iPhone 6: Most exquisite MOBILE? No. It is the Most Exquisite THING. EVER We had certain unavoidable production issues with this piece from our occasional "tech guru" Stephen Pie. Rather as plainly happened in the case of Stephen Fry - any other similarity between the two is purely coincidental - Mr Pie's thoughts on the iPhone 6 have had to be published almost completely without benefit of sub- …
Speak for yourselves.
Both of mine work just fine, their screen is beautiful (coming as they were from the first batches that had the better screens) and thanks to some neat ROM's I'm using the 4GB card as native memory space which means it can run everything (sloooooowly) and have 100+ apps installed.
Still, 4 years and 2 batteries later they're going strong. They're not my daily-use phone, but they've got pride of place on my bedside table, always ready to step in, in an emergency.
Best value for money ever.
>> and the ROMs didn't affect the warrany?
Response 1: Warranty? After 4 years? Good luck trying to get any phone manufacturer to fix anything under warranty after so long - even if the phone had been kept in pristine condition.
Response 2: The San Francisco was both relatively cheap and about as close to un-brickable as is possible that there were plenty who were able to take the risk of flashing it over and over again.
The original guardian article now has the correction:
This article was amended on 17 September 2014. An earlier version referred to Apple having had “all but 3%” of the personal computer market. This has been corrected to “just 3%”.
Truth can be stranger than fiction.
The ironic thing is that the "heartbreakingly dead staggering genius Steve Jobs" was stupid enough to entrust his liver cancer to a Homeopath. Homeopathy is a medical practice that claims to work by diluting various things in a solution. Homeopathy is the exact opposite of modern pharmacology in the belief that things get more potent as they become more dilute. By current laws in most countries, in order for something to be labeled as "homeopathic" it must not contain anything but the solution that the treatment has been "distilled into". Homeopathy is entirely "natural", and "harmless", because it is in most cases simply water.
Hardly irony.
Thick skin? That only gets acquired by emotional injury. Injury to what?? False identification which certain products and ideas that got derided by some hacks in the interwebs?
Its a load of emotional baggage over things human beings should be completely and utterly aloof from.
Only a fan boy for some corporation or other can waste his time and brain cycles in so miserable a way. Well done corporate brainwashing... Maybe it was Apple's Orwell commercial that got him.
Or maybe the oh-so-shiny surfaces of various objects of tech-distorted desires. This kind of loving attention should be reserved for sentient beings, not dead objects.
Whatever...
I know Mr. Fry is massively overexposed on the media, and has become famous for his sagacity because he can listen to someone telling him something in his ear and regurgitate it as if he had just thought it up himself - admittedly a useful skill - but still...
But still what?
Come to think of it yes, it is only just parody. Carry on as you were.
At least Bamber Gascoigne took the time to read the questions beforehand and research around them, so that he could make a judgement as to whether a slightly off answer could be deemed to be correct.
Paxo can't even properly pronounce the words in any vaguely science-based question, but still manages to maintain an air of snotty self-importance.
Really, he's a better example of the British upper middle class. Thankfully, he has no authority, other than over eight students for half an hour at a time. He does, however, manage to act as if he is a figure of authority. Whilst this might be amusing when watching him make weasly politicians squirm on national television, I would imagine that being in a room with him for any amount of time would lead to a desire to chew through the walls in order to escape.
> Paxo can't even properly pronounce the words in any vaguely science-based question, but still manages to maintain an air of snotty self-importance.
It's the same with maths - his mask slips occasionally in that he looks surprised when a contestant successfully answers a maths question for which he himself didn't have a clue.
But it's the sneery derision directed at the contestants for either (a) not knowing obscure Victorian poetry or (b) knowing some popular culture music answer that has the made the programme utterly unwatchable for me during his tenure.
... that provoked this Reg article? One or the other had a half-page piece by Stephen Fry about the iPhone 6 yesterday.
Anyway, last time the Reg had a piece like this, its name was brought by Stephen Fry's blog to the attention of thousands of people who had never heard of it.
I wouldn't be a regular Reg reader if I wasn't cynical, but cynicism cuts both ways.
This post has been deleted by its author
it is IMHO, if you're ripping the overly flowery prose, language manglement and general style of the original author.
See Troy Queef, a rip of the overly wordy and florid car mag journos.
" What man-made metal monster would presume to peel apart the green garden of Great Britain’s inner Eastern reaches? At the risk of sounding like an ardent Australian, don’t worry; it’s Eco, Sport.
Cleave the comma from the end of that sentiment and you arrive with elegant ease at the handle of the hot baby I am helming for this all-out, balls-out pedal across the feculent flatlands that coddle around Kettering for this morning’s wheelsmith steed is none other than the Blue Oval’s B-seg class buster, the high riding family funster they call EcoSport."
"Firing in spicy to an especially testing switchback I make a laser guided lunge for the bullseye marked ‘apex’ and then slam shut the taps to see what reacts. The answer is a playful tail, slyly stepping sideways to get in on the action. I simply caught it with a dab of oppo and I was away.
The Ford EcoSport 1.5 TDCi Titanium is a bitch. And I spanked it."
Which is a gentle tease of David Vivian, et al.
Props to Richard Porter for that particular fake journo.
Steven R
The iPhone 6's pre and post release hype has gained more press coverage than the Scottish referendum, all things ISIS, Kate and Will's second sprog and the Dalai Lama's third refusal to be allowed into South Africa. It's a fucking phone, not a pacemaker... and I so love the mix of hype and sarcasm that this is iMustHave is wrapped up in.. and with it being water resistant, Mister Fry can gag on it's beauty and functionality without his saliva ruining it..
> Havd you read the Guardian "article"? He really was asking for it.
Especially the bit about 'real' advantage of optical stabilisation, none of that software stabilisation rubbish that the previous iPhone had but which I recall was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread.
Jeez, I saw comparisons of Lumia 920 vs iPhone 5 and the 920 was better at almost every level, especially low light and video stabilisation.
Well, a Lumia 1020 blows an iPhone (and a 920) away and it can have wireless charging. The fact that it is less than half the price is just icing on the cake.
I bet a significant proportion of new iPhone users (60-70% would be my guess) will put their shiny in a case obviating all the slimness and lightness they just paid a fortune for.
Yes as a fruit enthusiast who can tell you something about my TCO, with some evidence to back it up, pieces like Fry's make me squirm. Along with spurious claims - first Mac to be imported into the UK for example (dirty I suppose) he is an embarrassment to the human race even if relatively harmless
The thing that really pisses me off? not the iphone darling - I could give a fuck! It's that the Guardian will have actually paid him for that love cum drizzle splurging out of his mouth.
APPLE SHOULD HAVE PAID HIM FOR THE GORRAM ADVERTISING!!!!
Fucks sake!
ARGH!!!
The Guardian doesn't have any money. I suspect Apple paid them for something else so they had the money to pay him.
Sad about the Guardian. The rot actually got through the garboard strake when they decided to support the Lib Dems, and since then they've been letting in water all over the place, hence the unpleasant smell from the bilges.
If you're wondering where this all comes from...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/17/-sp-stephen-fry-iphone-6-verdict-most-exquisite-mobile-ever-made
A weeee bit too close to reality to be a parody. Makes it come across more as just whinging. Still, I get the point - Fry's 'column' does read like someone who seriously needs to walk away from the keyboard and go outside more. :)
I skipped through the Fry piece. At first I laughed at what looked like brazen trolling of the anti Apple crowd.
Then it became obvious that he meant it, and I had to shed a tear to see even the supposed cleverest among us brought to prostituting themselves at the altar of shiny .
Yes, most amusing.
But I suspect that if most El Reg readers were in possession of a Fabergé egg, they wouldn't have the faintest idea what do do with it, and instead swipe the top of it with a teaspoon to get at the yolk.
For what it's worth, I don't think the iPhone 6 looks particularly wondrous.
"Get an iPhone 6 and then fucking kill yourself - if possible blow up the entire world and space and kill everyone else too - go back in time and kill your parents so that you will never have been born "
Sounds rather like Light Metal (tm). Anybody else remember The Bishop and The Warlord sketch by Fry and Laurie? Back in the days when Fry was better with Laurie.
... Time published an article about the Apple Watch which started with the headline:
"... gorgeous, fast and packed with brains..."
Time is a proper magazine, one of the very few worth reading and, whilst the article technically was asking "Do we want this intrusive tech on our person", it was really saying "Other people have done this but now Apple are doing it, it matters because it will just work and we will all be sending heartbeat readings to each other".
Absolute crap from beginning to end, starting with the word 'gorgeous'. That is about the last adjective I would have used when I saw it, 'square' and 'bulky' came to mind first.
A rather good documentary by Mr Fry looked at bipolar syndrome (or whatever it's called now) - brave too as he has that syndrome. He is normally in the 'up' part of the cycle and confessed that part of the nature of that for him is that he becomes fixated on gadgets and believes them to be wonderful. so much so that he purchases far more of them than he can use, partly because he has the money and partly because he just likes them.
So I'd view his article as perhaps reveling more about his condition thaan the gadget itself.
I suspect part of my issues with apple is the fact that around here they actually lock up change management for two weeks around an apple phone release. Cant do crap that needs to be done. Because "Oh Jezus Its An iPHONE launch".
And long and short, we sell *far* fewer of them than any other line of phones. I really don't understand the business sense of it. (Yes, I actually do have the stats to back that up)
Anon for the obvious.
That I was going to comment a snarky "Bong, is that you doing double duty mocking Fry under a nom de plume?".
Then I read the Guardian article and I realized it is Fry whose style is inspired by Bong instead.
Embarassing brownnosing gush, I'd be peeved if I was Apple.
I have no idea why the media get so excited when Stephen Fry says something about any Apple product.
Aside from probably being in breach of advertising rules, because Fry is of course now utterly sponsored by Apple so it's less opinion and more "paid celebrity endorsement" the guy doesn't know squat about technology, as is proven by his almost autistic focus on everything which is good about Apple whilst conveniently ignoring what a repulsive, greedy, exploititive company it is.
It's a phone.
A PHONE.
How about some of the other important people to 'walk the earth'? Jack Tramiel, for helping make computers affordable? Clive Sinclair, for doing much the same? Or the BBC Micro team for getting kit into schools?
Growing up, I didn't know anyone with an Apple. They were alien to me until I got one in 2006. My friends, all now working in media or tech, grew up with and learned on Commodore, Acorn, Sinclair, Amstrad et al. I should think we owe at least a nod to the people that made that happen and deposited so many future bods into the IT market, making it what it is.
There is a ghastly sort of revisionism going on, and it's getting increasingly more important that history is not re-written North Korea style to accommodate group think and fashion.
I'm a great believer in the right tool for the person - whatever floats your boat. But let's not yet cast statues when the credit for 'where we are' is spread among other luminaries who are denied the celebrity Mr Jobs enjoyed (?).
It's not a phone. It's a computer more powerful than the desktops we grew up using, selling for a fraction of the real-terms prices of those computers, which is smaller and lighter than a Sony Walkman, and contains a phone.
Modern phones ARE flat-out amazing, regardless of brand.
JDX: Natch - I did give the wrong impression there. Of course, you're right, and I make this point regularly.
I was just trying to communicate that this fetish-like hyperbole regarding upgrades - and, in the case of Apple - the people that create them - annoys when the rich history of home / consumer computing is being papered over with fruit symbols.
Granted, I made that point badly and these days a phone, is definitely not a phone.
A phone that's 18 months behind where the best Android devices are, give me a break.
A large proportion of the iPhone premium price tag is obviously to fund press smoozing. It's such a shame iFanboys can't see what their product purchases are funding.
At minimum, El_Reg shouldn't have got a iFanboy to review the next iThing, as it could be a big shiny turd and sill be the best thing ever.
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