Walt-O-Matic

For fun, let’s see of the sure fire headlines work.

Last night I went to the Apple Store in Tysons with a friend who bought his phone one week after me, putting him within the 14 day window. Apple credited him $200 on the spot.

I perhaps have one of the worse case situations, in that while early adopters have had their phone for a long time, I’m just outside of the 14 day window, meaning I don’t qualify for the price guarantee match, nor can I return my phone, nor did I get $200 of fanboy usage from the device.

Apple, however, was helpful and friendly. They looked up on my account and indicated that American Express was used to purchase the phone, and that I should call them. They even printed out a fresh copy of the invoice for me.

In the Jerry Seinfield and Superman commercial shorts by American Express, Jerry tells how, by using American Express, he’s protected from theft, damage, and so forth. Could it be true?

I looked at my American Express card, and found out I was a Platinum Member via Costco. Nice!

After looking up AMEX Best Value Guarantee with Google, seeing that a Gold Card Page mentioned BVG, and discovering Return Protection on Platinum Benefits, I felt it was worth a call to AMEX - given the Apple Store made the same suggestions as this newsworthy blog, this tech news article, and this tidbit.

I called 1-800-297-8019, and after a fairly long time on hold due to an enormous “unexpected” call volume, I reached a human who confirmed I had the right number. He explained that the Best Value Guarantee was discontinued in November 2006 (ah, the BVG article above was from 2003).

Turns out, the non-existent Best Value Guarantee would have meant AMEX would have had to pay $200. However, the “Apple won’t take my phone back [so I can purchase a new one at a cheaper rater] which is in affect puts them out $300 - though there’s the possibly you may have to send in your iPhone.

Follow along, cause this gets weird. Even if you paid $600 for the phone, a $300 credit from AMEX and a $100 from Jobs, gets you pretty darn close to the cost of getting a new phone (say if you’ve damaged yours dropping it or such); in fact, it might be just enough to make a point if you’re mad enough.

If you bought the cheaper phone, you very well could be beyond the break even point.

AMEX knows this, and they are well aware of the iPhone situation.

Because AMEX is getting hammered, they are looking for a compromise. Apparently there are enough people who are willing to return them iPhones that have been bricked in order to get $300 that AMEX doesn’t want to deal with that.

As such, they are looking at simply refunding the price difference (which is actually cheaper), especially if that means they don’t have to refund a larger amount and get stuck with a bunch of damaged phones with nothing in the file system and missing a SIMM card.

American Express took the date of purchase, the kind of iPhone, there price (with tax) of the iPhone, and the total cost of charges for the purchase and opened a case for me.

They claim they will review them individually, but the rep was fairly certain they’d be handled in bulk.

By bulk, I assume that means putting them in groups. Speculating here, I believe one group, will be the whining early adopters who will get nothing, another group will be those that are in the 14 day period and should be dealing with Apple, another group of questionable pro-rated matching, and a group that meets the intent of the policy (which is where I fall in), in that I’m just shy of being able to resolve it with Apple but haven’t had the long usage.

If AMEX comes though for me, then great, I will be using their card a lot more often.

If AMEX does anything, and I mean, anything at all, they come out looking like the heros, and have just secured themselves the holiday season as the card to purchase everything with.
Steve Jobs has one chance left to steal the thunder back, however. Tell people they are getting $100 back, but give a certain portion in the purchasing window $200 instead. Suddenly Apple looks beyond fair, but customer centric again.

I will note, however, that there were more people in line with iPhone receipts at Tysons than there were people buying the new iPods, while I was there. The early adopters are clearly gun shy.

One of the big things holding me back from buying an iPhone in the first place, aside from lack of SSH (which was soon resolved), was an article about the hidden evils in the Terms of Service contract.

Well, not sure about whether to take things at face value or not, I bounced my concern off my friend Phil, who’s extremely knowledgeable about telecommunications.

He wrote me back a wonderful point-by-point analysis, which swayed my decision. Feeling that other people might benefit as well, I sought permission from him to reprint it here.

iPhone Requires a 2-Year Contract with AT&T.
1. True; they make the 2-year contract requirement pretty clear. This isn’t a great thing but it’s pretty standard in the U.S. when you buy a phone.

Expensive: Requires $2,280, Over $1,730 in Wireless Costs.
2. Also true, though he overstates the price. The service plan runs about $60/month ($40 voice, $20 data); if that’s too expensive, the iPhone is probably a bad idea. That’s still less costly than a Blackberry or Treo (both about $80/month when you turn on the features needed).

Double Billing. You and the Caller Both Get Charged for the Same Call.
3. True, but not unique to the iPhone. Every cellular carrier in the United States save for a few Nextel plans will charge airtime on both incoming and outgoing calls. If you call another wireless phone user, I suppose you could call that double-billing (though if that other user is on the same carrier [ATT], the airtime rate is the princely sum of zero cents per minute).

All Use of the Networks Are Always Rounded Up to the Nearest Kilobyte or Minute.
4. Standard practice for the wireless industry. The per-kilobyte complaint is pretty funny, though, since the charge per kilobyte for domestic data usage is zero cents per kilobyte.

Customers Are Billed for “Network Errors” and “Network Overhead”.
5. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it makes no sense.

Billed Even Though the Call Doesn’t Go Through.
6. Basically untrue. Billing in a wireless system begins when the call is answered, though the timer starts when the call is initiated. In other words, if a call rings for fifteen seconds and then is answered, the clock begins at 15 seconds and counts up from there.

Bogus Fees Added to the Bill: Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge
7. While I agree that regulatory recovery fees are basically bogus padding, I challenge him to find a wireless (or, for that matter, conventional wireline) carrier that doesn’t do this.

$175.00 Termination Fee.
8. The early termination fee is pretty well standard throughout the industry. There are certain circumstances where you can avoid paying it (for example, if they raise rates during your contract term).

International Messages Are Charged Additional Fees as Are Files Over 300Kbps.
9. International text messaging (i.e. SMS) costs extra on every cellular carrier I’m aware of. The picture/video messaging charging he complains about isn’t even relevant to the iPhone. And the “additional fee” for large messages that he talks about is irrelevant to the iPhone. My phone communicates directly with my IMAP server over SSL; there’s no way that ATT can tell how large a message is, let alone bill me for those messages over 300K.

Over Your Quota: Get Gouged: 40¢ Per Minute and 69¢ Roaming Offnet.
10. Once again, he’s whining about something that’s absolutely standard in the industry: if you go over your bucket of minutes, you pay a pretty high rate. He conveniently neglects to mention that UNUSED minutes from your plan roll forward into the next month and can be used to offset high usage up to a year later. If that’s not enough, just call and switch to a higher plan and ask them to make it retroactive to your previous month’s usage.

The Services Are Not Secure and Can’t Block Your Phone Number.
11. “Not secure” is a leftover from the days of ANALOG cell phones, which could be listened in upon pretty trivially. And they’re saying that when calling certain toll-free numbers, you can’t block your caller ID since the recipient pays for the call. There’s a MENU on the iPhone that allows you set the default for whether you send caller ID or not; you can also set it per-call. In other words: JUST LIKE A LANDLINE.

The Current Mobile Email Service Doesn’t Support Attachments.
12. Absolutely false. You can send photos trivially (about the only sort of attachment that makes sense to create on a phone), and the iPhone will read a lot of formats (Word, Excel, PDF, JPEG at a minimum).

Prohibited Uses and “Unlimited” Sales Hype.
13. The prohibited uses language is pretty standard wireless carrier language. I agree with him that the claim of “unlimited” is pretty misleading marketing puffery, but it’s an industry-wide problem. If you use your FIOS connection at full bandwidth 24×7, you’ll soon discover that “unlimited” basically means that you’re not billed per unit of data, but that you can still be cut off if you abuse the service. There’s basically nothing you could do on the iPhone that would cause this to happen, though.

Service Is Not Intended to Provide Full-Time Connections: Unlimited is Hype
14. Same as above.

Wi-Fi Service is Limited
15. I think he’s deliberately misinterpreting this one. He’s talking about a completely different wi-fi service that one can purchase through AT&T that has nothing to do with the iPhone. There is of course no limit at all to the number of times in a given time period that the iPhone can connect to a wi-fi network.

“Offnet” Restrictions
16. Another deliberate misinterpretation, I think. “Off-net” usage refers to areas where you’re roaming. Since cell phone roaming charges basically don’t exist anymore for the consumer (the carriers charge each other, though), what they’re saying is that you can’t buy the phone and then use it full-time where, say, T-Mobile has service and ATT doesn’t.

Plan Goobly-gook
17. He’s so incoherent here that it’s hard to figure out what he’s mad about.

Comparing US and Other Broadband Countries: America Is being Laughed At.
18. Perhaps he should move! He forgot to mention that countries using the metric system think we’re pretty silly too–but I’m sure he would have if he’d thought about it. Seriously, he has a point: mobile telephony is more advanced in other parts of the world (largely due to standardization on one network type–GSM). But I’m not sure why that would be the fault of ATT and the iPhone.

To provide some context here, I actually ended up purchasing an iPhone. The SSH problem I had concerns with was resolved by the new set of software that’s come out by third parties. The iPhone legal rant was adequately rebutted by my friend, Phil.

But that’s not the big news. The big news is that Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone price was being dropped by $200. And, we knew in our heart of hearts that was going to happen sometime, but early adopters who wanted the iPhone to be a success, paid the expensive price.

Now that Apple’s benefited, the real question on the table is: Are the early adopters going to get screwed.

My take is no.

On the surface, I’m not too happy about having a 3-week old phone, which is less than a month old, yet one week past the return point.

Yes, I made the decision to buy it then, so I do take responsibility for that. But, on the other side, Apple also didn’t provide me with data that could have made me make a more discriminating purchase plan. (And, one can argue, why should they?)

Apple now has an interesting choice. Because of all these early adopters, their phone is a success. However, pissing them off would do some serious damage. One, those people are never going to buy into an early adopter program again and are going to spread negative comments. Two, non-early adopters are going to view this as a model of how Apple treats its customers.

THAT SAID, -twice- in the past, when I have purchased expensive software (about the same cost as the iPhone or more), Apple has dropped the price, and upon doing so, wrote me a Snail Mail telling me they appreciated my business and enclosed was a check for the difference. Unprompted.

I’d like to think that Apple will have the foresight to do that now, and the amount of good will this would result in would more than make it up.

At the moment, I have -one- iPhone. My wife is on the fence. If I get a refund from Apple, she’ll be having an iPhone too (and being realistic, if Apple produces a better version with more memory, I’ll be buying the higher end model for myself).

If I’m to eat the difference because of a single week, I don’t have the right to complain, but I’m going to take it out of Apple’s future sales by not upgrading, not early adopting, not evangelizing, and not buy multiple machines. And, let’s be honest, Apple knows this.

After doing a number of disk clean up and optimizations, I found myself in the circumstance of OS X’s spotlight returning no results. Whether I searched for a keyword in Mail, or by Spotlight using Command-Space, I got no results backs - just an empty list for my troubles.

It turns out there’s a neat utility out there called Rebuild Spotlight Index 2.7 that does all the grunt work for you. Problem is, it didn’t work for me.

What’s going on is actually fairly trivial, and it’s possible to simply do everything via the command line.

The metadata utilities need to run as root, so to see what your drive is up to, you’d enter something like: sudo mdutil -s /

This shows the status on the root volume.

To turn indexing on for a volume, you enter: sudo mdutil -i on /

And, to force Spotlight to rebuild its index, you simply erase the master copy of the metadata stores on the volume like this: sudo mdutil -E /

However, while I did all this, Spotlight was still not building the indexed for me.

Here’s how I solved it, using just the Terminal.
First, I wanted to see the schema file, so I printed it out using to the standard input using: sudo mdimport -X

At the bottom of the schema listing, I say a reference to a schemaLocation, and took a shot in the dark that perhaps that Spotlight’s index rebuilding needed to check data against its schema before it would start. To do that, it might need network access, if not back to the local machine.

And, for good measure, I went to check the date/timestamp on the Spotlight directory using: sudo ls -la /.Spotlight*

While most of the files had the timestamp of when I tried to delete the index, not all the files had the current date and time. Additionally, the file sizes were not growing, a good indication the index was not being rebuilt.

Thinking to myself, “what could be causing network traffic, even internally, not to be working”, I realized that I had just rebooted and PeerGuardian2 was currently active and blocking traffic. This is a great tool for blocking malware and unwanted network visitors, but occasionally it gets in the way. So, I turned it off.

Then, I did the following commands to ensure indexing was on, the spotlight metastore was really gone, and that I wanted it rebuilt:
sudo mdutil -i on /
rm -rf /.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -E /


The moment I did the last command, this time the system sprung to life, the directory /.Spotlight-V100 was created, and the files inside it were growing quickly. Spotlight on the toolbar showed a progress bar, indicating the system would be done indexing in a bit. The big difference? I turned off the network traffic blocker for a moment.

When Apple recalled batteries from its 15″ laptops, I would have thought that common sense would have prevailed in that if any battery exhibited a physical defect, such as exploding from its own case, that would be more than enough to exchange the battery.

Unfortunately for my friend Marcus, when he went to the Apple Store, with an exploded battery from a 17″ laptop (his is shown above), the manager wanted him to mail the battery and laptop back to Apple. This made no sense, as there was nothing wrong with the laptop. And, furthermore, the US Postal Service might take issue with a battery that is about to have its chemicals bust out of its shell.

17-Inch MacBook Pro Rechargeable Battery
Model A1189, Li-ion, 6N6184M9US0A

What he wanted was to simply have the hazardous waste properly disposed of, even if it meant buying a new battery.

She explained that the Apple Store didn’t have laptop batteries, he’d have to special order one. And to verify his battery was really damaged (she handled it!), he’d have to see an Apple Genius. And, unfortunately for Marcus, the Genius Bar was all filled up with appointments, and he’d have to return the next day. …meanwhile, the battery was still growing out of its shell; something that made Marcus feel very unsafe.

I’m totally of mixed minds on this. First of all, the battery fault isn’t Apple’s doing, it’s a bad batch they got them from. Second, when a battery dies or doesn’t hold a charge out of warranty, you don’t get a replacement. Third, if you take standard flashlight battery and let it age and leak, that’s not a warranty problem. So, on this hand Apple is under no obligation to replace the battery.

On the other hand, this wasn’t a matter of the battery being dead - it still held a full charge. It just would no longer fit in the machine because it was physically defective. In my mind, Apple should replace the battery, and then go back and beat up on the vendor. Even for customer service reasons alone, it’s the right thing to do.

Apple’s stance was if it was a battery for a 15″ laptop, they’d replace it, even out of warranty. But, since it was a 17″ battery, and even though it was made of the same stuff, by the same people, and exhibiting the same visibly defective problem, it wasn’t. That’s just not right.

Basically, Apple was saying that this was a “new” battery problem, and because not enough people reported the model number (A1189), their replacement warranty didn’t cover it.

Marcus came back the next day, stood in line, talked to a Genius who took his old battery to dispose while pointing him at an entire shelf of 17″ batteries. Marcus bought a new one.

Genius Bar Conversation | Register Conversation

Of course, after Marcus gets the run around and has to buy a new battery, we learn about this link: MacBook and MacBook Pro Battery Update

In it, it states that if a battery is visibly deformed, then Apple will replace it. …why didn’t the Apple Store know this?

Having just read an analysis of the iPhone terms of service, what’s hidden in the fine print is a deal breaker for me.

Until some of this settles down, I’ll not be getting the iPhone as planned.

Poop.

Realistically though, this may have pushed me more seriously at OpenMoko, the open source phone.

I’m especially developing the development kit.

So at this point it’s a race. Either Apple drops the price, adds some features, and addresses some pretty stressful points in the terms of service, or enough applications and positive reports come from OpenMoko.

UPDATE: These points have all been rebutted.

Shortly after the 10.4.9 update, and even though I’m running 10.4.10, I’ve noticed an odd behavior with my wireless network connectivity. While using my machine, often for hours at a time without incident, my applications will all suddenly act as though there’s no internet, and indeed, looking at the routing tables, by all appearances it is gone.

The odd part is that my signal strength is at full. And, even more confounding, if I turn off the wireless and turn it back on, I suddenly get connectivity again and the applications recover. Meanwhile, other devices connected wirelessly don’t see the drop, so I know it’s local to the Macbook Pro.

Is anyone else out there experiencing a similar problem where the machine just drops internet awareness?

The only clue I ever seem to get in my console.log file is the message:
mDNSResponder: SetupAddr invalid sa_family 0
mDNSResponder: getifaddrs ifa_netmask for fw0(7) Flags 8863 Family 2 169.254.59.71 has different family: 0
mDNSResponder: Repeated transitions for interface en1 (FE80:0000:0000:0000:0216:CBFF:FEB6:AD8C); delaying packets by 5 seconds

According to websites with source code for the operating system, the file dDNS.c contain codes that looks like this:

mStatus dDNS_SetupAddr(mDNSAddr *ip, const struct sockaddr *const sa)
	{
	if (!sa)
                {
                LogMsg("SetupAddr ERROR: NULL sockaddr");
                return(mStatus_Invalid);
                }

	if (sa->sa_family == AF_INET)
		{
		struct sockaddr_in *ifa_addr = (struct sockaddr_in *)sa;
		ip->type = mDNSAddrType_IPv4;
		ip->ip.v4.NotAnInteger = ifa_addr->sin_addr.s_addr;
		return(mStatus_NoError);
		}

	if (sa->sa_family == AF_INET6)
		{
		struct sockaddr_in6 *ifa_addr = (struct sockaddr_in6 *)sa;
		ip->type = mDNSAddrType_IPv6;
#if !defined(_WIN32)
		if (IN6_IS_ADDR_LINKLOCAL(&ifa_addr->sin6_addr))
                    ifa_addr->sin6_addr.__u6_addr.__u6_addr16[1] = 0;
#else
		if (IN6_IS_ADDR_LINKLOCAL(&ifa_addr->sin6_addr))
                    ifa_addr->sin6_addr.u.Word[1] = 0;
#endif
		ip->ip.v6 = *(mDNSv6Addr*)&ifa_addr->sin6_addr;
		return(mStatus_NoError);
		}

	LogMsg("SetupAddr invalid sa_family %d", sa->sa_family);
	return(mStatus_Invalid);
	}

It appears that the software can’t figure out whether IP4 or IP6 is in use, so it reports it has no idea how to set up the socket. It’s interesting to note that the socket isn’t null, so something’s going on.

But what is mDNSResponder? Well, for one, it contains Apple’s Bonjor services that allow zero-configuration networking.

mDNSResponder is a multi-cast DNS deamon. And, what’s even cooler, is that you can force it to emit its status and dump tons of info in the console.log by sending it a gentle signal:
sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder

Even FreeBSD has mDNSResponder in its ports collection.

And, even while Apple has a way to disable Bonjour, I’m not sure that I want to, nor am I 100% convinced this is the problem, but is more likely a symptom. Afterall, Apple has had network problems before. Plus, they appear to be actively working on Bonjour.

As my friend Phil points out, the IP addresses in the 169.254 range are in the zero-configuration range for peer-to-peer communication.

Like I said, I’m curious to know if I’m alone in this, or even better, if someone’s solved the problem, what was it…?

UPDATE 1-Aug-2007: It appears that the AirPort Extreme Update 2007-004 fixes this problem. And, while you’re at it, get the Security Update 2007-007 as well.

I’ve recently bumped into a problem where, on occasion, I get duplicate menu items in my right-click pop-up on the OS X desktop, when I select Open With.

Turns out this is merely an indicate that the database for LaunchServices needed to be fixed.

And, in fact, this was covered over at Mac OS X Hints a while back. But, given that I had need to look up the command more than once, I present it here.

Inside Terminal, enter:

You don’t even need to enter your administrator password, nor do you need to reboot.

OnyX allows you to also rebuild the LaunchServices by going to the Maintenance / Reset panel. Though there are a number of other ways to reset launch services for each version of OS X.

According to WebWare, Apple is releasing its browser, Safari, for the Windows platform.

The initial question from the community is: Why? (Though this may be the wrong question..!)

Clearly the region of the browser application space has been filled by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and a handful of others.

Wouldn’t releasing Safari simply make the Windows environment more compelling to stay? This got me thinking…

What if multi-platform Safari wasn’t the point at all, but it was actually a proof of concept of something greater?

A while back, Apple made the stunning announcement that it had been secretly working on a way to take the same source code and produce a PowerPC version and a Intel (Mac) version, and have them look identical. Combined together, they make the Universal Binary, which is a program that can be run on either system architecture. This was no small feat of clever engineering.

What if the Top Secret feature is that they’ve added Windows as a target for the same source code? Already RealBASIC is doing it, but that’s BASIC, not the mixed language richness of XCode.

As a developer, if I can use Apple’s amazing environment to produce Windows code, I’m all for it.

As a business owner, if I can produce applications and have them work on Apple’s customers as well, I’m all for the additional marketspace.

And, …if I’m a home user… if I’m wanting to switch to Mac, but I’m tied to the Windows platform because of application lock-in, this is a breath of freedom if my applications and data work elsewhere.

Could it be that Apple has taken Safari and simply “recompiled” it? That this is merely the test run to give applications independence of Windows, allowing users to switch over to a kinder, friendlier environment?

I’d like to think so.