Leaving the Collective

In my previous posting I complained that Lisa is part of the Apple collective.  She has (had) an iPhone 3GS.  The day after my previous posting, her phone slid off a stack of papers and the screen shattered (I honestly had nothing to do with it).  Quality workmanship.  If you don't believe me do a video search on repairing iPhone screens.  There are a ton of them.  I've never broken a phone screen and my phone even fell out of my pocket while running through a paved parking lot once.  My daughter has an iPhone 3G (her mom got it for her).  She's broken the screen 3 times.  It's currently broken again, but I have gotten tired of paying to get it repaired.

The difficulty in leaving "The Apple Collective" is directly related to the amount of money you've spent on electronics that are part of the collective.  It seems to me that there should be a whole host of companies producing electronics to help you leave the collective.  There aren't.  Apple must have a whole team of lawyers writing up patents to prevent people from leaving the collective.

Like that little funky cable that doesn't follow any open standards.  I'd like to reverse engineer it and then create adapters allowing people to keep their investments while leaving the collective.

I recently read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.  It's a quick read and free to download.  One of the things he said, in a round about way, is that he did things to make it easier on his fellow man.  He didn't patent anything.  It's relatively well known that he invented the Franklin Stove, but afterwards he went overseas on a political mission only to come back home and see that businesses had sprung up manufacturing and selling his stove.  But that was okay because he wanted people to use the idea to make their lives more comfortable.

We've become such a capitalistic money loving society that we don't try to help anyone for free any more.

Linux is open source.  It's helped tons of people.  If you don't want to send Microsoft $100+ for a new OS for your new PC, you can download and install multiple flavors of Linux for free and still be able to surf the Internet, play games, write documents, etc.  All the things you expect to do on a PC are available with a free OS.

Android is a mobile OS built around Linux.  It's also open to some extent.  I've heard that starting with Honeycomb there may be some limitations.  But, because of its openness, a variety of manufacturers can take it and modify it to create a unique experience on their devices.

Lisa left the collective in favor of the new Samsung Galaxy S II SkyRocket.  They really need to work on creating easier names.  Why not just call it the Skyrocket?  Anyway, it's a nice phone.  Blows away the iPhone in almost (if not) all categories.

However, it doesn't (can't) support that stupid proprietary interface that Apple created and patented.  So even though it's a better phone, Lisa still has misgivings because in her joining of the collective she purchased an $800 car stereo which is iCrap friendly.  It supports the iCable.  I've been kind of looking for adapters for making the transition less painful, but there aren't a whole lot to choose from.  The optimum one would be a Bluetooth adapter so that an Android phone could access the iCable wirelessly via Bluetooth.

What I've about decided is that she's going to have to buy an iPod with WiFi to leave hooked up in her car and then use wireless tethering on her new phone so that the iPod can access the Internet and run apps like Pandora.  It's like quitting smoking with a nicotine patch.

I just wanted to express my heartfelt thanks to Apple for creating products that don't work with anything else.