Mike Ash: ‘Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today!’

Mike Ash argues the other side:

But as they say, familiarity breeds contempt, and after using it more these past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that the iPhone platform is really pretty crappy in a lot of ways. And these ways are mostly not due to hardware limitations, but rather artificial limitations put in place by Apple. And mostly these are limitations which have been put in place For Our Own Protection, and which have been, shockingly, praised from many quarters.

Update: The problem with Ash’s argument is that it all hangs on this:

I am concerned that a lot of people have forgotten how resource constrained their once-powerful desktop systems of yesteryear were. 128 MB of RAM and a 600 MHz ARM is more than enough to run a modern mobile operating system, a music player, a chat client, and a web browser.

They might be enough to run a modern mobile OS, but they’re not enough to run the one that Apple has actually built. MobileSafari, by itself, can barely keep two typical pages in memory for me with iPhone OS 2.0. The number one complaint about the iPhone 3G is battery life — and battery life would be worse if third-party apps could run in the background.

★ Monday, 4 August 2008