When money isn’t enough: Getting an iPhone

Optus iPhone details
Optus iPhone details

Michelin play hard to get, and it is the same with Apple.

Their iPhone (and let’s face it pretty much all of their products) is so damn good that I simply must have one to satisfy my technolust.

Yet by partnering with buffoons like Vodafone NZ, Rogers Telecommunications in Canada and pretty much all of the other telcos, Apple has made it wildly expensive and complicated to own their product.

Witness Optus’s plans on the left – that’s on webpage. Theire plans are incredibly hard to understand, and like the hapless Vodafone New Zealand, assume that big data users are also big talkers.

They are not. And indeed big datas users may well prefer to be using data to connect rather than talk.

It’s a really really long page from Optus, and it’s complicated as well. I gave up.

I’ll also forget about Vodafone, the smirking monopolists from New Zealand will no longer get any discretionary business of mine – in any country. I say doscretionary, becasue I’ll be forced to use their services in New Zealand – at least until Telecom get their act together. (That’s really Hobsons choice right there)

So I went to Telstra, who, mere hours before launch, do not have iPhone plan details on their website. Geekzone do though:-).

Telstra coverage is what I want – in the rural areas where I’ll be motorcycling Vodafone and Optus fade away.

Their prices apparently include a 3GB plan, with $400 up front and just $25 of calls per month. That’s essentially perfect for me – minimum monthly spend, and it’s all concentrated on the data.

However, try looking for a Telstra store that sell these things, and you realise just how few they will have.

There is just one iPhone-selling store in the Perth metropolitan area, along with one in Kalgoorlie – about 6 hours away. I may try tomorrow, but I’m guessing that they’ll be sold out before I get out of bed. Else I’ll be in Kalgoorlie on Monday, and so I can stare forlornly at the empty displays.

No pricing, no phones and poor distribution – that’s not a great way to attract customers, but I still want one, and I’ll still (I think) try to get one. I’m 99% positive that I’ll be disappointed, and so sleeping in seems like an increasingly good thing to do.

When money isn’t enough: Michelin Deserts

Michelin Deserts. I’d love (not even like) to buy each of these right now, but it seems that Michelin are determined to make it hard, or even impossible, for me. So hard in fact that I feel obliged to go elsewhere because I am so annoyed, but the product is so good that I really will do anything to get them.

michelin
michelin

Just Deserts
The Michelin Desert is the ultimate overland tire for motorcycling in sandy terrain.

The tires last for an extraordinarily long time, are highly resistant to punctures and have immensely strong sidewalls that mean you can actually run with them flat for a while.

They are also wildly expensive, and legendarily difficult to get on and off, which you mneed to do when you get a puncture.

They are used for long and hard travel on deserts and dirt, exactly what I am setting my bike up to do, and exactly what I am going to do. They are also the tire of choice for Paris-Dakar racers, and for any number of other overland races, like the Australia Safari.

They are, in short, elite of overlanding tires, and I have always wanted to own a set.

But I can’t.  The local distributors have being with holding all of their Michelin Desert stock until after the end of the Australia Safari, which is the Aussie version of the Paris-Dakar race, and it is here in WA.

So I simply cannot buy them, even though there is a warehouse full of these things not 10kms from here.

The logic is befuddling – the Australia Safari is a great promotional vehicle, before, during and after the race. It gets people excited about overland riding through the conditions that the Deserts are perfect for, and yet the tire of choice is…unavailable.

So rather than me feeling good about Michelin and their tires being used by the pros, I feel massively pissed off at their lack of common sense in bringing in a bunch more tires to sell.

They didn’t get my money – I got some other brand instead. However that other brand of tire is wearing away before my eyes- and every time I see by just how much, I feel another pang of anger towards Michelin.

It’s not just a convenience thing, or a coolness thing – the Deserts would get me from here to Townsville on the  mainly off-road tracks I’m loking at being on. The Pirelli MT-21’s may do so (they are also unobtainable) but the piece of rubbish Karoo’s I have are likely to expire in the middle of nowhere.

That’s not just inconvenient, that’s potentially deadly in the desert. Michelin – are you really wanting this sort of publicity?

They are givng me the impression that they are feelingless bastards, but I still want to buy their product. (I’d love to talk to a human – but the only contact-us on thewebsite is for other countries)

This all reminds me of something else going on these days…

Vodaphone amateur hour

It’s not hard. They had weeks to prepare for the iPhone launch, but still Vodaphone.co.nz’s site still got swamped this morning.

Vodaphone NZ

Unacceptable. Completly unacceptable.

Vodafone.com.au struggled the first time I hit the site this morning, and then seemed to go into mobile mode – which was a clever way of dealing with a slashdotting. A second refresh and the normal homepage was back, but no prices on the iPhone.

Vodafone au

If you do ant Vodahone NZ iPhone pricing, then check out Geekzone‘s article.

Overworked: NZ and Australia

4th and 5th worst in the developed world. That’s where NZ and Australia stand in an ILO survey of the percentage of workers that work more than 48 hours a week. NZ scores 23.6% and Australia 20.4%.

Despite my belief, the  USA scored lower at 18.1%.

But we have it easy (as I sit here preparing to take off for a 1-3 month motorcycle trip). Spare a thought for the developing world and Indonesia and Peru in particular, where over 50% of workers spend more than 48 hours a week working.

More on working hours at the interesting Indian blog a wide angle view on India, by Nita J. Kulkarni. I have Nita’a blog on my list as she supplies a very different point of view on world events.

The ILO and CNN Money (the first link) could learn a bit from Nita.  I cannot find the source material for the CNN Money article from the slow and archaic ILO website. It not only should be easily findable on the ILO website, but the CNN Money article should have linked there. The top search result for “48 hours” from the ILO website‘ is a document from 1962. Yes – 1962. That’s before even I was born. I did find this though, and through perseverance I finally found the summary of the source report. After that it got silly. A summary page forthe report referred to one place to buy the report (which was the wrong place) and another for a chapter in an encyclopedia – which gave a 404 error. The store, when I found it, returned nothing for a search of the study title. I give up.

Banks? Real estate? the worst is yet to come

a Little bank story for kids, courtesy of the WSJ, and as told to writer Brian M Carney by billionaire and Private Equity pioneer Ted Forstmann.

Once upon a time, when credit conditions and the costs of borrowing money were normal, the bank opened at 9:00 a.m. and closed at 5:00 p.m. For eight hours a day, bankers made loans and took deposits, and then they went home.

But after 9/11, the Fed opened the spigot. Short-term interest rates went to zero in real terms and then into negative territory. When real interest rates are negative, borrowing money is effectively free – the debt loses value faster than the interest adds up.

“Now they [the banks] have all this excess money. And they open at nine, and from nine to noon or so, they’re doing all the same kind of basically legitimate things with it that they did before.”

“But at noon, they have tons of money left. They have all this supply, and the, what I would call ‘legitimate’ demand – it’s probably not a good word – but where risk and reward are still in balance, has been satisfied. But they’re still open until five. And around 3:30 in the afternoon they get to such things as subprime mortgages, OK? And what you guys haven’t seen yet is what happened between noon and 3:30.”

He later says:

“Buffett once told me there are three ‘I’s in every cycle. The ‘innovator,’ that’s the first ‘I.’ After the innovator comes the ‘imitator.’ And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot

and to reinforce the point:

“We’re in the third ‘I’ for sure,” he interjects an hour after first introducing the “rule.”

I’m hearing a heck of a lot of bearish sentiments from the USA, backed up by a general feeling when I was over there that times were pretty tough. While Obama provides some general optimism the power of economics is looking to tumble some serious players. Expect markets to fall more,.

How not to launch a political blog: “F$%k you”

NZ Left Wing election site 08Wire launched, it seems with an interesting group of backers and is based overseas. It is good to see new discourse emerge, but I see a couple of issues.

First, in the launch article they do their best to turn prospective readers off:

Some analysis is sensationalized. Like David “cut-and-paste / cut-and-paste / I’m-drunk-again! / cut-and-paste / short-spin-piece / hooters!” Farrar, or the various “fuck you!” “no, fuck you!” stoushes that now pass for broadcast-based political commentary. But it’s almost always shallow and disappointing.

Secondly, they follow the tabloid approach to showing articles – just the headlines and a sentence. That isn’t sufficient on a political website – it fails to give you anything to read when you arrive, and there are no glossy pictures to make up for it. It feels like a loony site as a result.

08wire

Better are Daily Kos (the biggest political blog) and NZ’s No Right Turn. Both are well laid out and invite you to immediately start reading when you land.

Daily KosNo Right Turn

Motorcyling: Stuck at the river 2



DSC06558, originally uploaded by y_kiwi.

I wanted to test the bike out and so I found a lovely place to lay it down in a controlled fashion…

Well – actually I was pretty tired at this point and had very little mud mojo left.
Worse still the others had to help me right the bike – which is a little scary. I can lift (it’s technique) the 1200GSA which is a lot heavier, but the KTM with the big tank has the weight up high.

Telstra and Optus iPhone prices released: ouch

Looks like all the prices are coming out from today.

1: they are expensive to buy prepay: $800 odd

2: Telstra will launch with the others on July 11

3: Data prices are horrific

Optus Contract

You can get an 8GB free if you sign up for 2 years on a $79 per month plan.

Sadly the data rates are extortionate – crippled by a low limits in the ’00 MB range.

optusiphone,  Even 1GB isn’t a lot when you have both 3G speeds and a decent mobile browser, and that costs $100.

As one commenter to a lifehacker article article points out, 1GB is about 2000 pages, which is around 60 page loads a day. That’s pathetic.

Excess data is charged at 35 cents per MB, which is $350 per GB. Going to be a surprise to some people, and unacceptably high.

On Optus Prepay you pay $729 or $849 for the 8 or 16GB version. Then for data you need to be spending $100 to get 1 GB.If you unlock the phone they’ll charge you $80, so you get a legit unlocked iPhone for $809 or $929. That’s a lot cheaper than my Nokia e90 – Apple are serving up a new era.

As an aside  the cell phone plans over here in Australia are impenetrable. I just get wildly frustrated when I look at them. I can’t find the penalty rate or what happens after you exceed your prepaid limit. But their overseas rates are the standard $15000 per GB

Telstra has this which seems very similar:

iPhone 3G™ will be available from Telstra on July 11 with a range of specially designed Next G™ iPhone 3G plans that meet the needs of any customer.

The Next G™ iPhone 3G™ plans start at $30 per month with an upfront cost of $279 for the 8GB model and $399 for the 16GB model.

Customers will receive the 8GB iPhone 3G™ model at no cost with the $80 plan, and either the 8GB or the 16GB model at no cost with plans starting at $100 per month. All plans include free Wi-Fi access at Telstra hotspots and require a 24-month contract.