Thoughts on iPhone 4 & Apple

I am one of the 600,000 people who pre-ordered the iPhone 4. I got it in the mail on Wednesday, a day before the retail insanity started. My verdict? It's a nice phone. The processor is blazingly fast, and the battery life is dramatically better than the one I experienced on my older iPhone 3G. Having said that, I want to share a couple of thoughts on the whole iPhone phenomenon.

Retail Insanity - what possesses people to camp out for days just to get a phone? Do these people have no jobs or families? Stranger still, why couldn't they just pre-order the damn thing online, like I did? Or else, why couldn't they wait a few weeks and just walk into any store and buy one off the shelf? I am amazed by people's impatience.

The Walled Garden - I think that this will be my last iPhone. I was seriously contemplating getting an Android based machine, but was intimidated by the hassle of prying all my music from the clutches of Apple's obnoxious music management system. There are phones out there that are just as good as the iPhone, but that don't restrict users from installing whatever the hell they please on the machines they buy with their hard-earned cash.

I hate Apple's censorship of applications. I am an adult and don't need a nanny to screen my content.

Worse still, I hate the fact that Apple is acting like a monopolist - restricting choice of carriers to AT&T's crappy network, preventing Flash from running on its platform and actively disrupting other devices from syncing with iTunes.

As monopolists go, Apple is far, far worse than Microsoft ever was.

The bottom line is that iPhone 4 is a great device and I highly recommend it, but Apple's smug and arrogant behavior makes me hope that the others guys win. Go Google Android!

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A Brand New Look

I have been on a little bit of a posting drought, haven't I? I have been keeping in touch on Twitter every couple of days, so at least it hasn't been complete radio silence.

Well - as of today, at least Money and Such has a brand new look. I like it. Do you?

Next up, some actual posts.

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The Most Important Class I Ever Took

Last week my CEO asked me to take his place and present at an investor conference. This was an excellent opportunity for me to stand in front of a large and influential audience and pitch my company to them. In the audience were senior investment bankers, venture capitalists, CEOs and, of course, my own company's board of directors members. It was one of those high stakes moments where you get a great deal of exposure and you have the chance to make an impression, good or bad, on many people who can influence the direction of your career.

I nailed it.

And... this take me back to the most important class I ever took: public speaking.

I was born and raised in Israel, where I also served in the military for 3 years. In my third year I served as an Air Force instructor, and to earn that privilege I had to pass a teaching class. This short, three week course, changed my life. For three weeks I was taught how to stand in front of an audience and communicate a message. I spoke, and my instructors and fellow students pointedly critiqued my performance. The first few times were unnerving. The stress of standing in front of an audience, some of which were instructed to intentionally throw off my pace, was something that I never had to face before. However, after three weeks of trial by fire, I mastered the techniques and my confidence and performance were much improved.

Almost twenty years later, I still use these same techniques. Speak slowly. Make eye contact. Move around. Modulate your voice. Use your hands for emphasis. Tell a story. Connect with the audience.

Public speaking is a skill in which very few of us receive formal training, but which is truly indispensable for one's career. While I didn't know it at the time, that three week teaching class continues to do wonders for my career decades later.

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Just "Upgraded" to Quicken "Premier" 2010

I just upgraded my Quicken 2007 to the 2010 version of the software. I didn't have much choice - Intuit makes you buy a new copy of the software every three years if you want to use the automatic online update for your accounts. Given that this is the most important reason to use Quicken in the first place, there's not much choice but to acquiesce. So, I took the $70 hit and bought the software on Amazon, and today when my old version of the software refused to update my accounts, I made the switch.

The upgrade went smoothly and quickly. No problems of any sort. Of course, Intuit made me register the new software as a condition to using online account updates. I hope they enjoy contacting me in Azerbaijan... Of course, Intuit just feels free to use my computer desktop as its private garbage can and dumped three additional useless icons / advertisements on it, without asking me, including an ad for a credit card and a "free credit report". Assho***.

The software itself includes some cosmetic changes compared to my 2007 version, but they are really minor, and definitely not worth paying the upgrade price. There are, however, a number of annoying bugs that I suffered from in the 2007 version and that seem to have been fixed. For one, Quicken now downloads information directly from our Citibank accounts. Previously I had to do that manually, after logging into the online account myself. Second, the 2007 version suffered from a really obnoxious bug in which whatever changes I made to a graph were not saved and had to be made again and again every time I opened a report. The problem seems to have gone away [late breaking news: this bug still seems to be there, in a different and more annoying form. Idiots!]

Wouldn't it be nice if Intuit showed some innovation with this product? How about letting the user REALLY customize views (colors, graph sizes, positions etc.); how about if they let you pick what types of charts you'd like to see? Is there any particular reason why spending charts always appear as a pie chart? Why can't I choose a different look? Why can't I drag charts to reposition them and resize them on the screen - just like you can do with virtually any online customized page? How about time ranges? Why can't I choose my own preferred time period to chart? For example, when looking at my expenses, I would prefer to look at a 13 month time period which would allow me to compare the current month to the same month a year ago.

This entire platform is old and tired. Worse, Intuit doesn't even pretend to give a damn about its customers any more. It sells us the same piece of junk year after year, relying on the power of its monopoly in the space to get us all to buy its sub-par product. We need an Apple or a Google to get into the game and make things actually work! We need some real competition in this space.

All in all, Quicken is a pretty crappy product - and I should know, I have been using it since 2002. Unfortunately, it's also the only one out there and having all my financial information in one central file is valuable to me. It would be nice if there were some better products out there, but unfortunately this is all I've got.

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Our Taxes with a Twist

Our taxes are done. Not yet filed, but at least they're done. This year I ran a little experiment. The good people at Intuit have been kind enough to give me a copy of TurboTax to play around with. However, knowing that I am not very good at doing this kind of thing, I figured I'd use TurboTax first, but then still visit our accountant to do our taxes. I could then compare the results of these two methods, and maybe even do our taxes on my own next year. What do you think happened?

Well, according to TurboTax we deserve a Federal refund of $2,878 and a California state refund of $5,392. Sweet. According to my accountant, we deserve a Federal refund of $3,042 and a state refund of only $2,313... Now that's one hell of a difference, especially on the state side...

So what's going on? I don't know and I think it's pretty complex to figure out exactly what the differences are. I plan to sit down with both of the returns and try to compare them. However, if I were to put my money on it (which I sort of have to, I guess), I would have to go with my accountant.

Our tax return is not hugely complex, but it's not a simple one either. In addition to W-2s, we had a veritable zoo of 1099s, foreign income and foreign trust distribution... I have a feeling that TurboTax is not meant for folks like us.

I will say this: if all you need to enter are some W-2s and 1099s, TurboTax makes the process simple and easy, in most cases simply downloading the information directly from our employers and financial institutions. I have never tried to do our own taxes before and (with the exception of the substantial discrepancy I pointed out above) the process was not intimidating or overly complex at all. Maybe I'll try TurboTax again next year if I can figure out what went wrong here.

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