Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Apple kept background wallpapers off of the iPhone 3G because it just didn't work well enough. No, this isn't just some incredible fantasy that a small JPEG or GIF could impact animation and performance, but a claim all the way from the top of Cupertino' smartphone empire itself, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs."

When asked by a customer why she couldn't get the wallpaper option on her 3G, Steve Jobs emailed her and said: "The icon animation with backgrounds didn't perform well enough." But according to the 9to5mac, jailbroken iPhones run it just fine. So I guess it's clear as mud eh? All I know is the one factory 3G that we have is definitely slower than the 3GS, so I tend to believe that adding something such as this would degrade performance even more, at least on the un-jailbroken versions. Time to upgrade!

"Is your desktop background getting boring? Perhaps something new is just what the doctor ordered. And what better way to show your love for Apple that an Apple-themed (Hey, this is TheAppleBlog remember. If you don't love Apple, why are you here?) wallpaper! I scoured the Internet and found a whole heap of nice shiny wallpapers. Here's a collection of my favorites."

I particularly liked this one so I put it on my MBP. There are 29 others in this list, more than enough to give everyone at least one choice for their library of wallpapers. And if you have several you like and want to alternate through them, you can go into the preferences pane and use the every hour option for "change picture" in the Desktop and Screen Saver options.

"Chances are good that almost everyone download and installing the freshly-leaked Windows 7 build 7068 ISO is installing Ultimate Edition - after all, it's the one our product keys work with and it'll run for over year with a valid key. Paul Thurrott, however, has taken the pains of installing each version- including Starter - to get a feel for what's coming. We already knew that Starter would be extremely feature-limited. How full an experience would you expect from an OS that can only run three programs at once? Regardless, one feature has been crippled that has a lot of people confused. In Windows 7 Starter Edition, the personalization option on the context menu isn't available. Worse yet, users can't even change their wallpaper."

Okay, it's not like anyone being reasonable was expecting a full-blown experience from something called "Starter Edition." Seriously. The problem is that changing wallpapers is one of the most basic things people do to customize their computer. In fact, for most people (like myself) that's all the customization that ever happens. I run stock themes on all of my computers and change wallpapers every three months or so; I'm not a huge tweaker that way. But to take even that away from consumers sounds, to me, just flat out stupid. I would say "imagine if Apple had done this," but I reckon that really is already floating through a lot of your minds already.

I have a feeling this will change before the release just based on the negative buzz it's attracting from the folks I've seen writing about it.

The linked article has a workaround for you, if you're toying with Starter Edition, because, as everyone knows, in a life without walls, you don't really need wallpaper, right?