Tag Archives: apple

Steve Wozniak’s Twitter bio

Steve Woz

Woz

I just glanced over Woz’s twitter profile because I wanted to tweet this Bloomberg article about him. What he notes in his 160-character-limited bio is notable for what it doesn’t contain.

Here it is in list form:

  1. Engineers first!
  2. Human rights.
  3. Gadgets.
  4. Jokes and pranks.
  5. Segways.
  6. Music and concerts.
  7. Gameboy Tetris*.

He recently did a Q&A over at Slashdot and someone asked him “Do you feel like you were dealt the short end of the stick where Apple is concerned?

Woz’s response:

Our union was very lucky. I think it was luckier for Jobs since I had strong internal philosophies that didn’t connect my happiness with business success or money or power. I built projects for myself and the Apple ][ was the 6th of those that Jobs saw (when he got into town) and said we could sell them. We always split the money evenly as far as I knew but money is not my thing in life. My best days were in the lab building things for myself. But I’m so nice that I give almost all my time now to young people and fans that I can help. I love my life the way it is and told that to Jobs in one of our last phone calls before his death.

A class act, through and through.

* Woz’s love of Tetris is one of my favorite side-stories about him. He was so prolific that his name was banned in the Nintendo Power listings for being listed too frequently. Here’s how he hacked around that.

Woz and Religion

As interesting as Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is, I liked the parts that featured Steve Wozniak the best. So I picked up Woz’s memoir – iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It – and read it at the same I read Jobs’s biography. As expected, Woz’s perspective contains much more detail about the technical underpinnings behind Apple’s early success, partly to clear up any misconception that Jobs invented everything himself.

The detailed technical narratives by Woz are worth the price alone. But his non-technical reflections could also fill a book.

Here’s his take on religion:

So this was a hard social time for me. I remember that at one point I was taking some night classes at San Jose State and this pretty girl comes up to my table in the cafeteria and says, “Oh, hi.” She just starts talking to me, and I’m so nervous all I can think to ask her is what her major is. She says, “Scientology.”

I’d never heard of this, but she assured me it was actually a major and I believed it. She invited me to a Scientology meeting, and of course I went. I ended up in the audience watching this guy make this incredible presentation about how you can basically be in better control of yourself and that you could get really happy from that.

After the meeting, the girl I met sat with me in some little office for an hour, trying to sell me these courses to become a better person. I was going to have to pay money for them. I said to her, “I’ve already got my happiness. I’ve got my keys to happiness. I don’t need anything. I’m not looking for any of this stuff.” And I meant it. The only thing I might’ve wanted was a girlfriend, that’s for sure, but the rest of the stuff I already had.

I had a sense of humor, and I had this attitude about life that let me choose to be happy. I knew that whether to be happy was always going to be my choice, and only my choice.

Wozniak, Steve (2007-10-17). iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (pp. 83-84). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Even if Woz played a bigger role in the Apple’s post-Macintosh era, you could forgive Jobs’s biographers for not devoting much more space to him: there’s just not much mystery or drama behind what Woz does. He’s just as astounding a mensch as he is an engineer. As predictable as that is, I still find myself going back and re-skimming his memoir for enjoyment and enlightenment.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

(I love that the filename for this Steve Jobs photo on apple.com is: http://images.apple.com/home/images/t_hero.png)

It’s hard to believe that we’ll ever see such a passionate and imaginative inventor in this generation again. R.I.P. Steve.

His 2005 commencement speech to Stanford:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Anna Kendrick, etc. at the Apple SoHo store

The cast of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” made an appearance at the SoHo Apple store. I think I was the oldest person there, except for the older uncle who was pathetically trying to give kids money for their Scott Pilgrim cheap-ass memorabilia (even for $20-$40, no kid wanted to talk to him. I ended up giving him my lanyard because I felt sorry, and the sad fellow didn’t even say thank you).

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World at SoHo Apple Store, Michael Cera, An

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World at SoHo Apple Store, Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, Jason Schwartzman, Edgar Wright

Kendrick plays such a difficult, uptight character in “Up in the Air”, which wasn’t a favorite of mine to begin with, that you forget that behind all those acting chops is an old fashioned hottie.

Scott Pilgrim cast at SoHo Apple Store

I would’ve gone just to see Edgar Wright talk, though. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were pretty much brilliant. Without his name behind the helm of “Scott Pilgrim”, I would’ve dismissed it as another cute-but-not-as-good-as-Superbad-Michael-Cera-teen-comedy. Cera was funny, but the awkward-kid-schtick only goes so far, it was a lot more interesting to hear Wright talk about trying to emulate Hong Kong movies.

Steve Jobs, adorably wrong, 14 years ago

Great time capsule from longform.org, a 1996 Wired interview with Steve Jobs, in which he makes a laughably wrong prediction on the impact of the web and an existential lament, long before his cancer diagnosis:

The Web is going to be very important. Is it going to be a life-changing event for millions of people? No. I mean, maybe. But it’s not an assured Yes at this point. And it’ll probably creep up on people.

It’s certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It’s certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It’s not going to be that profound.

We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

And here, maybe one of the more profound, humble statements from a CEO I’ve read. Puts those keynote addresses in which Jobs hops around the stage with a new gadget in a new light:

The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t…I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Birth Control? There’s an iPad app for that.

The baby products label, Pampers, put out a free app called “Hello Baby” which lets you input your baby’s info, get a week-by-weeky depiction of what it looks like in the momma, and then probably reminds you on the baby’s birthdate to buy Pampers.

It’s great, actually, to see the real-life size of a four-week old embryo. But bringing the iPad to the bar and showing everyone the real-size of a 20+ weeks-old fetus, that might prevent a lot of unwanted (and wanted) pregnancies from even starting.

Bercovici on 4G-iPhone: Apple could sue Gawker for buying “stolen goods”

DailyFinance’s Jeff Bercovici makes a compelling case that Gizmodo opened itself to criminal and civil penalties by paying someone $5,000 for the “found” iPhone prototype. He argues that California law compelled the finder, and Gizmodo, to make good-faith efforts to find the owner. Gizmodo’s efforts to return the device (before taking it apart and making millions of page hits from it) were at best, lazy and uninterested, and worst, nominal for the sake of covering-their-asses in a legal suit, Bercovici writes:

At heart is the question of whether the person who found the phone made “reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him,” as required by the California penal code. In its account of what happened, Gizmodo says the finder “asked around” the bar where he found it. And after realizing it was an Apple prototype, he called several numbers at the company.

What he never did, however, was notify anyone who worked at the bar, according to its owner, Volcker Staudt. That would have been the simplest way to get the phone back to the Apple employee who lost it, who “called constantly trying to retrieve it” in the days afterward, recalls Volcker. “The guy was pretty hectic about it.”

Nor did the finder report it to the Redwood City Police Department, says Sgt. Dan Mulholland. To be fair, no one from Apple told the police the phone was lost, either. I contacted a company spokeswoman to ask why not but never heard back.

And make no mistake: In this case, it was up to Gawker to establish that the seller legally possessed the property. Paul J. Wallin, a founding partner at the California law firm Wallin & Klaritch, offers an analogy. “If you purchase a Rolex watch at a swap meet for $200, a reasonable person would be put on notice that it might be stolen goods,” he says. The buyer would thus be required to take extra measures to determine that it wasn’t.

When I asked Denton what steps his company took to ensure that the seller had, in fact, made a good-faith effort to return the phone to Apple before shopping it around, he redirected the question. “We weren’t convinced the phone was even a genuine prototype until the weekend [ie. after Gizmodo bought and dismantled it],” he said. “And we didn’t discover the name of the Apple engineer who lost it until Monday. We called him and — after Apple officials got back to us — we returned the device to them.”

After further reflection, Bercovici is even more committed in his stance:

I understand the moral calculus they used. We all feel intuitively that picking up something that someone else left behind is not as bad as seizing it by force, stealth or deception. But in the eyes of the law, it’s still stealing. And buying stolen goods is a crime. In those rare cases where a journalist commits a crime and receives the benefit of prosecutorial discretion, it’s usually because he can demonstrate there was a compelling public interest at stake. There is no such interest here. The only parties who benefited from Gizmodo’s story are Gawker Media and Apple’s competitors.

It’s hard for me to pick a horse in this race. I’m a frequent reader of Gawker, though Gizmodo turned me off for awhile with their remotely-tampering-with-CES-displays stunt, and I most definitely read through their iPhone dissection (I also thought Giz had the best iPad app coverage). I think Bercovici is right, but if Giz is the purveyor of stolen info, then I definitely didn’t take the moral high ground by avoiding it.

On the other hand, I hope that if this disclosure can be shown not to have hurt Apple’s bottom line, I hope they ease up on their infamous, and now-tiringly-overdone commitment to secrecy. Not for the sake of its info-hungry fans, but for the workers employed by police-state-like distributors.

See full article from DailyFinance.

iPad: First Impressions

iPad at Fat Cat

As if chess at a bar wasn't geeky enough. I think we raised the bar at West Village's Fat Cat.

So I plunked $580 for the 16GB wireless iPad (that includes tax and the Apple case), plus about $60-$80 more on apps. I already have a laptop, a blackberry, and a netbook…but I justified this luxury purchase because I do think that tablet computing (whether or not the iPad leads it) will be the next boom in computer usage, and I’d like to at least be aware of it.

And I like doodling and watching movies in bed.

That said, I didn’t have a strong response for everyone who asked “How is this different than a bigger iPhone?” There’s not much difference, actually, but I think we have yet to see what touch-computing can offer, and it’s a decidedly different experience than a traditional laptop. I’ve owned a MSI Wind for a year now and barely use it, unless I need to pack a laptop when I’m carrying camera equipment around. I’ve already played more games and watched more movies in the past two days on the iPad than I have on my netbook, it just seems better suited for it. I think the lack of a attached keyboard makes for a fundamentally-different experience as least as significant as the iPod Touch (and to some extent, the iPhone) over every other mp3 player before it.

Brushes pic

One of my first attempts on Brushes

I’m not much of an artist, but I’ve always wanted to just sketch for fun without the hassle of buying and maintaining art supplies. A mouse and Illustrator just doesn’t do it for me, nor would a tablet connected to a laptop. Brushes has been one of my favorite apps so far.

I’ve mostly stopped playing video games. I downloaded a few of the marquee titles, including Real Racing, and barely touched them after a few minutes. But the more social, multiplayer games, like Flight Control and the various board games, were really entertaining when the bar we were at, Fat Cat, didn’t have the games we wanted.

As far as productivity…I haven’t used it at all for anything meaningful. When I was sitting around in my living room with both the laptop and iPad, I still, out of habit, switched to my laptop to do even just regular browsing. Typing is a wrist-killer…and touch-navigating the web is still cumbersome.

Didn’t do much reading, but I like that one of the free apps allows you to download classics like Alice in Wonderland for free, with pretty decent, readable text. I still do most of my New York Times reading on my Blackberry as I’m waiting in line or at the subway.

I think I’ll keep the iPad for now…Selling it while people still think it’s cool is still a possibility…but I see a lot of potential in it so far. But I wholeheartedly agree with Kotaku’s Mike Fahey: I feel like an asshole for owning an iPad and don’t feel comfortable using it in public, yet. That kind of reduces the device’s utility…For now, I’m keeping the plastic wrap on it that it came with.

Some other notes:

Cons:

  • I synced up my iPad just now for the first time with my laptop. I took awhile to figure out how to transfer photos from my laptop to the iPad (using the not-so-visible Photos tab in iTunes, and then having to create a special folder on my computer with duplicate copies of photos). And while it was doing that, it decided to delete all the apps from the iPad. The file management on the iPad, as it has been with the iPod, is fucking stupid, and possibly the worst part of any iProduct. I stopped using Sony products because of their proprietary – and generally inferior – formats (a $200 voice recorder I bought years ago is useless because Sony no longer produces/updates the software to access its files). I hope Apple doesn’t go the same path.
  • Apps were generally buggy. Netflix crashed many times.
  • Still haven’t figured out how to comfortably type.
  • Takes awhile to charge up the battery.
  • It’s hard to find a good Chess or Cards game…either they have hotseat-multiplayer or computer AI, rarely both.
  • Yeah, it is a bit heavy to not be resting on your lap.

Pros

  • Touch-interface is as solid as it is on the iPod Touch.
  • Being able to lockdown the screen rotation is great.
  • Lots of decent free apps. My favorite so far are craigsphone (craigslist on the pad), the NYT editor’s choice, Netflix, and Free Books
  • The launch games have been pretty good, including Flight Control, Minigore, Real Racing
  • Netflix streaming on my nightstand is great. Finally, I’ll finish 30 Rock.

Who better understands freedom of the press? An Apple supplier, or Chinese state police?

A Reuters reporter tried to photograph, from the street, a Foxconn plant that was rumored to be manufacturing parts for Apple products. Foxconn guards chased him, stopped the taxi he tried to escape in, and tried to drag him into the factory while beating him.

Who saved the reporter? Chinese police, who had to remind Foxconn guards that it is legal to take pictures from a public street.

In China, a Reuters reporter found out the hard way how seriously some Apple suppliers take security.

Tipped by a worker outside the Longhua complex that a nearby Foxconn plant was manufacturing parts for Apple too, our correspondent hopped in a taxi for a visit to the facility in Guanlan, which makes products for a range of companies.

As he stood on the public road taking photos of the front gate and security checkpoint, a guard shouted. The reporter continued snapping photos before jumping into a waiting taxi. The guard blocked the vehicle and ordered the driver to stop, threatening to strip him of his taxi license.

The correspondent got out and insisted he was within his rights as he was on the main road. The guard grabbed his arm. A second guard ran over, and with a crowd of Foxconn workers watching, they tried dragging him into the factory.

The reporter asked to be let go. When that didn’t happen, he jerked himself free and started walking off. The older guard kicked him in the leg, while the second threatened to hit him again if he moved. A few minutes later, a Foxconn security car came along but the reporter refused to board it. He called the police instead.

After the authorities arrived and mediated, the guards apologized and the matter was settled. The reporter left without filing a complaint, though the police gave him the option of doing so.

“You’re free to do what you want,” the policeman explained, “But this is Foxconn and they have a special status here. Please understand.”

The rest of the article is quite interesting and asserts that Apple’s obsession with secrecy permeates into its supply chain, causing each supplier to be extremely stringent with their employees and goods.

Last year, a Foxconn employee in China jumped to his death, reportedly after being interrogated by his employer on suspicion of sneaking out an iPhone prototype. The blame can’t be placed all on Apple, as this Reuters article from July 2009 points out: Chinese counterfeiters, and lack of enforcement of intellectual property laws, makes the theft of product a bit more damaging to the bottom line.

As for whether secrecy itself makes an Apple product more desirable…I’ve known about the iPad for a month, with all of its shortcomings. I’m still thinking about getting one. The problem is the product iterations; I waited for the new iPod model because I assumed it had a camera. If it leaked out that the new iPod touch was a minor increment, I would’ve gotten my Canon S90 point-and-shoot a lot earlier…