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Apple Orders 12 Million iPhones
Waqas writes "Apple has placed an order for 12 million iPhones to be built by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, according to an analyst citing reports from Asia. The Chinese-language Commercial Times on Wednesday cited Taiwan-based sources within Apple's iPod component supply chain as saying the phone is due to arrive during the first half of next year."
My phone calls people, it takes calls. It sends SMS and it receives them. That's all - I love my phone. When I went to buy it, the service chick couldn't understand why I didn't want a camera/video/gps/somethingsomething. I'm obviously a geek festooned with gadgets, afterall. The obvious answer is that I already have all those things, and much better ones than can be put in a phone, too. The original ipod was just a music player, but it has become more things - Apple is on a slippery slope - I hope they don't fall to the dark side with creeping featuritis and 'convergence'. I, for one, will always pass on a player/phone that is not just a player or phone.
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And now see the real reason Apple crippled the features to be included in the Motorola ROKR phone (especially the storage). they wanted that market for themselves, but didn't have a product ready yet.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Apple learned faster than Microsoft that the desktop-centric computing world is dying and be replaced by various computing devices, especially portable and useful ones. The Zune and the xBox are all about trying not to become irrelevant.
Apple is and always has been a company to make useful consumer computing devices, whether that computing decives is a really nifty audio player or a really nifty phone
My Sony(spit!)Ericsson phone does that too - but in such an obscure way that I didn't discover that feature until I had the phone for about a year, long after the irritating micro-joystick used to choose which of a contacts's numbers to dial had clogged up. The software is at best clunky, the bare minimum that the makes could get away with, unless they the developers thought of something that would add a bullet point to the feature list. So I have a built in multi-track music sequencer, but not the ability to take a photo without a 5 second wait.
There really is a huge gap in the market for a phone that's well designed and has a well written software, rather than the botchware that my past SE and Nokia phones shipped with. How did my phone ship with the ability to play a 45 minute video clip, but no way to pause, rewind or fast-forward it?
Apple's problem is not that the other makers are subsidised, because their phones will undoubtedly be subsidised too (why on earth does the analyst think this would be an issue?) but that one size doesn't fit all. I want at least a 2 megapixel camera and 4Gb of ram, or if wish fulfillment is an option, OSX on a transmeta cpu... but the 'bare bones' market wants just a phone/ipod nano combo in a small form factor. If we don't see iPhone, iPhone Nano, and iPhonePro then a big share of the potential audience will be disappointed.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
That's a strange number to order. Is that for a full year? If so, why order them all at once?
Just for a reference, Motorola sells around 10 million RAZRs a quarter. I don't think Apple is crazy enough to believe the iPhone is going to be that popular.
This is exactly the situation the iPod faced. I haven't yet found a better way to call someone than through Nokia's contact list, but that could be because of some fundamental design flaw in today's phones, which Apple has perhaps found. If Apple can actually improve on that design, they may launch the next generation of cell phone interfaces. I would be disappointed if they did any less than start a revolution.
This is not the signature you're looking for.
Steve must be pissed that this got out. Remember, loose lips sink ships.
Apple continue to show other makers how to not overload a music player.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but my iPod has a photo viewer, PIM functionality and games. It's basically like my mobile phone, but without the phone. I don't know of any other MP3 player that is as overloaded with useless features.
Ok, this is something that I don't really expect the majority of gadget freak slashdotters to ever really grok, but I'll say it anyway:
The iPod's integrated battery is a *good* thing.
The battery in most iPods will never be replaced, and I actually suspect it wouldn't be even if it were a simple 5-second task. Batteries have gotten good enough that their expected service lifetime can come close to matching the expected usage lifetime of devices they power (yes, some will fail early, but that doesn't mean all or even many will, there are always outliers).
Making a battery user-accessible requires adding latches, contacts, extra layers of plastic casing, and other design compromises that just aren't worth it to facilitate a task that *might* be performed once in a device's lifetime. Those compromises cost the device in terms of money, weight, and ruggedness, all of which could be better allocated enhancing something the user does every day, like listening to music on the go.
If you really want to keep your iPod a couple of years down the road, rather than upgrade to the latest greatest gadget like most people, you *can* still replace the battery, or even have a professional do it for you for a reasonable fee. You just won't have spent the last 700+ days carrying around the means to swap out the battery in your pocket, waiting for the one day when it's ready to be changed.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
And I say this as someone who doesn't own an IPod and who only uses a cell phone as a modem.
I don't claim to understand the market for their little gizmos. But it doesn't take understanding it to see that it's there.
Where they make it work is that if you only want to use the iPod to play music, you never even need to know that it can do all that other stuff. This is a skill that a surprisingly large number of "feature-rich" products lack.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I'm thinking the iPhone has to take the cake. What other continuously-running (not off and on, like the buyout/merger rumors) Apple rumor has had legs for this long? The iPhone rumor has been in full force for at least two and a half years.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I just want a phone with an SD slot, quality playback, and decent folder navigation. The only time I listen to music on a portable player is at the gym, so I just want to be able to pop the card out of my PC and into my phone/MP3 player. I don't want to carry around seperate devices, I don't want to have to remember to charge a player I only use a few days a week, and I don't need a goddamned computer-in-a-phone. For the love of God, SD cards are up to 8GB now. It's the simplest and fastest way to transfer music, but almost nobody's supporting it because they all want you to use their proprietary crap, or pay-to-download, etc. I finally found a decent car stereo with SD support, but as far as I've seen, the phones that do have SD slots are all full-blown SmartPhones (sic) with some craptastic keyboard and/or a huge display that's just begging to get broken/scratched if I were to put it in my pocket.
Maybe I should just start my own company, use someone else's VC to fund it, and if it fails, at least I'll have exactly what I wanted.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Whoah - not the way to do business with Apple.
Steve Jobs does ... not ... like ... his surprises to leak in advance.
Apple used to leak like a sieve. Everyone knew their product plans before their own salesfolk did. It got so bad sales took a huge hit every time the next big thing was due as everyone put off their orders. Now after Job's return Apple does a few big new introductions at their own MacWorld or at a few specialty shows, the famous "one more thing ..." products. Those are always hugely, obsessively, secret so Apple gets the maximum PR. Heck, everyone in the industry, caring about Apple or not, tracks these just to see what Apple will do next.
The last time someone leaked in a big way it was ATI. The result was 24 hours before the new Mac introductions, with ATI cards, they had their products stripped from the new Macs, all Apple presentations were rescripted to omit references to ATI, Apple marketing materials were quickly remade sans ATI, etc. Apparently ATI were persona non grata at Apple HQ for several months until his Steveness was sufficiently mollified this would never happen again.
Since then other Apple manufacturers have gotten in lower levels of trouble for simply acknowledging large orders had been made by Apple. These are picked up by the local press, which is of course read by everyone in the industry around the world.
But to confirm the long awaited iPhone, a rumor that has been a staple for years from the dingiest Mac rumor site to the NYT, that takes a special kind of stoopid.
My assumption is that as soon as this story started to break a damage control team from the manufacturer to Cupertino. Now the question is if Jobs will go ahead with the rollout or delay it at the last minute. As this is the same man who once had a factory closed down for all of the robots to be repainted, 9 times, 'til he was happy, who has a history of cancelling large projects, I dunno.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Also, if true, what the iPhone will entail, especially after Disney's recent phone flop.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I don't know of any other MP3 player that is as overloaded with useless features.
This is amusing, because most iPod-critics on slashdot decry how the iPod is lacking in features... yet I guess there are still some who think it has too many.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, those features are very incidental to the iPod and you can even simply not show them on your menu if you like... as I have done.
Hang on a minute, who said that an iPhone *has* to be a music player- the assumption just seems to be out there that apple are going to take an iPod and bolt on 9 keys and an internal arial.
:)
Apple know how to build great devices that just work, and if they're working on releasing a phone, well then you can be damned sure they're not going to compromise on making it a good phone just to squeeze iTunes in.
Also, why would they miss an opportunity to sell you a $300 phone that plays music , when they can sell you a $250 phone and a $250 music player
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
I know the phone doesn't fit in with the small phone crowd that screams for more features & better interface, but Treo's (outside of the 700w) are hands down the best interface you'll get your hands on. You don't even need to be so worried about losing your phone if you sync enough to keep data on the phone and your PC. New revision out? Get the new one and the data will come off your PC. No stupid assed copying contacts from the SIM card that only allows one phone # per record. It's a hell of allot better option than anyone else's current offerings.
Only way the iPhone will be taking the place of my Treo is if they have it able to sync with iCal and Addressbook at the very least with my Mac. I'd love to see it happen, but I really don't see it working out.
For anyone sufing this low in the thread, even as recently as 25 years ago it was pretty standard that all long distance calls were 25c/minute - in 1980ish dollars. You can see today what "everybody playing on a level field" has brought in terms of services costs. That's what dereg in the LD market did - one standard, many players. I pay the "outrageous" rate of 4c/minute, but I have no minimums and no service fees, so my LD runs me about $2/mo. I'd prefer to see some real standardization in the cell coverage market - then we might get some better rural coverage, as we wouldn't need three vendors on every metropolitan tower just to cover the handsets used.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?