to see that Ive is using the gold one. However, I can't imagine that Tim Cook would have a green 5C as his primary phone, so I think the picture has nothing to do with reality. My best guess is that Ive would prefer the silver device, since that seems to be the more widespread Apple aesthetic, permeating through their products and into the design of their stores as well.

 

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/cook-ive-and-federighi-on-the-new-iphone-and-apples-once-and-future-strategy

iPhone 5C & 5S Announcement Impressions

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I've got lots to say about the new iPhone lineup announced today so let's get right into it. On September 20th, 2013 there will be three base devices available: iPhone 5S starting at $199, iPhone 5C starting at $99, and and iPhone 4S for free, all subsidized with two year contracts.

Typically, last years model is pushed into the $99 spot in the lineup, which is nearly what they did here, but not quite. The iPhone 5C they've introduced to fill this spot is effectively an iPhone 5 in a plastic body that comes in 5 colors. The front facing camera and battery have been improved over the 5, but that's about it. Folks at the hands-on after the event say they look great, and I'm sure Apple will sell a ton of them at $99. It's too bad that this is a stupid reason for them to be popular, and I'll explain what I mean by that shortly.

Before getting into the stuff I'm excited about and lose everyone into a vortex of internetTelephone boredom, I'll start with the bottom line.

The bottom line: Choose the 5S over the 5C

If your contract is up and you qualify for a new phone at the fully subsidized price, you are doing yourself a silly disservice by getting anything less than the 5S. For $100, you get a much better camera, a much faster phone, and the ease and security of the fingerprint scanner. Now let's get those arguments about the extra Benjamin out of the way:

  • "But the 5S is DOUBLE the cost of the 5S! There's no way the improvements could justify that!"  you say. No, dummy, the 5C and 5S actually cost $549 and $649 respectively, so that's not anywhere near double. This is what Apple gets paid by your carrier, and you end up paying it back to your carrier over the course of your two year contract hidden in the cost of your data plan.  You're REALLY paying $549 or $649, it just isn't dangled in front of your face. Because of this, we get duped into thinking there's a big price gap between the devices when there really isn't. Interestingly, the US is the only market that sells phones this way. Everywhere else, people pony up the cash up front and have cheap data plans.

  • "But the 5C is $100 cheaper than the 5S!"  you say, "Do I really care about a better camera and some weird fingerprint scanner when I could invest this $100 in stocks, bonds, or livestock futures?". Let's say you pay at least $80/month for your iPhone service. Over the two year contract you will have forked over $1920. For about 5% of the cost of your service over two years, you've opted to have an inferior phone experience. And over those two years you could have had much better pictures, quicker unlocking, and faster everything, but no; instead you saved 5%. Impressive! You're like a financial mathemagician.

  • "But the 5C colors are so pretty!"  you say, or "Bro, I'm gonna get so many chicks with this colorful 5C". If you're the type of person that gets all excited about something like that, then you're likely the type of person who will be putting their phone in a case. There are a multitude of cases available in pretty colors, and you can change them when you get bored of them. If you're going to wrap the thing up in a case anyway, why trade a significantly better phone experience for the color of a shell that's hidden in a case?   I'm already angry just thinking about this.

What's the ordering situation? 

      The 5S is available to order and buy in-store on 9/20. There is no pre-order available as of this writing but I really hope that they end up allowing for that. The last few new iPhones were available for pre-order and delivered on release day. I'm not interested in waiting in line and sprinting through a mall again. The 5C pre-orders begin on the 13th, but as we discussed, you're not getting that one.

      Ok, now on to the more detailed stuff about why the 5S is exciting. 

      The iPhone 5S

       

      The new iPhone 5S has all the usual CPU/GPU and camera performance improvements, and comes in a new gold on white color (and a tweaked slate color to replace black) but there are two new hardware features that I believe could be game changing. 

      Touch ID - A fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button

      Quoting Apple's statistics, about half of iPhone users don't bother to set up a passcode on their phone. I use a four digit passcode and have enabled the get-it-wrong-10-times-and-the-phone-auto-wipes option to protect my data in case it gets stolen. The main problem with the passcode lock is that you have to do it approximately 10,000 times per day. This is even worse for people that have to unlock with an alphanumeric passcode - I can't even imagine that. Apple has relieved this issue by buying the best fingerprint scanner hardware company for over $350 million and seamlessly integrating their IP into the 5S.

      The scanner remembers up to 5 fingerprints (a few of your own fingers and maybe your special lady/gentleman friend's thumbs) and can read them from any angle, so you don't have to worry about how to press it. On any other phone I'd be concerned it was some half-baked unreliable gimmick, and forgetting about the maps debacle for a second, I had assumed Apple nailed it and was immediately excited. And the initial impressions of three highly reputable tech news guys who actually used it seem to back this up: 

      Unlocking the iPhone 5S was very slick—just rest your finger on the Home button and the phone unlocks immediately. You don’t have to press or move your finger around waiting for it to be recognized—it just worked.
      - Jim Dalrymple, The Loop

      MG Siegler's comments are to be taken with whatever the opposite of a grain of salt is, since he's a partner at Google Ventures and is constantly bombarded with demos of new tech. If he says it feels 'exactly how locking/unlocking should work', I believe it, and I can't wait to try it for myself. We will have to wait and see how reliable it is, but I'm optimistic that it will be reliable enough.

      I think there's a huge opportunity here if this thing works. This method of authenticating with your fingerprint instead of typing a password is unprecidented in a widespread consumer device, and I don't suspect it will be long before other companies begin to allow this through iOS apps. Just think about credit card companies putting your cards in Passbook and authenticating payments with Touch ID! Not only is that ultra convenient, but it's even MORE secure than a physical credit card. The security concerns of Touch ID authentication, in my opinion, are minor. The Verge discusses these opportunities here as well. 

      M7 - Motion coprocessor

      Apple rolled their own silicon to make a dedicated chip to handle accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass measurements. Why should we care about this? Shame on you four doubting, this is why: This dedicated chip will use much lower power than having the CPU communicate with these motion chips, enabling a whole slew of Fitbit / Nike Fuel Band class apps that otherwise would have been too much of a battery drain to be practical. I believe that this new chip, paired with iOS 7's new background processing abilities for apps, will make dedicated devices like the Fitbit, Fuel Band, and Jawbone obsolete. These functions can now simply be apps, and can get the heck outta my pants (I wear a Fitbit One hooked inside my pocket).

      I love the Fitbit One, but I'll be the first one to toss it in the trash if that functionality can be sucked into my phone. It looks like that will be the case.  Paradoxically, this also removes the main use case i was thinking of for Apple's foray into smart watches, so I'm not sure what the big draw of such a device would now be.

      The rest of the 5S updates

      The other headline feature of the 5S is that it is natively 64-bit, and is in fact the first smartphone SoC of this persuasion. Aside from the benefit to high end gaming, I'm not sure what effect this will have on overall performance, but at least would have been necessary for future incarnations of the phone to handle large amounts of RAM. I don't imagine they went to all the trouble of reworking their chipset and software for this if it wasn't very important, so we'll have to stay tuned and see what happens.

      The camera updates are very exciting - particularly the 33% sensitivity improvement of the sensor. They keep making this thing better and better in low light and we're getting to the point where the flash is becoming irrelevant. This is a very good thing. As far as people whining about megapixels are concerned, I choose image quality over raw pixel counts any day of the week. Pictures are already the largest single block of used storage on my phone, so I'm happy that Apple isn't arbitrarily increasing the pixel counts on these photos just to be in the megapixel wars that everyone else wants to fight.

      Lastly, there's the colors. I really don't know which one I'm going to get, and am seriously considering the gold one. To make this choice, you really need to see them in person, but to get it on release day you'll have to settle for pouring over pictures on the interwebs.

      Now to continuously reload the iPhone 5S page on the Apple store and quietly sob as i wait for them to capitulate and put up a pre-order announcement. 

       

      A Trio of iPhone Restoration Problems (and Fixes!)

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      After weeks of dealing with a bizzaro battery life problem (sudden precipitous drops, plugging the thing in then disconnecting it a few seconds later only to watch it immediately drop by 20 percentage points, etc), I decided to restore. My settings have been schlepped from iOS version to iOS version and across 6 iPhones over the course of the past 5-6 years and now reside on a black 64GB Verizon iPhone 5 running iOS 6.1.4. If it's a hardware problem there really isn't anything I can do about it, short of replacing the battery, so it's worth a shot to clean up the OS. Here's what went down and what got me going again...

      The first step before restoring is always to back up iOS to a local machine - you don't want to be waiting to pull down your photos and such from iCloud.  The issues began as soon as I started.

       

      Issue #1: Not enough storage on local drive to perform a backup or restore. 

      I've been rocking an 80GB SSD for quite some time, and all the crap associated with a Win7 installation and installed programs filled it up fast. iPhone and iPad backups can be very large, into the 10's of GB. With a small drive like this, I really can't have more than a couple of them before there's an issue. 

      Once I cleared out enough space to do a backup (by moving the backup files to a separate drive with plenty of space), I was able to do a final backup. However, half way through the restore process, it ran out of space again saving GBs of who-knows-what to the drive. The restore failed.   

      Solution #1: Link iTunes Backup Folder to a Different Drive

      This is something that's frequently done in Linux, but less so in Windows. I had been avoiding doing it for months since I expect to have to re-do it every time iTunes is upgraded, but it's a very simple task - especially if you use an application to do it for you.

      Symbolic links can map a folder or a file to some other folder or file anywhere else on the system. So for this, I created a symbolic link from the backups folder on my small SSD to a backups folder I created on a large HDD. Since the path doesn't change, iTunes doesn't know the difference, but now it's got plenty of room to dump its crap all over the place.  

      You can do this on the command line or find a GUI like I did to type the commands in for you.  

       

      Issue #2: Restoring 32GB of music from iCloud is a nightmare.

      There is no single button that will download all of your music from iCloud. In fact, there are as many buttons as you have albums, and there's no way in hell you're going to want to push all those individually. You have to open each album, scroll to the bottom, and tap 'Download All Songs'. Too many albums, too much tapping, too long to wait for 32GB of music to shower down upon the device.

      Solution #2: Force music to restore via iTunes.

      Presumably you keep the same music library on your phone as you do on your computer and iTunes has it all stored locally. These days, music syncing isn't typically handled by iTunes; it's managed directly on the device and hooked up to iCloud to tie in with your purchases. This needs to temporarily be turned off to allow iTunes to sync your music. 

      Settings >> Music >> Turn off iTunes Match

      This will let iTunes manage your music, and give you a chance to sync it all back onto your device from your computer instead of via iCloud. This saves a ton of time since the local transfer speeds are so high. After flipping off iTunes Match, sync with iTunes then flip iTunes Match back on. After a minute or so of staring at a picture of a cloud with a progress bar slowly ticking across the screen, your music will again be tied in with iCloud. All of your music is now on the device, and you didn't have to manually tap on all of those Boyz II Men albums.

       

      Issue #3: Over half of my apps would not re-download after install.

      After the restore from iTunes had 'completed', I noticed over half of my apps were stuck in the 'Waiting...' state and had not been installed. No amount of tapping, double tapping, or rebooting would fix this. It seemed the only way was going to be to delete each one and reinstall them, at the great expense of losing all the data and settings within them. I stared at these sad, empty progress bars for an entire day before figuring this one out.

      Syncing the device with iTunes would not cause the apps to be downloaded - it would hang right before doing so. I did this so many times with all sorts of different incantations. No matter what I tried, including restoring again and restoring from iCloud, it would not sync the apps. 

      Solution #3: The apps must be updated in iTunes if they are out of date.

      Going to the 'Apps' section of iTunes (not the store, not the list of installed apps on your phone, but the app library alongside the music library) revealed that the vast majority were flagged as needing updates. Turns out it was simply refusing to put old versions on there when newer ones had previously been installed.

      This is an artifact of rarely syncing with iTunes. The apps were no longer being downloaded automatically by iTunes, and for good reason - app updates rarely find their way on the phone via iTunes. Force all the updates and sync. Suddenly the apps begin downloading. A Christmas miracle. 

       

      And now everything is back to normal. Except of course for my battery life issues, which the restore did not fix. Figures.

      My first iOS app: You've just gotta fight your way through.

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      Several months ago I got a prototype of my first attempt at an iOS app working, but I'm still quite far from being ready to release it to the app store. Some of the reasons for this are technical, and some are not. It's these non-technical issues that have really been problematic so far, and the introduction of iOS 7 has made me completely rethink what I had already figured out. During this difficulty, I heard this great quote from Ira Glass, the host of NPR's excellent radio show (and podcast) 'This American Life', that really cuts to the core of what's going on. It's a long one, but well worth the read if you too are starting out on a creative project.

      "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through." - Ira Glass (source)

      Ira is talking about writing, but this really applies to any creative project. The problem is that you get this idea in your head - Ah ha! I can make a thing that is so much better than this crappy thing by doing such and such! - but, you can't execute on it the way you believe it should be executed. If this thing you come up with happens to be within your skill set already then, boom, you're off and running.  But if it's something that is outside of your wheelhouse, then Ira's Law (a term I'm coining here) kicks in, and things can become much more difficult. This thing you make turns out to suck, or so you think. It probably does. How do you get to that place you visualized when you started this project?

      In this case I had been looking for a good excuse to learn how to create iOS apps. The idea came: I saw an opportunity to create an app for a niche market in the App Store that is lacking in quality options. Even in prototype form, I found my app to be significantly better than all of its existing competitors. But that doesn't matter; I need to ship something or I can't even consider myself a competitor. It's the aesthetics I'm struggling with primarily, and it's what I believe is most important to set my app apart. I'm in that phase that Ira talks about, the phase where the most important thing you can do is a lot of work. And that's what I'm going to have to do to come up with something that is up to the standard that I've decided is necessary.

      What is important now is figuring out how to fight my way through this and ship something. For the technical challenges involved with simultaneously learning object oriented programming concepts, Objective C, the model-view-controller programming paradigm, and the seemingly infinite set of APIs available in iOS I fall back to advice one of my college professors gave me in undergrad: Sometimes you've gotta feel your way through the dark. It's been working, and slowly I'm getting there. I think I'm going to be ok with the programming part. 

      To push things along, I've done two important things that have become excellent mental aids: 

      There's a deadline: This app will ship when iOS 7 ships. For no reason other than aesthetics, it will require iOS 7 or higher.

      The problem has been bounded: I've established a feature roadmap. This was a critical exercise, as there is now a light at the end of the tunnel for version 1.0.

      The next step is to work through what the heck the design of this app is going to be. I've got the features down, but the design (especially with the curveball thrown by iOS 7's new look) will take some trial and error. The key is it's not just the aesthetic, "Design is how it works", to quote Steve Jobs. And I've got a lot of work to do to figure out how to make it work while I close the gap between my abilities and taste.