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For Normals, Jobs' "Retina Display" Claim May Be Fair After All
The Bad Astronomer writes "AT WWDC, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone 4's display has about the same resolution as the human eye — held at one foot away, the iPhone 4's pixels are too small to see. After reading an earlier Slashdot post about an expert disputing Jobs' claim, I decided to run the numbers myself. I found that Jobs is correct for people with normal vision, and the expert was using numbers for theoretically perfect vision. So to most people, the iPhone 4 display will look unpixellated."
i'm holding my droid at 1 foot distance and I can't distinguish any single pixel. I have to get it to about 3-4 inches to do so convincingly.
Granted, anti-aliased fonts help a ton.
... will it look even better for me?
blah, blah, blah...
It's still marketing drivel along the lines of "blast processing". Wholly unnecessary...just tell us the resolution, Jobsy. No need to spice it up, the specs should speak for themselves.
Living With a Nerd
One must not forget about Anti aliasing or the fact that each pixel contains 3 RGB sub pixels. This increases the effect PPI significantly.
I mean one story is really too much on the topic. Isn't there anything more interesting out there in the world not focused on the iPhone's capabilities? Sheesh.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
What bugs me is when a company uses a name for something that doesn't make sense.
When I hear "retina display" I think what you are talking about is a system that projects an image into my retina.
Let me make this clear: if you have perfect eyesight, then at one foot away the iPhone 4’s pixels are resolved. The picture will look pixellated. If you have average eyesight, the picture will look just fine.
Beer!
To claim any display has the same resolution as the human eye when what they really mean is that it looks "less pixelly" is misleading at best.
crazy dynamite monkey
Most Slashdotters will never be anywhere close to one foot from a vagina anyway, so it's not like we'll have anything to compare it to when surfing our porn on it.
... every one turns off their WiFi
The only people who are going to look at the screen and think "hey, they said I wouldn't be able to see the pixels but I can!" are people who look at printed magazines and think "wow, when are they going to get rid of all these dots?" The screen has print level resolution and, as a graphic designer, that simply blows my mind. As has been mentioned in that other thread, graphic designers do digital work in 300 dpi for print work and 72 dpi for online work. If this screen technology becomes the new norm, we'll be doing all work at 300 dpi, which is damn, damn, damn impressive to look at. At that point, the technology bottleneck will be the pipes (a 72 dpi image is quite a bit smaller than a 300 dpi image, after all...). I do hope this tech spreads to lots of other devices and computer displays.
But, yes, anyone who claims that Apple was lying about it being a "retinal" display is simply attempting to pick a needless fight. Ignore them and move on.
There's one in the eye for all the haters on the previous story who just took the random guy off the internet's word for it that Apple was wrong.
This is what I would call an extremely interesting discussion...
sigh
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Found some more resources and examples of retinal display here.
Oh wait...
Get off it. iPhone is still owned by a corporation that has gone from innovative, to more constraining and restrictive than the RIAA in many respects.
that means steve jobs is gonna punch you in the eye and you'll love the resulting display of sparkly lights!
IMHO Apple/Jobs has learned to sell directly to the average consumer and bypassed the geek promotion theory. To their target market I think his description was a much better sales statement than listing the resolution. Their market is Betty Lou that wants cutting edge, but still has trouble embedding a link in an email.
There are many anti-Apple people. If Apple told them, don't jump off the cliff you'll die... they'd look right at Jobs, give him the finger, and jump off.
I seem to be about 9 inches away from my phone. Is smaller than an iPhone though so maybe users do have them further away.
Where do you think the figure for 300dpi printers came from in the 90's?
See I didn't know you meant "normal" people. I thought you meant "Super" people with like xray vision, heat vision, and telescopic vision and all that shit.
It makes so much more sense now when you explain it that way.
P.S. Of course my vision (-11.25,-11.5) an 8 bit Nintendo somehow running on a Lite-Brite would likely have more "pixels" or resolution than my eyes, so I guess it is all about perspective. Maybe if I glue two iPhone4's to my retina's I will be cured, surely a crass miracle such as that should be child's play for such a monumental device...
it's alright, the math assumes that nobody is nearsighted. Since nearsightedness is very common, the article's comments don't hold true at all.
Some people can see magnitudes smaller arcmin than .6 up close, in fact like .2 or so. Anyone with 20/10 vision (which is common with correction such as eyeglasses or contacts) is going to still see plenty of pixelation.
It's still a substantial improvement in pixels, but the article is incorrect.
stop being a fan-boy, and find a better use for your time..
Prophet Jobs can be mistaken too....
The iPhone 4 also has 50% more pixels than the Motorola Droid, which the expert had said was "comparable".
You mean that real life doesn't have pixels everywhere I look? OMG I'm trapped in the machine!
Seriously though, I remember one extra-long coding session. Near the end, everywhere I looked, things seemed to have a pixelated "overlay".
Of course, if the iJobs has a "retina display", so do a lot of other devices.
My god. Just think of the poor electrons wasted by these posts. Can't wait for the first lawsuit because someone CAN see individual pixel.
Conservative, mod down for violating
Abby Normals?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
"Jobs is actually correct." Says that blog. But not really. As another poster put it, if you have really BAD eyesight, then the Gameboy has "retina display".
Te poor eyesight is because of the lens, not the retina. The retina on a person with 12/20 eyesight is as good as someone with 20/20 or 30/20 eyesight. The lens in front is just crap.
And what's this "new and exciting" (yeah, right) display called? Lensdisplay? CorneaDisplay? No.
Retina Display.
If it hadn't been given a new dumb name as a marketing feature (and that "about 300dpi" figure means the N900 has had retina display for ages, hence not new and exciting), there would be nothing to worry about.
If Jobs had said it had 4x the resolution so that apps for the old iPhone would be as crisp as native resolution and new iPhone aps EVEN CRISPER, then I would be A-OK with it.
But no, since he over hyped that out the arse, we get to call it a POS.
He upped the stakes.
We upp the downsides.
Don't like it, Jobs? Then stop over-selling.
PS one message on that blog shows why this is a problem:
"Man, forget the hype, I’m just impressed that they can pack pixels at such density."
Uh, the iPhone isn't the first.
But because it's been given a new name and hawked as new and innovative by "new and innovative" Steve Jobs at the expo, this fan jumps straight to the conclusion that this is new and amazing.
It's *OK*, but not impressive as an Apple innovation.
It's not _projecting onto ones retina_ any more than another LCD screen is.
But you see, they all do that. All visible objects do that. That's how our eyes work. Light reflected or emitted from objects uses the lens in your eye to project an image onto your retina. It is technically correct, and no, it's not anything special, other than being a high resolution display.
Could it be, that this is just a trade name? (and that perhaps some people have a little too much time on their hands?)
When I search for a document on my Mac, I don't expect an actual Spotlight to shine on the document.
When I restore a file from a backup using Time Machine, I don't imagine that there's actual time travel taking place.
If I use the feature that shows all of my overlapping windows resized so they fit on the screen and I can choose which one to work on, I don't expect the crew from 20/20 or 60 Minutes or Dateline NBC to show up and do an actual Exposé.
Holy crap, I just found out there's no control tower or runway involved in using Airport networking! What a complete and total fraud!
MobileMe doesn't actually cause me to move around either!
And, worst of all, the damned Magic Mouse doesn't have any magical powers! I just tried to cast a Patronus Charm with it, just like in those Harry Potter movies, and the damn thing didn't work at all. It doesn't even fly around unless you throw it. I want my money back!
Putting moderation advice in your
The human eye can resolve much finer than 300 dpi --- 400 dpi is where fonts start to look nice on a laserprinter (notably the NeXT laserprinter had a 400dpi mode in addition to the then more standard 300dpi --- it was distinctly noticeable when one changed printing modes) and imagesetters are easily differentiated by their output at 1,270 ppi vice 2,540 ppi (and there are models which go higher) --- see the book _Counterpunch: Making Type in the 16th Century, Designing Typefaces Now_ by Fred Smeijers for electron micrographs and a discussion of this which shows that the human eye can easily see the thickness of a 1/1,270th of an inch curl of steel.
Granted, the iPhone screen is 326 _pixels_ per inch, so one gets anti-aliasing, yielding a higher effective dpi, and possibly sub-pixel rendering, but screens need to get better yet.
Image resolution is measured in several ways:
ppi (pixels per inch) --- input / file resolution
dpi (dots per inch) --- output resolution for a single ink colour
lpi - (lines per inch) --- output resolution for ``halftones'' which allows the simulation of multiple levels when one can only do on/off --- newspapers use ~85 lpi, uncoated stock in books ~133lpi, magazines 150 lpi or higher, art books 200 lpi --- different printing processes/tecniques are used for better quality or fewer generations
A pixel is a ``picture element'' a unit of a raster grid which can be more finely differentiated than just black or white --- the coarsest pixel I can think of would be the monochrome NeXT Cube (and later Slabs) which had black, white and two shades of grey.
Try putting a 326 ppi greyscale image of a Gustav Doré engraving on the iPhone and compare that to the actual engraving in a book --- the difference between them will be obvious to anyone w/ good vision.
Different printing and halftoning techniques make lpi rather complex --- stochastic screening does away w/ it for example and exhibits improvement to the limits of output resolution --- 3600 dpi on some imagesetters.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I heard the other day that the jumbotron at the new cowboy stadium is a retina display.... from a distance of 27 miles.
This seems to be an arbitrary way of claiming that your screen is better than everyone else's.
It's nice, but it isn't revolutionary outside of the iWorld. It's only a little bit denser than other phone displays that have been around for months. Did anyone notice the demonstration of the difference between the two versions of the letter a? In the video, did everyone notice how the pixels on the "better" a just kind of disappeared? Will someone please tell me how that isn't false advertising? He was comparing a pixel density that was probably 50x greater than in the other "a."
What's really exciting about the iPhone's new resolution is that we're approaching the point where higher rez doesn't make any difference. We might be there already for lots of people with subaverage visual acuity, or just getting near for those with supervision. Since marketers will keep pushing for higher rez even after it can't make a visible difference, because they can sell the numbers to the ignorant and the gullible, we will soon have enough resolution that nobody will see the difference if it went any higher. At which point the marketing will start to switch to some other visual feature that actually looks different for the money.
I'd love to see display tech finally start to get off the grid. Patterns that aren't a regular grid, because the eye can see the grid itself, or that there's some kind of grid, even when the individual pixels can't be distinguished from their neighbors. Or off the grid of time, with pixels updating at times not strictly synced with each other on a frame clock. The retina's image sensing cells are in a stochastic distribution around a sinusoidal rosette, each independently signaling over the optic nerve at about 40Hz. So once framerates are above 80Hz (the usual Nyquist frequency doubling limit), the time grid itself will be the limit, not the rate of the grid. The colorspace itself is a grid that's pretty regular throughout R, G and B, even though the eye sees in a very uneven colorspace that's really Yellow/Blue and Red/Green in axes, and mostly greens. 16.8M colors is probably the color resolution, but far too many non-green colors are indistinguishable in displays, while there aren't nearly enough greens to look like natural colors.
When we get off those grids, in space and time, these displays will start to jump in realism again. We're now at the point where just investing in higher resolution is no longer making any real difference. The rest of the grids await mastery.
--
make install -not war
The bits you are referring to are the vulva. Before trying to get a girl to show you hers, you might at least learn to get the terminology right. I don't normally post on these topics, but this particular misuse annoys me as much as the people that think cars have breaks rather than brakes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
When will a company step up to plate for those of us with xray vision? I'm so sick of checking my email while on the train and seeing underwear.
--- What?
Excellent point, and as a corollary to that it's worth noting that the plethora of Android devices are available on all of the Big Four networks, while iPhone continues to be available only on AT&T. It says something about the popularity of the iPhone that it's available only on arguably the worst of the major networks yet is stll No. 2 behind only Blackberry.
Much has been made of the fact that the Android platform outsold the iPhone in the 1st Quarter, but the Apple-haters crowing that this somehow signals the ascendancy of Android and the end for the iPhone's supremacy are bound to be bitterly disappointed when the iPhone becomes available on othe networks. Not "if", "when". The general consensus is that it will be available on Verizon sometime in 2011, and according to Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros., it may be on T-Mobile as early as fall of this year. In my opinion, the rapid sales of Android devices have as much to do with Verizon's aggressive promotion, as well as the reluctance of people to switch from their existing providers to AT&T, as the merits of the platform itself. That calculus will change dramatically when the iPhone throws off the AT&T shackles. Android outselling iPhone in the 1st Quarter of 2010 may well come to be looked on as an anomaly
It's not a retina display to EVERYONE so it's still false advertising. Then again, the iPhone isnt a PDA for everyone either. It's an entry level PDA for people that cant figure out how to use more capable devices... The iPhone is to PDA users what America Online was to internet users. Less capable, restrictive, and EASY to use. Remember when you used AOL for years, you strutted around telling people proudly, "I use AMERICA ONLINE". Then, years later, you found out you were an idiot for doing so?
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
1. There is no such thing as "perfect" vision. There is normal vision that requires no correction. Typically that comes down to 20/20 vision. There are some people with better vision. Very good eyes are measured as 20/10. There is no limit, physiological or theoretical, hence no "perfect".
2. Resolving things at any distance requires far more than static placement of object with X size and retina of Y resolving power. The visual system (NOTE the retina does not resolve ANYTHING. The visual system as a whole does.) resolves things by a complex interplay between what's presented at any given point in time, what's presented at other times but is cognitively determined to be the same target, the speed at which the boundaries of images cross the same point in the visual field, and calculations that occur in the visual cortex on these things, which result in a VISUAL ACUITY (that's the term they were addressing, or should have been) that is often far greater than can be conceived of when one considers the components of the eye as though they were parts of a camera or other device. They are not, and the terms used for those don't apply.
3. Please tell me no one has bothered to test this empirically. I'm always looking for things my undergrad labs can do real science on, especially when it punctures some overinflated gas bag.
Plait, there's more than running numbers, there's knowing what to run numbers on. There's also knowing when to STFU. There's still also acting like a professional and not confusing people who'll believe you because you've made a name in the entertainment field. This last is something a real scientist/educator, not a blogger who happened to hold some science jobs and now makes a living getting attention for talking about science stuff like he knows it, would understand -- so we can expect your next spew in what, 600 words of 4 letters each is 2400 letters, and 40 cps is, an hour?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
While the iPod brand of products did and still does sell well, it's a very small segment of the entire portable personal music products market. Most estimates put it at around 13% to 18%, with some liberal estimates even giving them up to 24%.
The situation is even worse for the iPhone. It's only about 12% to 13% of the entire smartphone market. Offerings from RIM alone, plus those of other vendors far outnumber the number of Apple devices.
It's difficult to say that Apple's competitors have "failed" when these competitors hold 4 to 8 times more of the market that Apple's products have. In fact, in the smartphone market, we see the adoption rate of Android-based smartphones growing significantly faster than that of the iPhone.
The only market that Apple's devices hold nearly perfectly is the unsubstantiated hype market. Nobody can touch the Apple market when it comes to drumming up undeserved excitement.
> I found that Jobs is correct for people with normal vision,
By "normal vision", do you mean average (20/20)? Because, very few people have normal vision. Most people either have above-average or below-average vision. In fact, nearly half the population has *better* than average vision. Last time I was checked (which, admittedly, has been more than ten years), I had 40/20 vision, which is about twice as good as average. This is not abnormal, or even unusual.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Isn't this a bit of pinhead angel counting? Who holds a phone 12 inches from their face when looking at anything where pixelation matters a hoot.
If you hold it like a book in your lap or on a table top when you sit it's about 2 feet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why? Did it land too close to you?
So Steve it seems like perfect to you're eyes, but not so to your younger buyers.
The real problem is going to be "does it run *this* app".
And the answer is "No, because the app doesn't exist on iPhone, in turn because Apple's regulations don't allow it. But Droid does."
Calling something a mouthful of numbers and acronyms, such as "a 326 DPI LCD panel", isn't going to get nearly the consumer attention as a "Retina Display" will.
They could always go the Konami route and call it the MAX 300 display.
66dpi? Yes, if it's compared to 3000dpi it's nowt. It's very little against 300dpi.
But it's not even 66dpi.
N900: 267dpi.
iPhone: 326dpi.
Difference: 59dpi.
How old is the 900?
The screen of the much older Nokia N770 had 225, with a much larger screen.
Jobs hyped it and so a hyped rebuttal is appropriate.
Woz would probably have gone on about WHY they picked that resolution and what cool tech they used for it. E.g. "We picked double the resolution and made sure that this display would be AS sharp at least as your current iPhone with all your current apps, but with apps that know about resolution, show them to even greater detail!".
The N900 resolution was probably picked because that's the resolution of some standard Widscreen display for video purposes. If Apple had picked the same, then there would HAVE to be some antialiasing to fit the app to the screen, making it more blurred.
Well, the Android phones have been having quite an impact in the market recently.
True.
The big benefit of "being able to run the software you want rather than what Steve Jobs says you can run" seems to speak to people, since that's the major thing Android has going for it that the iPhone doesn't.
Whether that is a "big" benefit or not is a matter of opinion. Your argument is one that speaks to a segment of the geek crowd here on slashdot but hardly anyone else actually cares. Very few people actually feel constrained by the software available on the iPhone. You might be one who does but if so you are in a VERY small minority. Doesn't mean you are wrong to care but most people simply don't feel your pain. In short, if you want to explain the success of Android you'll have to look for a different argument.
Really the success of Android probably lies mostly in the fact that the iPhone is only available through AT&T and the other carriers and handset manufacturers needed a product to compete. Verizon wasn't about to sit around and not compete with the iPhone and the other alternatives (Blackberry and Nokia) simply weren't getting the job done. Most of the competitors prior to the iPhone competed on feature lists (and arguably still do) but not so much on actual usability. The Nokia I have have sitting on my desk can technically do everything an iPhone 3G can do but it has an interface only a geek could love. Android has provided a way to reach the segment of consumers attracted to the iPhone in a way the alternatives didn't.
Same goes for anyone who puts a dollar sign in "Microsoft". As if Apple is in it for the good of the universe, and not profit just like every other corporation. Maybe we should all start writing "$teve Job$" too.
Somebody doesn't understand the difference between mean and median.
Are you adequate?
A consumer products manufacturer makes a slightly exaggerated claim about the specs on one of it's new models! Stop the presses! Film at 11!
I mean, really, what's the big deal? Stuff like this goes on all the time and people just laugh it off. Here on Slashdot, however, there have been hundreds of posts over the last two days about it. To quote William Shatner: Get a life!
This ain't rocket surgery.
All this arguing doesn't take into account the Nyquist limit which applies to vision as well.
Even if your argument were factually correct, which it is not, exercising a modicum of common sense would explain that it is AT&T who gain from exclusivity, not Apple. When Apple, approached the carriers with the iPhone, AT&T were the only ones who did not point blank reject Apple's demand that the device not carry the network logo, as well as crippling the phone with their network's "features" and burying it in shovelware. AT&T demanded exclusive rights for five years in return for agreeing to Apple's terms.
Remember that no one could have predicted that the device would become a runaway smash hit, and AT&T were in the driver's seat; they were the only option left to Apple after the other networks had rejected Apple's terms. Jobs demanded a percentage of iPhone data revenues in return for exclusivity, to help offset lost opportunities with other carriers. This was a no-brainer for AT&T. If iPhone failed, no big deal, they sell a hell of a lot of different devices, and if only a tiny fraction of their customers used the iPhone, giving Apple a cut of iPhone data revenues would have a minimal impact on their bottom line.
Except...the iPhone succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. It brought AT&T millions of new customers, and data traffic spiked, bringing the network to its knees. AT&T made money hand over fist off their exclusivity deal, attracting new customers and retaining them despite their shitty service. Case in point, a friend of mine in Seattle who switched from Verizon to AT&T in February just to get an iPhone. She had wanted to trade her BlackBerry Curve for a touchscreen smartphone, and the only thing Verizon had at the time was the Storm. She loathed it, and whenever we spoke she'd complain bitterly about it. When she called me a couple months ago just to tell me how much she loved her iPhone, AT&T dropped the call three times in fifteen minutes. When I redialed her for the third time and asked her how the hell she could put up with such awful service, she said that the iPhone was such a joy for her to use that she was willing to tolerate it, but said she'd jump back to Verizon in a New York minute if they got the device. In fact, her enthusiasm for the iPhone was such that she said she was considering getting her first Mac, which couldn't have gone over too well at home; her husband works for Microsoft. And just to forestall the argument that iPhone users are sheep, yes, she is a non-technical user, but far from stupid; she's an emergency room physician, and a damned good one too. It never fails to amuse me when smug, elitist techies describe users of Apple products as smug and elitist.
To suggest that Apple were the ones who demanded exclusivity is laughable, and that they did so out of greed, is simply irrational. Why the hell would they willingly restrict their own potential sales? You sound like just another anti-Apple jihadist, willing to distort facts in any way you can to demonstrate that Apple is "evil".
I agree with Jobs. Frankly, even the previous generation of iPod/iPhone are retina displays for me. Seeing the pixels is exceedingly difficult. Some people just seem to need something to complain about.
66dpi? Yes, if it's compared to 3000dpi it's nowt. It's very little against 300dpi.
326 compared to 300 is still significant. You're talking about a technical field in which improvements of 1% are hard-fought. You're also talking about a size in which there are no 300 ppi displays on the market.
How old is the 900?
Less than a year.
The screen of the much older Nokia N770 had 225, with a much larger screen.
How is a difference of 0.6 inches "much" larger when a density increase of 25% (or, for the screen you're referencing here, 45% trivial? Either they're both not trivial (which is the case) or neither is trivial (which would be wrong of you, but at least consistent to state). It's a showing of the clear bias of the ignorant when talking about display densities.
The reason you don't get the microformat densities at the 3-5" range, or smartphone densities on netbooks, or netbook densities on most notebooks, or notebook densities on desktop monitors, or desktop monitors on big-screen LCD TVs is because it's not feasible to do so.
This display is a major breakthrough in its size class--20-25% over its previous record-setting competitors. It's an even bigger leap forward in IPS technology, which has never been marketed anywhere near even 200 ppi. It is nothing short of revolutionary, and blind anti-Apple blather only discredits the fine work of the engineers and physicists who developed it, none of whom have anything to do with Apple.
If it had been a Nokia phone as launch customer, you'd be drooling all over it. Meanwhile, the previous groundbreaking LCD, used in the N900 and the Droid and several other products, was lavished with plenty of well-deserved respect and praise from all circles. This display is in all regards an even bigger achievement and deserves the same.
Did you guys seriously use the word "normals"? I knew everyone here had Asperger's, but this is ridiculous.
As pointed out in the article, the assumption that 20/20 is normal vision is absolutely wrong and is based on a self-reported sample of people 120 years ago. Mean visual acuity for ages 18-29 is better than 20/15.
I had a whole bunch of good information to post here, but someone at the article's comments said it even better.
So, shamelessly quoted from there:
40. Daniel Says:
June 10th, 2010 at 9:25 am
It is clearly an exaggerated claim. 20/20 Snellen visual acuity is a reference standard used as a cut-off for the lowest level of normal vision -- not as an average visual acuity for the human population.
Elliott, Yang and Whitaker (1995) published Visual Acuity Changes Throughout Adulthood in Normal Healthy Eyes. In this paper, they reported mean VA for 18-24 was 20/15 (6/4.5 metric). That's the MEAN visual acuity for young adults. So a significant number likely had a better VA than 20/15. 25-29 year old mean actually _improved_ to ~20/13 (6/4 metric). The mean VA increased (approaching 20/20 or 1.0) from that point until reaching a mean VA of 20/20 (6/6 metric) in the 75-year-old group!
20/20 is the wrong VA to use for average human visual acuity. In addition, R.N.Clark at Clarkvision.com reports that people up to 50 can reliably tell the difference between 300 ppi and 600 ppi printouts.
...slow day in the world of Apple or what???
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Same goes for anyone who puts a dollar sign in "Microsoft". As if Apple is in it for the good of the universe, and not profit just like every other corporation. Maybe we should all start writing "$teve Job$" too.
You don't know it yet but you just started a trend. :)
Most print artwork is done at 300 dpi. It's a magic number in publishing. iPhone 4 is the first screen device that can show print artwork. We've been looking forward to this for about 20 years. You have to be a fucking idiot to piss on it.
... and it's hardly unique to Apple. Damn near every company in existence comes up with some feature, gives it a name that's stupid to one degree or another, and uses it to help sell the product. Sometimes this helps, sometimes not. Remember Intel's "Viiv"? That was marketing stupid turned up to 11.
Let me begin by saying "I'm a PC". Wouldn't buy a MAC, MAC Book, or iMAC on a bet. 15 months ago, my contract was up with ATT and I started looking for a new phone. I wanted to move to a competitor because of more reliable service. Heck, the company I work for even dropped ATT and moved to a competitor because of dropouts and deadspots. The other requirement I had was that I wanted a phone with a better internet browser than the scrap pile that ran on my RAZOR. But when I looked at the available phones, none had an interface that worked as well as the iPhone's. There wasn't even one remotely close. So I ponied up my $199, swallowed my reluctance to buy an Apple product, and bought an iPhone. Of course, that means I'm still stuck with lousy service, but I now have features like pinch and expand (priceless for an older person with somwhat aging sight). My employer bought HTCs for all of their supervisors and managers, thats several hundred people. They hate the interface (its not intuitive at all) and the need to use the stylus. Several have even turned in their HTC and gone out and purchased iPhones on their own. Well its 9 months from contract time again, and I've looked at all the smart phones on the market. The iPhone 4 is going to be my choice. There's 3 parts to the smart phone puzzle. Features, ease of use, and quality of phone service. The first two are the reasons most people choose a particular smartphone. I'm thinking that 4 years from now when I'm ready to replace my desktop PC (haven't bought a laptop because most of the things that I want to do on a computer when I'm away from home I can now do on my phone), I'll probably buy the iPhone6 because it'll have matured into the palmtop that does it all.
in the USA, maybe. The problem is that they tried pulling the same stuff in europe too.
Traditonnally, in several countries here it works differently :
Phones are not subsidized and sold by network carriers. Phone are sold normally in normal electronic shops. the only thing is only, if you sign for or extend a plan with a carrier in the same shop, you get a rebate to buy which ever phone of you liking, and you're free to do whatever you want with said phone: you can use it with the contract you extended, or you can give it as a present to your S.O. and use the sim with your older phone.
Carriers don't directly subsidize phones, carrier can't load craptons of maketware - as the phone never goes through their hands, users are free to mix'n'match phone and services as they like.
The logical strategy would be to make deal with major retailer chains to get the phone to as many stores as possible, the network will take care of the subsidizing by the rebate system. And that's indeed how lots of phone makers do it (mostly european makers).
That's not what Apple (or other USAsian maker) do. They still try to get special exclusivity deal with branded retails of specific operator (nothing prevents operator to have their own retails). Thus the iPhone and alii are only available through some specific carrier because it's the only shop in town selling it. Apple gets money out of data deals, operators get users to switch to their networks to get a phone which has already proven to sell like got cake in the USA during the previous months.
So maybe in the USA they where forced to make exclusive deals with network carriers. But they did the same in Switzerland, where that's absolutely not the norm.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Normal 20/20 is used as a median eyesight. The difference between farsighted and nearsighted is balanced at this value.