Slashdot Mirror
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."
While I don't care about a phone that plays music or video, I want a phone that has a quick, intuitive interface for placing calls and text messages to people in my address book. I find that each time I've had to replace my phone, I'm progressively less satisfied with the interface. It seems like Motorola et al are so worried about form factor that they ignore interface design.
For example, about 7 years ago I got a Motorola StarTac. It was the coolest form factor phone at the time, and had a reasonable interface. Each name in my phone directory could have multiple numbers associated with it, with each number having an icon for office, home, cell, etc. When I wanted to call someone, I first selected the name, then the appropriate icon from that person's list. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked reasonably well. Now I've got a Motorola RAZR, and they've somehow lost the ability to recognize that a single person can have multiple numbers. If I have office, home, and cell numbers stored for the same person, I get three entries for them, making the full list of names much longer. Not only are phone makers not making steps forward, they're moving backwards.
Given Apple's track record, I'd say they're the most likely candidates to figure out an elegant cell phone interface, and I'm looking forward to the iPhone for that reason alone. If the interface is half decent, I'll be buying one to replace my RAZR.
-JMP
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.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
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 has placed an order for 12 million iPhones to be built by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, according to an analyst citing reports from Asia.
Let's just be thankful that they aren't being designed by Microsoft. If they were, you could only talk to other Microsoft phone owners, and every number you called would get blocked after three calls or three days unless you paid extra to get it unlocked...
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I remember when phones were used to talk to people.
(Git off my lawn!)
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
ANd the best feature of all, a timer. And not just an alarm clock (which it does have) but a "ring 10/30/60/ minutes from now" timer, and it's only 4 keystrokes TOTAL (my old nokia had me set the time and date and it took 12+ keystrokes).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I remember when apple was a fruit
My beef with the RAZR is its Voice Recognition. While it works, it doesn't understand my preferred terminology. With the V60i, I recorded my own voice tag for selected numbers. That let me refer to a telephone as Name Cell. RAZR only accepts NAME MOBILE. Also for business numbers I used Name Office. The RAZR only understands Name Work.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Apple has manufactured still and web cameras, printers, scanners, modems, NICs, displays, etc.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Apple may not be a fruit, but its customers are.
(ducks)
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.
So, I'm rather curious as to Slashdot's opinion on the iPhone.
Most industry/financial analysts have been harshly attacking Apple for the iPhone. (Many of these same analysts were gushing over Motorola's "genius" idea to design a "cool" cell phone, ala razr)
So I ask you, Slashdot analysts, how will the iPhone fare?
or a Music Label...
No sig for the moment.
The headline reminded me of the (in?)famous lifecycle
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
1) a CD
2) a computer (up to 5 with no limits to how many times you play them on there)
3) your iPod which you now can have linked to up to 2 librarys on 2 different computers
Yes you need to strip the DRM to play it on a device that is not supported by fairplay, but if your buying from iTunes then you know this already and its not a issue, as everyone knows iTunes exists to sell the iPod, and your personally ripped tracks stay DRM free (unlike Microsofts which get the 3or3 scheme thrown into them too)
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Thats right. Brown.
Steve must be pissed that this got out. Remember, loose lips sink ships.
You were lucky!
When I were a lad I'd have to walk two hundred miles to the nearest village with my legs tied together with barbed wire, find a rotten apple on the floor near Farmer Bob's apple cart, then take it one thousand miles over broken glass and rusty nails to grandma for her dinner.
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
Will these phones be GSM or CDMA? And are there any carriers lined up for them? I'd predict they'll likely be GSM since most USA CDMA carriers like to cripple the snot out of their phones and remove all the cool features unless they can nickel and dime their customers out of pay-per-use of those features. Heaven forbid you wish to make your own mp3 ringtones without buying them from the carrier or anything like that, or dare to use BT for anything other than connecting an earpiece.
- when I'm at home rings if someone dials in on my home number
- when I'm at work rings if someone dials in on my work number
- if I have voip and the person I'm after it does too, call using that
I really don't cary about being to take photos. I own a camera that is vastly better than my phone camera. I'm hoping Apple will shake the tree a bit with a new phone concept. I'm unimpressed with most of the phones at the moment because they really only offer new ways for TelCos to take money off me.have courage
I've also heard that...
Microsoft is working on a Zune phone that will allow you to record something and send it to someone else with a Zune phone. But they'll only be able to listen to this "message" for three days unless you pay Cingular and Universal Music Group each a dollar.
This new product will be called the "Zone". Microsoft's marketing message will be "Welcome to the Zone".
This "record and recall" feature should be added to the Zune within a year, but look for C|Net News.com to buck the trend and to annoint the "Zone" an "iPhone killer" for the next six months, followed by swooning reviews of the Zone, claiming it's "great for phone beginners".
Also, the Zone is slated to be compatible with Windows XP SR2 and Windows Vista only.
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
Besides getting scratched easily, your nice white apple cell phone will be dirty with all that oil your face produces. How good is that going to be?
Everyone knows that Apple always does one stupid thing with every piece of hardware they sell. Something that isn't a deal breaker, but is annoying, and makes no real sense. With the Macs, it's their refusal to ship the things with 2-button mice. Withe the iPod, it's their refusal to include an FM tuner.
My guess is the iPhone will have no "7" button.
Steve hates the number 7.
um, Taiwanese contract manufacturers probably manufacture just about everything that's within five feet of your person, right this minute.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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 have a native OS X application from Sony Ericsson for developing themes for many of their cell phones (my trusty T610 included). With Bluetooth for data transfer, and Apple'OS X's built-in iSync, SMS through the Address Book, Bluetooth File Transfer software, and GPRS dialler support, what more could one need or use?
Yaz.
I believed you up until you said wife.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Please, this is a much better business model. Now, mobile phones are much more appealing to the most lucrative market. By loading phones with dozens of complicated games and applications, they are objects of desire for rich nerds who love twiddling with little gadgets but would never want to own a regular telephone because they don't have any friends to call.
That's progress!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Tell the kids o' today that, an they won't believe yer.
Interesting to see that TFA is already predicting that the iPhone will bomb because it can't compete with subsidised handsets in the US. I really wish this meme would die.
For one thing, of course there's no such thing as a free phone. You just pay the cost over time through higher call plans. Admittedly, you may get some benefit of scale when the network buys handsets in bulk but there's no reason Apple couldn't do that too. More likely some company will just start offering much cheaper pre-paid SIM plans like everywhere else in the world.
Another thing, the US carrier market is only a minor fraction of the world market. There are 1.5 *billion* handsets in the world. There are around 300M US citizens. Do the math. The European and Asian markets are enormously larger and people there are used to buying unlocked handsets so that they can connect to any network they like. Here in Australia we've had number portability for years.
Lastly, independence from carriers is a *good* thing. We need to stop carriers dictating phone features. I'd like to see a phone that can switch to WiFi when it gets a signal, or peer to peer when I'm close to the person I'm calling. Think the carriers want that? There's no technical reason that phones can't do this today, but the longer the carriers control the phones people buy, the longer it'll take to happen.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there