I’m not generally a fan of The Telegraph and especially its tech section, but Shane Richmond absolutely nails it with his great piece on Twitter. His thoughts are largely summed up by the following quote:

Writing on his Telegraph blog last month, Brendan O’Neill argued that “far from being a bastion of freedom of speech, Twitter can be a remarkably conformist, elitist and intolerant arena”. It is a statement that is both self-evidently true and entirely meaningless. Twitter is a communication tool. It makes no more sense to describe it as “conformist” or “elitist” than it does to say that the telephone is conformist or elitist.

But if you’re at all into social networking and/or want to understand how and why Twitter is often misrepresented by the mainstream press, Richmond’s piece is a must-read.

David Pogue and John Gruber have gone head-to-head, highlighting an increasing problem in IT journalism. Pogue reporting on the Samsung Chromebook:

How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world? Unfortunately, not very well. […] With very few exceptions, when the Chromebook isn’t online, it’s a 3.3-pound paperweight. Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it’s as big, heavy and expensive as it is. You can find plenty of full-blown Windows laptops with the same price, weight and size. Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500.

Wow, that sounds pretty poor. But Pogue concludes:

For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody’s trying to shake up the operating system wars. But unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook.

Pogue’s conclusion is weak, and the qualifier if anything makes things worse. He’s written about something with a lot of problems, but argued we should praise Google, for creating something that would have been exciting a couple of years back or if the iPad (or the MacBook Air, for that matter) didn’t exist. Gruber:

Would everyone have praised Apple for its “noble experiment” if the $500 iPad had been too big and heavy, felt like it was worth only $180, and was “a 3.3-pound paperweight” when offline? Fuck that. This is the big leagues. There is no credit for trying.

Only there is, all over the tech pundit world. Apple gets slammed for the slightest perceived drawback or very real fuck-up; by comparison, other companies are too often congratulated for churning out garbage, because, hey, you shouldn’t be expected to be Apple, right? That’s utter bollocks, and the sooner everyone is held to the same standards, the better the entire tech industry will be. This also goes in ‘reverse’, for Apple pundits, by the way, who argue everything at Cupertino is spiffy when it isn’t.

So, pundits, if something is utter crap, have the balls to say so. If something is at best a botched, half-arsed attempt to compete with another product, tell it like it is. And if a massive company spends years and millions of bucks working on a product that turns out to have some potential but in reality is a waste of time and space, don’t praise them and don’t call them noble—bury them.

Harry Marks, writing for his Curious Rat website on Apple’s true legacy:

Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”. With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.

That’s a thing a lot of people are missing about Apple’s plans and also the iterative nature of its OS evolution. Apple very rarely these days pushes massive new features, resulting in people screaming that everything past the original Mac OS X release has been a service pack. But things like Quick Look (instant, browsable previews of items in Finder) and upgrades to Preview (which has gone from Acrobat Reader Very Lite Indeed to a really good app for PDF edits, scanning and basic image manipulation) are attempts to make computing easier, a little at a time.

With iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion, though, Apple’s digital hub dream finally comes to fruition, but in a manner even Apple couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago. Assuming it works, you’ll get seamless computing across devices, a massive reduction in user error for tasks we take for granted but shouldn’t have to deal with (document sync, saving work on a regular basis), and that’s why people like Paul Thurrott look like dolts for dismissing what Apple’s doing as ‘more of the same’ or nothing different to the competition. It’s not about any one feature—it’s about everything. And until Microsoft, Sony and others get this, the playing field won’t be remotely even.

You’ve got to love the juxtaposition. The Economist reckons Apple will, like IBM, last 100 years, because

it has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablet computers, and is now moving into cloud-based services. Each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. This approach can be applied to whatever technology is flavour of the month.

If we nip back over the past decade or so, you’ve got the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010—and that ignores all the various flavours of iPod released after the original one, along with Apple’s many computer innovations (such as the screen-only iMac and the new MacBook Air). It’s only natural, then, that Wall Street thinks Apple is doomed. CNN Money reports RBC’s Mike Abramsky saying Apple’s poor stock performance

reflects market uncertainty regarding what will drive the next leg of growth, how much or not Android will impact Apple, Steve [Jobs]’s health, etc

The iPad, not long out of the gate, transforming the entire PC industry, but, man, what’s next Apple? WHY HAVEN’T YOU RELEASED SOMETHING NEW IN 2011, YOU LAZY BASTARDS?

And then there’s BCG Partner’s Collin Gillis:

A year ago, the iPad was a new source of revenue for Apple. Growth over zero was tremendous. Now it’s not, and revenue growth has to slow down.

Because, clearly, Apple’s diminishing share of a rapidly growing industry will mean it’ll make no money. Or something. Man, if only Apple was reporting record earnings. (Apple Reports Second Quarter Results: Record March Quarter Drives 83 Percent Revenue Growth, 95 Percent Profit Growth—Apple.) Oh.

iTunes might be a big bag of digital poo, but it’s still disappointing and worrying to hear from One FPS that half of users never sync their devices after the initial set-up:

A little birdie says that about 50 percent of Apple Store customers who need to get their iPhones swapped have never plugged them into iTunes after the initial activation and sync. This is a big reason, according to this birdie, for why Apple Store Geniuses are excited about iCloud.

I’ll bet.

My advice (at least until iOS 5 rolls around): if you don’t care about your iOS data at all, don’t back it up. But if you do care about your data, you should regularly sync your device with iTunes. And if you really care about your data, make regular manual copies of  ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ on the Mac, \Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ on Windows 7 or \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\ on Windows XP. That way if you do a sync and iTunes screws it up, you still have a copy of your app data stored somewhere safe.

Note that it’s also currently possible to make back-ups of a single application’s data (which isn’t possible to extract from the Apple back-ups) by directly pulling /Documents and /Library folders from an app’s bundle. My tool of choice for this is PhoneView for Mac, but iPhone Explorer will do much the same for Mac and Windows, albeit in clunkier fashion from a browsing standpoint.