Category Archives: 10th Anniversary

Celebrating ten years of the best photography blog on the planet.

Photographs – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Photographs

Ten years and ten million readers.

I started writing here ten years ago today, ten million hits ago. When titling this journal I had three topics in mind.

‘Photographers’ would address pieces about photographers whose work I like and which in some way influenced my way of seeing. The most influential by far is Henri Cartier-Bresson whose work I first chanced upon in the public library in London, when I was 10 years old. It immediately captivated and does so to this day.

‘Photography’ would address technical aspects of the craft, including both cameras and processing hardware. At the start of the last decade the latter had come to irreversibly mean no more film or chemical darkroom, but rather a digital image and a desktop computer. And thank goodness for that. The amount of time spent on the production process has never been lower. Just download, click a couple of things in LR then push Print. Done.

But the most important of those three aspects of the image captured in the title of this journal is ‘Photographs’ and that means photographs taken by me. This journal is like a television set – if you don’t like the content, switch channels. I have dozens of large prints of my snaps on the walls here, their daily examination reminding me what an absolute blast I have taking pictures. I enjoy my ‘channel’.

My primary interest is street photography and it does not hurt that America’s most photogenic city, San Francisco, is at my doorstep. To illustrate my street work of the past decade I have selected just two rolls’ worth of ‘film’. 72 snaps. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already appeared here.

What HC-B taught me at the tender age of 10 is that good street photography is much more than just pressing the button at the right moment. Sure, you cannot produce a good image from a poorly timed snap. But the other key attributes abundantly found in HC-B’s street work are a sense of drama, enhanced by an absence of clutter. Accomplishing the latter in street snaps is one of the more challenging aspects of our crowded urban environment. Drama is not an issue. There is a lot to go around in the eternal human comedy.

The other attribute which pervades my snaps is something of which the master’s work is totally devoid. Humor. The sheer pleasure, joy and frequent hilarity the streets of a great American city bring to the eye are the sublimest of pleasures. A life without humor is no life at all.

And there’s one other variable, one about which HC-B was clueless. Color. I have little interest in monochrome snaps, which mostly say to me that the photographer was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We live, as Eliot Porter reminds us, in a world of color.

A quick peek at the bottom of this journal’s page will show how those three major categories addressed here were favored over the past decade:


10 years of snaps and writing.

If the ‘Photographers’ category is light, it’s no surprise. There are few out there of note.

The decade since the first entry here on June 15, 2005 has seen this journal bring me tremendous satisfaction, lasting friendships, the joy of both learning and teaching and a wonderful outlet for whatever was in my mind on any one of those 3,000 plus days. If there have been frustrations – resulting solely from trolls who will never contribute anything useful to civilization – then these were quickly forgotten, courtesy of the Delete key and secure in the knowledge that no negative person has ever accomplished anything of value.

I hope you enjoy the slideshow I have put together of those 72 images. Every time I gaze at these snaps I enjoy perfect recall of how each was made and remember the thrill of seeing the moment come together. What other hobby can compare?

Some were sheer automated reaction as a situation presented itself, like the bike-taxi rider (#1), the selfie couple (#9), the joyous street scene (#42), the lady with the raised knee (#64), or Superman entering his car (#65). Others were carefully premeditated, like the lone snapper below the Golden Gate Bridge (#3), the solitary, seated figure outside the CJM (#13) or the lady in the Balenciaga outfit (#54). Three were actually posed – the bell ringer (#7), the unhappy pair in The Saloon (#22) on Grant Street and the glass treader in the Castro (#32). Many were simply magic, like the little boy in the window (#34), the sack carrier (#45), the man with the finger (#47) or the child chasing the bubble (#49) – these last four being snapped in the Mission District, my favorite part of the city.

The flamenco music accompanying the slide show is by Nova Menco, full of that same joie de vivre I experience on the street. Where EXIF data is spotty that’s because the related image was made with an ancient MF Nikkor before I had added a CPU to properly record everything. The occasional hiccup in inter-slide fades is thanks to Adobe’s Lightroom 6.

To view those ‘two rolls’, click the image below. All these snaps were taken in San Francisco. The running time is six minutes, or 5 seconds a slide.

[iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/132615344″ width=”1000″ height=”563″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

For those of you who have been around for the journey, some 4,000 readers daily, I extend a hearty thanks.

Technical articles – 10 years

10th Anniversary

Specialized guides.

Click on ‘Technical’ atop this site’s home screen and you will see:

Over the years several topics have captured my interest and as I believe that if you want to do something well you need to understand it at a fundamental level, I explored these in depth and, once I had meaningful data, wrote about them.


That prince among men, my dear love Bert the Border Terrier, demonstrates a large screen Seiki TV attached to one of my Hacksters. I miss that pup more than I can say.

When I got tired of watching my various Macs melt down – three G4 iBooks and three iMacs (a G5 and two Core2Duos) – I said “to heck with Apple” and built a Hackintosh. The machine was infinitely upgradable, very fast indeed and while its insides looked like the engine compartment of a Fiat it was a lot more reliable. My constantly upgraded Hackster saw me through many years of happy use and was eventually remaindered when lightly used Mac Pros became affordable. Issues? Just two. It got really old when, with every OS X upgrade, something in the Hack broke and needed …. new hacking. And Sleep never did work correctly without endless kernel panics. But the Hack community is large and vibrant and it helped keep things running. Just do yourself a favor and don’t make a Hack for income producing uses. There’s too much risk something will break when you need it most and, let’s face it, this is for guys who like English cars and motorbikes with the constant attendant care and feeding dictated by these beasts. You want’s a Lexus? You get a Mac Pro.


The best computer from Apple. Ever.

And my burgeoning series of Mac Pro articles contains not only everything you need to know about the care, maintenance and upgrade of the 2009 and later machines, it’s also superbly written and profusely illustrated. Based on solid practical experience you will never find me using words like “…. it seems that ….” or “…. it feels like ….”. These are the writings of an engineer not a ballet dancer.

At one time I published a comprehensive guide to CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pro, a high risk process, but after various cretins disclosed they had poor reading skills to accompany their grade school educations and started writing me threatening Comments I did the only two things possible: I removed those articles and I closed this site to Comments. I should have known better than to assume that my level of intelligence prevailed in the population as a whole and as for closing Comments, that was the single best thing I did since starting this journal a decade ago. Gentlemen (?), you cretinous wankers who wrote me those rude outpourings of undistilled vomit, I have but two words for you: “Up yours”. Your poison ruined the playing field for thousands.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of working Pros who know better than to tinker have availed themselves of my Mac Pro CPU upgrade service since then and not a one of them is unhappy with his investment. And nor is my educational charitable foundation which receives 100% of the net proceeds to fund scholarships for poor but bright mechanical engineering students. The last thing this world needs is more liberal arts graduates.


Just two examples of the many old MF Nikkors updated by the author.

The third technical area which absorbed me during the past decade was the updating of Nikon’s superb pre-Ai lenses to modern specifications by conferring Ai functionality and, more importantly, installing CPUs to properly record EXIF data to the related digital image files. This series is recognized as the definitive piece on the topic, is extensively read and referenced and when you read what I have written you will see why. In all cases my work was illustrated with images taken with these great Nikkors which remain mechanically the best thing Nikon ever did (that and the original Nikon F film camera). As with my Hackintosh and Mac Pro articles, you will find zero subjective claptrap with regard to the mechanical processes involved. Just hard data. This is a simple engineering exercise, not the New York Review of Books. My work brought with it tailored lens correction profiles for use in PS or LR for each of the lenses I upgraded. These are all free downloads here.


Still one of the very best printers ever made – the 18″ DJ90 or 24″ DJ130.

Finally, the HP DesignJet 30/90/130 wide carriage ink dye printers captured my attention and another set of definitive artciles on maintenance, fault diagnosis and repair put in place what the miserable management at Hewlett Packard could not. They remain widely referenced and I have had much fun time resolving issues with other users.

Sceptical about my claims? Here’s today’s visitor data for this journal:


Bots, crawlers and other trash excluded from the above.

The above constitute the core of the technical writing here and while the topics are very specialized, aficionados of great engineering may well find themselves migrating to a Mac Pro driving their DesignJet to print images from 50 year old Nikkor manual focus lenses. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that technical chain and it’s one I enjoy daily.

At the Movies – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Movies

Nothing new here.

As with books, the movies which most inspire the visual senses were all made a long time ago. The modern obsession with the action/adventure genre, along with attention spans shortened by video games and the like, largely preclude the making of beautiful movies. There’s no money in them and the Hollywood system no longer has time for art house movies.

But go back a few years and choosing just five of the most beautiful movies is not at all easy, for there is so much great work out there especially from the 1960s and 1970s.

In no particular order, then, these are the five which have most stimulated my visual cortex this past decade.

1 – Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde, directed by Luchino Visconti. 1971

Based on Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name, Death in Venice chronicles the last vacation and death of one Gustav von Aschenbach in fin de siècle Venice. Visconti’s work was always rich and lush with Italianate color and from Bogarde, a lightly regarded British comedic heart throb, he coaxed one of the very greatest performance on film. Never less than lovely to look at the movie is a treat for the ear, too, much of it set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The movie demands attention and patience, both amply rewarded. I originally saw it on its first run in Mayfair as a young man of 18 and recall well stumbling out into the Belgravia streets simply dazed and overcome with emotion.

2 РStreets of Fire, starring Michael Par̩, directed by Walter Hill. 1984.

You could not find a visual masterpiece as culturally removed from Death in Venice as this rollicking good time. Set seemingly in 1950’s Chicago and filmed almost exclusively at night, the imagery – set to a raucous Ry Cooder rock track – is startling and attention getting. Even the video game generation will get this one. The youngest movie here.

3 – Barry Lyndon, starring Ryan O’Neal, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1975

This three hour long movie is not for those in a hurry, and visually it remains unsurpassed. Rather forgotten in a Kubrick oeuvre whose admirers prefer ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’, this lushly filmed and costumed period piece is balm for the eyes. If your visual senses matter to you, this is probably the movie to see above all others. If nothing else, Marisa Berenson (the niece of that great Renaissance art expert and charlatan, Bernard Berenson) has never looked lovelier. Handel’s Sarabande dominates the sound track and could not be bettered.

My son, aged 13, had already watched it – all rapt attention – thrice, which tells you something about how you should bring up a kid in today’s world. He will be successful as a result of his attention span, not despite it.

4 – 2001: A Space Odyssey. The star is the English cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968

In the previous column, one on photography books, I made mention of the adjective ‘breathtaking’ as one which is abused yet remains useful for lovers of good English. And ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is nothing if not breathtaking. It does not hurt that the movie includes simply the most stunning cut in world cinema, the moment when the monkey hurls the bone/weapon victoriously in the air and Kubrick and Unsworth cut to a space station set to Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. Breathtaking. And if you have never quite understood Varese’s music, this is a good place to start.

5 – Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, directed by David Lean. 1962.

Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert?
T.E. Lawrence: It’s clean.

A rare moment of humor in a film which you should see, if at all possible, in a revival movie theater on a huge Cinemascope screen. I saw it thus twice when it played in the Carnegie Theater in Manhattan, close to my home on 8th Avenue and 56th Street in the mid-1980s and it really is the only way to do it justice. And speaking of great cuts, the one here is in the same class as Kubrick’s money with the femur. Lawrence, showing off his disdain for pain, snuffs out a match with his bare fingers and Lean cuts to the infinite vistas of the desert. That is special and Maurice Jarre’s music is the icing on the cake. One of O’Toole’s earliest movies and one for which he was cruelly denied the Oscar.

If there was ever a more physically perfect leading man than O’Toole, I cannot think of one and it’s lovely to hear him speak in the proper English of my youth, not the grammar school garbage emerging from the mouth of the average English speaker today.

* * * * *

With the exception of Barry Lyndon, made on Kodak film (Kubrick opting for the pastel rendering), all were made in Technicolor. No surprise there. ‘Death in Venice’ comes on an SD DVD only (a so-so print) as does ‘Streets of Fire’ (an excellent print). The others all come in Blu-Ray options and there really is no alternative but to get these.

You can see all my movie reviews here.

Photography books – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Book reviews

10 years of inspiration.

When I write ‘Photography books’ I am not referring to tomes dealing with the dry arcana of Photoshop. Rather, I mean books of photographs by great photographers, books meant to inspire and improve one’s own vision.

On that basis very little of substance has been published during the decade I have been writing this journal and one might go further and say that very little of substance has been published since Henry Fox Talbot was knee high to a grasshopper. The same goes in most fields of endeavor. There are only a few great, memorable buildings in the world. A few great leaders. A few cars. A few scientists. A few artists. A few great composers. You name it and Pareto’s principle is not 80/20 but rather 99/1. 99% of most every genre is garbage.

And so it is with photography books.

Click here and you can see the contents of my library of photography books, some three hundred all told. They lie merrily around the abode in absolutely no sort of order, an approach based in the simple belief that a good photography book should always come as a surprise. A long lost friend made new again when savored after a long absence.

And while reading devices like tablets and cell phones have obsoleted most books the one genre which remains untouched by this technological upheaval is the art book. Can you imagine enjoying Raphael’s frescoes or Cartier-Bresson’s masterpieces on a poncy 11″ display? No.

What are the qualities which makes a photography book great? The one which must surely take first place is repeatability, by which I mean that every time you return to it you see something new. Your pulse rises and you ask “How did he see that?”. So if forced to name just five favorites for the proverbial desert island, a location devoid of the culturally arid expanse that is Facebook, the choice is surpassingly simple.

1 – Steam, Steel and Stars by O. Winston Link.

‘Breathtaking’, like ‘gay’, is a once charming word which has lost all meaning, overuse and abuse having confined both to the status of grammatical detritus. Yet used in the traditional sense, the one in which maybe a Spitfire pilot might have used it about his machine when battling the Hun in the skies over London in 1940, Steam, Steel and Stars is so obviously the greatest chronicle of a bygone age that this photographer has seen. It is breathtaking.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

More than documentary, it’s a passionate memoir of the last days of steam seen through the eyes of a photographer who spared no effort in lighting his subjects – be they trains or the people charged with their care and nurture – invariably at night. And it’s literally breathtaking when you realize that as often as not his miles of cabling for the complex flash apparatus used would be severed by the very subject illuminated, as the train thundered over the wires. An absolute masterpiece and you cannot call yourself a photographer if it’s not in your library.

2 – Henri Cartier-Bresson – The Man, the Image and the World.

Realistically, just about any HC-B book will do. It’s the images which matter not the invariably blathering, pseudo-psychological texts which accompany them.

Those lucky enough to own his first – Images à la Sauvette – probably have the finest précis of the man’s oeuvre, and if you want the early HC-B, still mightily influenced by his painting teacher, the surrealist André Lhote, that’s a fine place to go. Sadly, it’s rare and costly, so the choice here – more comprehensive in its coverage – is a suitable alternative.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

When negotiating with the prickly Charles de Gaulle, France’s greatest post war leader, Churchill once remarked “I have the cross of Lorraine to bear”. But even WSC knew that a world without the French, a world without Paris, without Parisian culture and gastronomy and clothing and light and sheer style, would be a worse place. And complain as one might about the cowardice of the French in the face of the Germans in 1940, of their Vichy government and its collaborationist ways, if you do not love France and its culture you simply do not get it. We have their weakness to thank for the fact that Paris, that most perfect of cities, survived unscathed. Krupp’s guns were directed at the land of my parents and then on the land of my upbringing, but mercifully not at Paris.

And it’s hardly a wonder that the greatest slice-of-life snapper ever was French. Arguably he could not have originated anywhere else.

3 – Paris by Night – Brassaï.

And speaking of Paris, never was that wonderful city done greater justice than in Brassaï’s – yes, breathtaking – slim tome of night pictures. More than breathtaking, it’s magic and is likely the only book I own where you can smell the city. In Paris de Nuit the Hungarian émigré, to use modern vernacular, absolutely nailed it, in that most welcoming of cities for artists and revolutionaries.


Click the picture for Amazon US.

I confess to being so fond of this book that it’s within arm’s reach, as often as not.

4 – Horst, His Work and His World.

Another émigré who was to leave his definitive stamp on the world of photography is Horst P. Horst. The young German had wisely changed his name from Horst Bohrmann when immigrating to New York, where his talent was immediately noticed – first as a model then as a photographer at American Vogue. American Vogue may not have had the style of it’s French counterpart but it had great couturiers galore in Horst’s time and, of course, Americans were rich and willing to support them. (British Vogue can be largely dismissed as English women of the period were clueless about clothes sense. Horses and tweeds may go together but it’s not a pastime supportive of haute couture).


Click the image for Amazon.

Horst is the master of the formal, carefully staged, studio portrait, his work putting the efforts of the likes of Cecil Beaton to shame. The famous corset image, above, is of none other than Lee Miller who went on to becone a great photographer (and lover of Man Ray, no less) in her own right. Her experience of seeing the Nazis’ death camps almost destroyed her as it would many a man.

In much the same way that Brassaï’s images of Paris at night will never be surpassed, one can comfortably place Horst’s studio work in the same category of excellence.

5 – Nature’s Chaos by Eliot Porter.

This lovely book was a 1990 Christmas gift from a great American capitalist and his playwright wife with the charming inscription “These photographs remind us of your work”. Roy and Carol had always made their magnificent Venice Beach home open to me with its expansive displays of art and sculpture and their generosity in turn inculcated in me that great American spirit of philanthropy.

Their inscription was more politeness than accuracy, as I am generally completely clueless about nature photography, but the book is special. Porter has published many books of his images, and this one is as fine as any. There is nothing remotely picture postcard about his work which tends to abstraction and thoughtfulness.


Click the image for Amazon US.

So there you have it. My five most favorite photography books, ones from which I have learned much and continue to learn more. And ten years earlier I very much doubt that short list would be any different.

Click here for an index of all my book reviews.

Apple changes – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Photography

A mixed bag.

Desktop and laptop hardware:

When I started using Apple hardware in 1999 it was a disgust with Windows and PCs which drove there. My first iMac was the classic G4 ‘screen on a stick’ design, an ergonomic bull’s eye, which is still in use to this day. It was a revelation, never locking up, recognizing all manner of peripherals instantly and came with an OS which was night-and-day compared to the horrors of Windows.

As my time becomes more valuable daily , seeing as it’s a pot amortizing at an accelerating rate, I see no way that I would revert to Windows, something I have not touched since 2004 when I commenced self-employment. All of my work and computing leisure are spent on Macs or iOS devices. If my son so much as mentions Windows, I threaten him with my will and an eraser.

A decade ago that great CEO/marketer/carnival barker/charlatan/thief Steve Jobs was well into the AAPL revival, which peaked on his death when the business became the most valuable public company on earth. I published a picture taken the day of his death in downtown San Francisco and it remains as moving today as it was then:


Pacific Stock Exchange building, Pine and Sansome, San Francisco.
G3, kit lens @ 71mm, 1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 1600

You can read that piece here.

But, I’m afraid to say, since then Apple has gone nowhere as regards the pro video/audio/photography user set. Sure they sell lots of phones, but for pros it’s all been downhill. The obsession with thinness and looks, driven by designer Jony Ive, has lost its governor on reality, one Saint Steve. With everything but looks sacrificed on the Altar of Thin, today’s iMac 5K is every bit as bad when it comes to thermal management as the iMacs which ushered in the Intel era, purportedly running CPUs much cooler than the IBM G4/5 ones which preceded them.

However, bad as the early Intel iMacs were, if any iMac takes the prize for multi-purpose machine, it has to be the pre-Intel G5. Computer and toaster in one. My new one was sold so fast that I think I left the bread in it – its fans would roar at the slightest provocation and, often as not, the machine would also leak coolant all over the place as soldered joints melted in the inferno. An abomination. It looked nice, of course.


The worst Mac of the past decade – the iMac G5.

Thus, when I wrote Putting out the Garbage five years ago I simultaneously abandoned desktop Macs in favor of a Hackintosh, a machine using common PC parts but hacked to run OS X. The machine was a blast to build, the hacking was a nice challenge (and sweet revenge), fast, infinitely upgradable and robust as it comes except …. when Apple made changes to OS X. Each saw the Hackintosh gurus scrambling for a fix as a host of new things was broken. After a while this began to get really old. That emotion coincided with the classic Mac Pro becoming very affordable on the used market and the 2009 model I specialize in upgrading is easily modified to current performance at modest cost.


The best Mac of the past decade – the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pro.

And the Mac Pro, introduced in 2006, really was a nod to Apple’s roots, comprised of movie makers, sound artists and photographers. Not cellphone dabblers but rather people who used the Mac Pro to make a living, with all the attendant demands on robustness and coolness (literally) under pressure. And it bears repeating – for heavy processing, especially video, you must be certifiable to use an iMac. Only the classic or new Mac Pros (the latter also thermally well managed, albeit at a high price) are up to the task.

And even in the new Mac Pro you see the invidious creep of form over function in Ive’s designs. I mean, all the storage is external? The GPUs cannot be upgraded? The CPU is difficult and costly to upgrade? And it looks like a garbage can? What was Ive thinking? And it’s doubly tough for those working pros who really do not want to build Hacks or join the PC world, preferring to work on their clients’ projects rather than spending time endlessly debugging their machines.


The 2013 Mac Pro – form and function. but at a price.

The other change to Macs since the white Intel iMac machines melted down is that every Mac screen out there has a ghastly, glossy finish. There used to be an option for the MacBook Pro of a matte screen, but I have not the energy to check the fine print to determine if that still exists. Even their Cinema Displays are glossy. Again, what are they thinking of?

In fairness, Apple’s laptops are superb in every way. Take into account annual depreciation of maybe 20% and an annual or biennial upgrade is perfectly feasible economically for just about anyone. People who talk of the ‘Apple premium’ probably failed finance classes. Then again, they mostly use PCs. Every Mac today runs Windows if that’s your thing, many buying them for just that purpose, they are fast and so long as you do not overtax them, stay reasonably cool. Battery lives only get better, keyboards and trackpads are the best in the business and there seem to be no reports of fundamental design flaws. Even the glossy screen intrudes little for who, after all, would use that for serious work? You switch to closed lid mode and procure a mouse, keyboard and (non-Apple branded) display with a matte screen. Just lay off the heavy video stuff.


The MacBook Pro – Retina Display. The best laptop in the business.

So if the pro user has a beef with Apple’s hardware it’s easy to see why.

OS X:

More troubling is the direction OS X has taken. I recall all the bloatware which PCs came with when new and while OS X is not in that league, we are constantly seeing insanely frustrating changes which seem to deny the platform-agnostic nature of the Unix core on which OS X is built.

OS X arguably peaked with Snow Leopard OS 10.6 in 2008 which took Leopard, shook out all the bugs, introduced nothing new and was lean and mean. That’s what I call software development. Since then we have had Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite and none has added anything useful over Snow Leopard, except for a lot of feature bloat and sheer stupidity (making icons monochrome in Finder, for heaven’s sake? Hiding Library directories? Translucent menus? Backward scrolling? The arrant idiocy of the ‘fly away’ option on cursor hover over a dock icon?). And you really want to take phone calls on your computer or hop off the desktop and take over on the laptop in mid-sentence? Really?


Snow Leopard – the best OS X ever.

It’s as if there is a child with Attention Deficit Disorder running OS X development, ignorant of when it’s best to just leave things alone. And the constant dumbing down, directionally pointing to iOS, is insanely frustrating, no less than the constant rounds of application upgrades with every major release. I do not want OS X to look like my iPhone and know no one who does. So far that idiot child has not managed to break the main reason for using OS X in the first place, its rock solid reliability, but give him enough room and he will get there. Apple, please, just leave OS X alone. No one ever bought a Mac because a new version of OS X just came out and no one ever will.

The iPhone:

Today’s Apple is a cell phone maker. Nearly all of its revenue and net profit is from the iPhone. The iPad is doomed to no growth owing to its long life cycle and the tablet craze has rather faded.

And in that regard it’s fair to say that the original iPhone was the technological product of the new century so far. I bought mine on July 31, 2007, the day it became available, doing so in the college town of San Luis Obispo where the predominantly student population had either not seen the keynote some six months earlier or was too stoned to go to the Apple Store. I queued all of 5 minutes, with the news full of mile long lines elsewhere. Some people, whose time was worth nothing at all, even lined up in San Francisco. Only in America do the unemployed line up for cell phones.


The first iPhone. Apple’s greatest product ever.

Sure, later iPhones added the App Store, sharper screens, 3G, 4G, a better camera and on and on. And, of course, they became thinner and thinner. But inside every iPhone is that first iPhone with its no less brilliant operating system, iOS. iOS may see constant tinkering by Cupertino but, unlike with OS X, you are free to largely disregard bloat features you do not need. And in the iPhone 5 and 6 it’s no exaggeration to say that the camera is superb. The iPhone destroyed Blackberry and Nokia, arguably made Samsung (a work in progress, that one, as Sammy finds it increasingly difficult to steal/copy/clone), and bankrupted Nokia and Motorola. It will eventually destroy Canon and Nikon as camera makers.

Steve Jobs’s roll out presentation of the iPhone is perhaps the greatest display of marketing prowess ever and you can (and should) watch it here, even if your parents dropped you on your head when you were knee high to a grasshopper, leaving you hating all things Apple. “A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone”. Genius. And true. As thrilling to see today as it was in early 2007. And, of course, “You had me at scrolling”.


The author’s iPhones – now and then.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Westinghouse …. Jobs. A pantheon of American capitalists and originals all.

Here’s hoping:

So my hope for Apple is that they leave OS X alone, at least make some effort to maintain a professional computer product in their increasingly bloated product line (Gil Amelio, anyone?) and continue to improve the camera in the iPhone. Of these three, only the last is a realistic expectation, and that’s sad.

Oh, that and have its CEO stick to talking about what he is paid to do during business hours, not about what he does in his bedroom. And enough already with that dumb watch.