Kurt Hanson: The Wonders of an iPhone 6

kurt hanson 300wHaving been organized enough, thank goodness, to order it while driving home from the NAB/RAB Radio Show in Indianapolis on September 12th, my iPhone 6 arrived at my office via UPS from Zhengzhou last Friday, and am I here to report that it’s absolutely amazing. You should order yours today if you haven’t already.

Part of my satisfaction, I should note, may be due to the fact that I skipped a generation of iPhones (I’m leaping from the 4s to the 6). Some of the pleasures I’ve been experiencing over the past few days, you may have experienced if you own a 5, 5s, or 5c.

I should note that another part of my satisfaction is not hardware-related, but rather due to the excellence of the new iOS 8 operating system. Among other things, iOS 8 now offers live, on-the-fly dictation of things like memos, text messages, and e-mails, with surprisingly great accuracy. (This bodes well for the upcoming Apple Watch, since of course it isn’t big enough to use a keyboard as an input device.)

iphone 6Switching to T-Mobile from AT&T was another satisfying piece of the experience. (Let me rant momentarily: AT&T makes at least tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in what should be illegal profits every year by ripping off its customers who travel overseas — specifically, the customers who trust AT&T [a brand name that has been around our whole lifetimes] to charge them fairly for data usage, and as a result end up paying 1,500 times the prices while traveling than they do at home. [Yes, that’s 150,000% more than they pay at home!] This is accomplished in part by the fact that that AT&T describes a price per mB that is about 50% more than their domestic price per gB, so the naive, trusting regular consumer — who doesn’t have a good handle on mBs vs. gBs; imagine your parents as an example — thinks they’re paying 50% more internationally [which sounds reasonable] when in fact they’re paying 1,000 times what they think they’re paying. So it’s a great pleasure to drop AT&T and switch to T-Mobile [which does not charge a premium for international data, albeit it’s offered at only 3G or 4G speeds].)

At any rate, now let me rhapsodize for a bit: Carrying an iPhone 6 with you is like carrying a tiny (4.5 oz.), cinematic-aspect-ratio iPad with you in your shirt pocket! You barely know it’s there; it’s the perfect size. (Although admittedly I haven’t seen the iPhone 6 plus yet; maybe that’s even more perfect.)

Plus, it obviates the need for carrying all sorts of other devices: The same 4.5 oz. device is an awesome camera, a fine camcorder, a perfect Kindle replacement, an excellent substitute for a transistor radio (albeit one that picks up, essentially, all the radio stations on the entire planet), a wonderful GPS device replacement, and much, much more.

star trek 4The last time that Picard-era “Star Trek” was in production, Starfleet personnel occasionally went back in time to the 21st century (i.e., today), but the “Star Trek” writers of the era did not anticipate a world in which everyone was walking around with powerful, shirt-pocket-sized personal computers in their hands.

Nonetheless, that’s the world we live in today!

And if you’re a radio executive (whether AM/FM, satellite, or Internet-only), as you make your strategic plans for later in this decade, you should take this phenomenon into account… and even be planning for what the world will be like when there are iPhone 8s running iOS 11. At the rate things are moving, they’re going to incredible.

Kurt Hanson