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Apple Platform Lock-Ins, A 3rd Party Dev's Opinion
Iftekhar writes "Wil Shipley, of Delicious Monster fame, has written a very candid essay on what he perceives as Apple's growing trend toward platform lock-ins. He writes: 'Why is the iPhone locked to a single carrier, so I can't travel internationally with it? There's really only one viable reason: Apple wanted a share of the carrier's profits, which meant giving AT&T an exclusive deal. Which meant, we get screwed so Apple can make more money. It's that simple. [...] As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation. We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'"
Apple is a company that's trying to maximize its profits? Wha????
What an astute essay! Of course, it's about 20 years late, but hey, better late than never, huh?
Apple has been actively engaging in hardware/software lock-in for 20+ years. Nothing has changed other than this one particular person has started to remove his head from his ass. Yippee.
I don't respond to AC's.
It does sting a little... we've got a lot of Macs between us and consider ourselves loyal Apple customers... oh well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You know what? I'm sick of this sort of thing. Guess what guys, Apple is in it for the money! They're not running a charity here. Yes, they locked in with another company, it's their prerogative. When you create a product you get to decide if someone is going to exclusively sell it, that's the way it works. No one is forcing you to buy the iPhone. Yeah, it's a create phone, but other phones get the job done just fine.
Apple when dealing with third parties loses some control over the experience of using their devices.
They want to minimize this. It's bad enough they have people perceiving the iphone to have problems because of cell service outages, ridiculous billing from at&t, awful customer support at AT&T, etc. Imagine if they were having to fight that battle on more than one front?
It's silly, because it's not apples fault, but everyone (average consumer) will relate the bad experience to apple even if they are one of the more clear thinking ones.
Since their inception, they've kept control of their hardware, ensuring a consistent and good experience on their computer. This is their strength over microsoft. This is their strength over Dell. They can give you a good experience and manage it. They don't have anyone else to blame!
'Nuff said.
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Didn't some judge say that kind of behavior was illegal?
Oh, Lord. Please point out to me the place in the U.S. where it's easy to buy an unlocked phone and take it from carrier to carrier, cause I'd like to live there. Then maybe I could cancel my contract without an early termination fee and sign up to another carrier without signing a contract. Look, Apple does some stupid shit, but blaming them for the terrible and non-competitive state of the U.S. cel phone industry is just plain stupid. We have, IMO, a de facto telecommunications monopoly in this country, and the reasons for that are a whole lot more complicate than 'Apple is teh sux0r!' The whole essay reads like someone who lives a fair distance from logic. And then there's this:
No, the view among a small percentage of Slashdot posters and some people with blogs is that Apple's screwing up. The view of most rational people is they're doing just fine. Why didn't he just call the essay "I Hate Apple"?
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
that it is Microsoft. A soon as they get more than 15% market share in anything (got forbid higher like with the Ipods), they start pulling stunts and tricks to lock-in people, hardware, devs..
Steve Jobs makes Bill Gates and Ballmer look like open source zealots.
That Jobs wants Apple to be like Microsoft - Big and monopolistic, while Gates wants MSFT to be like Apple - Hip like like a Zune. (I also think Gates secretly wants to leave MSFT to Ozzie to come back and save the day just like you know who.)
As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this.
I wouldn't refer to anyone that can afford a $600 phone as "suffering".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Wow! Apple ... lock in? That's news to me.. lets see. I can run OSX on... a mac only. I can *legally* use an iPod with.... iTunes only... Where are the Mac Clones? Gone... Apple... Locked... No shit, Sherlock.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
...your comment may have merit. In the meantime, you are comparing having something shoved down your throat in one domain by a company holding a (virtual) monopoloy in another domain, with a product and service that has single-digit market-share in a crowded and highly competative field. The latter is called "choice", and as many have already pointed out, you have *huge* selection beyong the iPhone for your "smart phone" needs. -- ~AC
Apple maliciously wants to keep all the money from their products to themselves, instead of giving some of it to me, the struggling developer. Those filthy rich bastards.
Look, every purchase, be it a loaf of bread or an iPhone, is an exercise in weighing potential benefits of the thing acquired against the sum of money needed to acquire it. If for you the lock-in is a deal-breaker, don't buy. When enough people do that, Apple will listen. Before that - I wouldn't bet on it.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
It's called roaming, and you certainly can with the iphone.
You mean the company's first priority is to make money? Say its not so! All this time I thought Apple was around to make people feel all warm and happy inside.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Wait...
There's really only one viable reason: Apple wanted a share of the carrier's profits, which meant giving AT&T an exclusive deal.
How does Shipley know this? It could just as easily have been that no mobile carrier would agree to allow the iPhone on its network (and to incorporate features like visual voice mail) unless it was under an exclusive license.
I'm not saying that's necessarily how it went down, but it's well known that Jobs cares little for the mobile carriers.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Luckily for Apple however, there's enough idiots in the world to pay for their over-priced, under-featured, low quality products.
The amount of defects in Apple is quite astonishing and the software aint much better, yet people flock back to them again and again. Hell, the new iPods don't even look good - one of the few things usually going for Apple products and yet I bet they'll still sell like hotcakes.
People say it's Apple's UIs that do it for them, but anyone able to talk in an even slightly non-biased manner will realise that iTunes, one of Apple's primary products is pretty damn atrocious.
Because.... ???
Look. Go whine somewhere else. You've made your bed, go lie in it.
Deleted
If you don't like it, don't buy it. If you're a 3rd party developer, then don't develop applications for it. Vote with your wallet. Nobody is forcing you to buy the iPhone. Go buy a different smartphone that allows 3rd-party apps.
"Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation."
This might actually make sense if this were a necessity of life, but this is a luxury item we're talking about. I give this a big fat "SO WHAT?" What Apple decided to do with the iPhone was a business decision. Business decisions are made based on the potential to make the company money, either in the short- or long-term. Making customers happy is only important to a company when doing so will help the company make money. If a company makes its customers happy but doesn't make a profit, its competitors will drive it into the ground. This is the whole basis for capitalism: if you don't like one company's product, take your money elsewhere. Besides, everyone was warned well in advance that the iPhone would be closed to third-party apps. There was no surprise. Now, if the iPhone had originally allowed 3rd party apps, and then through an update removed that ability, then you would have a cause to complain.
But the whining I hear day after day about "oh no, the iPhone doesn't do [insert pet feature]! Woe is me!" has long passed the point of "annoying". Face it, even if all the current complaints about the iPhone were resolved, we'd find something else to complain about.
The instant I heard "We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money," the article lost all credibility. Nobody is making you suffer. And so what if they have money? Do you know where that money goes? Let's see...it goes to paying all the people who work for the company. It pays the CEO a big fat paycheck, which he then spends on yacht, which creates jobs. Or he invests it, which means that the money goes to fund some other project or initiative which gives other people jobs. Money sitting in a pile does a company no good.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
On powerbooks and macbook pros the wireless card is locked to channel 1-11. This is fine for the US but, unlike other cards, there is no way to unlock it when you go to Europe (where channels up to 13 are used). This can be a major PITA on a customer site... but at least a spare wireless card is cheap, unlike...
Apple are about the only company that ship the very restricted form of DVD drives. Most will let you read the _data_ from an out-of-region disk, meaning that you can use VLC or another libdvdcss2 solution to play the DVD. The drives that ship with Apple laptops (since late revision powerbooks) totally block reads for out-of-region disks so VLC won't work.
This sucks as it means that my legally purchased region 2 DVDs won't work. There is now a RPC1 de-region crack for macbook pro drives but it requires a copy of Windows to install.
So much for it just works. You would have thought their testing would have involved taking one over the pond for a week of business travel.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/16
As an iPhone owner, you are not Apple's customer. You are the product. The iPhone is a device that uses a shiny interface to deliver subscribers to AT&T, who is Apple's true customer in this deal. I've been an Apple user since 1986, but this time I think I'll pass.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Apple is not providing a generic PC phone, it's providing it's usual seamless enduser enviroment. If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail. Upgrade software would be spotty, itunes store might have some problem, etc...
So what, you might say, Let me have the downgraded experience if that's what I want. Well That's just the point. Apple does not sell downgraded, sort works, experiences. That is their brand image. 1) It just works. 2) every machine has 100% of it's high end features working. (e.g. when you buy an apple computer you get Firewire whether you want it or not--every one has it and developers can count on it).
So it's not up to You. It's up to apple.
Now I'm sure there are boatload of other reasons. Some of them might be to do with revenue sharing. But I think its also to promote the vendor's attention to the details apple likes. By giving exclusive contracts they can pick people who will make Edge work well and make visual voicemail work well. Maybe they can also pick people who wont create nightmare pricing plans. FOr example look at the discpline apple enforced with the Ringtones. while people complain about ringtone costing anything, apple simplified the whole pricing plan. 1) it's cheaper (verizon) 2) you can customize it (all of them) 3) and they don't expire (sprint).
Apple keeps control for it's reason of perpetuating it's brand image and making a profit when they only have small portion of the market and are taking expensive R&D risks.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
oh boy... microsoft comparisons are awfully dimwitted ont this issue. the average consumer (busy life, 30 minute max. learning curve) has literally hundreds of cell-phone options that will work with current infrastructure/calling plans. MS on the other hand controls the vast majority of the populations computer needs with Windows. Anti-MS critics are aware of this responsability and don't react to phrases like 'vendor-lock' like a bunch of dorito clogs.
free software, DRM, vendor lock-in:
it ll comes down to the conflict of property rights vs. immaterial goods rights.
More information on Wil Shipley
... if you plan for it. I bought an iPhone for my wife (I kept my trusty Treo 650) and we went to Germany about two weeks later. Of course, I did call AT&T to discuss International rates and set us up on an appropriate plan for while we were there. I put us on a $6.95/month plan that dropped our per-minute fees by over 60%. I canceled it when we returned. Was still it expensive? Of course - our bill was a couple of hundred bucks when we got back - but that's no worse than with any other phone. We did know what we were getting into, though, and had planned accordingly. And more importantly, we could both send and receive calls while we were there - we both own our own companies and people have to get ahold of us. Ironically, her phone worked perfectly while my Treo had all sorts of problems (but to be fair, I'm pretty sure it's because of some frigtarded AT&T setup issues).
If you really need to cut costs when you travel internationally, buy a disposable phone or rent one or use the old phone you've got lying around when you're in the country you're traveling to. Otherwise, remember the Law of the Seven P's - Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance (not to mention sky-high phone bills).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Apple took a risk with the iphone by releasing an expensive device with extra features that not everyone would consider essential. By taking the deal with AT&T, they probably reduced some of their financial risk. They also reduced their available market share since people may not be able or willing to switch to AT&T. I don't necessarily like their decision, but I don't think it was motivated entirely by corporate greed. As for the ipod, we all know the argument about controlling the end-user's experience in order to guarantee that everything works well together. Apple is extending that formula to the iphone. Like the ipod, there will be more and more ways to get around the limitations as time passes. It's cool to continue to call for the opening up of these devices because the payoff for a techie is huge, but it will take time. I don't think it will speed things along to resort to conspiracy theories or dismissal of Apple's motives in this case.
I find this article and the associated thread fascinating in that I am not a developer and until this moment, had no idea who Will Shipley was.
Coming at it from that angle, I found him to be a childish potty-mouthed sort of fellow who seems to be crying "Sour Grapes" really loudly. I imagine that he has some kind of techie internet-based fame that allows him to write this kind of thing and come across as insightful? As an article on it's own however, discovered without reference to background or source, it reads like a bunch of juvenile whining.
At best it seems only to state some very well-known "wrongs" and then just add a (mostly unspoken) OMG! at the end of each point.
I am guessing that this article is really a developers expression of personal frustration, that a lot of folks here (also developers) can identify with and thus nod your heads in unison, but to the uninitiated it just reads like a bad rant.
I have never heard Microsoft ever preventing you from running some other company's browser or media player on a Windows machine, yet Microsoft is evil because they give you a free browser and media player with Windows. I have never heard Microsoft ever insist that you had to buy your PC from them, yet Microsoft is evil because most PCs are sold with Windows pre-loaded.
Apple is in every way more restrictive, but is the force of goodness and light.
I'll never understand fanboys.
We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.
... I don't own a single Apple product, and haven't since I retired my Apple //e decades ago. Suffering is relative. Now, if Apple had a de facto monopoly on cell phones I might feel differently, but there is such an incredible array of competing equipment out there I just don't see the point in whining about one vendor. Consumers will decide if the iPhone survives or not: obviously Apple is hoping for a repeat of their success with the iPod. Cell phones are a much more complex marketplace but, hey, time will tell.
I don't suffer
Personally, I think that if Apple wants the iPhone to last, to have a substantial ecosystem develop around their hardware, they should open it up for third-party code. I believe they eventually will, once they've squeezed the last drop out of the early-adopter crowd.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yes, I too believed the endless Apple hype. Even twenty years ago before knowing anything about computers and electronics (they are the same thing, in reality).
Then when I was an electronics student, the original Mac came out. What a media shitstorm! You would have thought that the sun danced in front of Dan Rather and cast of thousands in a sleepy little Portuguese village. Then people started exiting the Jobs reality-distortion field and real reports started circulating (but not being published as most computer magazines were dependent on computer company ad purchases and wouldn't report anything dispiriting about anybody's computer. Plus,there was no WWW then).
Well this little box was an earth shattering copy of a Xerox Star and somewhat cheaper, but it had one problem. It couldn't, well,..uh.. do..anything actually. I mean after you wiggled the mouse around and clicked on some menu bars, well that was about it. That's what you got for your $2000. It even took five swaps to copy a floppy disk.
The problem was that the machine had no memory. It had two banks of 64K chips to run the whole show. But there were holes and traces on the circuit board to hold the new 256K RAM chips. It wasn't long before hardware hackers (and there were many then) realized that by carefully removing the 64K chips and replacing them with 256K chips, the new Mac could perform almost as well as a CPM machine or even a RadioShack Trash-80. Apple would upgrade your new machine, but they charged two to three times as much as the cost of the 256K RAM chips themselves. And basically all they did was pop the top, unscrew the main circuit board from the box, pull some easy-on,easy-off connectors, put in the new board with the 256K RAM chips and slap everything back together. It took about 15 minutes, maybe, if the store was busy. But Apple charged many hundreds of dollars for this, uh, service.
So lots of people, (first customers, the ones who took a chance and paid the big bucks for Apple's new machine) simply did this procedure themselves. Word filtered back to this asshole Steve Jobs that about this and he decided that: "Anyone who did a non-Apple upgrade of the Mac RAM could NOT be allowed to purchase upgrade ROMs that fixed all the little bugs in version 1.0". This was a big thing: ROM chip swap was the only way to upgrade the Mac OS and, back then, almost everybody was a hardware hacker. Popular computer magazines published schematics and code to home-build copies of the latest equipment and peripherals that were being reviewed and sold.
Not long after that Jobs was thrown out of the company for being a greedy megalomaniac and pissing off the entire Apple community. But he never lost the uncanny ability to take people's money, give them second-rate equipment, and convince them that they were part of some 'insanely great' movement of which he was the guru through which the divine light of technology and coolness passed.
So it comes as no surprise that one by one, millions of people come to learn what a greedy vicious little fraud this guy is. Do yourself a favor; don't buy stuff from this guy. You can always get the same functionality in better and much cheaper equipment elsewhere.
$300 and up mac midrange from newegg:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/PublicWishLists.asp?ViewType=&searchTitle=osx86&searchItemNumber=&actionType=SEARCH&sortFld=CREATEDATE&sortOrder=DESC&Page=
I'm kinda wondering what the big deal about visual voicemail is.
I mean, I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself. But it seems to me that it'd be pretty easy for any network to offer it to almost ANY phone, or at least a pretty close facsimile to a large majority.
Phones that can receive audio-video MMS messages have been around for many years. So why not just MMS the recorded voice file directly to the phone, when it's convenient? They already SMS you the notification, why not just send the voice too? Then you can see all your voicemail messages listed individually on your phone, and listen to them at will.
Technically it's better for the network, as the bandwidth cost is lower than playing the message over a voice call, and they can do it at less-than-realtime data rates too. They can still charge for the service however they like, and many customers would pay for the convenience. They could send extra info in the MMS, maybe even a basic speech-to-text summary (for a fee). They could also email it anywhere, as many VoIP providers do now.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
MacOS was very proprietary, and Apple went to court protecting whatever proprietary aspects of it could.
OS X may use some open source components and command line UNIX interface, but the administration tools, graphics libraries, development tools, primary scripting language, and user interface are entirely proprietary.
Apple likes to create the impression that this is because their tools are better, but there is little concrete evidence that Quartz, Cocoa, AppleScript, Xcode, or Objective C are better than their open source equivalents. The main areas where Apple clearly wins are design, marketing, and out-of-box experience.
Apple's strategy seems to always have been, and continue to be, to be as proprietary as they can get away with. Nothing wrong with that--they are a for profit company. But don't you forget that they are a company and do what maximizes their profit, not what maximizes your benefit. And don't you forget that companies are very effective at marketing and creating addictive products--Apple products feel good, but so do lots of things that aren't good for you.
Consumers don't suffer, only the sort that go to pay to buy the Apple stuff suffers.
It's plain simple: Don't buy or let the Chinese or othe electronics manufacturers clone the iPhone then people like you will be happy. Shhesh!
"Apple has engaged two of the most cock-thirsty and money-grubbing conglomerates in the United States -- the movie and record industries"
Wouldn't that be nice... "cock thirsty and money grubbing" describes a good whore.
Unfortunately, the movie and record industry aren't "cock thirsty", they want to screw you.
We know what Apple has said. Unfortunately we won't know the reality for a year or so.
What they said is that they want to do something different from other vendors. Generally cell phones are pretty much fixed when you buy them. Apple says that want to do something more like a desktop computer: They want to keep adding new functionality. With OS X people expect to buy periodic new versions. We don't have that tradition with cell phones. Supposedly getting a continuous income stream from ATT will let them put continuing development work into it.
Unfortunately we won't know whether this is for real until we see what kind of development they do over the course of a year or two.
So don't buy Apple!
You whiny iPhone owners are starting to get on my nerves. If you had two brain cells to put together, you would have known that a company that sells a $699 cellphone is in it for the money.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
He who owns the road sets the rules. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If you want to play in Steve's sandbox, you better do what Steve says, or he just might smite you. If your business model depends on the whims of a tyrant, you'd better have some cash on hand to weather the storm.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Back in the good old days of mainframes, people (companies) used to invest a large chunk of cash into a single powerful mainframe system. They were then obliged to spend even more cash to buy peripherals for that system, which usually were only available from the original vendor. Some folks grumbled about this, but those were mostly bean counters and management (who listened to the bean counters far more often than their technical staff).
The technical staff generally were happy with this arrangement. Part of the cash going to the vendor usually also paid for a nice fat service contract which meant if your disk drive walked a bit too far and bent the pins on the connector, they'd happily wander out and fix it for you. Sure, it might take them a little time, but generally speaking they'd eventually get it right and things would work properly.
It also meant that the developers could learn how the system worked in a few months and then be productive for many years to come. No need to relearn the OS every few years because an update was just that, an update -- not a whole wad of new stuff lumped in and a big chunk of old stuff ripped out. No need to write code to handle 5 billion possible combinations of hardware from vendors who can't even read an English spec sheet when they design their chipsets. You wrote code, it worked.
Then the microcomputer arrived and the PC got the attention of the bean counters. Not only could you buy dozens of these little boxes for a fraction of the cost of that big lump of iron in the basement, but there were no service contracts to sign... and no need for super-specialized support staff. The company could hire the VP's grandma to do tech support.
Thus the industry went through a total reversal of operating standards. We went from having single-source products which were well tested, reliable, and backed by support from the folks who built and designed the systems, to cobbled together bits of duct tape and bailing wire that needed to be kicked every few hours to keep it running. But, it's cheaper.
So, you'll forgive me if I don't take you guys very seriously when you say how much you love Apple because it just works, and because everything meshes together nicely, but you hate Apple because you can't add anything you want onto it and make it into the kind of frankenbox a typical PC is.
Apple made the decision to sign a deal with AT&T for the money. Duh, they're a company trying to make a profit. They probably ALSO figured if they only had to deal with ONE vendor, they wouldn't have to worry if their new iPhone gizmo looked horrible when Bob's Budget Cellz decided to write their own GUI to slap on it for their customers.
In short... make up your mind folks. You can have it done cheap, done right, or done quick... choose two.
Apple has enetered a new and very competitive market with the iPhone.
It has developed something that was aimed to be more than just an other cell phone.
Apple needed the support not only from iPhone customers, but also from AT&T or similar company and it makes sense that they offered exclusivity in return - at last for the beginning.
"Screwing customers" by high initial price, which is getting dropped shortly, or locking them into a single carier is not really about screwing Apple users: once iPhone is reaching a critical mass - Apple will be in a different position and pretty much all analyst tend to think that eventually iPhone customers won't be locked in to single carrier.
Please google the pbs.org site for I Cringely continous and intersting takes on this issue - including Google's phone plans - and check out Jim Cramer's video: "Teens would devour iPhone if AT&T loosened up".
I mean, just because Apple makes a product, that doesn't mean you need to get one. If the iPhone provides what you need better than the alternatives, and you don't need what it doesn't provide... go for it. If it doesn't... get something else.
There's no "platform lock-in" to the iPhone. If there was an iPhone SDK, there would be, but as it is if you don't have an iPhone you can get another phone that can still use all the same third-party content you could if you had one, and if you do you aren't locked into it. This is a different kind of lockin-in, and it's got nothing to do with developers.
On the iPod...
Now we see that iPod owners who upgrade to a newer iPod must re-buy the games they've already bought, because the new iPods are incompatible with the old. No credit given for having already bought an identical game.
Is he talking about games produced by Apple, or games produced by third parties? I don't know, I never bought games for my iPod. I never even considered buying games for my iPod. Why? Because it was obviously a closed system from the start.
But I did buy some software for my Palm, and had to re-buy some of it when I got a newer PalmOS device, because the older games didn't handle the new screen size. That's not Palm's fault, and I don't blame them for that (and not just because there's enough well-earned blame landing on them as it is).
And I'm certainly not going to *create* a platform lock-in for them by buying an iPhone and crack into it.
What should Steve do? Well, for starters, give up on trying to control everything.
Oh, I can only agree, but Steve isn't going to do that, so my recommendation is to stick to the Mac, ignore the 'appliance' products, and have an exit strategy so you can jump ship if Apple decides they're going to get serious about making the Mac an appliance again. That way we'll never have to put up with 1984 being just like 1984.
In the meantime, be picky.
Apple needs to be able to say, "Look, NBC, you want to be dumb-asses and try to sell people crap they don't want, fine -- we're still going to sell iPods that'll play your programs, we just won't sell your programs on the nicest internet store in the world. Your loss, suckers, call us when you change your mind."
I don't think Apple can say that. Because you will only be able to download those videos to your iPod on Windows: We're Sorry the requested download is unavailable. Downloads are only available to users located in the United States that have a Microsoft operating system and Internet Explorer web browser. Please check back soon for other offers.
Now *there* is your *platform* lock in.
I don't write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment
Don't write programs for Apple. Write programs for Macintosh. You can't write programs for Apple's appliances.
I agree with you, they should make it possible, it wouldn't even be that hard... it'd just be another target option for XCode.
But Apple's decided they're not interested in selling iAppliances to me, so I'm not going to get one.
Apple's just Microsoft in cooler clothes. Where does the personification of Linux fit in those clever commercials? Oh, right -- it doesn't fit in a 'commercial' at all.
The problem is that people think Apple is their friend. This is no doubt a testament to their marketing skills, but the fanboy crowd really needs to get their collective head out of their collective ass about this. Apple is a publicly-traded corporation, with all the financial responsibilities that entails (i.e. they are obligated by law to act in the best interest of their profits). The sooner people get it through their head that Steve Jobs isn't going to stop by their house and do a couple bong hits with them, the sooner they'll stop whining.
Every cell phone company does this at first. The RAZR was Cingular only to begin with, the Chocolate is still Verizon only (last I checked). Apple just figured out a way to lock it down a bit more.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Wil's comments are spot-on with respect to Apple's recent alienation of both its developers, and its early adopters.
It was these very developers and early adopters (fan-boys, if you wish) who kept buying Apple products through the dark times.
Now that Apple is firing on all cylinders, can they afford to alienate these two groups? In the short term, iPhone, iPod, and MacBook sales are through the roof.
The question is, what is the long-term ramification of their actions.
And we all know when I say "their actions" I mean "Steve Jobs' actions."
They have never planned on owning the markets they are in. They have always wanted to maximize the amount of money they get from the specific consumers that buy their product.
Microsoft won the PC market because they leveraged partners and helped build a large competitive industry around their software. Yes, Apple wants to control 'the user experience' even at the cost of the quality and interoperability of such experience. This has also been apple's way, they hope to provide a controlled experience with their products.
As far as philosophy, control of a 'market' has never been apple's way and anyone who thinks Steve Jobs wants to be Bill Gates is just confused as they appear to be in Bill's market. Steve understands human behavior and has never wanted own the whole market, he wants to lead his consumers. Cult of Mac is no joke. Steve takes care of his children and is rewarded with ownership of his children. It also helps that he has treated media people quite well and even tailored his computers almost exclusively for their use back in the day when no one else would buy the crap.
You can clearly see why Bill is envious of such loyalty, and he does seem quite often wishful in the products Microsoft makes that they would have such loyal followers.
The problem here is that because of the quality of the product and of the current cell phone market in the US, Apple is getting regular buyers/user/consumers and isn't converting them properly. Basically, when you buy an Apple experience, you tend to know you are giving up certain things other products because you are joining not buying. When a consumer chooses Apple, they go through the stages of grief/acceptance for many interoperability(rights)/features missing they find come with a similar product. All cell phone companies in the US control everything they can and that incidentally includes the experience. Apple is in a competitive market(such as it is) for the first time and so their being criticized more heavier here than they are used to and by more people willing to join. People are pissed about having to join AT&T, pissed about dropping some other company they were forced to join before (they have already accepted its limitations and cherish its limited set of features). In the long run, it will likely cause the market to open if Apple competes successfully. If the cell phone companies have to compete on loyalty it will take more than Alltel ads and the bs 'feature' of reasonable prices to succeed. Since experience isn't their expertise or goal, hopefully they will start giving consumers rights to contrast from the Apple/AT&T experience.
How many OS-X machines have you built with cheap parts you can get at Frys? How many run on low price/bulk volume Dell or Gateway hardware?
If you want to use OS-X, general* consensus is that you pay several hundred bucks more for your locked in Apple hardware than you would for a comparable third party's hardware. (*note: Yes, there are arguments against this but it's still a very, very common belief)
Have you ever installed the superior iPod interface software on a cheaper MP3 player? OK, so that's trickier than an OS install... So how many non-Apple MP3 players have you bought that have licensed the iPod interface, plug in to iTunes and can read your iTunes store purchases?
Again, for access to Apple's prized world, they lock you to their hardware and then bill you $50-$100 more than the equivalent MP3 player from Creative, Sandisk or whoever.
In short, Apple has always increased revenue by refusing to even consider competitors, meaning there's decreased competition and increased prices.
The only difference this time is they've partnered with someone to do it because there's an area they have no existing business strength in. It's still the same basic premise... they just have funkier TV ads now that have made most of us think they're our cool friend and not the same business that's always wanted to maximise profits from us through a model of non-competition.
On the flipside, they do get to keep using the [somewhat arguable] phrase, "It Just Works" because, unlike Microsoft's open approach to other hardware vendors, they don't get a reputation for putting out buggy systems when product X completely fails to work with product Y and product Z was never tested properly in the first place.
By that rationale, they could equally argue, "Had we openned it up, we'd have to rely on carriers for testing as we couldn't test with every one of them. The moment Sprint or T-Mobile had a glitch where everyone's emails disappeared or a virus got in to the system that we couldn't lock out by forced updates, news stories would tar the iPhone's name as well as just the guilty vendor, people would see the iPhone as buggy and we'd lose our market share through something that wasn't our fault. We'd rather stay locked to something we can control, sell a few less but maintain our reputation."
Whether for profits or for quality, it hardly matters. One has always been the claim against Apple, the other has always been their defense. Nothing's changed in far longer than the iPhone's lifetime.
There is another reason for vendor lockin - Apple wanted new features that do not exist today (like Visual Voicemail). How were they supposed to ever get something like that implemented without also doing something for the vendor that implemented it?
Yes Apple probably also wanted some of the incoming revenue from subscribers, but it's not like there were not also other benefits derived. You may scoff at the benefit visual voicemail brings, but that is actually a pretty giant step in usability over voicemail on most phones, for the average person.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
WTF? Microsoft is way worse about this than Apple is. And because of it they got more money than anyone else, and make shitty products. At least Apples stuff works and is fun to use. When Steve is the richest man on earth and everything they make is jacked, then write this article.
Let me get this straight. You make the personal choice to purchase a piece of Apple hardware and knowingly pay two or three times the price you would pay to an alternative vendor and somehow Apple is screwing you? How does someone walk into a store and make a purchase knowing full well the price they are being charged and the price the bestbuy down the street is charging, yet this person somehow is being taken advantage of?
His complaint is that developers are locked out, and thus customers are locked in to whatever Apple deigns to produce. Perhaps that's not quite the same as lock-in to Windows, but it has the same effect - a slow erosion of rights until you realise you don't even own your device. The same can not be said for OS X on the desktop.
The real fear here (and this is voiced in the article), is that in 10 years, when the OS X platform is mostly about mobile devices, and there are 10 million iPhones to each 1 million macs (this day will come), only Apple will control everything about these phones, and all the 3rd party developers will have to find some other platform to use, and customers will have to take what they're given, or look elsewhere. That would be a real shame, and a disappointment for many mac users. People would desert the platform in droves. Apple has done a good job up to now of balancing their need for control with the needs of their customers, but the iPhone, with no promise of being open at all, isn't looking good.
All it would take from Apple would be a simple statement that the SDK is coming next year, and people should be patient till then. That would calm a lot of nerves. As it is it's starting to look like hubris on the part of Apple, perhaps the thought that they can do it all themselves so much better (when they patently can't). The iPhone is the future of the mac, it *is* the future mac, and Shipley doesn't like what he sees, as far as software support goes. This is what Jobs said before he came back, I believe he meant it
I think Shipley rightly feels if no-one speaks out, then Jobs will think it's fine to continue down this path - perhaps even try to switch the entire OS X platform to a closed one like the iPhone, and to hell with the developers (they've said that enough times : ). I disagree that Apple has necessarily made an irreversible decision on this, and feel with enough pressure they could be encouraged to change their mind. Pressure from people like Wil Shipley and potential customers.
The main problem is - there is no device like this out there, and no prospect of one in the near future, so we have nowhere to jump ship to if Apple gets worse.
So for those who see this as a great device with huge potential, the attempt by Apple to lock this down so that they control it completely is foolish, disappointing, and short-sighted. Apple have not tried this on the desktop, so why do it on the phone? That's what he's asking. In short, this is a new departure for Apple (contrary to most of the comments on this thread), and as potential customers, we should speak up if we don't like what we see - it could be a defining moment for Apple.
Which meant, we get screwed so Apple can make more money. It's that simple.
Why do you think things have changed at all from the "bad" old days of "we are committed to maintaining shareholder value"?
If you look at the history of Apple and what Apple has done to consumers/developers/partners - examine the history of what Steve Jobs has done to his business partners - you'll see they are not far different than Sony or Microsoft.
I remember while (I was a Canadian) living in Berkeley, one of the residents told me of the time they first got an American credit card (he was a foreigner too). Everything was all well and good with the world, except when he took a trip to the East Coast. The credit card was declined can cut up. Why? Because the CC company had only authorized it to be used in the area in which he lived. Why? Because Americans just don't travel enough to make it common enough that such things shouldn't be considered theft right off the hop. And we're not talking about limiting to a local area, we're talking about the USA!
/can/ do these things? Because they can. Because Americans do NOT travel, to the point of rarely leaving within 100 miles of where they live.
/is/ an international plan - see below). But, I highly doubt that this would be different with any other company.
/.?
So, why is it that Apple
Now, I'm not saying that this isn't a dick move on Apple's part. But, at the same time, if Americans were actually well traveled, they wouldn't be able to get away with this. As it sits, barely anyone will even notice.
And btw, it's not that you can't use the iPhone internationally. It's that you'll be charged roaming fees while doing it (yes, there
For that matter, given this story:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/10/1216224&from=rss
It's actually retarded to say that people can't travel internationally with it. Doesn't Wil Shipley read
The writer is assuming that Apple wants to tie iPhone to a single carrier and wants a piece in the carrier's profit. Both these assumptions could be completely wrong. First of all, a company like AT&T will never give a share of its revenue to Apple. More so, the subscription plan of iPhone is relatively so cheap (unlimited internet access), that I think, Apple must have bargained for a cheaper subscription plan for iPhone with AT&T. Now about tying up to single carrier, Apple would never have surely liked this option for its iPhone. Apple will surely earn more revenue if iPhone is sold with more number of carriers. This is something AT&T must have bargained hard with Apple in return for providing features like list of voice-messages and Wifi (AT&T could have disabled it on iPhone).
..for having articles like this one. Consumers REALLY need to learn to start saying no to businesses that use fuck-you-over tactics like these. Choose brands that give you *freedom*, consumers, not ones that control you. YOU should be in control, especially when you buy something, it controlling you.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
how to keep me from buying your computer: Tie it to an oddball OS that oversimplifies simple tasks & buries (or just plain doesnt offer) complex tasks
how to keep me from buying your media player: Tie it to an oddball software interface that monkeys with all my computers' media settings & is covered with ads for main-stream pap
how to keep me from buying your phone: Tie it to the most customer-hating black-hearted soulless carrier in the western hemisphere
Way to go Apple! you got the hat-trick!
For example, Apple pushed writeable DVDs, by making sure that people not only had burners in their computers (Macs), but also that DVDs were affordable. Apple could have chosen to increase mobile marketshare by making a cool phone with cool third party apps. If they'd negotiated great dataplans, everyone would buy the iPhone whatever the price.
I've a company, 100% Mac. But I'm planning ahead. Some applications developed for my company were web-apps on purpose. I can switch to Linux, and I'm sure to follow the OpenMoko developments when it comes to chosing the company phones.
Bert
MacFan
And, as for where the personification of Linux is, sadly those commercials were not shot in someone's parents' basement.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Then don't buy the fucking device.
If you're travelling anywhere for a reasonable length of time, it's much much cheaper just to buy a local PAYG SIM (and leave a voicemail message on your old one with the temp number).
Should you wish to keep your Apple warranty, there's no way to use a local SIM, so if you're planning on running up a few hundred dollars, then you'd have been much better off buying a local SIM and phone for it (and leave the iphone at home).
A lot of commentators seemed to have missed this part of the article:
A kinder way of phrasing this point of view might have been to say that Jobs probably thinks as much like an artist as a product developer: he's driven by an internal desire to realize his vision for the product, to give life to his aesthetics of function, form, and interaction, and he doesn't want to compromise with people whose aesthetics he doesn't know and trust, at least insofar as he doesn't have to in order to give the product life at all.
This is a *very* distinct issue from greed. Both of these motives can lead to closed systems, and both of them can even be in play at once -- and either way, it ends up being somewhat antithetical to the hacker ethic, where a closed system is at a minimum a problem waiting to be solved (and more often as a wrong waiting to be righted.
But it's important to see the difference between the two, because the kind of control regime that coalesces around a vision-driven aesthetic is different, and susceptible to catalysts for change that a profit-driven regime might not be.
Tweet, tweet.
"We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'"
So does that mean that we should wait till apple's hurting for money before we say lock-in is OK?
Anyway the real issue is, is "exclusives"* compatiable with the ideas of capitalism and consumer freedom to do whatever they want (even if 'whatever they want' isn't the wisest thing in the world)?
*Keeping in mind that an exclusive is natural in a lot of cases. e.g. Ford cars, Whirlpool washing machines, etc. I have freedom within the boundaries of those choices. However I don't have unlimited "do whatever I want" freedom (no one does in a society).
Steven Paul Jobs is a MacDickhead. So is Fat Wil.
Given how this thread has become an anti-Apple bitch fest, as opposed to an anti-iphone bitch fest:
.Net. There are OSS versions of both (Mono and GnuStep), but neither are of production qualiyt which means that in realiyt, if you want to do cross platform stuff you either go with C++, Java or one of the scipting languages like Python.
I have three Macs, one PPC Powerbook laptop with Adobe CS2 on it for compatibility with work, where they still use CS2 and two Intel Macs with all my development tools and my Adobe CS3 suite. My Macbook dual boots into Windows where I have Office 2003 pro for compatibility with our customers. I also have a Windows machhine at work with XP, Adobe CS2 and a host of other stuff that is very modern, but which I am using less and less.
Why? I personally am happy with and use Windows, Linux and OSX, so why do I go with the most expensive option?
Mainly, because OSX is, in our design business, the easiest to use, has the least downtime and is technically optimal for certain things. In terms of ease of use, Mac OSX is very simple compared to XP (or Linux). The configurational options are much easier for the majority of our workers, most of whom are designers, compared to Windows. There are many things in OSX that make a designers life easy, such as the Expose feature, the Zeroconf networking, drag and drop in almost every application, built-in spell checking in all text apps, decent built-in font managment and color sync. Added to that is that fact that modern Intel macs run Windows just fine for those of us who need it for office use or 3D work, and Apple's workgroup servers are many more times easier to use and configure than Windows or Linux machines.
Another thing is OSX' memory managment and multi tasking. Linux is excellent in this respect as well but Windows really suffers when RAM is almost full, and page swapping begins, and multitasking in Windows is much less smooth than it is in OSX.
Another thing is that almost all of our fonts are still in the old resource fork format, and although we have some very good font conversion utilities, those fonts often don't work properly on Windows.
I really prefer Windows XP for smaller tasks as the application startup time and general responsiveness of that OS is generally better than OSX in that case.
Winodws Vista, however, is a non starter at the moment, even though it improves many issues, including color synchronisation. Its terrible responsiveness on brand new hardware reminds me of OSX back in 2001. It has a whole load of a way to go.
Linux is still, sadly, a non option in a design agency. Inkscape, the GIMP, Scribus, Blender et al are improving, but until CMYK and color handling are integrated and synchronised, there is no way that they will be of much use there.
If I were doing anythng else, however, I would probably be using Linux and Windows, although even in major development houses, OSX is starting to become mainstream. Apple's Cocoa/ObjC tools are just as propietry as Microsoft's
Apple is "trying" to charge them (third party manufacturers) a "Made for iPod" sticker tax for adding no value? First off, it isn't trying, it *is*charging, and secondly, no value? The value is that the accessory will actually work with your iPod. That's value. And again, when everybody and their goddamned dog does the same thing for thoroughly ridiculous reasons (makers of vanilla power bars that are "Windows Certified") exactly what is the complaint here? That Apple makes a bit of money making sure that third party device stick to Apple's guidelines and the products behave in a consistent fashion? How fucking evil of Apple.
Seriously now. People that pointed out where Microsoft's market dominance would lead were for decades derided as haters and sour grapes types. Now that Apple has committed the crime of surviving into this Millennium and is again producing innovative cutting edge products and services that people actually go out of their way to buy, Apple is in the wrong and is somehow worse than Microsoft? Please. Shove all this whining up your ass.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Only Apple fans could possibly be surprised by Wil Shipley's article. Compared to other software and hardware vendors, Apple aren't particularly different in their outlook on keeping users tied to their systems. Steve Jobs said in an interview with Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (June 2004):
Put another way, by controlling the software we can tie users to our products. It's an attitude shared by many other software and hardware companies and obviously Apple doesn't "Think Different(ly)" in this regard.
What, we should invest in Apple so it doesn't have to try to make money?
If the phone would have been a flop, Apple would have been the only one holding the bag. Unless you suggest we all pay for a phone whether we need it or not, then STFU when a company makes something everyone wants.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
The MPAA and RIAA have been trying to do this for years...
That was awesome how you completely dodged the question of locked-up iPhones and iPod touches.
For the record, I own three Macs, four if you count my (jailbroken, actually USEFUL) iPhone.
+++ATH0
you don't have to buy a Mac or an iPod or an iPhone, there alternatives, Apple owes you Nothing. They are doing what any other company does, market their products in the way that would offer the best outcome for the company, OFFS it's just a 'phone! The other phone manufacturers have had decades to do the same thing, if they didn't, then they are the one's that are giving consumers a raw deal, not Apple.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
the subscription plan of iPhone is relatively so cheap (unlimited internet access)
My current plan (Sprint SERO) gives me 500 prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, unlimited texts, unlimited data, and unlimited roaming. Total cost for voice+data? $30/month. And I get, regularly, 1.5Mbps/800Kbps up/down (it's rated for 3/1.5 Mbps but I rarely see that). I've run hours of person-to-person video calls over the connection with no drop-out. Plus I can tether my phone and use it for internet access. As a result, I rarely have to switch on its built-in Wifi (which sucks more battery compared with 3G).
I've looked at AT&T's plans and they are pretty expensive. Add up the total amount of data in AT&T's "unlimited, but slow" data plan and it's even less of a bargain.
Da Blog
I'm not going to get into all this BS about marketing, but personally I had an Ibook, battery died in 3 weeks, took 4 months to have it fixed and when I got it back the drive had been reformatted and I lost some things, #2 My ipod battery only lasted a month was sent in and came back with a faulty screen after which I threw it out, Safari is a piece of crap, and I can't play a decent game on an Apple computer. So all of this "you get what you pay for" BS is lost on me, as I bought the over priced junk, and then had to replace it with something that actually worked every single time. I now have a simple flash mp3 player that WORKS. A custom PC that not only WORKS but blows away my Ibook, and I don't need an iphone because I don't care if my peers think I'm cool or not. again just my 2 cents.
Apple wanted new features that do not exist today (like Visual Voicemail)
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).
Da Blog
You can clearly see why Bill is envious of such loyalty, and he does seem quite often wishful in the products Microsoft makes that they would have such loyal followers.
Where do you get such an insight into Gates's psyche? From where I sit, he came from behind two decades ago. Remember at one time Apple was the world's largest PC manufacturer *and* OS provider. Simply put, when people thought of "personal computer", they thought "Apple". MS managed to grab that market, and while Jobs is certainly not hurting for cash, Gates's wealth is on a scale that dwarfs Jobs. So much so, in fact, that the spare change Gates donated to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is saving millions of lives (and in future hundreds of millions) of lives throughout the world.
I have yet to see a single life saved by an ipod.
I never thought I'd write something in favour of Bill Gates (back in the mind-90s I wrote one of the first MS antitrust articles in the Euro press) but your absurdly weird fannish comment drove me to it!
Da Blog
His complaint is that developers are locked out,
.NET so it would run on Windows and Linux, and abandon the Macintosh, if Steve didn't open up the iPhone, they may think he's really crazy and they won't listen. And if two developers, two developers do it, in harmony, they may think they're both crazy and they won't listen to either of them. And three developers do it, three, can you imagine, maybe Adobe could get involved again, they may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty developers, I said fifty developers holding pulling up stakes because they want an iPhone SDK. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
That's true for any appliance. You don't complain that you're locked in to your TV, or your refrigerator, or your toaster, even when they have software in them. The thing is that once you have bought a refrigerator, and you need to get a new one, you're not locked in to getting one that's compatible, that runs the same software.
The real fear here (and this is voiced in the article), is that in 10 years, when the OS X platform is mostly about mobile devices, and there are 10 million iPhones to each 1 million macs (this day will come), only Apple will control everything about these phones, and all the 3rd party developers will have to find some other platform to use, and customers will have to take what they're given, or look elsewhere.
If he means that Apple may abandon the Mac, because the iPhone and ipod are making so much money and the Mac is a liability, well, that's possible. And that's possible whether the iPhone is open or closed, and whether the iPhone is based on OS X or Windows CE. The iPhone is not a Macintosh. Just because it's running similar software, it's a different kind of device.
It's 10 years now since Microsoft started putting out Windows based handhelds. There's hardly any overlap at all between them and the Windows desktop, even though Microsoft has been trying hard to push full blown Windows NT into the handheld world. They're different kinds of devices.
All it would take from Apple would be a simple statement that the SDK is coming next year, and people should be patient till then.
You're assuming that Apple intends on there being an SDK. I don't expect so, any more. Apple is not interested in blurring the line between handhelds and desktops. After all, look how well that's worked for Microsoft.
I think Shipley rightly feels if no-one speaks out, then Jobs will think it's fine to continue down this path - perhaps even try to switch the entire OS X platform to a closed one like the iPhone, and to hell with the developers (they've said that enough times : ).
I think that Apple would have to do a lot more than introduce a new iPod (whether it's a phone or not) to make me concerned that they are headed down the path of a "sealed Mac". They may have said things like that, but when the developers dug in their heels and refused to go with Yellow Box, Rhapsody went on the shelf, Carbon came out, and OS 9, and what became OS X was delayed for years while they redesigned it to accommodate Adobe. But that's on the desktop, where they HAVE developers. Not in the handheld market, where they've already dumped them. So I don't think that ANYONE just "speaking out" is going to make Steve listen. They'd still be selling Newtons if that would work.
Now if Wil were to say that he was going to recode Delicious Monster in C# for Mono and
The main problem is - there is no device like this out there, and no prospect of one in the near future, so we have nowhere to jump ship to if Apple gets worse.
Oh, you're not worried about the Mac after all. You just want to make the iPhone into a smartphone. Well, friend, Apple has only made ONE handheld device that was open, and that was the Newton, and that was a disaster. It had potential, but it was premature... the hardware wasn't there yet... but Apple has been wary of the whole programmable handheld market since. This isn't a new thing, it's just business as usual.
cell phones are pretty much fixed when you buy them ... Apple says that want to do something more like a desktop computer: They want to keep adding new functionality.
I just checked, and last month I downloaded and installed (usually with a single click) more than forty programs for my Windows phone, including MS Portrait (a video phone app), various ebook readers, emulators, vxUtils, a packet snarfer and a WEP cracker, Google Maps, a "touch" contacts UI app, several new screen input UIs, a threaded SMS program to enhance conversations, Flash, a mind mapping program, GMail, several new UI skins, a universal remote for the infrared, a backup program, an encrypted data wallet, Doom, and pacman.
Yeah, I guess my phone really is pretty much fixed.
Da Blog
"B) AAC is open (patented only in the USA, but even there free for non-commercial use)"
/rant
This is not Open. Open is when anyone can use the format, for free, with the only limitation being that they must not impede someone else's use of the content they encode.
Open formats are FOR businesses stupid. They are so a business can be assured that they will be able to produce a viewer for a file no matter what hardware platform they're on no matter how far in the future no matter what happens to the company or group that originally produced it.
Free for non-commercial use is great if you want a bunch of fanboi geeks to use it in their basement and build "geek" cred (fanboi geeks aren't geeks). But FREE as in anyone can use it unencumbered, is great if you want governments, corporations, academia, and the sciences as a whole to adopt it.
My Babylon
Apple took a risk with the iphone by releasing an expensive device with extra features that not everyone would consider essential.
Apple took a risk with the iphone by releasing an expensive device lacking features that most people would consider essential.
There, fixed that for you.
Da Blog
Its called capitalism which provides you with the inalienable right to not buy one.
exclusivity in exchange for visual voice mail is plausible.
Here: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).
Da Blog
Does your mom use the GC setup?
Yes, you're right, bookmarking m.grandcentral.com on the phone is *hard*. You know, like math. Or email. How will old people ever cope?
by noting it's grainy you must not have access to the WiFi version of YouTube the iPhone offers
No, I was noting that the OTA youtube designed for EDGE has very low bandwidth, making all the videos look basically like Amiga animations from 1987 or so. And unless you hang out in Starbucks all day that's what most iphone people will get.
When I go to Youtube (or use Orb to stream my media from my home server), my phone actually does 1.5 Mbps/800Kbps up/down on typical use over 3G. So I rarely, if ever, turn on my Wifi. Basically, I use it only in basements or suchlike. Always-on 3G means that you're not twiddling as you hop from one AP to another, not draining your battery wifi style, and it works when you are outdriving on the highway.
using the web based version of google maps would not be nearly as nice as the multitouch version of google maps. It's nice that you can do so, but it's just not nearly as fluid to use.
I think you are a little unaware of how many good applications are available on more open phone platforms. The Google Maps I use on my Mogul is a native ARM implementation on Windows CE. It's touchscreen aware, I just drag my finger to scroll and zoom. I can bookmark destinations, call up traffic reports, switch views, and so on. I can also trigger it using the voice UI by simply saying "Maps!" - which is great when driving, believe me. Additionally, while I haven't used it, there's a new ARM-native Windows Live maps that's actually getting better reviews than Google's rather old offering in this space. Outside the Apple firewall, market competition drives product enhancement, not the whims of Herr Jobs.
Da Blog
add features like VVM (which rocketh)
Earlier: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others, and it's simply not that difficult to do, or novel. The beauty of GC's web/SMS approach is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you can hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone.
Da Blog
Did you actually read the blog in its entirety? He was given full credit for the full amount.
So every time I get billed $3K by AT&T and Apple, I'll need to blog it, get global exposure, and whine on the phone about it to get a special dispensation for my bill to be reduced. Great, sign me up for that plan!
Da Blog
Please point out to me the place in the U.S. where it's easy to buy an unlocked phone and take it from carrier to carrier, cause I'd like to live there.
I got a T-Mobile phone a few years ago in New York. Was travelling to Europe. Called T-Mobile CSR, asked them to unlock it. They did so, took all of two minutes for them to text me an unlock code. Swapped in a few PAYG SIMs, worked great. I was within my first month or two of a two-year contract.
Da Blog
If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal.
Da Blog
I saw the ATT deal as making sure they got this done as right as they could in the first go around.
We saw some blips with one carrier to worry about - and Apple was vilified for just those.
Multiple carriers would have made for multiple headaches.
I'd venture the bargain for working with ATT was a longer period of exclusivity than Apple needed.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly.
Da Blog
A large company puts profits before people? No!
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
While I'll agree that Apple isn't perfect etc., and there have been some egregious mistakes on Apple's part etc., I'm starting to get tired of all these "Apple Sucks" articles, blog postings and internet comment rants. Why? Because most of the Apple Sucks stories, articles and whatnot are written just to get the page hits. The saying used to be "bad news sells". For the internet, computer and gadget intelligentsia, slamming Apple or pointing out a new Apple product's shortcomings sells.
This sig kills fascists.
First of all, where did you get those absurd numbers from? Since when is the TyTN $860? Why is it that I purchased mine for $399 and got a free Bluetooth headset while I was at it -- and that was a year ago?
At the same time, it also looks like the OS X architecture wasn't designed from the start to accommodate open development, so providing open access now is not just a matter of "letting people in," but in making sure the system can handle it.
What kind of absurdist assertion is this? Have you even LOOKED at the real programming interface for the iPhone? I suspect the answer is "no." While you've been picking your nose and shouting the virtues of AJAX (AJAX? Are you serious? REALLY? AJAX?), the iPhone "unauthorized" developers have been writing all kinds of applications that work *right now* and *all the time*, as opposed to AJAX applications which work "when the page finally finishes loading," because HTTP is stateless and not a good fit for many, many application models, and "only when the network is accessible," which is utterly worthless in areas that have neither EDGE coverage nor WiFi.
As an example of how bad AJAX is, let's look at a very, very simple application example. How about a financial account tracker? Great. With AJAX, I have to keep -- read this very carefully -- all of my banking information on someone else's server somewhere. Wow. That sounds like a goddamn terrific idea, doesn't it?
With Objective-C, on the other hand, all of my data stays securely stored on my iPhone, as is the case with MobileMoney.app. It can even import data from Quicken now. Mind you, this application has been developed over the span of approximately a month and a half. Who knows what else can be accomplished with more time and the guarantee that Apple isn't going to stomp all over your ability to do what you want with the device you purchased with your own money?
The "system," Dan, is entirely capable of "handling it." There are about 40 applications on my iPhone and it slows no signs of slowing down or having any trouble whatsoever. This is because Apple writes very, very good software and designs very, very good hardware. I have no problems with security (but of course everyone knew that was bull as soon as it came out of Steve's mouth). I have no problems with existing functionality being "damaged" somehow by the add-on software. Everything works very, very well. Much is possible with the exploitation of the Mobile OS X API.
It's a bit like people waiting in line at a busy restaurant. They see open tables and bitch because they think they should be seated immediately, but if they were, they'd be complaining about the service being slow and the kitchen being backed up. It's easy to run multibillion dollar operations from the safety of home, but Apple seems to be doing a good job of actually delivering real technology.
Did you have a point here, or what? All that is being asked for right now is for Apple to stop gimping our ability to write real applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in an effort to keep the phone locked to AT&T. News flash, Apple: it isn't going to work. Give up the race against the hackers, who do this in their free time because they love it and because they love the platform. Stop fighting the very people who would love to take the justification to evangelize the product to everyone they know and run with it.
We don't need support for the API right now. We don't even need documentation (though it would be nice). All we need is for the door to be open, but right now it looks like firmware 1.1.1 (which I will not be downgrading to from 1.0.2) is going to shut the existing door just like it's shut on the iPod touch.
If developers really wanted to impress us with their work, why haven't we seen very many web apps tuned for the iPhone like Facebook's iphone.facebook.com ? That app demonstrates what can be done,
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because that would be what we like to call "fucking stupid."
In fact, your premise is wrong on its face, because OS X applications interoperate just fine with Windows. Even Mac HARDWARE works fine with Windows these days.
Where is the "incompatibility" problem? It stopped existing years ago. "Incompatible" is just a campfire ghost story made up by Microsoft to scare away consumers.
+++ATH0
You wrote too much to read, but you've mischaracterize what I said so I'll correct that.
When I said "it also looks like the OS X architecture wasn't designed from the start to accommodate open development, so providing open access now is not just a matter of letting people in but in making sure the system can handle it," I was referring to the fact that apps on the iPhone appear to all run in the same security context as the same user. That means an errant 3rd party app can not only cause problems, but also can read all your data. That's a can-of-worms problem that indicates the iPhone isn't going to open up anytime soon. It is not a flattering observation.
So after you put your third party mobile Quicken financial software on the iPhone, and then you load some third party game you found on the interweb, and find that Russians are selling your data to Korean hackers via your own WiFi connection, and yes that would make Apple look bad. To prevent that, Apple doesn't currently let you operate outside the known security context of a web session.
Expecting Apple to deliver the iPhone as 'more than a product' within six months is unreasonable. It could have copied Windows Mobile/Palm/Symbian to deliver its own unique platform, but it wouldn't be able to deliver it as quickly (a lot more work than just delivering a closed iPhone) and would then have to maintain every app ever written (imagine the cost of certifying them) and make sure it outlined a stable API. Apple's making rapid changes and defining the iPhone as it goes. It's only been out for three months!
Microsoft can dump out a horrible public API as it did with WinCE 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc and Gartner will continue to recommend people consume it. But Apple was hounded when hackers discovered flaws in its web API that were based on third party open software libraries. Apple has to meet a standard far higher than Microsoft.
I mentioned the market for Ajax apps because it takes time to deliver products. If there was a consuming demand for iPhone software, why aren't there any Ajax apps? Remember too that in 1984, Mac software didn't start coming out for a year after it launched, and nothing revolutionary came out until the killer apps in 1986. How long was Mac OS X out before lots of serious apps appeared for it, 2-3 years? Expecting an instant mature platform for the iPhone is silly. And mobiles are very different from desktop PCs. There's no market for $100 mobile apps, as there is for commercial desktop software. It's a different market. So Apple should drop its plans to cater to a shareware/hobbyist market? That's what OpenMoko is for.
I think your position that Apple "just open the phone" because you'd like a wide open platform is unreasonable, and attacking me for discussing the issues involved doesn't prove your point at all.
The article you refer to was pointing out Apple's motivations, not describing why any of it was "desirable to me." I pointed that out very clearly in the article. I'm not advocating the iPhone stay an appliance because Apple Says It Should, but rather looking at the subject rationally rather than emotionally. I don't make money selling software, so I have a different outlook than many developers who feel shut out. I understand why Shipley describes his position as he does. I'm also an iPhone user, so I have no reason to want its capacity to be limited artificially. I gain nothing from a closed iPhone platform, so calling me a "shill" for describing it as a likely event is nonsensical.
I have also repeatedly questioned Apple pointedly on a variety of subjects, and was among the first people to pin down Steve Jobs in public on the issue of third party software for the iPhone and the needs of companies who want to offer customized or vertical solutions for it. I don't think anyone really stopped and asked Jobs about it before in front of journalists the way I did, and few journalists present even covered it.
It is unfair to start personal attacks on my character because you disagree
And as a long-time AAPL shareholder - including a large portion of my parents' retirement portfolio - I don't think that some dumb developer should tell me how much money Apple needs.
/.'ers claim that they are libertarian. This sounds a lot more like a leftist collectivist impulse, how much someone else "should" make. "Should" might be the scariest word in the libertarian language, other than "tax."
We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'"
This is the sort of statement that makes me laugh when I hear
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"That was awesome how you completely dodged the question of locked-up iPhones and iPod touches."
Well let's see, by partnering with AT&T Apple gained immediate access to AT&T's customers through an agreement that let them upgrade existing accounts immediately, regardless of contract. They also gained a marketing partner, and an additional 2,000 or so outlets for the phone. They also got AT&T to do some custom software support, in part due to the exclusive deal. They also convinced them not to rape their customers with overly expensive data plans.
They also convinced AT&T to support Apple's iTunes store for downloadable music (against their Mobile Music offering), and also in regard to downloadable ring tones (also against AT&T's offerings). And they also managed (mostly) to convince AT&T not to screw with the phone's interface or software or syncing services (like Sprint requiring a Vision plan to get photos off one of their phones). AND they got a cut of the service plan.
Without an arrangement, I suspect Apple would have had a difficult time getting their phone offered by AT&T and T-Mobile, especially in terms of it having a competing music service offering.
Translated, AT&T got to offer Apple's latest and greatest to their customers, and Apple got a Titanic-sized boatload of concessions. Concessions that I think tend to vastly outweigh the minor inconvenience of having an "unlocked" phone. But that's just me.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Anyone else find it funny that the grammar nazi tagging crew took a break from tagging stories with corrections to "its" and "their" and let "onelessmac" slide? The very fact that you can have one of it should be a sure sign to use fewer.
The market is great at producing alternative products that are more cost effective and work just as well. Time is on your side, unless you have so little self control that you absolutely must be an early adopter.
When you buy Apple, you are paying for the brand, and they charge a high premium. This is not new.
I don't want to pay that premium, so I have the basic phone that comes "free" with my plan.
This is one of the sillier things I've ever heard.
Desktop, maybe. Mobile devices? Fat Bloody Chance.
It took Linux 8 years to get anywhere near usable on the desktop. There is no reason to think it will take any less time to get usable on cell phones (OpenMoko and Greenphone are pieces of crap and we all know it).
Moreover, no cell phone company in the United States will tolerate a device that is actually what we want, running Linux, on their network. There is a proportion at work here between capabilities and lock-down: the better a phone is, the more it can be used to make end-runs around a carrier's ways of milking its customers, and the more the carrier will try to lock it down.
+++ATH0
Why? Does it remind you of the weekend?
Ontopic: I think they are stupid for doing this, if it wasn't locked in to one carrier they could have sold it to the international market already PLUS more people would be willing to buy it if it worked with their fave provider (taking advantage of bundle packages etc)
Make SELinux enforcing again!
All of that was great for Apple. How is any of it great for iPhone users?
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Somebody always gets screwed so someone else can make a profit. Zero-sum game. Corporations always screw people. U live in good old USA where money is the king. What do you expect ?
And that doesn't make anything either of them do with that objective good or right.
The assumption that pursuit of profits by whatever means is automatically valid is just as incorrect when applied to a company you like (Apple) as a company that I think we can safely assume many people here don't like (MS).
Read Pynchon.
Um, it's great for iPhone users because without a viable business behind it there'd be no iPhone?
Just my guess.
Does this lead to some less-than-desirable results? You bet it does - but if you want to make a change, put your efforts into reforming corporate law in this country, not beating up on the corporations that have to work within those laws.
Uh, did you miss the part about AT&T customers getting access w/o waiting for plans to expire, and users getting better data service terms, and customized services, and being able to buy though AT&T if you didn't have a local Apple store, and cheaper music and ringtones through iTunes, and not having had AT&T screw with the phone's interface, and...
Never mind. Obviously you can't read for comprehension...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
This is only one piece of a larger problem - why are phones ever tied to a specific carrier? Imagine if we had to buy specific models of computers based on which company we chose as an internet provider. That would be ridiculous, and so is the phone situation.
Ideally, cell providers should offer a data stream, and charge you based on traffic. They wouldn't care what type of phone you were using, or what service you were connecting to. They'd simply be a connector between your phone and various web addresses. (They'd also still provide voice service, priced separately. They wouldn't try to stop you from running Skype on your cell phone, but you wouldn't because you'd probably pay more for a lower quality service.)
The internet started primarily as a place for open science research. Cell phones started primarily as a business. See the difference?
You forgot one small part. Apple also leaves out that whole monopoly thing. Especially with the iPhone. There are at least a few other cell phones on the market, if I remember correctly...
Perhaps this is Wil's way of soliciting for work at Apple; and for a longer span than that internship at NeXT?
it's even simpler: you're screwed because you bought the iphone....
" ... We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'" ..."
We what? Suffer? Because you want an iPhone?
Earth to child-in-adult-sized-body: Get old, at least old enough so your maturity is within perhaps a decade of your real age, son.
Suffer? Over a gadget? Well, I hate to see anyone or anything suffer.
Let's all throw money at whomever the parent poster is, because I know money will solve his "suffering". We could pay to have his current contract cancelled, buy him an expensive gadget, and help him do whatever it takes to END HIS SUFFERING, PEOPLE!!!
The mind boggles.
I know you're just flamebaiting, but I would still like to point out that I generally buy the product with the best price/performance ratio. Often, this ends up being an Apple product. I just replaced my self-built Ubuntu MythTV box at home with a Mac mini because it simply works better and costs less (if I factor in my time). Apple is successful because people love their products. Apple quite simply makes better products than most other companies.
What Apple is doing right now is hurting them. They generally try to do well with the people who buy their products, which is what sets them apart from Microsoft (Microsoft sells to corporations, the actual users be damned). Unfortunately, Apple has now started to give too much weight to the interests of content providers (see: ringtones) and AT&T (see: no unlocked iPhone).
People tend to be loyal to Apple because Apple tends to make well-made, pretty, usable, affordable stuff. If they stop doing what their users want, people will not be loyal anymore; it's that simple.
So, yeah. Labeling Apple's customers "fanboys" tells the reader more about your own views than about the people who actually purchase Apple's products.
I couldn't disagree more - that's exactly what they're doing and will continue to do - they run almost the same software after all.
I am worried about OS X, not desktop macs specifically - the iPhone and Apple TV are one possible future (seemingly Apple's preferred one) for Macs and Mac OS X - I don't want to see OS X run only on locked down appliances - do you? This is a new thing, it has not historically been the way they operate - Apple have always had a thriving third party developer market which they depend on. If that were to cease, a lot of people would find the platform a lot less interesting and it would become less a platform, and more of a set of tools for Apple to use to sell typewriters, phones and media centres.
I disagree when you say that this is just a new iPod - it's the new Mac, and will get the lion's share of attention (along with other mobile devices) from now on. That's why it's important. Apple are throwing away the one huge advantage they have here - a computing platform and interface far more advanced than any of the others currently on smartphones and a stable of great 3rd party developers who are familiar with it.
So this is not just whining about the new iPods (though the article was a little whiny for my tastes), it's legitimate concern about the future of all OS X based products. But we'll see what transpires over the next few years - perhaps they just haven't had time to work out an SDK, and one will come out in due course. Given Steve's comments so far though, and his bullshit excuses over 'bringing the west coast Cingular network down', I'm beginning to doubt it.
"Personal insults, the last defense of a poor argument."
I suppose if I was trying to make any argument at all, you'd have something
Since my point was to tell you that both you and your joke were dumb, there's really nothing to argue over.
See, it was a s-t-a-t-e-m-e-n-t not an argument.
But you can't tell that your joke was awful, so why would I expect you to see there's no argument in process.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Here here, you just said everything I was going to say after reading his post. Despite being an AC, if I had mod points I'd mod you up. Very nice rebuttal.
"Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?"
Uh, did you miss the part about AT&T customers getting access w/o waiting for plans to expire,
Why should this be a problem in the first place?
users getting better data service terms,
Barely. And not really, since you cannot use 3G internet with the iPhone plan.
You've "got me" on Visual Voicemail. Congratulations.
cheaper music and ringtones through iTunes,
Oh, yes. It's simply wonderful for consumers to be charged twice for every ringtone they buy -- three times if they've ripped a song from a CD.
AT&T screw with the phone's interface,
Pardon my Swahili, but who gives a shit? You really think AT&T didn't get to sign off on everything Apple did with this thing?
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I couldn't disagree more - that's exactly what they're doing and will continue to do - they run almost the same software after all.
I guess we'll have to disagree on this one.
If they were trying to make them do the same job (ie, Palm-Sized PC/Pocket PC/Tablet PC... running different operating systems but all general purpose computers), then I would say so. But Apple is very clearly, it seems to me, distinguishing the iPhone/iPod from the Mac.
The iPhone is NOT "the new Mac". You seem to want to make it the new Mac, you want them to release an SDK for it, turn it into a "Pocket Mac". They don't want to do that, and have said so in no uncertain terms. They could turn that decision around, god knows they've given us whiplash of the blogosphere often enough, but right now that's NOT the course they've laid out.
The bottom line for me is that OS X is just another UNIX variant, like Linux, BSD, Solaris, or Xenix. It can be used for embedded systems or mainframes and everything in between. Using it as an embedded system doesn't signal a change in policy any more than switching to an aluminum case does.
Personally, I would love to see Apple put OS X up against Windows NT, ship a portable version for generic PCs, and ship an embedded OS X SDK for people to use in handhelds, and go so far beyond what you're looking for that it's over the event horizon. But it's not going to happen any time soon.
...find an alternative. If you think iPhone is the only tech gadget that does what it does, you're deluded. It may be the coolest, but it's hardly unique.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
This is an odd argument. Apple can do what it wants with its platform(s) and the consumer can do what he wants: buy or not buy it. Go buy an open phone if that's what you want. If you hate Apple policy, there is plenty of consumer choice (I can name dozens of smartphones that are "open" or support multiple carriers). I think this argument is really about: Apple is cool on one hand (its products) and not so cool on the other hand (its biz practices)... and people want it to be cool on both fronts, but like many things in life, you can wish it to be true, but doing so doesn't make it so. Personally I love my iPhone (the product) and basically live with the fact that Apple, the company, can be a real pain in the ass! Love hate relationship. -sammy / loving my iPhone
I asked if she did.
She was eaten by bears, you insensitive clod!
Actually, I think you are underestimating the abilities of people, and overestimating the difficulty of bookmarking. It's not that hard. People have been bookmarking porno sites for the better part of 20 years now, and it seems to be working out ok.
What a shame then you are forced to live with a cap on teh quality of your videos us iPhone owners can so easily surpass, and that you feel so afraid of using WiFi you have to actually "turn it on" to use it. How quaint! Using a real phone you just leave it on, drift between WiFi clouds, and still get great battery life.
What cap is this? Who said there was a cap? I can stream SD DIVX from my home server to a client through the phone connection. That's pretty impressive. I think you are misunderstanding me. It's not that I don't want to turn on Wifi, it's that I don't *need* to. With 3G. When you leave your schoolyard or your cubicle, decent wifi is not always as available. You can't be seriously suggesting that if we take two phones, one with Wifi + 3G, and one with Wifi + crappyG, that you would prefer the latter? Unlike your apparently limitless land of effortless wifi clouds, I live in the real world, where wifi is discontinuous, spotty, and frequently encrypted. 3G just works out for better consistent coverage. Plus, I like to run some servers on my phone, and maintaining a consistent IP is important. Hopping from one AP to another would bugger that, *and* they tend to have varying IP filters.
great map interaction involves equally seemless zooming in and out
I tap a single finger once to zoom. How much more seamless can it be? Seriously?
I can't imagine why several people I know ditched the 8525 that they used heavily and started using the iPhone.
Maybe they like the pretty colours? After all, your sample must be uniformly representative, right?
It's great you have many options for substandard mapping solutions, but I'd rather take the best one even if there's only one.
How do you know it's "the best" when you apparently have never used the others?
Da Blog
According to whom??? They aren't selling units as fast as they can make them AC. I can go pick one up right now if I wanted a pretty paperweight. There are no back orders, they were in negotiations to cut production in half within a month of the debut, at two months they dropped the price by 33%, and they didn't hit a million units until 74 days after release on Sept 10th. Since 270,000 of those units were last quarter sales, they'll be lucky to hit a million units this quarter. By comparison, Nokia, in their most recent quarter, sold 1.5 Million units of their new and much more expensive N95 smartphones.
Time will tell if your estimates are true, but Nokia N95 has a) been out 3 months longer, b) is available in way, way more markets than the iPhone.
The iPhone's success is unquestionable in terms of brand presence: *everyone* knows about it, even non-gadget people. To contrast, relatively few "normal people" know about the N95.
-Stu
Time will tell if your estimates are true, but Nokia N95 has a) been out 3 months longer,
You're point? Nokia's 2nd quarter is not the same as Apple's. The quarterly numbers I cited were Nokia's Q2: April/May/June. iPhone shipped two days before Apple Q4 began. N95 shipped a little over a week before Nokia's Q2 began. It's not an unfair comparison, and yes, time will tell indeed.
b) is available in way, way more markets than the iPhone.
Who's fault is that? If Apple sold an unlocked phone, it would be in every market, worldwide. If all Nokia sold were locked phones, I wouldn't have been able to buy one to use in the US. They aren't available here through any carrier.
The iPhone's success is unquestionable in terms of brand presence:
Brand presence != sales. Brand presence != quality product.
*everyone* knows about it, even non-gadget people.
In the United States.
To contrast, relatively few "normal people" know about the N95.
Relatively few "normal people" buy $700 phones. As long as those who might be interested and capable of buying one know about it, that's all that really matters. Making sure the rest of the universe knows about your new shiny won't sell more phones. Being an attention whore does make product failure a much more spectacular and embarrassing event though. The Segway comes to mind. Everyone knows about that "revolutionary new product."
C'mon -- Delicious monster does just as bad -- Delicious library leeches tons of money
from their customers with Amazon referral dollars.
creep.
Why are you so obsessed with grandmothers? I find your fascination with my grandmother... disturbing.
you are held back from by not using an iPhone to access content on a mobile.
Actually, you're still not getting it. I go to the "real" YouTube, I click a video, it plays back. What is the problem here? How are you missing this? How many times do you need it explained? How can I make it clearer to you? My "grainy" comment was based on the fact that, if you use an iphone outside of your little wifi bubble, the quality of the converted downloads is crap. I note that all the Apple shops demo the iphone only on wifi because, let's face it, the 2G is a buzz killer. Come to think of it, I have a suspicion that my phone plays back more video codecs than yours, unless you've been busy compiling a lot of them.
I gesture and zoom in or out to arbitrary degrees in as much time
I've used it, and while it's a neat trick, it's pretty slow to update, and while you may like the *idea* of arbitrarily enlarging and shrinking your maps using a rather imprecise finger-wiggling, I personally like actually quickly getting a view that frames my goal, and then scrolling if required around. But the crux of the argument is that the iphone Google Maps UI is *still* zooming in discrete steps between set magnification levels... whatever about a little interpolation blur. Howeverm, the iphone's use of taps to scroll in fundamentally replicates the ARM UI. You could decide to use multi-touch here but, in general, given its application domain, would one not overwhelmingly prefer single-finger operation for in-car use (a primary domain)? It's cognitively easier with one finger to just point while I keep the other on the wheel! And it's still damn slow to scroll over 2G. I know you're going to say "wifi" again here but really, how many people have wifi in the car?
This brings up an interesting point about the limited grammar of continuous motion gestural interfaces. I recall doing some work on these in the early 90s, comparing productivity to interfaces driven by discrete, constrained actions. In general, there was a limited grammar to gestures that didn't easily scale past narrowly defined task domains. MS has the same problem with the Surface interface... great for the demo apps, not so easy to extend across the board. And I note that the iphone's Maps application actually uses a slightly different grammar than the "standard" UI gestures (what's up with Maps' 2-finger zoom-out thing anyway, I find it impressive that Apple broke its own UI guidelines so quickly).
It'll probably take another decade or so before we nail down an optimal, consensus set, much as the mouse went through several generations of development in the 70s and early 80s. And even then, it's not going to be a panacea, just an easier or quicker way to accomplish a few specific tasks. Much like a voice interface, or a jogwheel, or a message wheel, or all the other little tricks that our handhelds and PCs have been picking up. Often these don't last.
When I was a nipper we were all looking forward to using light pens, just as soon as they became available cheaply. But they never really did, and then the mouse came along, and people preferred horizontal over vertical interaction surfaces. The future doesn't always turn out the way you think. Just because it looked cool in Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report, the future will probably not be 100% continuous gesture... and the issue of why that is is a deep problem in HCI.
You've used the iPhone for how long again?
It really bugs you when someone doesn't drink the Kool Aid, doesn't it?
Da Blog
If you were one of those people, you would have had to wait for perhaps two years before you could have purchased a phone had Apple gone "rogue".
Why? AT&T couldn't care less if you switch phones. The iPhone is unsubsidized, remember?
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And if I play it in a common WiFi zone that I am in 90% of my day, I get a better quality video than you do visiting the web page.
If you are using wifi and I am using 3G at 1.5 Mbps, and we are both downloading a video at 500 Kbps, how are you getting "better quality"? In actuality, I am probably downloading videos from my home server over Orb or VLC and getting far better results than anything available at youtube.
Have fun in the wifi reservation. Maybe when the next iphone has 3G you'll come out to play?
Apple has constrained said gesture to domains it makes perfect sense in then.
Also helps that there's so few blessed programs!.
I know mine
You haven't admitted to any yet, despite being wrong about Google Maps on ARM three times (yes, I was counting). If your goal is to start measuring UI experience then, unless you're very much older than you seem, you're going to lose. But you, that's too much like cock boxing, so I don't think I'll engage. Finally, I note that you are peculiarly intransigent and apparently completely devoid of a humour bone, a personality trait I've seen repeated again and again in a certain demographic of Apple people since the 1970s.
Da Blog
Brand presence != sales. Brand presence != quality product.
That's misleading. There absolutely is a strong correlation between brand presence and sales, and most of the brand presence of the iPhone is absolutely due to word of mouth and positive reviews reflecting on the quality of the product.
In the United States.
Europe too.
Relatively few "normal people" buy $700 phones.
The iPhone is not $700. I'll note that most first release smart phones are at least $400-500.
As long as those who might be interested and capable of buying one know about it, that's all that really matters. Making sure the rest of the universe knows about your new shiny won't sell more phones.
That may be your prefferred marketing strategy, but it is not a matter of fact. Apple's betting that letting the rest of the universe know about it will create a new market opportunity. It worked with the iPod.
Being an attention whore does make product failure a much more spectacular and embarrassing event though. The Segway comes to mind. Everyone knows about that "revolutionary new product."
Which is a piss poor comparison with the iPhone, on many levels.
-Stu
"Well it is an argument because I disagree."
That doesn't make it an argument, it just makes you an imbecile.
"You would have saved yourself some time and effort if you didn't bother to comment at all. Next time, just go with that."
Comedian, amuse thyself.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
The ugly is that it requires a new phone number.
You mean you *don't* have several numbers? One for business/banks, one for spammers/telemarketers, and one or two for friends and family?
Da Blog
I already explained this, way way back. YouTube quality on the iPhone over WiFi is better than the web version. What you cannot grasp is that the web version (using the flash encoder) is a totally different source than the h.264 stream the iPhone gets.
My phone plays back H.264 quite fine, and my browser spoofs user agents for sites that don't immediately serve up content in the way I want. Also, I like grabbing some media that's marked as "stream only", so UA spoofing and packet sniffing works great here. But thanks for asking. Actually, I don't really understand why there's so much focus on youtube, when Google seems to have less restrictions on bandwidth and length on video.google.
Meanwhile I'm using a faster network than you are 99% of the time.
I doubt you've measured that percentage. In any case, what does wifi get you for general internet access... unless you are running bittorrent on your phone? I have, occasionally, and when I feel I need more speed I use wifi. Or to take it one step further, when I have a lot of data I want to copy to the phone, I plug in the USB and upload directly. Or the ultimate, when I want to fill a few 4GB memory cards with several thousand of my favourite ebooks or shows, I pop them in the card reader, upload, then pop them in the phone.
if you had ever bothered to look there are quite a lot.
Really? How many programs has Apple officially "blessed" as suitable for general iphone deployment? Let me count...
I wasn't wrong once - I guess you can't even count right.
Truly, your Macolyte skills are impressive! Read your earlier posts - in your eagerness to explain how much better a touchscreen driven Google Maps was on iphone, you apparently failed to recognise, over several exchanges, that there's an ARM-compiled touchscreen program as well. Missing it once I could understand, missing it several times lets me know that you're just not seriously listening.
I am a "UNIX People"
No, you're obviously quite attached to a self-image of yourself as an Apple defender. Apple uses GNU/Linux and BSD and other OSS and basically gives back nothing worthwhile. But this enables it to recruit potentially valuable fanatics away from the OSS camp and into its shiny playpen. Ever get the feeling you've been had?
technological dinosaurs that have wandering into Microsoft's mental swamp
Oh dear, my dear dear friend. If anything, I'm more of a fan of Symbian. I was publishing critical Microsoft pieces way back when you were obviously wearing diapers. The fact that your screed descends quickly to such a binary framing of the debate that everyone with opinions different from yours must be a "Microsoft" head is telling. It exposes the deep-rooted insecurity of many of the more fanatical fringe of Apple zealots. By choosing to invest so much of their personality and identity in the consumption of a rather pretty brand of commodity electronics, such people engender a shallowness in their worldview that can only be compensated, or acknowledge, by attacks on an ugly "other". Apple's marketing people really know how to push those buttons to get free effort.
Da Blog
"Sure, if by 'cooler clothes', you mean a shirt with the proper number of sleeves, and on opposite sides of the shirt; pants that don't have a hole in the crotch, so you aren't a virus magnet whenever you use a chair; and shoes of the correct size that, when you try to put them on, don't ask 'You are trying to don footwear. Cancel or Allow?'" ... And gloves with only one finger, afterall, if youre a mac user, thats all you need.
most of the brand presence of the iPhone is absolutely due to word of mouth and positive reviews
I beg to differ on this point. In my experience, most "normal people" know about the iPhone thanks to television commercials, and to a lesser extent, Apple stores.
That may be your prefferred marketing strategy, but it is not a matter of fact.
Oh, but it is a matter of fact. Nokia, according to you, has nowhere near the "brand presence" of the Apple and its N95 is more expensive to boot. Yet they sold half a million more N95s in that product's first quarter than Apple will sell iPhones.
Which is a piss poor comparison with the iPhone, on many levels.
True, we don't have pictures of the president accidently shattering a glass screen yet.
the iPhone is using a custom connection to the server, not the web client which only ever sends out flash encoded files.
Oh yes, I forgot, the iphone cant actually play Flash, can it? That's what, like 90% of the new video content on the net these days? How splendid for you! No wonder you're so focussed on youtube. I've personally tested the iphone's video codec supports and it blows. Despite what ADC *says* are the supported MIME types, the server/codec combinations are finicky and extremely fragile. Which really cripples universal RSS enclosures. And I saw some crashing of Safari during loads following certain UI operations. The templated QUicktime Pro combos work best, which makes me think that Apple really only tested that combo out and ran out of hours for the others.
You already admitted you have ot "turn on" your WiFi signal.
No, the point is that usually I don't *need* to. I get stable IPs, no firewalls, better security, and better connections while mobile.
KHTML, Darwin, GCC updates for Objectsive C, I could go Yawn and Yawn.
Beads and worthless trinkets for some of the more easily gulled natives.
We already established you were an idiot.
I love the way fervent Apple people quickly descend into a disparagement of the intelligence of people who "just don't get it". It's very much 'I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me' writ large. I bet you're itching to say something like "cluetrain", or "empowerment" next, aren't you? Symbian is challenging to program but has worked well over the decades since basically the Psion invented the PDA to enable an impressive breadth of software choices - Symbian runs, what, like 70% of the world's smartphones? OSX is already looking a little crufty... give it another 10 years and get back to me. In any case, given current iphone sales it'll take, what, a century to shift as many units as Symbian. Good luck with that!
Da Blog
Nope. And it's quite hard to consider it a downside given what I am missing.
Yes, because what really counts when watching video is the codec it supports, not the actual content available. "Don't mind the story, but check out that edge!"
Ignoring, of course, that I hear that Flash 9 now also encapsulates H.264 (or am I mistaken?). Ignoring also, of course, the constellation of new video sites that specialise in higher-quality, higher-bandwidth offerings that youtube does. But you're in luck, some of them (though it's only a minority for now) do offer mp4 as an option so you're not totally locked out of the real world.
I notice you've abandoned your fixation on Google Maps. Maybe because it's the only mapping tool you have. Where are your geocaching utils, something like Memory-Map Navigator with topographic map flythroughs, or GPS-enabled astronomy programs, to simulate the night sky above you and show you what you are looking at ("AstroNavigator"), etc? Finally, if a handheld doesn't have something like "Math Tablet" then it's just a toy.
You quickly moved from substance to abuse, which is tragic, though understandable because your initial position was so weak.
Da Blog