Sunday, July 13, 2008

Apple iPhone 2.0 Download Problems? Cut Steve Jobs some slack!


I, just like 6 million others, tried to download the new 2.0 iPhone software on Friday. The result? I just about bricked my iPhone. Luckily I had Googled a bunch of articles as my download was churning away and I was able to stop it and roll everything back to my original state before things got ugly.

To quote my wife, "You know better than that! Always give it a couple of days when a new release comes out."

So, today (Sunday) I tried again. and voila! It worked seamlessly. Everything went just as Steve Jobs planned -- just 48 hours too late. But I'm happy.

Why should we assume everything will work out OK. Think about what Apple was trying to do. I commend them for doing things that are different than the rest of the digital world. I mean, how many of you tried recently to update new software on a 6 million revolutionary hardware devices? So there were a couple of bugs and you weren't able to call your office for a few hours. Big deal. Think about what Apple has done to improve your life up to this point. I think they deserve a big break on this one -- even though I'm sure we'll hear about it in the press for weeks and months to come (primarily from non-iPhone using luddites).
I find it interesting that on Friday there were about 3,000 hundreds of articles written about the disaster that Apple was having. But when I Google how great the new tool is I only get a couple hundred articles.

The moral of the story is this: if you want to have cutting edge technology that does cutting edge tasks, cut the inventors some slack. No one's ever done this before.