With the announcement of the iPhone's price plans today, I dusted off my calculator (widget) and worked out how much an iPhone would cost me over the length of my mandatory two year contract with AT&T. The result is that if you choose the cheaper iPhone and the cheapest price plan, I'd be looking at just under $81 a month. Put another way, it's a total of just under $2000 for the whole of the two years, assuming I don't go over the bundled minutes and SMS allowance in that plan.

Want a better value deal? The 8GB iPhone allied with the $99/month plan would cost me a rather terrifying $2999 over the course of the contract, a price so neat and tidy that you wonder if someone has done this calculation before me...



Transcribe those prices straight to pounds sterling, and the more expensive options works out at £62 a month, and even that price makes me wince a little. It's impossible to calculate how much the iPhone and its data plans will be when it's available here in the UK. Normally, figuring out the UK price involves doing a straight conversion (halve the dollar price), then replacing the dollar sign with a pound sign on the original price, and splitting the difference depending on the size and attitude of the company involved. With phones, it's a wholly different matter. The price of the phone is much more at the whim of the carriers – apparently driving a hard bargain here in Europe, much to nobody's surprise – and is entirely bound up in the nature of the price plans.

All AT&T's price plans in the States, for example, include unlimited data for email and web browsing; that could turn out not to be the case in the UK, which could in theory mean that the handset itself is cheaper. (Why? The iPhone encourages people to use data, either by making web/email easier and more pleasant than ever, through using Web 2.0 apps, or just by pinging weather and stocks services for updates. The data traffic, if billable, ensures revenue in the future for the carriers and so they can further subsidise the cost of the handset.)

All of this makes me much less decided about buying an iPhone. Nothing has changed with the device itself – it's still a superb piece of immaculately-executed technology, and the spell I fell under when I had it in my hands in San Fancisco in January hasn't broken – but the figure of three thousand dollars sounds a hell of a daunting. Are you tempted?


* UK prices converted using the exchange rate of 0.50014

...but News Knight with Sir Trev, which only started tonight on ITV, had me laughing out loud mostly because it has him saying stuff you usually only hear from Rory Bremner. I think the comedy works largely because we've heard that particular voice read out headlines for thirty years; I've never known a time when he wasn't presenting news, and to hear him doing comedy – albeit a slightly smug, knowing comedy – is funny in itself. Plus it had Clive Anderson and Marcus Brigstocke. Recommended watching, and if you missed the first one, I have it recorded.

And finally [bong] I have to report that this was a very dull weekend during which I couldn't muster up the energy to do much. I'm now getting seriously bored and pissed off at being sans wife. The end of July cannot come quickly enough.

Is there anything nicer than a freshly baked Maris Piper potato, oozing melting Cornish butter, with cracked black pepper and a sprinkling of Anglesey sea salt? Why yes, yes there is. And that something is the self-same baked potato with tuna mayonnaise and spring onions. But I didn't have that tonight. Oh no, it was the unadulterated potato* for me this evening, largely – indeed solely – as the blinding realisation dawned on me as I went to prep the tuna a couple of hours after popping the potatoes into the oven that I don't have a tin opener here in Bath.

* Good name for a band, Mr Cope?

Have spent the last fortnight rebuilding my Mac absolutely from scratch – really not fun – and recreating parts of this site too. Apologies if your RSS feed suddenly got repopulated with lots of stories from this site.

Remember kids: back up. (I had, I should point out, but for various dull reasons restoring wasn't a simple clone-across-and-be-done-with-it thing.)

Also, apologies for the terrible geek joke in this post's title; I never can resist.

Cut through all the Leopard misinformation and rhetoric with MacFormat's special edition podcast, in which I talk about what the new operating system offers, how it disappoints, and what Apple's announcement about no SDK for the iPhone really means. Information on how to download or subscribe to the podcast can be found at MacFormat's site, and be sure to let us know what you think.

Transparent menu bar; that's just so Vista, dude.


Downloads folder; Vista has that. (So does every bloody operating system if you create a new folder and can master your motor functions sufficiently to bash the letters D, O, W, N, L, O, A, D and S on a keyboard.)


Proper thumbnail previews; Vista got there first, though adding Quick Look makes the experience much richer.


Spaces; in damn near every Linux distro under the sun.


Parental controls; Vista, Vista, Vista, Vista.


OS-level backup; XP, for goodness' sake.

The point I'm making, here, folks, is that good ideas are good ideas; please don't get all arsey about who had them first. Integrate backup into an OS, and the users win. Give us proper thumbnail icons, and the users win. Put any good idea at all into an operating system, and the users win.

Apple's “Redmond, start your photocopiers” line is a very dangerous and frankly a little silly game to play. Grow up, please, boys and girls.

Safari? In my Windows? Dirty bastards.

I started drafting a post about the new Olympic logo, but found that Coudal got there before me with something far more articulate, less ranty, and more swearword-free. Their post is perfect; the one thing I'd add is my wife's observation that the new logo evokes the graffiti you see everywhere in London, which is quite a nice visual play.

And will everyone please point at least one visually illiterate dolt to the following text from Coudal's eighth point; if we can make just a few people take this on board, mankind may have a chance at being not so pig-headedly stupid:

“When we hear ‘my kid could have done that!’ we think ‘success’. Some of the greatest logos of all time involve two lines (the Christian cross) or three lines and a circle (Mercedes). Your kid could have done that, but she didn't. Nor did she design the graphics standards manual that goes with it. So give it a rest. Or send us her resume.”

Young Mrs Receding Hairline came to visit last weekend, which was very very lovely. It was the first time she'd been to Bath properly – this is, not in the welter of form signing, bank-balance depletion and desk-humphing* that characterised our previous visits – and I think she now feels much more positive about the move.

On the subject of Better Half, I should record for posterity the immeasurable good she has done to the apparent taste of my music library. Yes, Max Raabe is still in there – nothing to do with her, I hasten to add – but it's been very rewarding to have a proper muso for a wife. And I do mean proper muso. As a teenager she was an avid reader of Q and the NME, and, though not quite as fundamentalist as she once was, she still maintains a pretty hard line on novelty records, bubblegum pop and the musical stylings of Phil Colins. But then, that's quite as it should be.

If it weren't for her, though, I'd never have sought out and discovered so much music that I now love. Case in point: The Divine Comedy. (I know they qualify as mainstream by most people's reckoning, but work with me here.) I recently bought Victory for the Comic Muse and it's been on continuous loop on my iPod ever since. You can preview it on iLike or through iTunes, and is one of the most rewarding albums I've bought in ages. I humble direct you to A Lady of a Certain Age, Mother Dear, and, just because it amuses me, Threesome.

* No, not humping. Humphing may be a Scottishism, and just means lifting, though it suggests that the objects being lifted are heavy and unwieldy, and that the process of moving them around is tiresome and unwelcome.

This morning saw my broadband finally activated in Bath and boy does it feel good. For someone like me, going cold turkey on Internet access – or, worse, the methadone of jumping on a neighbour's dodgy open network – is hell on a stick.