MattMaroon.com

Everyone’s in an uproar about Apple’s rejecting the Google Voice app. My thoughts on that are pretty much “duh”. That’s Apple. That’s how they’ve always run their show. Always. If you make something on their very closed, very proprietary platform, it better be something they don’t feel competes with them in any way or they’re going to reject it. End of story.

They rejected an app that does nothing more than automatically download podcasts to your iPhone because they felt it competes with iTunes. How something that makes your iPhone, and only your iPhone, better could possibly compete with the iPhone I have no idea. But that’s Apple. They want you hitting up iTunes, and therefore being within a reasonable proximity of the iTunes store where you might pay them, as much as possible so they ban anything that might interfere with that.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s their right. I’m not one of those far-left idealists who has moral qualms with somebody trying to make a buck, so while I totally expect this sort of behavior from Apple, it doesn’t make angry at them. It does make me just a little more glad I got a Palm Pre instead. It does make me glad I’ve consistently chosen products (from mp3 players to cell phones) that optimize user experience over ones that want to lock me in and make money. It does make me laugh every time I hear one of their higher-ups talk about how they just want to make good products and don’t worry about making money, because just about everything they’ve done in the last decade has belied that. And it also does make me question the wisdom of blocking an app that makes your product better in the hopes that it will lead to someone spending an extra buck or two on songs.

But it doesn’t piss me off and it wouldn’t even if I owned an iPhone because I’m not dumb enough to expect anything else. It’s just Apple doing what Apple has always done. If you bought an iPhone you should have seen this sort of thing coming. To Steve Jobs, every customer is just a means to an end. People who love Apple products try their best to forget that and imagine Steve’s arms around them keeping them warm while they’re standing in line for the 3GS at 6 a.m., and then they get angry every time Cupertino does something like this and forces them to snap back to reality.

The reality is, of course, that Apple is in it for the money. Always has been too. They haven’t always been good at it, but they’ve always tried to make products that make money. If they make products that are “better” they only do so because it will make them more money than making ones that are not “better”. If you think they’re some sort of Prometheus bringing style down from Mount Olympus to mankind just to save us from our tasteless dictators in Redmond, you’re deluding yourself and you deserve the disappointment that inevitably follows time and time again.

Some people are blaming the whole fiasco on AT&T too, but that makes no sense to me. There’s a Google Voice app that runs on Blackberries, which AT&T hosts. And besides, what does AT&T have to lose? It doesn’t reduce in the slightest the number of AT&T minutes or text messages you use (and therefore buy). They’re most certainly going to pull the plug on anything that interferes with you paying them, but Google Voice doesn’t do that. In fact it might result in you paying them more.

But it does interfere with the iPhone, in the same way that the Podcaster app did. It’s got you replacing one iPhone function with a third party version that’s better. And unlike the Podcaster app, they couldn’t just toss that feature in at a later date and steamroll Google for having found itself on the wrong street in their product road map. So if you didn’t see this coming, you just haven’t been paying attention.

I was listening to Marketplace yesterday when I heard something that was so dumb that it offended me. It was an interview with a guy named Christopher Steiner, the full text of which can be found here, about his book $20 Per Gallon, which is about what will happen to society as gas prices rise. Some of the classics were:

at $6 per gallon Americans will abandon SUVs forever.

at $12 we’ll all start living in urban condos and walking everywhere, roads will start closing and many of the remaining ones will start charging tolls.

at $14 per gallon big box stores like Wal-Mart will go out of business.

There are so many things wrong with this. First is the notion that gasoline could somehow get to $20. It assumes proportional demand. India and China will make a bunch of gas guzzlers just like we have, and want to buy just as much gas as we do. Of course, almost nobody in either country can afford to pay what we do in gas, and virtually none will be able to pay $10 per gallon. At some point in oil’s meteoric price rise those estimates, which are likely based on today’s gasoline prices, will all fall off a cliff.

But supply and demand is nebulous and impossible to gauge, so let’s just fast forward to a future where he’s correct, and that however many billions of BRIC dwellers suddenly have cars and the GDP per capita to bid gas prices up considerably higher than they already do. Then we get to the real reason the whole argument is stupid, which is that it assumes humans will adapt to the changing prices of gas by radically changing our lifestyles rather than developing new technologies to mitigate the costs. That’s like saying we’ll stopping having casual sex because AIDS is spreading. Despite the almost endless list of times humans were faced with technological hurdles and overcame them, this notion might just be mildly misinformed, rather than borderline-retarded, if not for the fact that those new technologies are already here.

Take ethanol, for instance. There’s a lot of controversy about it now because of government subsidies and the fact that it’s actually more expensive than gasoline for the same level of output without them. Those are true and valid criticisms, but it’s not that much more expensive and it still has to be factored in when discussing future gas prices. Unsubsidized corn-based ethanol already puts an upper limit on the cost of gasoline of somewhere around $5-$7 per gallon, depending on where you get your numbers from, and that’s rapidly becoming an outdated technology. We’ve got thousands of scientists at work on new biomass sources and production methods, but even if you discount that all as pie-in-the-sky optimism, our currently available ethanol production will stop the ascent of gasoline prices long before all Lowe’s locations turn to ghost towns.

And then there’s the even more exciting technology, electricity. We’ve already got usable electric cars on the road, with more coming out every year. There’s the Tesla. There’s the Chevy Volt, which is expected to get 50-60mpg when running on gasoline alone. There’s the new plug-in Prius.

Electric cars aren’t quite ready for primetime yet, but they’re close. Battery technology, which seems to be the limiting reagent, is rapidly improving. Our power-grid couldn’t handle everyone driving plug-ins yet, but we already have smart grid technology that could and we’re in the process of rolling it out. A process that would be sped up greatly by gasoline hitting $10. Nuclear power can provide us nearly unlimited cheap electricity, which again would advance quickly with high gas prices.

All of the pieces are there, we just haven’t had sufficient motivation to pay for them yet. But given the choice between that and not driving our SUVs 30 miles to work every day, it’s pretty clear what the First World will choose.