We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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An Apple-produced television set is still in the rumour-mill, but the concept still mystifies us. Media outlets are proposing that Apple will do with the television industry what they did with the computer, music, and cell-phone industries. But TV isn’t the same beast, because of much of what TV is is not the hardware, or even the software, but the content distribution. That is to say, what brings value to your television beyond its size and image quality is what you have connected to your TV: a DVD or Blu-ray player, a gaming console, or simply your cable tuner. All of these accessories make use of content from different distribution methods, be it optical media, digital streaming, or something else.

Apple influenced computers by re-engineering the hardware and software; they made computers simpler.¹ They didn’t invent a better internet. And they backed content distribution formats that already existed, favoring those with longer expected lifespans (first optical discs, now digital streaming) versus those that were on their way out (first floppies, now Blu-ray). People bought Macs because they were easier to learn, were more stable, and abstracted a lot of the things Average Joe hates about computers (blue screens of death, configuration issues, et al).

Apple repeated the process with the music industry by making a better mp3 player, and then pushing a distribution method that already existed (digital downloads), albeit in a pay-for-content form. People bought iPods because they had better interfaces than the competition, generally greater storage capacities, all wrapped in a robust package that interfaced nicely with Apple software.

When Apple took on the cell phone market, they took on hardware that, like PCs earlier, were built on a myriad of shaky hardware platforms, with non-intuitive software interfaces, and with limited downloadable apps available through expensive, extremely proprietary outlets. People bought iPhones because the price was right, and because the iPhone easily leveraged the market Apple built with the iPod.

With tablets, Apple further abstracted the things Average Joe hates about PCs, providing the iPhone’s intuitive UI in a larger format for better web browsing and general computer use. Arguably, they made the tablet space, which is somewhat of a first for Apple.²

But televisions aren’t tablets. While Apple may have thrown around the idea of taking on carriers directly with the release of the iPhone, they ultimately signed a deal with AT&T to use existing infrastructure. Now surely, in the television space, Apple is better positioned to take on the carriers, because Apple already has a distribution platform they’ve successfully used since the iPod was born. But unlike each area Apple tackled before, televisions aren’t inherently broken. You can argue that TVs should be easier to set up, what with channel scanning, picture calibration, input configuration, DVR setup, etc. But these are problems with accessories, particularly those utilizing legacy inputs. If Apple sold a TV that dismissed legacy devices entirely (as Apple once shirked floppies and Blu-ray), would consumers buy the device? Would enough consumers buy the device to make entering this market worthwhile?

The Apple TV of today (the iOS-running media box) is a perfect test of this market, and it’s not clear just how profitable it’s been for Apple. The Apple TV is great because it’s instant-on, and it’s not hard to see how embedding this device into a conventional TV may make sense, just as some TVs sold today already offer some internet services like Pandora, Netflix, etc. But if you can buy an Apple TV today for $100, why would anyone replace their entire television to the tune of $2000+ just to have a fully-integrated solution? For such a solution to be elegant, it would likely reserve only HDMI inputs, and no matter how Apple wanted to go about it, setup would remain tedious without lots of hardware being integrated off the bat (like an audio solution).

Sure, we can envision a sleek, Apple-branded television that comes with surround-sound speakers, complete with an audio configuration wizard to optimize sound. It would indeed be an elegant solution, but at what price? People don’t replace their TVs as often as they do their computers and mobile devices. If anything, most people wait until they actually have the space for a big-screen TV, their TV dies, or a major new display technology is unveiled.³ So sure, we can envision such an object, but not outside Apple’s research lab.

For a consumer product, Apple would be better off working with TV manufacturers to create “Apple TV-ready” televisions, where a designated HDMI port would always be the default when turning a TV on, such that the first thing a user sees is the Apple TV. With some fancy integration, attached Apple TVs could control access to other input ports to access attached consoles and legacy hardware, so in effect, an Apple TV “brain” would ensure a perfect user experience. With no Apple TV attached, however, the television would simply revert back to the “generic” menus most TVs have today.

Think we’re wrong? Drop us a tweet and explain what would compel you to shell out big money to replace your existing HDTV.⁴

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The last several years have shown us the demise of retail giants like Circuit City and CompUSA. In a way, the birth of these big-box retailers was out of necessity: electronics and computers were typically too complicated for the average consumer to research without help from knowledgeable salespeople. On Monday, Larry Downes at Forbes wrote a piece on Best Buy’s recent disappointing earnings announcement, and how Best Buy may soon go the way of the dodo as well.¹

With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums.

The problem isn’t with a lack of compelling hardware, or even Apple’s rise.² Rather, it’s entirely about a lack of customer service. Forbes addresses this by discussing the annoying up-selling and cross-selling that salespeople are required to try, but that’s not the main problem. It’s the education.

It doesn’t take much to become a retail employee at one of these stores. Your average Best Buy is staffed by teenagers and college kids trying to earn a bit of pocket change. Occasionally you’ll find someone who’s been selling TVs for the last ten years and knows the brands and tech and usability of each option quite well, but how often does that happen? How often is the basis of hiring an employee to truly understand the products they’re selling, and educate them about the products over the course of their employment?

On our last trip to Best Buy, we eyed the integrated Bose surround sound systems offered. There were three. Between two salesmen, neither could tell us the extent of the differences between systems, and the prices were no better than what we could get from Bose directly. Neither salesman could offer suggestions on comparable equipment, both agreeing that “Bose is the best”.³ When we asked a question they couldn’t answer, they looked on Best Buy’s web site.

Here’s the thing: we can go online, too, and we do.⁴ As a kid, when our father wanted to shop for a piece of electronics, we’d drive down to the local electronics store where we were greeted by grown men who knew the products they sold inside and out. They didn’t have to consult a big book to determine what options a given company had, or what a particular device could or could not do. They knew these answers because it was their job, and in order to do their job well, they had to stay educated about their trade. That quality is lost these days, and it’s easier and quicker for us to do some online research and make a purchase on the web than it is to get shoddy information from a kid who only knows to get on Best Buy’s web page for more information about what they sell.

Don’t think we’re singling out Best Buy, here. The same is true wherever we go these days. Pride in knowing your product is left to very niche, small outlets.[^4] A local Starbucks barista didn’t know the definition of “fair trade coffee”. A Target employee in the cell phone area didn’t know what Jawbone was, or what the display of the Jawbone Up was for. If your employees don’t know their product, then they’re failures. And you are too.

We’re reminded of the magical Macy’s from Miracle on 34th Street, which ended up formalizing a policy to direct buyers to exactly what they were looking for even if Macy’s itself didn’t have it. Nowadays, retail employees can’t do this, because they barely even know their own, in-house products. But maybe the decline of big retailers will increase the gaps that smaller, niche retailers can fit. Looking to put a home theater system together remains a confusing endeavor, and there’s still opportunity for small retailers in this space. Growing that expertise into something profitable, however, will be a challenge, especially given the low salaries most salespeople are forced to cope with.

As for Best Buy, we won’t miss ‘em.

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As a followup to our last post on the Jawbone UP, we thought it appropriate to provide an update to our UP experience, which has unfortunately stalled. While we were among a group of users who didn’t have any notable problems with our UP, we’re now part of the class of users who have a non-functional UP band.

Our band worked fine up until a few days ago, when we noticed that the Smart Alarm would only vibrate twice before stopping. This wasn’t immediately apparent, as we first thought that perhaps, in a sleepy state, we hit the alarm off button and forgot about it, but after a couple days of missing the alarm (thankfully we were on vacation), we realized that there were only two vibration cycles before the band stopped the alarm automatically. We suspect that the software on the device was still working, as we still noticed a flashing light on the UP when the alarm went off, despite the vibrations having stopped.

We sent Jawbone customer support a message through their web site explaining the problem, and in a couple short hours later, we received a message back saying that we could reset the band by holding the band’s button while we plugged it in. The capacitors would be reset once we released the button and the band was plugged in, and hopefully this would fix our problem.

Strangely, that same day, despite our band reporting it had a 30% charge left in the morning, it died in the afternoon. We tried the reset trick that evening, and had a full charge by bed-time. The next morning, we noticed the alarm, and at first thought that the two-vibration cycle was still in effect, but after a short delay after the second vibration, the alarm continued, and we thought all was well. Happy, we continued to wear our band that day, but by late afternoon, the band again reported a low battery. So, we plugged her back in.

Unfortunately, despite a charge of two+ hours, the band didn’t come back on; the band continued to report a low battery, and we couldn’t even sync the band with our iPhone. In short, our band too had become a “brick”. We left the band plugged in to a power source for the rest of the night, but nothing had changed by morning.

We sent a followup e-mail to Jawbone, this time including contact information which Jawbone’s prior e-mail had asked for in the event the reset trick didn’t work. Again, in a couple short hours we had a response, complete with confirmation number that a new band would be on its way to us, and that there was no need to send out old band back.

This tells us two important things:

1) Jawbone presumably has enough diagnostics information on hand from other customer band’s that they don’t need ours to help determine why UPs have failed since release.

2) Jawbone customer service is awesome.¹

Sure, we’re disappointed that the product we bought failed in so short a time, but we’re very happy with Jawbone’s response to the issue. In fact, Jawbone’s customer support was so fantastic, that we would gladly purchase another product from them in the future. Other companies should take note of this, because even if an unfortunate issue comes up in a product, it’s how the respective company responds that determines whether the customer remains loyal. In this case, assuming Jawbone continues to put out awesome products, we won’t hesitate to buy from them again.² Good job, Jawbone!

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“So it’s come to this” I thought as I held down the white iPhone’s power button. A frustrating task because it took time, and any time not spent doing what I wanted was time wasted. I only had the bastard for a few days when all of a sudden its data feed died, going out while I I clamored to log in to Evernote before the moment to grab a picture passed before the moment to grab a picture passed. The 3G indicator was still on, but the cursed phone just sat there, miniature hamsters spinning away to no avail.

“Fuck you” I silently cursed, waiting a moment before I pressed the power button again to complete the reboot cycle. But it didn’t work as its wont to fail. A third press, this time longer, and the phone woke from its slumber. A full thirty seconds before it sprang back to life, but spring back it did with its data stream intact. I shrugged. “What causes such a strange 3G outage?” I wondered, as if my phone were a patient and I were its confused doctor.

I thought about how every phone I’ve owned has required reboots and shut-downs and airplane-mode cycles to fix various issues and stability problems. They’re like Windows PCs in the 90s, requiring a dozen reboots a week to keep the wheels greased and moving smoothly. As phones became more complicated and smart, so did the need to reboot them rise accordingly. That is, until the iPhone, when there was a noticeable drop in the frequency of such reboots. And now, my iPhone runs days, if not weeks, without needing to sleep, clamoring on with only the occasional hiccup.

“The value of a mobile device is inversely proportional to the frequency of its required reboots”, I concluded. One may wonder why such reboots are necessary at all, and why radio issues and platform stability can’t be addressed in a way that doesn’t force the user to lose a minute of their time on a boot sequence. And I wonder this too, but right now I’m busy capturing a scene into Evernote.

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Recently, John Gruber linked to a new Kickstarter campaign for a fairly nice iPhone dock, called the Elevation Dock. As Gruber notes, it’s certainly a beautiful dock, but we question how useful it is. Particularly, in regards to FaceTime:

The dock’s acoustics make the iPhone sound great and less tinny than when laid on a desk, so speakerphone and FaceTime calls sound better. And its angled back 8 degrees, so you are perfectly in frame of the video.

Here’s the problem the Elevate, and most every other dock out there, have: they keep the iPhone in portrait mode. That’s fine for some features, but it’s horrible for FaceTime, which just looks so much better in landscape mode. We’ll admit that we’re starting to use our iPad in portrait mode a lot more often than in the past, but even for FaceTime, we set our iPad up in landscape mode because we prefer to see video maximized.

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On browsing the feed for Stephen Hackett’s excellent blog, 512 Pixels, we came across a post quoting Garret Murray on the Jawbone UP:

Don’t buy this piece of shit. It doesn’t work, it will fail, and the software is terrible. Jawbone is still selling them even though they know they’re all future bricks. Don’t buy one.

For what it’s worth, our Jawbone UP has worked fine since we bought it on the first day of release. We own a medium UP, and the one issue we experienced with a night of sleep not getting logged was because of a software bug not accounting for daylight savings time. That bug was fixed a day or two after the UP’s release with an app update. Beyond that, we haven’t had any frustrations with the device, though we’ll caveat that with three other remarks:

1. We’ve experienced the occasional “sync error”, but unlike Murray’s experience, it’s been far from “75% of the time”. In fact, we’ve had, maybe, three sync errors in the several weeks we’ve owned our UP.
2. The battery life does not meet the expected 10-day operating window. On average, we estimate the UP loses about 15% of its charge per day, which means we have to plug the UP in every six or so days for a recharge. Is the battery getting weaker over time? It’s too early to tell.
3. The software feels like a beta, not because it’s “buggy” like Murray claims (because it’s not), but because it’s not as feature rich as we’d like, especially in regards to food intake. Jawbone’s actions seem to suggest they’re aware of this, and plan to increase the scope of what they track.[^1]

Murray complainsabout the UP movement tracking being off, but it’s no more off than similar devices. There’s a limit to what the UP can and cannot track, and we feel that as a daily average, it does fine. Yes, it’s logged steps as we brushed our teeth, but it’s also not logged steps at the local market because we were holding a Starbucks coffee cup and weren’t adequately swaying the respective arm. Again, we’re looking for a reasonable daily estimate. If you want highly accurate tracking, then track only specific events using UP’s workout mode, and don’t wear the UP when you’re at your desk and you know you’re not moving around.

This problem partially extends to sleep as well. The UP uses movement to determine your light versus deep sleep patterns. The problem is that its alarm utilizes this movement to decide when to wake you up in a 30-minute window. For a single person or someone who does not have pets, this might work fine. But when you share a bed with another person and have cats that like to crawl around on you all morning, what this leads to is being woken up within two minutes of that window’s start time.

We’re not sure what Murray’s getting at here. Is he moving to swat at his cats, or are his cats pulling at his arm? In other words, what is causing him to move, which ultimately sets off the alarm? If he’s physically moving his arm (meaning he’s no longer in deep sleep), then the alarm should be going off, cats or not.

Was it truly a coincidence that I happened to be in light sleep at the start of that window every morning? Based on how insanely tired I felt when it woke me up, I doubt it. A further problem is there is no way to snooze the UP, so if you don’t get up right away, you’d better have a backup alarm.

This confirms that Murray just doesn’t get what the UP is designed to do here. If you’re not getting adequate sleep in the first place, you’ll be tired whether or not the UP goes off because of movement or because it hit the alarm time. Adding a snooze button entirely defeats the purpose of this system, as it’s supposed to wake you when you’re in a lighter sleep and therefore less tired when getting up. If you’re willing to ignore the alarm and go back to sleep, then this system isn’t for you, because you’ve just acted contrary to its design: get a “normal” alarm clock and stop bitching.

I’ve yet to hear from anyone who has had an UP for more than a few weeks that works.

Well, we’re one. Maybe we’re lucky, but it’s doubtful that we’re the one exception that proves the rule.[^2] Maybe our UP will die tomorrow, but for the last several weeks, we’ve enjoyed using our UP daily, and would still recommend it to others. We’d tell them to be aware that some UPs are having issues, but that if they get one that doesn’t, they’ll have a convenient movement tracker and alarm that works wonderfully alongside an iOS device.

[1]: We base this statement on an e-mail survey Jawbone sent UP users about what features they’d like to see in future software releases.

[2]: That’s not to say that we deny the failure problems with the UP. We realize that there’s a real problem with UP devices bricking and losing battery capacity fairly quickly. However, our experience tells us that the major issues are only affecting some owners, even if that percentage is fairly significant.

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Paul Graham wrote a great piece on “stuff”, and how the trend of recent decades has been to amass an inordinate amount of it. It’s a message that some other bloggers have made as well, because there really is something to be said for the simplicity of having less stuff and living a more streamlined life. On a recent cross-country move where we had little personal belongings with us on the coast-to-coast drive, we found it rather refreshing to have little on our minds other than the drive ahead and locating a suitable rental at our destination. Evenings were spent with family, and our primary outlet into the rest of the world was our iPad, which is itself a statement of simplicity compared to computers of yesterday.

But this experience isn’t why we link to Paul Graham’s article. Rather, it’s this statement of Graham’s:

Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?

Most of us are probably guilty of buying something we didn’t need but that we picked up just in case, because the price seemed good. Meanwhile, we sometimes gawk at the more expensive prices associated with certain items that we really would use a lot, yet hesitate to purchase because of the up-front cost. Our philosophy has generally been to spend more money on quality items, versus buying something cheap that we’ll outgrow or have to replace in the near future because of cheaper construction. Yet, we still shy away from certain expensive items because we don’t necessarily need them, like an iPhone 4S. We do, after all, already have an iPhone 4. Some minimalists will a argue that this hesitation is just: the iPhone 4 is good enough, so skip the iPhone 4S. But Graham made a statement that’s equally valid: if we’ll use the iPhone 4S constantly, then the purchase may make more sense.

So we don’t feel as guilty about upgrading our iPhone 4 now. We advised a friend in the past that such an upgrade, based on the merits of what the new iPhone offers, is likely not worthwhile, but we’ll now revise that claim: if you use your iPhone 4 a lot, and expect to continue doing so, then upgrading to the iPhone 4S is absolutely worthwhile. More specifically, if you use the iPhone camera, and anticipate regular use of Siri, then the upgrade is definitely a functional one, and an upgrade you should really consider. If, however, you don’t use your iPhone much beyond a phone, and maybe a handful of apps, then an upgrade to the 4S is likely not worth your money.

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Perusing the official Jawbone UP forum, we caught a complaint about the UP not including bluetooth. It’s true that Jawbone devices have to date been built around bluetooth, so why require the UP to be physically plugged into your iPhone in order to synchronize data?

The simple answer is that bluetooth is a battery drain, even if you only turn it on to synchronize. A full charge on the UP is estimated to last around 10 days, and a bluetooth module would cut that number down. Further, adding a method to turn bluetooth on and off on the UP increases the complexity of the device, whereas in its current state, it has one button used only to switch between active and sleep modes (and maybe workout mode if that’s your thing).

There’s another answer too, and one that we hope went into Jawbone’s market analysis. The UP is designed to be worn all day, and that means for certain professions, walking around with a bluetooth device strapped to your wrist is a big no-no. From pilots to doctors to defense contractors, some people aren’t supposed to have devices that transmit data wireless on them in certain environments, and this means that a bluetooth-enabled UP would have a smaller customer base than the UP that Jawbone shipped.

We wondered at first why the UP uses an audio port to transfer data, and not a USB cable that plugs into the iPhone’s dock connector. It turns out, just as wireless devices are a no-no in certain work environments, the same is true for devices that can be connected via USB to a desktop. While Jawbone did ship the UP with a charge-by-USB cable, the fact that the UP doesn’t transmit data via USB means it should be an acceptable device in environments where things like USB drives are not.

Overall, an excellent move by the UP’s designers to go with a unique audio-based interface for synchronization.

We mentioned earlier that we were interested in doing a side-by-side comparison of the Jawbone UP’s sleep analysis and that done by the Sleep Cycle iPhone app. Well, user alexw at the official UP forum beat us to the punch with a sample one-day analysis. As expected, because the UP is attached to you, it’s accuracy is better than Sleep Cycle, which relies on the iPhone sitting on the corner of your bed.

Another user compared the UP to another body-mounted device, and the results were very similar. It sounds like the UP’s sleep analysis will be a much better log of sleep activity than what Sleep Cycle offers, so the UP is definitely an upgrade. The downside at the moment is that several users have noted bugs in the sleep analysis display, which at least for one night, didn’t show up at all in the detailed, landscape-based mode. Jawbone has already released an update for the UP, which is a good start, but on our end, the logged sleep from last night remains missing. Hopefully the update ensures that future logged nights display correctly.

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