iPhones suck. Right?
As I am sure many of you have noticed, I wrote an article a little while ago titled ‘iPods suck. Right?‘ where I basically just demanded that iPods are built better then people bitch and moan about and that in fact that are extremely hardy. I stand by this completely. Some of you may also have noticed that there was a very pleasing comment with a link to an article about an iPhone that had been run over by a truck, and while not in its best condition, still functioned.
I have decided to post a follow up to that, because I have some interesting new developments. Now, the reason I was driven to write this actually branched from an unfortunate accident, that involved the house of 3 of my close friends burning down, leaving them with next to nothing. The news report can be watched here, its quite the fire.
This was truely a tragic event, there is no denying it. I know I will be among the people to mourn this house, as I spent a good amount of time there on a regular basis. Thats apart from the point though.
While fleeing their house, they clearly did not have time to save many possessions, keeping in mind that two of the three residents own an iPhone. Thankfully one of them had her phone in her pocket when she left, however the other person was less lucky, as with the third resident and her iPod.
Eventually the next day the three of them were allowed into the very much destroyed house to try and find any possessions that somehow could have survived not only the inferno, but also the smoke and water damage. And believe me, there was very little. Despite this, as they were looking they heard the alarm of the iPhone going off, making it very easy to hunt down. The iPhone was found sitting on a blackened bed with absolutely nothing wrong with it, working completely normally, not even slightly melted… it just smelt bad. Not only that, but it was laying on the bed in the open beside an open laptop which got hot enough for the screen to buckle and melt. The laptop was a windows laptop. 
Yes, the iPhone survived, and no, we don’t know how. Oh but it does not stop there, oh my no. Not only was the iPhone recovered completely fine, the iPod was also. Complete with a fully charged battery. It baffles us how this happened, we have no clue, all we know is that Apple products get a much worse rap then they deserved.
An interesting journey to say the least
Three months.
It has just come to my attention that that is the amount of time since the last post here. It is true, I lost sight of Designkai to some extent in a haze of bizarre journeys and unexpected destinations. While I am well aware most readers don’t actually care about my life or my whereabouts I do still feel it necessary to apologize for the sudden disappearance, particularly so soon after promising a barrage of new articles (a couple of which had actually been written but I have since lost… I am still working on that). Having said that, I am unsure of my time allowances for Designkai in the future, they may not be what I would hope. This is for a few reasons; the most important of which is that I have finished school and been flung semi-nude and shivering into the adult world (reminiscent of the Ren & Stimpy into). Due to this my days of being something of an educated hobo with an income have ceased, instead I am now required to hold a job, a growingly difficult social life, other projects which will hopefully have an income source (unlike this one) and of course, tertiary study… an abyss to where I can see much of my time heading. Although less abyss…y. Abyssy? Abyssie? You know what I mean.
Yes that right, I am now a design student at university. To be more specific I am studying ‘Visual Communications’ an apparently huge part of which is studying communications which are not visual at all. Who would have thought. The upside of this study? Well now I can only assume my articles on this website will have more a more educated insight into design and the world it saturates, particularly from a professional standpoint.
So yes, I am aware that it has been relatively inactive around here and for that I apologize, but at the same time I thank the apparent consistent flow of users through the website. I will attempt to make an effort at bringing this back in a big way, but I really cannot make any promises at this stage because I am still unsure of upcoming workloads, otherwise Designkai will probably coast along as it has in the last 3 months.
iPods suck. Right?
Some have said that I kiss some Apple arse, and that may be true. But there is a good reason for that. It works. I am not going to rant and rave about how Mac is the superior OS or the better hardware and things of the what not, no, I will save that for another post (:P jokes, each has its own benefits). I intend to have a rant about iPods right now.
The common myth that iPods break easily. Everyone has heard it from someone, seen it on the news, read it in a paper, magazine, etc. The numbers of broken iPods sure are astonishing, I won’t at all deny that. But you know what is more astonishing? The sales numbers. Lets use some pretty basic numbers as an example here. Lets say we take an MP3 brand called ‘mpMe’ (I apologize if this resembles anything real, that was of no intention, I was just pulling shit out of nowhere), and now lets say 1 in 10 breaks or has some faults which require it to be replaced. Now lets assume the statistics for an iPod are the same, 1 in 10 breaks. Now pretend in month, mpMe sells 40 MP3 systems, 4 will break in that month. Now lets assume apple sells 10,000 iPods in that month, 1,000 will break. 1,000 broken iPods seems like a damn lot of wasted money for consumers, but its not looked at comparatively. Also, the 1 in 10 statistic is not real, it was hypothetical.
Logic would state that the highest selling MP3 player in the world would also have the highest break rate just by sheer ratio, right? Apparently not.
I am constantly bombarded by people who claim iPods suck because they break easily. I won’t deny that they have faults (namely the battery or that short screen crisis they had), everything does, but what gets me is the people who tell me this at the sight of my iPod. At least 90% of people who have spoken negatively about iPod’s to me have never themselves owned an iPod, they just bitch and moan based on what they have heard or what has happened to people they know.
You frequently hear the horror stories ‘my brother got 3 and all 3 broke’ and shit like that. Is it ever possible that they just don’t take care of their iPods correctly? This Apple kiss arse post is not based on nothing either, it is based on own experience. 3 years ago next month myself and my two sisters purchased a 30GB iPod Classics (5th gen) each. Alas, on November 10th, one of the 3 broke. Took almost 3 years though. And it was by no means Apple’s or the iPods fault. No, instead it broke because my sister left it on the floor and stepped on the screen. I would expect my heel to do damage to any MP3 player on the market.
I have had some argue that it was because they were the newer ones that they lasted (yet they argue that ones that came out after ours are still crap…?), which is just not true. I have seen black and white iPod’s last 3 years without needing replacement, and how old are they! I have even been lucky enough to use a functional, and in use second gen iPod earlier this year.
I am not trying to force anyone into buying an iPod, its their loss if they don’t in my opinion. But iPod’s seem to carry a stigma with people who have never owned one and never will due to. I can respect someone’s decision to purchase an alternative because lets face it, iPod’s probably aren’t the best thing on the market, but they sure as hell aren’t the worst.
I think what it comes down to is how much you respect you’re iPod or technology in general. I know for a fact that a well treated iPod will last a long time. Hell I have even dropped my iPod from roofs and had it kicked in the screen and mine is fine, so apparently you don’t even need to show them that much respect.
I know (in fact I planned and hoped on it) that this post will probably piss some hardcore anti-apple enthusiasts off, its your place, stand up for what you believe. I will however direct you to my comment form below. I want to hear everyones story, the horrible stories about how iPod’s are lemons and the great ones about people who have owned their iPod’s since the mid Triassic period. Go wild! And hell, prove me wrong. Nothing like some food for thought.
A decent downtime?
As some of you -if not all of you- will notice, there has been very little activity on the website recently and for this I apologize. I was pretty busy for quite a while there as I was in my last year of high school (yes, I am only young) and my final exams were approaching a lot quicker then I had initially anticipated and indeed hoped. But now with that shit out of the way (I sat my final exam day before yesterday) I have the time to actually do some work on this website (and other projects). So, expect more. And more importantly, expect better. I had pretty good feedback from the articles I posted previously and I hope to only better the standard. This should be helped a lot by a few key factors;
- For starters, now that I have graduated high school, the next stop is university where I will be studying, you guessed it, graphic design (visual communication to be a little more specific).
- I now have the time to work on more design projects and templates which will be for both personal gain and profit.
- I should (if all goes well) be starting a job in January designing for a local magazine.
.Again? Are you serious…
Welcome to v14 of Designkai.com!
To anyone who is a regular here, they will most likely be confused as v13 was only released a very short time ago and was only up for maybe… a fortnight or so. This was because the database was having apparently irreparable issues with content and comments so I decided I would take it down and re-content it from scratch. However, while it was down I began thinking (thats never a good thing). Anyone who has visited Designkai previous to this version will be aware that it also included a portfolio and blog for myself, and was essentially a website about myself and things I enjoyed talking about, which was more or less shit. In my mind, this was very unprofessional, so I decided to make a drastic change. For the first time, Designkai would no longer serve as a portfolio for me. Ever again. I decided I would split my portfolio into a separate website which is completely stand-alone as just a portfolio. This should be running soon.
However, during this drastic overhaul I figured it would be worthy to re-build the way Designkai handles and presents content. The new Designkai, as of now, will serve as more of a resource/article website for designers or people who like to read the ranting of a madman often bored. But don’t get my wrong, I don’t intend to keep it as just me writing, hint hint. So what will be the benefits of the new Designkai? Lets have a look shall we;
- More interesting articles – they will now have a point, they will now make a point and they will now hopefully fill a small void of information as well as provide an informative and hopefully useful view on the world, although generally restricted to the world that is the internet.
- More structure – yes, much more. The articles will be researched, thought out and drafted to hopefully avoid the general bullshit that previous versions of Designkai was oh-so-good at pumping out.
- And finally, more useful – I can only hope. My aim is to provide you with the information you were looking for, and if you weren’t looking for anything, provide you with an interesting read.
