It’s official: Verizon is going to offer iPhone buyers a $30 unlimited data plan. The carrier’s heir apparent and chief operating officer, Lowell McAdam, told us the news ahead of the company’s meeting with investors.
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But you’d better act fast. Speaking later Tuesday morning, Mr. McAdam said the iPhone unlimited plan will be a temporary offer and that the carrier will follow AT&T’s move to tiered pricing in the not too distant future.
I can’t wait for February 3.
That’s the fundamental point I really want to get across in this post, how applications like Evernote have encouraged us to become information hoarders.
Since it’s so easy to clip and save information throughout the day off the glutton of information that is the Internet, we almost feel compelled to store away facts and blog posts, photos and wikipedia articles because we can.
I mean damn, I can take a photo of a business card and send it to Evernote just in case I want to contact the annoying sales guy at the conference that gave me his business card 11 times, but do I actually NEED to?
NASA:
Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, which passed its seventh anniversary on Mars this week, both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.
Its amazing that those things were built for a 90-day mission. While Spirit is out of commission right now, Opportunity continues to make amazing discoveries on Mars.
These two little rovers may be the most impressive engineering NASA’s ever completed.
The thing is, I’m one dude with a finite amount of time and attention and I simply can’t maintain 500 friendships. I don’t believe anybody can — at least not the type of friendships I’m interested in maintaining.
I just can’t maintain 500 relationships — I don’t want to.
[Shamelessly duplicated from TBR]
Dave Lawrence has posted some new iPhone wallpapers, including one inspired by the Newton. Great stuff.
With less than a week until my 25th birthday, there’s still time to donate to my charity: water birthday campaign!
![Magic Trackpad [023-365; 01-23-11].jpg](https://media.512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/S3/Magic-Trackpad-023-365-01-23-1111.jpg)
Even though I wrote a negative review of the Magic Trackpad, we have one at home now, since my wife really liked it.
Joel Mackey, on HP’s unfortunate habit of backdating warranties on computers:
If HP Computer does this to every single customer, or heck even if they just do this to 10% of their customers do you realize how much money they’re saving? They could be saving millions in warranty repair and service issues. Just systematically reduce people’s warranty by 6 months and you save millions. Brilliant!
Man, I love OEMs.
I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to “use the computer” so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!
But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about. A host of ancillary software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve.
I love every word of this. The artificial, false reality that is the computer is sort of stunning, at least on a philosophical level.
What’s more, I remembered why I use Apple products in the first place. Sure there are a million choices in the PC (Windows/Android) world. I can make things look this way or that. I can download this or that utility. I can use this or that hardware. But really, I don’t want to. I want my phone to be done when I buy it. I want to know what it does, and how I’m going to do it. I don’t want to scour message boards for help when I’m in over my head.
iPhoto works, iTunes works, iMovie works, iChat works, Safari works, Apple stuff works. Sure there might be a program that lets you organize photos better than iPhoto, or a faster music player than iTunes. But my Mac was handed to me preloaded with 98.3% of what I want my computer to do. You can’t put a price on that.
[via Patrick Rhone]