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Chip Guru Papermaster Loses Signal At Apple
ColdWetDog writes "Computerworld reports that Mark Papermaster has left his job as Apple's Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering. He was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4 and thus responsible in some unknown fashion for 'antennagate.' His name may ring bells from previous coverage of his jump from IBM to Apple. From a brief blurb on Daring Fireball: 'From what I've heard, it's clear he was canned. Papermaster was a conspicuous absence at the Antennagate press conference. Inside Apple, he's "the guy responsible for the antenna" — that's a quote from a source back on July 23. (Another quote from the same source: "Apparently the antenna guys used to have a big chip on their shoulder. No more.")'" Update: 08/08 03:01 GMT by KD : Swapped out a registration-required NY Times link for a Computerworld one; corrected the direction of Papermaster's career move.
Windows 7 is not the point, all it takes is one really shitty product, like Vista, to turn people off for good when they're straddling the fence and considering alternatives*.
That's like (hypothetically) touting the iPhone 5 even after half of Apple users replaced their iPhone 4's with 'Droid phones and never looked back.
* You could try to make the case that people still used Windows after WinMe, but Mac and Linux were not serious competitors for home-use marketshare back in the WinMe days.
There were several and yet fixable "antennagate" happenings on Nokia, the 40% share (for now) not-taken-seriously smart phone giant.
N97 for example, a device which made everyone drool and yet shipped with 256MB of RAM (remember, Symbian and users heavily multitask) and no hardware accelerated UI. Now, N97 owners say "OK you tell us Symbian 3 is great, upgrade us for free and we stop bitching". While technically possible (know anything Qt doesn't work?) Nokia is very silent. Stupid guys could even have "free beta testers" for their next flagship N8 which is extremely important these days. Remember, MS essentially gave Windows 7 free to testers.
N900, based on Linux has no word from Nokia whether its firmware will be fixed or better switched to MeeGo (Intel/Nok thing).
These are "iPhone class" devices I talk about. They dream that, owners of these devices, cursing every moment will flock to Nokia stores to buy N8 for a iPhone sec. hand price.
These are just 2 "flagships", several more software scandals which are fixable are happening but they are a bit deeper technical issues.
Imagine Apple doing these mistakes and chief of hardware still stays. Man, they would even fire SJobs if they felt like it. Apple's success comes from "no mercy" policy, even on OS X.