The buzz word is, what, if anything, could ever compete with Apple or produce the sought after "iPhone Killer"? The answer is: no one. But, will apple crumble under the weight of its own empire?

History and Nature run rampant with examples cultures and creatures who, as the undisputed top of the food chain, become their own worst enemies. The biggest threat to the Roman Empire was its own corruption. A human being's natural predator is other people. The Church during the middle ages found that one of its own priests, Martin Luther, was the one to tear it apart, and when new adult lions take over a pride, they often kill the young and thus eliminate the chance of any rivalry against offspring he later fathers.


The catch-word in the world of smart-phones is who or what could stand up to the marvels of the iPhone and shine brighter than it. Who or what could stand against its resplendent coolness and utility and garner the favor of the public. What, if anything, will be the "iPhone Killer." The answer is nothing will, I think.

After all, it is undeniably sleek, inexpensive (not counting service fees) and easy to use. Most Web ware is disigned specifically for its screen. It is the bench mark. It has no other natural predators - not even the Blackberry - or at least not in the same way.

But an ill wind is blowing through the social sphere for Apple. It would seem that the Mac world without any natural predators, and perhaps without the demanding vision of an ailing Steve Jobs, they've seemed to start showing little cracks and chicks in their armor, especially in their hallmark of out-thinking or defining design and ultra-no-brainer-usability.

When my wife had to call upon Apple Care to replace her 15" Mac Book Pro, her model had been discontinued and was sent the latest "upgrade." A stickler for form, she opted to haggle her way to whatever the warehouses still had in stock that resembled her older model. In the end, she fell in-line with the clamor and debate that said, "Why didn't Apple offer a matte screen when releasing the next version of their line of laptops?"

While we’ve come to accept that today’s LCD displays, particularly on notebooks, are mostly of the glossy variety, Apple took it a step further with a glass sheet on top of what already appears to be a glossy LCD screen. The affect is an unsettling double-reflection from a display that’s mirror-like.

"We’ve spent a considerable amount of time with the full range of Apple notebook displays, from the matte and glossy from the previous generation MacBook Pro to the “glassy” unibody MacBook. And we’ll be the first say that the aesthetic designs of the new unibody MacBooks are worthy of a museum, but in terms of usability, the glass-covered screen is a pain to work with even when indoors". - "MacBook Pro Glossy vs. Matte FIGHT!," February 26, 2009 by Marcus Yam http://www.tomshardware.com/

 At the end of the day, she "settled" on a 17" version that was selling in 2006, despite what she could have had with up-to-date hardware and processing power. She, the epitome of Apple's target audience that is characterized by an overarching attention to form over function, was happier with an older machine.

A month ago this popped up in my Facebook feed:

"I want to punch the dumbass at Apple who designed the latest shuffle. New shuffle is about as useful 40 lb sack of deflated footballs. Not only do I want a refund, but I now officially want Apple to get swallowed by an 8-track and Etch-a-sketch revival." - September 4, 2009 (Name withheld out of courtesy).

Presumably, the issue here was that the new shuffle has no buttons. Controlling its playback happens through controls on the headphones.

A few days later of Facebook:

"Adam P. officially hates his iphone." -September 16, 2009

A followup comment to someone considering buying an iPhone vs. continuing with a Blackberry, the same user said this:

"I'd stay stick with it. The iPhone offers the best user interface of any smartphone on the market. It's a joy to use, when it works. Unfortunately, it's tied to AT&T's decrepit network. 3G is frequently unusable, voice quality is poor, and I can seldom get through a call of more than ten minutes without having it drop. A fast car on poor roads makes little headway, while continuing to cost a lot."

This user makes a living as a computer professional, and granted he's quoting issues with his cellular carrier, but when there's only one option Apple has given for using its "fast car" then the utility of its gadget is united with the mobile carrier that supplies its pipeline. In short, it's no use pardoning the shortcomings of the iPhone because the affairs of AT&T is out of its hands. Presumably the folks who designed it dreamed, hoped and prayed that the success it has garnered is what we see today. They want to have everyone want one and own one without thinking that their options for service aught to be sufficient to accommodate infinite demand for their product.

Furthermore, it's a really swell idea and truly characteristic of Apple to have the iPhone's synchronize with iTunes. It's a really swell idea, in theory. But, anyone who has had to take their computer in for a service repair and had it returned empty and at factory condition knows that it's nearly impossible to restore iTunes back to the state you had it.

iTunes is a poor excuse for a synchronization software. Data is gold these days, and though Apple is known for removing as many buttons and extra screens as possible, having access to how and when and in which direction your data is being moved or stored is critical. It's not something to keep behind the closed doors of buttons, and certainly a task that should have more real estate than to mingle on the same patio as a juke box or a media shopping mall.

Ask anyone who has lost all their contacts when a reloaded iTunes automatically syncs and overwrites its empty library to your iPhone and you're looking at one miserable socialite.

Furthermore, if you, say, want to synchronize your contacts and calendar items with anything but iCal or MobileMe, you're in for quite a hacking adventure. Apple has yet to recognize (and it never did since that is its underlying ethos, and perhaps its beauty) that nowadays people are forming gadget ecologies. That is, when every gadget you own, touch and double click is made by Apple, there is harmony, style and perfection, but throw in a free radical like Microsoft Entourage and your whole Device's OS collapses.

Finally there are some strange hardware omissions to Apple's next generation of mainstay products. The new iPod Touch doesn't have a camera, while the iPod Nano does - but only for video. There's been a lot of speculation on why Apple, who has done the miraculous over the years with making the mouse a mainstay, creating (or at least making it commonplace) the Web app industry, for taking our mobile devices to the next level in the form of the first release of the iPhone, and in short, always being the pioneer, but now it would seem that they are becoming insincere with their fans.

Gizmodo.com has a full treatment on why their next generation of products has, not just fallen short of what we have all come to expect from Apple - miracles, but also some of their peculiar decisions on both form, their strongest suit, and function. Here's the concluding thoughts from Gizmodo's article, "Why There Is No Camera In the iPod Touch and Why That Sucks" by Jesus Diaz:

"• Feature Evolution: This, to me, is the most reasonable explanation. Apple is getting oh-so-lazy. Or, better said, greedy. They are the number one player in every single category. They own the market. And they know the competition is just catching on. So instead of releasing an iPhone that is way better than the previous model, they release the modest upgrade of the iPhone 3GS. And instead of releasing an iPod touch with a nice camera, they just slap some new software, slightly updated guts and more memory.

That's what you get when a company owns an empire, and the other tiny people are trying to catch up with an already phenomenal device. The company gets slow and complacent, and does the minimum to keep its products ahead."

 And so, it would seem that Apple has a finally found its match: iTself. It's hard to imagine those years when Apple was a lame and crippled company; when there was no hope that it would ever survive, much like the word around town is shouting the end of Palm. It's hard to remember that Microsoft was hot and not an "Evil Empire," but behold! They passed the baton back over to Apple.

It may very well be that Apple continues to hold its dominance for many years to come, but, it's hard to conceive of that happening. See, Apple, at its core, loathes diversity. It thrives when all of the apples in the barrel are freshly provided by their orchard. Stick anything not grown by them and their bushels rot with from that one bad apple.

It's competition - particularly next generations of Android and WebOS - will have on its side, not only a coalition of mobile providers and Goolge's army of free products to draw from in the case of Android, but also an army of pasty faced youths who have a small learning curve ahead of them in designing for WebOS. In short Apple has fallen, already, way behind in what is the zeitgeist of Web 2.0: namely, open sourcing and open platforms.

They're miserly with their products and shun any incursion into their territory.

Frankly, that will be their undoing, and their time in the sun as the undisputed top of the food chain will fade.

Recently, Zarathustra came out of his cave, had a sudden shiver run down his spine; he yawned, and in the last hurrah of his expiration, he sighed, saying: "Circuit City is dead."

Shopping is at last in the hands of the people, he thought; no longer a dictum of the mega-conglomerate Gods, but dictated and shaped by the terrestrials: the user, the blogger, the five-starred volunteer reviewer.

And so, with this thought, Zarathustra walked down from his aerie towards the nearest village to spread the good news that commerce was now in their hands, and that by their own hands they destroyed the monolith of hegemony. Individuality was restored, he thought, and though the products - the manna - that the Gods of commerce would continue to shower on their target demographic with nifty electronics, at last, the marketing rested in the hands of an individual's personal story - their experience in the form of a review.


At last, he thought, shopping and trade were now the responsibility of the people and the villages, and he hastened to tell them of it.


The first villager he encountered scuttled out of a shopping frenzy of 30-percent off 30-percent that would make city pigeons lusty with envy that they no longer held the scavenging title for a while.


And when Zarathustra approached him, the feverish-eyed villager rushed passed carrying an oblonged box under his arm and looking like he had just gotten away with murder. He was hastening to stash his eBay auction before anyone noticed it was in his possession.


Zarathustra spoke: "Good man, what haveth you under your arm?"


The villager smiled with pride. "I just got the HP TouchSmart IQ816 for next to the price of dirt. You oughtta run to Circuit City before they run out."


"Are they going to forget how to make them, or will computers or even electricity to power them disappear," Zarathustra asked mildly.


"No, but Circuit City's gonna run out of them."


"Precisely!"


The villager frowned. "After that, dummy, we'll have to wait for Best Buy to liquidate before you can get your brand new wares at close-out. And if that happens, then you'll just be buying direct from manufacturers and distributors. No more playing with them in-store and getting the best deal online."


"Or buying them slightly used on eBay or reconditioned from the manufacturer," added Zarathustra.


"Right!"


"So what are you going to do with that one under your arm?"


"I'm going to flip it by posting it to eBay. Make a few bucks off of it."


Zarathustra began to get glassy-eyed and his soliloquy waxed with pathos. He began to unravel for the man the UberShopper - the one that buys direct from the manufacturer or from an outlet or from another, fellow villager for the best deal; and that the purchase is informed by his fellows who have used the product and his fellows who have reviewed the merchant. He unraveled the phenomena of price-at-cost of materials, labor, and delivery without the problems of overhead and marketing campaigns. He began to unravel the issue of The Long Tail, but he cut his soliloquy short because the villager walked away frustrated that this dude was saying nonsense, and he was forgetting, by the distraction, the description he had planned for his eBay posting.


Zarathustra watched the villager walk off huffing and puffing in dismay, and considered his discourse in a different way.

Aside from the obvious buzzwords that are coming out of reports and reviews of Consumer Electronics Show 2009 in Las Vegas like the Palm Pre, Windows 7 and Netbooks like the Sony Vaio P, the undisputed, most used and unnoticed buzzword on every one's lips and pens was this: the downturn in the U.S. Economy. No doubt its a frightening picture for producers of electronic goods and software to have their hard-won efforts emerge during such a treacherous consumer climate, but its even more scary for those who want to gobble up their products but are just simply unable to when their credit is maxxed out and their pay checks are either getting slashed or taken away from them; when the issue of how or where one is going to eat becomes a oppressively real possibility - even if its just overreacting to the "downturn in the economy" it bodes for some really scary, but potentially fruitful times.

MONEY FOR NOTHING: And this is how the artist reacts to society when they have drugs around!!

photo curtosy of Carly Sioux, www.paparazza.net, copywright 2009

Even on a personal note, a recent acquaintance of mine - a struggling musician - reported that his warehouse tenement, filled with starving artists and otherwise destitute but well-educated squatters has, by-and-large, resorted to dumpster diving at New York City five-stars just to survive. For them there's now a serious glut in the type of jobs that used to sustain them rather well like waiter and bartender positions, production assistant jobs and odd jobs like painting walls or other manual labor. How are they going to eat when it looks like the Internet has demolished the idea that movies (production assistant jobs) and music (gobbled up by torrents and free download) is now considered a commodity that is so plentiful that putting a dollar value on it seems nearly as ridiculous as paying for air. How will they eat, and more importantly, how and what will these highly educated, young, passionate and intensely idealistic bunch with a lot of friends and a lot of spit and vinegar for the "institution" do with themselves when they can't buy their drugs - and more importantly not by choice but because you can't find them in dumpsters; in short, what does anyone think will happen to this demographic when they sober up and can't get their drugs - the thing that was keeping their reactionary spirit at bay and pacified?


Anatomy of a Revolution by Crane Brinton , makes it clear that, though, the American, Bolshevik, and French were radically different in their dynamic and treatment of their particular issues, one thing was common to all: that they fomented in a climate of a disenfranchised young intelligentsia. In other words, revolutions happen in a climate precisely when the starving artist can't get hold of its drugs. Or, that is to say that, though Obama's inauguration provides a ray of hope that in a few years we'll be back in the land of milk-and-honey, how patient can a dope fiend be even while he's sure Obama will reverse the "downturn in the economy" once and for all on January 21, and no later than that?


Frankly, the ugly of it is that fanaticism is about to sweep over these amber waves of grain. That is that zealotism, radicalism, even rank animalism is not just something culture has endured in the history books, but also a climate that has entered the arena of this "economic downturn," and it is threatening to get tagged into the match when nobility gets worn out of pummelings by the faltering of our expectations we remember enjoying from our employers, governments and so on. That is, an ugly, passionate and reactionary social climate is now peeking out of the shadows despite the hopes that come from reclaiming some good leaders to defend us from ourselves. After all survival has its own code of morality that transcends things like the Ten Commandments, and no one can or should dispute survival-instinct's ethics of what constitutes good and evil.


On the other hand, and bringing this discourse back to point - the role of technology in these most auspicious times - while fanaticism may play out "only and hopefully" a minor role in the news, there may also be a climate riding along with it of intense creativity in solving the problems of rent and survival. That is, one need only look a few decades ago where the Baby Boomers faced what they considered an intolerable social climate, and while they got their drugs and resorted to zealotism, they, nonetheless became extraordinarily creative about how they were going to solve their situation. Granted, their generation enjoyed the luxury of a cohesive solidarity and also the knowing that what they were doing was important. Our generation - X - is faced with having to solve its predicament without the luxury of being inspired by visions of Strawberry Fields.


Nonetheless, Gen X will, despite itself, go down in the books as the generation who embraced the value of the Internet and paved the foundation for what future generations can enjoy as, probably, one of the most instrumental turns in history. That is, while things begin to hit the fan harder than what we have seen thus far, and while large segments of this culture begin their outright protests, there will also be a large chunk who turn to this Generation's enduring legacy, the Internet, and exploit its inherent assets with such creativity that no keynote speaker nor reporter nor corporate representative nor gadget engineer in CES 2009 has the gumption to admit: that every day dream and every fanciful idea and every futuristic scenario that they've had during their career is soon to become a constructive venue for the same fanaticism that will hit the streets and courthouses. The engineers who designed the iPhone are, go figure, Gen X'rs, and their protests by way of creative, technological solutions to our social climate will be nothing short of legendary.

FANATIROMANCE: "I told you not to come home until you paid the internet and brought me a working laptop, asshole"

photo curtosy of Carly Sioux, www.paparazza.net, copywright 2009

Here's, perhaps, one example where this feverish creativity could play out constructively in this "economic downturn": a Wiki Bank. It seems like a rather silly idea at this point - a bank owned and operated by a group of eager volunteers and whose funds are backed not by gold but by penny jars of massive amounts of users. For certain, there are some swarthy and capable Web coding zealots with a lot of jobless time on their hands and who watched Zeitgeist: Addendum one too many times - impressed with the notion that the real problem isn't money or banks, but current practice of charging interest for loans ... well, with the Internet's penchant for democratizing every aspect of our lives, it's not far fetched to think that, while it already democratized knowledge in the form of Wikipedia, has been democratizing the Media Industry - kicking and screaming, has been democratizing the publishing industry, is democratizing software development and proprietary knowledge, and, in short: Democratizing ... well, it's not too far of a stretch that some core institutions who form the fabric what seems to be as solid as the Earth being flat: banking ... well, that's under the gun as well - especially when financial institutions are collapsing right and left.


At any rate, while technology pundits and the average iPhone user and Web surfer all admit that the economic downturn is quite a bummer, nothing short of a miracle's - even the election of Obama - is going to clear the issue up right away and, God help us all, in time to rescue all of us without casualties. But, while our, thus-far, extravagant lifestyle that we've enjoyed since Ronald Regan gives way to the ever increasing rigors of a deep, dark recession, there's a bit of silver lining in all of this. The crucible, the kiln and the forge are hell-fire environment where metals and earth are shred apart and molten into unusual forms, but when the fires cool, something rare and beautiful are emerge where artistry has shaped those extreme situations into an artifact worthy of admiration.


Likewise, while everyone pats themselves on the back over CES 2009's success as a trade show, the lingering and resonant mentions to the economic downturn forebode what will be strong current in Technology's trends for 2009: using its latent democratizing nature for discovering left-wing, hair-brained and downright radical new ways of enduring and emerging from this long dark night of the soul that sure to face every one of us at some point before the year's out.