I have a friend who works for Apple and loves their corporate
culture to the point of embarrassment (mine mostly). We were sitting in a smart
London restaurant having brunch and discussing Apple products when I noticed
that we had both placed our iPhones on the table in front of us, as had almost
every other customer in the restaurant. A
quick survey of the tables revealed 14 iPhones and a single Samsung Galaxy on
show. With a sample that small one shouldn’t leap to statistical conclusions,
but I believe this impromptu survey conclusively showed that the iPhone is by
far the preferred choice of the affluent residents of Westbourne Grove.
Nationally Android phones are outselling IOS phones,
although the latter still enjoy numerical superiority in the smart phone market
as they’ve been around for longer. In time this will change because iPhones are substantially
more expensive than their Android competitors; I own an iPhone because I find
that Android phones are a little clumsier to operate; this perception is reflected
in industry handset satisfaction surveys which rate iPhones as the best by a margin of 10%, and I’m prepared to pay the substantial premium to own an iPhone 4 because
I prefer the slicker operating system and the ease of use that comes with it. Many
other people will take a more parsimonious view and opt for the cheaper
handsets.
While I’m busy generalising one thing I noticed a few months
ago when we had a surge of MacBook viruses was that Mac users are far more
gullible than Windows users who have spent years living with security threats
and as a result have become cautious in their surfing behaviour. Each of these Mac
infections had been invited on board by the gullible user clicking on a ‘Yes’ button
because if the web site was telling them that they needed to install a security
scanner, then this must be true.
To test this hypothesis I explained to my friend that iPhones
had a vulnerably that allowed me to change her unlock code (which I don’t know
of course) while her phone was still locked. She refused to believe this was possible until
I took her phone from her, shielded it from view for a few seconds, and then
returned it. When she tried to enter her unlock code it wouldn’t work, and
although I reversed my hack a few seconds later she no doubt went back to the mother-ship
where her reports of this security vulnerability may for all I know still be
keeping teams of experts working long hours trying to replicate my feat. My trick was simple – seeing that she was
using the default Apple wallpaper on her unlock screen I waited until she went
to the loo and then changed my own phone to use the same default wallpaper (predictably,
I normally have a photo of my cat). When she came back I simply used some basic
sleight of hand to swap phones. The real irony is that she didn’t notice that
my phone is an iPhone 4, not a 4s like hers. So yes, gullible.
The moral of the story is make sure you personalise you
iPhone wallpaper before your friends start taking advantage of you.
No comments:
Post a Comment