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Did Apple’s iPhone Track Lady Gaga to William and Kate’s Wedding?

27 Apr

No, it didn’t. Apple made a statement confirming what I’d been suspecting: the consolidated.db file is a cache of cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations to speed up triangulation in Location Services on iOS, period.

“The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.”

So, if you’re worried about Apple tracking you,

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

I’m hoping this settles things, but—knowing people—I doubt it. Two guys from Florida are planning on suing Apple in a class action suit, which will like go nowhere, and the Congress—as if it didn’t have actual problems to worry about in this country at the moment—is planning on holding hearings on this weighty, troublesome matter.

It turns out, not quite relatedly, that Facebook has been putting tracking cookies onto the computers of people who aren’t themselves Facebook users, but have simply visited sites that use Facebook Connect. Facebook’s explanation? “Oops.”

iPhone SpyPhone? The Video!

24 Apr

I had a realization yesterday that, since lots of locations—as many as 43 or more at a time—get given the same time stamp in the consolidated.db file, there wasn’t any particular reason to bucket things by week, or by day. You can get a sequential picture of what the phone was doing by simply treating each set of locations as an “incident”.

I’ve put an updated version of the file from Pete Warden’s project, iPhoneTracker, onto my site for you to download if you like. It’s the version used to produce this video, which incorporates the change described, as well as increasing the resolution forty times over Pete’s version. Download my version of iPhoneTrackerAppDelegate.m from here. Alternatively, I’ve also put up a pre-built version of the iPhoneTracker application which displays the locations in your data the way I did mine for the video. (Without the soundtrack, sorry.)

A high-quality (SD) version of the video can be downloaded from here.

For those interested in the nitty-gritty, video screen capture was done with SnapZ Pro, editing with Final Cut Pro, and titling with Motion. The sound track is “My Fair Lady” by David Byrne, which was released under a Creative Commons license as part of, The Wired CD a “free music” compilation by Wired magazine several years ago. You can download all the tracks from here.

Enjoy it! I’ve had fun with it, but I’m guessing I’ve pretty much plumbed the depths of this at this point…

What do you think after seeing this video? Are you more, or less, concerned about your iPhone, or other cell phone, “keeping track of your every move”?

And check out my previous postings on this subject: iPhones and Location—Let’s Not Get Hysterical; A Follow-up on the iPhone Location Fracas; and An Even Deeper Dive Into the iPhone Location Data.

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An Even Deeper Dive Into the iPhone Location Data

22 Apr

The iPhone "CellLocation" table, 6/23/10 to 6/25/10

[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]

So, I went through the exercise of pulling an old consolidated.db table out of a backup—this seems to be the very first one from my iPhone 4. What you see above is (most of) the data plotted onto Google maps—there are a couple of outliers to the south that fell off the bottom, but they’re included in the detail maps below. This represents 3 days worth of data, which I’m nominally referring to as 6/23/10 through 6/25/10 (I’m not sure about these time stamps; more on this in a bit).

The Data

Altogether, there are 302 data points. On the map above, all the locations collected the first day are yellow, the second day’s are purple, and the third day’s are cyan.

I’ve provided a number of detail maps below, one corresponding to each unique timestamp in the table. In two cases, the locations with a given time covered an extremely wide area; in both instances, I’ve provided a detail map to show the main cluster of locations in better detail. The locations were apparently collected, or added, or something, in several batches, all with exactly the same time stamp, as follows:

6/23/10 03:55—8 locations

Eighteen hours, thirty minutes later…

6/23/10 22:25—21 locations

Sixteen hours, twenty minutes later…

6/24/10 14:45—15 locations

Eight minutes later….

6/24/10 14:53—21 locations

Seven minutes later…

6/24/10 15:00—42 locations

Five minutes later….

6/24/10 15:05—19 locations

One minute later…

6/24/10 15:06—24 locations

6/24/10 15:06—detail

Nine minutes later…

6/24/10 15:15—43 locations

Five minutes later…

6/24/10 15:20—7 locations

Eight hours, fifty-five minutes later…

6/25/10 00:15—21 locations

Four hours, thirty-seven minutes later…

6/25/10 04:52—19 locations

One minute later…

6/25/10 04:53—21 locations

Four minutes later…

6/25/10 04:57—41 locations

6/25/10 04:57—detail

Some Oddities

Now, about the timestamps. I’ve used the same conversion that Peter Warden uses in his iPhoneTracker application, however, the first set of dates comes out as June 23rd. The iPhone 4 was released June 24th, and I picked mine up that evening, so it seems that something is amiss here.

The way the locations are clustered by time stamp seem bizarre, at least if they’re meant to indicate the time the entry was created. No multiday gaps in here, but multi-hour ones and an extremely wide variance in both the number of locations with a given time stamp and the geographical range encompassing those locations. In particular, the locations with the time stamp of 15:06 on the 24th and 04:57 on the 25th cover a great deal of ground. Why locations would be added in this fashion, and why those locations at any given moment is a mystery.

Some Observations

The fact that anywhere from 7 to 43 locations have the same time stamp, that those locations can demonstrably be spread over an area of ninety or a hundred miles (as in the case of the latest-dated set of locations) and the wide variance in the time between subsequent time stamps makes the idea that the iPhone is “tracking your every move” or even very many of them, pretty questionable.

“Tracking your every move” is what my geo-tagger does: once it gets a fix from GPS, it makes a note of where I am every five seconds, if at all possible. That allowed me to put together tracks like the ones I show on the web pages on my pilgrimage in Japan in 2009, reproduced below. This is not what the iPhone is doing.

I’d like to try to verify at some point whether the locations found in consolidated.db are, indeed, cell towers, as I suspect. In some cases, it seems as though there might be too many of them in too small an area, but there may be some other explanation for that.

How I Did This

First, I had to find the consolidated.db file. Anyone who tells you this is easy has never done it. First, you have to find the appropriate backup folder in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/MobileSync/Backups/ folder. The folder in the Backups directory have names like “8a0bf15905f9cb6e3e6df6fc551467676f3873dc”, and there may be several for every device you sync to the desktop system. To determine the correct one, you have to go into the folder and examine the file “Info.plist” and look for the device name corresponding to your iPhone.

Once you’ve accomplished that, you have to determine which of the files in there is actually the consolidated.db database file, since all the files also have names like “fe5632d8f9e0966173c59da3d92af864bb8cfdc6″. To do this, you’re going to need to decipher the manifest, which is in the files Manifest.dmdb and Manifest.dmdx. A Python script developed by the user “galloglass” in response to a question on StackOverflow accomplishes this. (You can download a copy of this script from my website.) Copy the two Manifest files to the same directory as the script, and the command

./ParseManifest.py | grep consolidated

should produce some output along the lines of

-rw-r--r-- 00000000 00000000  528384 1277443751 1277443751 1277166641
   (4096c9ec676f2847dc283405900e284a7c815836)
     RootDomain::Library/Caches/locationd/
       consolidated.db

The file name is the long, incomprehensible string in the parentheses. Copy the file with that name from the backup folder to your work directory, and rename it “consolidated.db”.

Next, you’ll need to dump the “CellLocations” table from the file. You can use any SQLite-capable tool you like for this. I used RazorSQL, which is a decent enough OS X application to manage this, and lets you dump an entire table to an Excel spreadsheet, or a variety of other formats easily. (It’s a free trial for 30 days.) Once you’ve done that, you’re good to go.

(I’ve uploaded the Excel spreadsheet I used to do this analysis, so you can download a copy to play with as well. The only addition I’ve made is to add a column to the right with the date corresponding (according to Peter’s kind of suspect conversion) to the time stamp. You can get a copy from here.)

Given a spreadsheet, putting the data onto a Google Map takes a little work, but nothing insurmountable. I used the Google Earth Spreadsheet Mapper, but I’m not proposing to provide a tutorial here.

If people come up with any exciting discoveries playing around with this, I’d be interested in hearing about them. My guess is still that this is most likely cell tower data for use as a cache for triangulation. Where it comes from, exactly, I have no actual idea, but I’d guess that the iPhone makes a note of any cell tower it becomes aware of, regardless of the signal strength, and obtains its geographical location from Apple by some means. I’ll likewise be interested in hearing what kind of response Apple comes up with to the questions raised by Sen. Franken and others.

But me, I’m not especially worried about the existence of this data on my phone.

A Follow-up on the iPhone Location Fracas

22 Apr

[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]

[UPDATE: I've taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database's CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]

My posting on my investigations into the content of the consolidated.db file on the iPhone has gotten some 40,000 views, so far, thanks to the magic of Slashdot. There have been a couple of worthwhile items that came up in comments, and I wanted to collect them into a follow-up posting here.

First, Alex Levinson, a researcher who’s done academic work on iOS forensics, posted an excellent column on this which probably deserved to make it to Slashdot more than mine did. It turns out that the existence of this file was not only known, but mentioned in Sean Morrisey’s book on iOS forensics, to which Alex was a contributor.

Second, even without a handy database of what is increasingly appearing to be cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations, people should be aware that their cell phone—as a simple consequence of its operation—”tracks” their movements, simply to enable the hand-off of the phone from one cel tower to the next. Your carrier maintains this information for some period of time, and will provide it to law enforcement in response to an appropriate subpoena.

Interestingly, a German politician, Malte Spitz, sued his carrier, Deutsche Telekomm, to get a copy of the records that they had maintained on him, and discovered that, between August 2009 and February 2010, they had recorded his geographical location some 35,000 times. Zeit Online has a fascinating visualization of Mr. Spitz’s movement and activities developed from this data.

Finally, and sadly, Brian Chen over at Wired has a follow-on to his original column where he gets off to a bad start by noting that people had been “spooked” by the revelation of the existence of this file on their iPhones, but without noting that it was his own headline the previous day—which claimed that iPhones were “tracking [their owners'] every move”, inaccurately as it turns out—which engendered a lot of the “spooking”.

If you’re concerned about this file’s being backed up to your desktop, I’d recommend that you turn on encrypted backups, which can be accomplished through iTunes, as this posting on Techland explains. I still haven’t got the slightest idea why people would be particularly worried about thieves getting this particular file off their desktops, but not (apparently) concerned about their address books, their email archives, their document folders or their calendars.

People are strange.

iPhones and Location: Let’s Not Get Hysterical.

21 Apr

[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]

[UPDATE: I've taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database's CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]

There’s been a lot of discussion of the discovery that there’s a database file called “consolidated.db” on your iPhone, full of latitude and longitude coordinates. Most of it has been completely hysterical, and not based on an actual look at the data involved.

I downloaded Peter Warden’s iPhoneTracker program, as well as the source code for it, and played around with it a good bit yesterday. I’m not done—I haven’t done a raw dump of the locations in the file yet—but I’ve been able to determine several things, the most important of which is that the iPhone is not “tracking your every move”, by any stretch of the imagination.

The default version of the program deliberately muddies the location by restricting the locations to a certain level of precision, and also aggregates its data by week. I modified it to increase that resolution by ten times,  and to aggregate the data on an daily, rather than a weekly basis. I discovered a number of interesting things.

First, note that there’s a slider along the bottom of the window, which is set to the extreme right, to show all locations no matter when they were collected. On the left side of the slider, there’s a “Play” button, which will animate the locations captured. You can also drag the slider’s “thumb” to see the data for an individual week (in the default version) or day, in my modified version.

Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker program can be found here. If anyone wants to reproduce the various tweaks I made to adjust the location and time resolution to be finer, drop me a note, and I’ll get you some details.

First, here’s a map of Amsterdam, showing every single location it collected there during my time there last July 23. As you can see, for 24 hours time, it’s not showing very much detail at all as far as my movements go.

Second, here’s a shot showing all of the data for the following day, July 24. I spent that day in Amsterdam until the late afternoon, when I took a train down to Den Haag:

As you can see pretty clearly, my ride on a train between Amsterdam and Den Haag is not depicted with even the slightest degree of fidelity or accuracy.

I’ve noticed that the amount and timing of the data collected is very odd as well: I’ve got multi-day gaps in the data, as long as almost two weeks on one occasion. Some days’ data clearly contains information that couldn’t possible have been collected on that day.

A good example is the set of locations dated Christmas Day of last year:

I was in the Central Valley, in Le Grand (about 15 miles south of Merced) all day Christmas Day and I never left the house. Not only does this show locations stretching from Santa Cruz in the West to Merced in the East (a distance of some 130-140 miles), but it shows movement up and down I5 for a distance of about 80 miles or so.

So, it’s entirely unclear to me what this data actually represents. What it most certainly doesn’t represent is the phone’s “tracking your every move” as the histrionic writers at Wired and The Atlantic would like you to think…

[UPDATE: Exactly the same kind of information seems to be getting stored on Android phones. Here's an application you can use to dump it out...]

[UPDATED UPDATE: I've put up a follow-on posting, with some additional interesting information...]

Techies Don’t Understand What Apple Makes

21 Jan

Energy Conversion, or Crispy Bread? (image courtesty Zalgon)

I’ve just seen yet another “the ‘i’ in iPhone stands for ‘idiot’” rant—hilariously, in the mistaken belief that libical, a standard open source calendar library which is an undocumented and hair-raising piece of cruft, had something to do with Apple—and it reminded me of something I’d wanted to point out.

Most of the folks who like to hate on Apple for its closedness (and it’s certainly closed in some fundamental ways) are largely technical types who have a set of expectations around what they imagine “computers” to be, and they’re operating under the completely mistaken assumption that Apple is in the business of selling computers.

Few of these folks think of the device depicted above as an “energy converter” (although there are those, I imagine, who are inclined, perhaps, to “hack” their toasters; I suspect they’re a distinct minority). The folks at Cuisinart and Hamilton Beach are not selling energy conversion, as accurate a description as that may be of what the device does on some level. They’re selling hot, crispy bread.

Apple does not sell computers, they sell consumer appliances. But what they really sell is an experience: consistency and ease-of-use, and working right out of the box, combined with solid and thoughtful industrial design and user interface. And while they’re certainly not perfect, from all accounts, Apple’s customers generally agree that this is what they’re actually getting for their money.

Another manifestation of this misplaced umbrage this week is the revelation (sort of) that Apple is replacing the Phillips screws in iPhones that are brought in for repair with (slightly) more tamperproof Torx 5-lobe screws. Let’s note that the folks raising much of the misplaced umbrage are in the business of selling Torx 5-lobe screwdrivers, among other things, for those inclined to want to optimize their appliance’s performance on their own. They’re pricing this item about a third over what you can get it for on Amazon, by the way. Appliance manufacturers do this all the time, sorry: it’s intended to keep the clumsy fingers of well-meaning do-it-yourself-ers out of there, which has been repeatedly shown to cut down dramatically on time-wasting calls to support lines over matters for which no help can be provided: you broke it, dude.

Apple isn’t in the business of making products for technical types, and they never have been: the original Macintoshes were every bit as resistant to consumer meddling and “improvement” as the iPhone 4. I actually owned, for a good long while, the tool which was required to open unibody Macs, the infamous MacCracker. (This was an 15-inch Torx T15 screwdriver—the holes in which those screws were buried were deep—with an arrangement on the far end used to pry open the clamshell case once the screws had been removed.)

This misunderstanding—or rather, this clear understanding on Apple’s part of what they’re selling and to whom—is one of the reasons that Apple does as well as it does with the iPhone and the iPad, and why I believe that the upcoming flotilla of Android-based tablets will be chasing the iPad’s taillights for a good, long time: Android is largely being developed by a rather small number of “technical types”, open source licenses notwithstanding. (Mainstream Linux, driven by even more inward-looking, more deeply technical types will, in turn, chase Android’s various taillights, but that’s another story.)

There’s a lesson for designers and marketers here, but it’s not a new one.

Great Moments in Apple History: Is 2000 a “Leap Year”?

1 Nov

In addition to Steve Jobs’ irrational hatred of pixels, and Keith Stattenfield’s approach to soliciting input, the occasional “expertise wars” at Apple could be entertaining.

Back in late 1999, when we were working on the upcoming release of Mac OS, a sort of strident “discussion” broke out during a meeting in my VP’s office with the EVP of software. Apparently a friend of his “alerted” him to the fact that 2000 was showing as a leap year, and, “of course”, leap years are any year that’s divisible by four unless they’re also divisible by 100! “What are you people, a bunch of idiots? Don’t you know this stuff? Why am I getting calls from my friends to correct your work?”

“We know it,” I said, “it’s your friend who doesn’t. The rule for a leap year is any year that’s divisible by four, unless it’s divisible by 100, unless it’s divisible by 400 as well. 2000 is the exception to the exception. Tell your friend to check his ‘facts’.”

The EVP stared at me for about fifteen seconds. Then he said, “What are you, some sort of calendar expert?”

“Try me,” I replied.

He stared at me for another ten seconds, then stared at my VP, who shrugged. “He is,” he said. The EVP then got up and stomped out of the office. That was actually the last we ever heard on that particular “issue”.

Apple’s Big Patent Loss

5 Oct

Patents are much in the news lately, between Google and its Android-shipping tributaries being sued by much of the known universe, Apple included, and now, a big judgment against Apple for infringing the patents of David Gelernter (who is also known for having been one of Ted Kaczynski’s victims), $625.5 million. This isn’t quite the largest patent judgment ever—it’s the second-largest this year, and the fourth-largest in history, though.

I got into a discussion of sorts—okay, it was on Twitter, call it a micro-discussion—last night with Adam Banks and Craig Grannell about this, and (I believe) I was able to clear up a few misconceptions about things. This seems like a good opportunity to provide some background, for those who are interested.

David Gelernter is a fairly prolific inventor. He seems to hold some twenty-odd patents, most of which were issued in the mid- to late-90s, all having to do with various aspects of computing and networking. The patents which are at issue are some later ones, however, granted in 2003 and 2004. Specifically, we’re talking about patents 6638313, “Document Stream Operating System” and 6725427, “Document Stream Operating System with Document Organizing and Display Capabilities”. Briefly, Gelernter describes a way of architecting an operating system that is organized around the documents stored on that system, whatever their type, displayed—as described in the patent—in a chronological order, with a specific method described as well for viewing, browsing and searching through them.

There are differences from Cover Play here, but—speaking as one “skilled in the art”—I can certainly see how one might use an alphabetical ordering rather than a chronological one, and only show the “document” immediately before and immediately after the “focus” document, which pretty much gets you from Gelernter’s patents to Cover Flow. “Obvious”, as they say. (I suppose, were I hauled in as an “expert witness” for the plaintiffs, Apple would likely have felt obliged to drag one of their engineers in to swear under oath that it would never have occurred to him, on the basis of Gelernter’s invention, in a million years.)

Now, the history of Cover Flow begins around 2006, when a method of display which they called “FlipTych” was proposed by Andrew Coulter Enright and subsequently implemented by Jonathan del Strother in a shareware application called “Cover Flow”. This application was purchased by Apple in 2007 and incorporated into iTunes and later, into things like the iPhone as well.

Mirror Worlds, Gelernter’s company and the assignee of the patent, brought suit against Apple in 2008. We have no way of knowing precisely what happened between 2006 and 2008, but given the way things work, it’s not unreasonable to believe that the better part of two years could have been burnt up in letters back and forth between Mirror Worlds’ attorneys and Apple Legal, before things got to a point where Mirror Worlds apparently felt it had no recourse but to take Apple to court in 2008.

The broad beams of the events are covered at Bloomberg. Apple is, of course, appealing the verdict on a number of grounds, including “That’s a heckuva lotta money!”, and it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out. For the folks out in free software land who are hoping this might nudge Apple in the direction of becoming patent-unfriendly, I wouldn’t bet on that at all. I’m confident that, overall, Apple is quite happy with the way the patent system works, in spite of its working to their detriment from time to time. Cost of doing business.

This is actually the way things are supposed to work: patents exist to allow inventors to trade disclosing an invention publicly for having a limited monopoly on the invention’s use for a while. A rather similar case—although I don’t think the folks who came up with FlipTych had any particular knowledge of Gelernter’s invention when they came up with the idea—is that of Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, tried to license it to Ford and Chrysler, was rejected, and ultimately found himself obliged to sue both companies when they started installing them in their cars anyway. Kearns’ lawsuit against Ford is the subject of the film Flash of Genius, which is a pretty good movie, and the only one I can actually think of on the subject of patent infringement suits.

In contrast, I can think of two movies about Japanese noodles.

“Apple Addresses iPhone 4 Antenna Issue”

25 Jun
Having reception issues with your shiny, new iPhone 4? Apple has a solution for you!

Apple cares!

Problem solved!

Oh, 4nicate the iPhone.

24 Jun

Well, after considerable effort, involving several hours, four different browsers, three different laptops, and a regularly crashing “Apple Store” app last week, I managed to get myself a “reservation” to pick up an iPhone 4 today at the Valley Fair Apple Store in San Jose.

This past week, my anticipation grew, and this morning, I got up early, slugged down a cuppa joe, jumped into the car and drove over to San Jose. This is what greeted me, with the Apple Store’s doors having only been open for half an hour:

That’s about a third of the line, folks. The rest of it stretched on for twice as long behind me. I’m guessing there are 12,000 people waiting to get an iPhone there, and they seemed to be processing them in the store at a rate of something like, maybe, 300 an hour… I don’t think the folks on the end of that line are getting their iPhones. And that’s the line for the folks with “reservations“.

I certainly wasn’t going to be able to get mine. I had a three-hour window where I could be there before I had to come back home: my work doesn’t stop for Steve’s or Apple’s benefit. I bailed after staring at this fiasco for about thirty minutes.

Now, I don’t know which is more aggravating: spending time, over a four or five hour period last week, struggling with Apple’s utterly broken ordering process, or having driven an hour this morning in order to stand around for half an hour in order to drive home for an hour for absolutely no purpose. A complete, utter and unmitigated waste of time, effort, gasoline and patience.

Well, not quite. As I stood there, I felt a clarity return to my mind: the influence of the Reality Distortion Field™ had been lifted.

“No phone can possibly be worth a nine hour wait, even if I could do it. It’s got a better screen, which I’d like. It’s faster, which is fine. It has a gyroscope and a front-facing camera, which I don’t much care about. Is there anything here which I couldn’t wait a month for? Or two?”

Clearly, the answer is “no”. I can wait a few weeks, or a few months, to have my life changed. I’m definitely not down with spending an entire working day, and then some, standing in an endless and scarcely-moving line, for the privilege of handing over five hundred bucks for a phone. I’ll muddle through with my 3Gs somehow.

I guess what bothers me the most is that if I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that of course, this was exactly what was going to happen.

Apple’s success with their customers has developed in them a pretty healthy contempt for their customers’ time, which I suppose is not unreasonable from their point of view. If you’ve got an audience of large numbers of sheep, fleece ‘em. We should be glad they’re not going up and down the line asking people to shave their heads or paint themselves purple in exchange for a place toward the front of the line. They could. And people would.

Not me. I’ll get one in July. Or August. Or later.

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