Goodbye, Fake Steve
Dear Dan Lyons,
[ This letter is a response to this Newsweek article. ]
Ok, you’re frustrated. We get that. I feel like you didn’t bring your journalist A-game to this subject (a little of Google I/O conference reality distortion maybe?).
Three obvious examples:
- Android outselling iPhone. Given that Verizon has more customers than anyone, and that there are several variants of Android phones, and some of them are offered for $.01, how surprising is it that a hot phone offered essentially free sells well? To report this as “Customers Choose Android Over iPhone” is exactly what the marketing people at Verizon and Google wanted you to say when they decided to offer their phones for free.
“If we did not act, we faced a draconian future where one man, one company, one carrier would be our future.”
- A Google exec promoting his company as a defender of the common man against the evils of a competitor with an eye toward monopoly is these days more ridiculous than hearing those words from someone at Microsoft.
- [Android OS] “blowing past Apple in terms of the technology it’s delivering.” Google has ANNOUNCED a bunch of very cool stuff, but NONE of it is in a phone you can buy today. And the implication you make is that Apple is resting on its laurels, which you of course know is not true (are you going to be at WWDC again next month?)
However, to your rage about ATT and iPhones dropping calls: Amen. My email signature says “Sent from my iPhone, because who knows WHAT would happen if I tried to use it as a phone…”
That said, you’re making way too much out of the woes you list. You’re an uber-geek. Every regular person I know with an iPhone thinks it’s no less than great. Yes there are issues here and there, but really: what product do you own that doesn’t occasionally disappoint?
Your reporting here is misleading and sensationalist. You touch on some big issues (monopoly, innovation-stifling, bad corporate behavior), but instead of unpacking these rationally in a way that might elevate the conversation, you delivered a Fox News-worthy rant.
Your Fake Steve work was once supreme. Thank you for that, but time to move on. Retire FSJ, excise his zealotry from your psyche, and get back to good reporting.
Namaste. I wait for the time when your insightful thoughts and my enquiring mind again become one.