The best Apple advert

I usually cringe when I see Apple adverts on TV. The print or billboard one are alright, usually just showing an attractive product in a stylish setting, but the TV ones with their self obsessive evangelism just put me off. So I think the best advert for any Apple product (aside from this one near work) is Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography.

I've been reading it for the past few weeks after being given it shortly after the man himself passed away and I'm embarrassed to say that I have found myself looking again at Apple stores, Macs and seriously considering buying every one.

I say this as someone who recently switched from an iPhone 4 to a Google Nexus 5 and bought a Nexus 7 tablet on the basis that it was as good as an iPad mini but barely 2/3 of the price. I had an iPod when I was 18 and loved it but my rule of thumb with Apple is that you pay twice as much for a product that is rarely twice as good. Nevertheless, when I next buy a computer, for the first time I might find myself tempted by a Mac.

In the chapter on the iPhone there's a great deal about how it was originally conceived as an iPod that makes phone calls and they originally tried to incorporate the iPod click wheel before giving up and going with touch screen. The click wheel worked for almost everything but they couldn't get past how difficult it was to simply dial a phone number.

But there isn't much talk about apps. This is strange because for me the revolutionary thing about the iPhone was that you could add all sorts of extra functions to your phone via the app store. Phones that could browse the internet or play music has been around for years but the iPhone stood out to me because you could download all these apps to do all sorts of useful, cool, funky things that nobody had ever considered using a phone for before. Your phone was suddenly potentially hundreds of other devices in one.

It's ironic that a company as devoted to the 'closed system' ideal as Apple was largely responsible for the situation we have now where you can add new functions to your phone that the phone's designers never even dreamed of, created by third party developers.

UPDATE 1:

Issacson actually does address the topic of apps when he talks about the launch of the iPad in 2010. Through the iPhone and iPad Apple basically jump-started an entire sub-industry within software development I'd argue that the iPhone had more to do with this initially than the iPad. Although Apple apparently planned the iPad before the iPhone, the phone was the first to come out and when the tablet was released everyone, understandably, said it was just a big iPhone.

UPDATE 2: 

Also if you want more proof that Steve Jobs was kind of an ass, here's the latest update

Labour's fragile poll lead

An interesting little experiment in this weeks Opinium / Observer poll was that we asked people if their reason for voting Labour, for example, was to vote for Labour or vote against someone else.

Unfortunately not enough people (from a research perspective) said that they were mainly voting against someone else for us to properly look at who they're voting against but we can see what proportion of each party's voters said it was partly or mainly to vote against someone else:

Labour: 32%
Conservative: 25%
Lib Dem: 28%
UKIP: 32%

By comparison to the last time we had a Conservative prime minister, Labour's poll lead is a lot smaller and this is for two reasons. First, opinion polling is much better than it was in the 80s but more importantly, the fact that we have an almost multi-party system means that the Labour party is no longer receiving as many protest votes as it might have during its last period in opposition.

Still, the fact that the Labour figure is higher than that for either governing party shows why Labour's lead is liable to collapse every so often. If people are voting for you mainly to oppose someone else then it's hardly surprising that they're the quickest to desert if circumstances change.

Would the Scottish referendum be closer if the Euro was a more attractive option?

Given the centrality of currency issues to the debate in Scotland at the moment it's interesting to imagine how different, or maybe how similar, things would be if joining the Euro was a serious option for Scotland?

A quick Google came up with this from a few years ago when the SNP were divided on whether to offer a referendum on joining the Euro or just join the EU and accept it as part of the broader package of EU membership. That was only five years ago.

Imagine that there was no Eurozone crisis or that the referendum was happening a few years ago but somehow all other factors were the same. Would Yes Scotland be ahead because the post-UK currency didn't involve pinning the country's hopes on whether or not George Osborne was bluffing about a currency union but instead meant entering a currency union with Germany, France (and Greece)? Or would Better Together be ahead because, even though Scotland is more pro-EU than England, actually joining the Euro is a step too far even then and too much of a change given how much the SNP are trying to emphasise how things will stay the same?

The other hypothetical is that let's say that the referendum results in Scotland staying but by a margin less clear than the 60-40% split predicted by polls. Let's say that the Eurozone crisis ultimately resolves itself the way Angela Merkel is hoping (continued austerity in the bailout countries, nobody leaves the Eurozone, some tightening of EU controls over Eurozone country budgets) and that the SNP continue to be the dominant party in Scottish politics. Is it unrealistic not to expect another referendum in Scotland but this time with Euro membership a much more realistic option?
Even if Better Together win in September, I doubt we'll have to wait more than a decade for another vote.

There's a democratic deficit in the EU and Britain's parties don't care

"Unelected bureaucrats", "Brussels Eurocrats" imposing their will on the British people against their wishes. Europe's democratic deficit is well established both academically and in popular culture and it's certainly one of the things that got mentioned most in the study I ran last year when we asked people what they least liked about the EU (alongside immigration).

The idea of "foreign bureaucrats telling us how to run things" is so entrenched that it's a wonder nobody has done anything about it. Why hasn't the European Union decided to do anything so that voters can have their say over what it does?

The answer is that they did. It's just that nobody in Britain seems to care.


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