Differentiating an Apple from Oranges.

To start off this topic I want to make one thing very clear , I am not a Fanboy. By term Fanboy, I mean I don't preach or bind myself to some group, faith or consumer level product. I am writing something that I have experienced myself and my conclusion of it.

I usually buy stuff which I feel is good, useful and of-course awesome, During last one year two of the stuff that I bought which are worth mentioning are Refurbished Microsoft's Xbox 360(March' 08) and Apple iPhone( Sept'07). Both of them are pretty good in their area, for gaming Xbox 360 is way better than technologically advance Sony's Playstation 3 for which not many games were there when I bought though Sony is gaining ground but I did not want a gaming console which is approximately 20 times faster than normal home computers but difficult to program and hence not many games for it, plus being a poor graduate student I did not want to spend ~$424 on this super computer and hence settled down on refurbished Xbox 360 from ecost.com which set me back to $199 but I found it to be pretty good deal.

Everything with Xbox 360 was well and good for 3 weeks but after that nightmare started, I got acquainted to what 33% of the Xbox 360 suffer from which most people call "RRoD" which stands for Red Ring of Death, 3 red lights started blinking and console became inoperable. I called Microsoft and they sent me an empty box to send them back Xbox for repair, the box they sent me took approximately 3 days to come which is fine but the box could not be picked up by UPS from my door and the nearest UPS is like 2 miles away from my place so I had to walk there carrying my xbox. I was happy at-least they would be repairing it and I would be playing it again. After a long 3 weeks, I received back my Xbox, I was so happy thinking of playing next generation games such as Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Bio Shock again. But guess what, when I opened the box there was a letter saying that "Dear Xbox customer, your xbox has been opened before(seal broken) and therefore we are not repairing it". Those dumb a**holes did'nt knew even after registering with them that I bought a refurbished Xbox and it might be possible ecost.com might have opened it for repair and when I called Microsoft's customer care they were totally unhelpful when I told they sent me back console without repairing it and they said they could not do anything with this console, which means I have to throw this thing into bin and buy the same thing again. I searched internet and I found a way to temporarily make Xbox 360 work for like 2 weeks every-time I do Towel trick with it, since then I am playing happily with my xbox without paying Microsoft anything from my pocket again.


Now comes my after sales experience with Apple, I was going to library and it started raining heavily and in my pocket was my iPhone and it got wet and when I reached library I tried calling to one my friends, the screen started showing vertical and horizontal lines and after a while it switched off automatically, I knew my iPhone is now useless, I was very much disappointed and got little depressed since being a student and spending ~$324 on this thing and it died within 9 months but I knew it was all my fault and nobody else's. Then I called Apple Customer Care and told them that my iPhone is not working and lines are coming on the screen. They sent me an empty box which reached at my place the next day and they picked up( FedEx) from my door and it reached their service center the next day. On the 5th day after sending my useless iPhone, I received a box from Apple, when I opened it, it had a letter saying "Dear Mr. Singh, we could not repair your iPhone that's why we are sending you a new iPhone". I was so happy and delighted since I had left hopes of reusing an iPhone again and with my prior sore and apathetic experience received from Microsoft customer service but I always knew Apple is not Microsoft and they take good care of their customers. Such kind and gentle care instills good amount of faith and loyalty of a customer towards the company( in this case Apple).

To sum it all, most of you will agree Microsoft products sucks a big time to name a few Windows Vista ( damn 2 GB RAM to run a personal computer and not a server :O), Microsoft Zune( ever heard of it, it was(is) an MP3 player), Xbox 360 (check out the virginity seal before buying this dumb machine otherwise your towels would be used for more than one thing). If Microsoft had ever designed a car then most probably it's engine or breaks would have failed leading to an accident and in their defense they would have said the car owner once opened it's bonnet or why the owner ever started and driving a car at first place (was'nt a car meant to be driven :P). They will never improve and will keep on dereferencing the "NULL POINTER", leading to blue screen of death( BSoD).

MAC-inization of the world!

"They say Apple products are not for everyone, but you are not everyone".

I think above statement is going to change forever with the unveiling of iPhone 2.0 starting at $199 and introducing this phone to over 70 countries from July 11th, 2008 onwards.

"The only thing that can beat an iPhone(1.0) is a new iPhone(2.0)".

Today at World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) at San Fransisco, Steve Jobs unveiled iPhone 2.0 which looks more or less the same as last generation of iPhone but it comes with 3G, GPS and its quite cheap in price (8 GB for $199 and 16 GB for $299 with 2 yr contract).

I find pricing very competitive and with support for Microsoft Exchange, Apple is all set to enter corporate world which till now is dominated by Blackberry and with host of security features such as Cisco IPSec VPN, they are making sure that they comply with security needed in Enterprise environment.

I personally believe that iPhone had much bigger impact on masses on how they started perceiving and accepting Apple products beyond iPod and iPhone. Reading from last year statistics Apple's Macintosh line of Computers such as Macbooks and iMacs are selling 30% more than previous year. Now the question might pop up in your mind, how iPhone and Macintosh sales related. The answer is, iPhone is build on the same software that Macintosh uses which is OS X (Darwin) which is based on BSD implementation of UNIX OS. iPhone users are mesmerized by the stability, user friendliness along with the eye catching features of iPhone.

Potential Users of new iPhone would be-:
1) Big Corporations which needed Enterprise wide support which was lacking in previous generation of iPhone.
2) Corporations sick and tired of monopoly of Blackberry(s).
3) Individuals who are willing to pay extra with Contract and use phone for internet surfing( Safari), listening to music (iPod), email, GPS, photos, Youtube-ing, SMS than merely to call someone.

The only roadblock that I see is the contract for 2 years but without contract, Apple cannot sell this phone for $199 and to use 3G services one has to pay $30 extra every month( though I am not sure that getting 3G service is mandatory or not).

So with this development what should one be thinking if they are existing iPhone owners (1st generation). I feel there's no reason to feel sad or to repent if one has bought last June(when it was released, though $200 price cut in 2 months would have made experience sore) or in September'07( this was the best time to experience at lowered prices). One should remember, one has to pay substantially more being early adopter of the new technology. If one has waited a whole year for lowering of prices, then you never know next January(2009), Steve Jobs unveil a whole new iPhone at even more lowered price. What I mean to say is, if the product is awesome, then the best time to buy it, is right now.

To conclude this topic, I think iPhone is pretty awesome phone. It has changed how people conceived and used phones. With releasing of this phone to over 70 countries including developing(third world) countries such as India, it would interesting to see how it competes with well established and dominant brands such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson and watching people tapping their multi fingers on touch screen which they never ever did before.

Every day is a Sunday for me these days!

I am done with my Masters. Now, I am actively looking for a job which fits my profile. For me a dream job would be of a Developer which means-:
1) Gathering Requirements.
2) Designing application according to specifications.
3) Using good Design techniques.
4) Coding.
5) Testing the application.

This is how I did during my internship and everything seemed perfect.

Now, for the past 4-5 months I am giving interviews(Microsoft, NetApp, Mathworks, Sun, Qualcomm..list goes on and on) and visited many places in United States. The result has been same which is rejects from everywhere.

To be really honest I never felt I lacked technical skills which interviewers were asking and after giving so many interviews, more or less they ask the same questions.

If the interviewer is an Indian/Chinese, he/she will ask directly from a technical interview book and questions range from Linked List, Binary trees to Operating System Concepts...sometimes puzzles but rarely. One thing everyone asks is polymorphism :P.

If the interviewer is American, he/she will ask more about your work experience.
-> What kind of challenges one faced during projects?
-> Have you ever worked in team?
-> What was your role?
-> Why this company and this role?
-> Which environments you prefer most?
-> Why we should hire you?
-> Which course you liked most and why?
-> What are your career aspirations and where do you see yourself after 4-5 years?
In some interviews 2nd type of interviewers hardly ever delved into technical questions.

After thorough introspection, I believe I suck big time answering to questions the second type of interviewers asked. Just mainly because for these kind of questions one can't do much preparation and with varying job profiles it becomes little bit more difficult to answer such questions, reversing and sorting a linked list is so easy compared to this.

Now, with nothing in my hand and sitting idle on my ass with perl and design patterns books beside me, I wish I had some more work experience of about 3-4 years in core development environment, things would have been very different, work experience here matters a lot and I hardly see any Entry Level job for Master's/ International Student these days( people call it recession).

Wish me luck, now thats what I need most at this point in my life.