Slashdot Mirror
Woz Misquoted About Android Dominating iOS
bonch writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's quote that Android would dominate over iOS was widely covered by the tech press, but after seeking clarification, Engadget reports that Wozniak was misquoted by Dutch paper De Telegraaf. 'Almost every app that I have is better on the iPhone,' says Woz, claiming that he would never say that Android was better than iOS. 'I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy.' Woz has an Engadget account and has posted further comments to the linked article."
Steve Wozniak may or may not have been saying Android or any other os would or would not dominate IOS or other OSES in any potential platform that has been and will be invented in future. This may, or may not be a news broadcast.
Read radical news here
AAPL was up about $8 this morning before Engadget posted the correction. Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Me, I just remember the numerous times I've been interviewed or quoted by publications, or read a report about something that I witnessed. Almost without fail I'll be misquoted at some point (usually not horribly, but it's certainly not exactly what I said), and the report of what I witnessed gets something wrong. So I'm more willing to believe that a paper with a less-than-stellar reputation got it wrong rather than spin off into some conspiracy theory.
Indeed. BTW, this Slashdot story misquotes Woz too. He did say that Android would likely dominate. What he was misquoted about was the quality of Android vs. iOS. He said he prefers iOS apps over Android apps but he thinks Android as an OS will likely dominate over time.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
Don't forget about the headaches that come with programming for the platform. Angry Birds developers also have come out to say, in many words and with a lot of cact, what a headache it is to develop for the fragmented hardware platform.
"I'm not trying to put Android down, but... it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."
I'm Dutch and I concur. Comparing De Telegraaf to The Sun feels about right. I won't comment about this incident, but De Telegraaf is not known for being nonpartisan and rigorous, to put it nicely.
Apple trades at around 20 times its earnings, similar to Google and Oracle which are both market leaders as well. Nothing out of the ordinary here. What doesn't seem to make sense is why a company like Amazon trades at 60 times its earnings. Is its growth potential 3 times greater than Apple?
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Far less than the number of people who have turned the price of a Windows license and a MSDN subscription into a shit ton of cash, I assure you. After all, corporations pay a lot better than hipsters.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
from the comments, most engadget readers (and I'm one but I digress) are pro-sumers at best and often sound like high schoolers fighting over whose gadget is coolest. You don't seem to get any actual techs or engineers (at least those of us there are smart enough to keep our mouth shut since the SNR is so darned high) unlike here where you can (sometimes) get engaged in interesting discussions on the real technical specifics.
This is so true. A comment here has no credibility in and of itself but there WILL be serious physicists posting on a physics story here. The same with any other scientific, technical, or engineering article.
There is plenty of hyperbole posted. When I read a hyperbole headline a glance at the comments will usually reveal how and why the article/summary isn't what it seemed within 5-10 lines.
Is exactly the same battle as Apple vs. Microsoft a decade ago. And Apple will lose again for the same reasons: Inflated price, locked platform, and developer exclusion. Woz sees the obvious. Jobs apparently does not.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Very much, it's the free world. Not sure whether you're trolling or not but some explanation appears to be in place.
If you think it is the same as China, think again. It belongs politically to China but for the rest in practice it's more like an independent country.
Hong Kong is one of the free-est countries in the world, ranking nr. 1 in the Heritage Foundation list for economic freedom (this compared to the US which comes in at nr 8).
It's a free port, little restrictions to capital flow with a freely convertible currency, open immigration policy, with a government that is maybe even more pro-business than the US is (and yes that government is a major problem but luckily it stays mostly out of the way). Hong Kong also has press freedom (a decent nr. 34 on the Reporters without Borders 2010 list - China is near the bottom on nr 171).
It's also a place with a strong rule of law and a fair, highly respected justice system and police, and one of the lowest corruption rates in the world, ranking 15th on the "corruption perception index 2010", two places higher than the US.
Furthermore Hong Kong is slowly but surely moving towards full democracy, so that government thingy will be solved too. Freedom of press is also being protected furiously - remember 2003 when about half a million people (or a full 7% of the total population!) went to the streets to protect those freedoms.
"De Telegraaf" is not that right-wing. THAT would be a political view. Its view of the world is more "against". Not against left or right, just against. Immigrants? Against. Deporting immigrants? Against. Restrictions on immigrants? Against.
It will one day warn of the risks of 2nd hand smoke, then next day run an article that bans on smoking are bad. If anything the Telegraaf is the Teaparty. They don't have any ideas, they just know everyone elses ideas suck.
The Sun and Fox News have very clear political agenda's. When The Sun backed Labour this was clear throughout its pages. De Telegraaf isn't clear on a single page. That makes it far harder to deal with. How do you deal with a newspaper and its audience that in one paper can argue against a powerplant being build in an area AND argue that we got to cut through this red tape and get powerplants build? Impossible. It is the ultimate NIMBY newspaper.
All the other newspapers in Holland however are just as unclear. For instance shouldn't the Volkskrant (left) be more worried about the effects of immigrants on wages? Shouldn't Elsevier (right) be more honest about business demand for cheap immigrant labour?
That is the real reason The Telegraaf is so hated (and the most read), it is sure to upset everyone, except its readers.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yet, that's a Rovio specific problem, because other games which are far more resource intensive are developed for Android just fine without facing such issues.
The problem is almost certainly that Rovio tried to pull of a lazy port, and rather than rewrite specifically for Android, likely pulled across a bunch of C code from the other platforms they initially wrote for and interfaced using the NDK. This means you need a higher spec on average than on the original platform to achieve the same performance results, and that if you haven't taken advantage of the available abstraction layers, then you're bound to face unpredictable results. This is how things like SCUMM were ported across- sure it was done quickly, but the end result isn't very good.
This is similar to the problems that even single hardware platform devices have faced with ports in the past such as the PS3- on release many PS3 games were poor ports of the XBox 360 version, and it wasn't because the PS3 couldn't cope, it was merely because they'd been ported over in the fastest, cheapest way possible, without care for the fact that'll make it a second rate product on that platform.
So effectively you're conflating the issue of Android development with the problems caused by a poor porting process by using Angry Birds as your example. These are two different issues, and in mixing them up as you have, you've made out the issue of fragmentation to be more of a problem than it really is. There's really no reason developing for Android has to be any more problematic than dealing with the fragmentation with Apple's platforms- screen resolution differences between the iPhone 4, iPad and other devices, OS differences between the iPhone, iPad, and iPhone 3G/3Gs/4, differences in processing power across devices, and differences in available hardware between devices.
If you think programming for Android and dealing with fragmentation causes headaches, you've clearly never developed for any platform over any period of time. Fragmentation exists on every platform designed to last more than a generation be it Android, Windows, iOS. Exceptions would be things like the PS3 or Wii or XBox 360 where they are only designed to last a generation but even here if you develop a game designed to be released on more than one of these systems you face the fragmentation problem.
Fragmentation is something for non-programmers, inexperienced programmers and trolls to whinge about. For skilled, professional developers, it's a fact of life you've long learnt to deal with because it's merely the price of progress, the only alternative is to simply use a platform that never progresses and rapidly becomes outdated, something which Apple, despite holding out on what quickly became an abysmally low screen resolution of the iPhone compared to the industry standard all the way up until the 3GS finally accepted is a bad idea unless you want to be seen to have a product that sucks.
It's a shame people like you who are clearly inexperienced at software development keep parroting this myth, because it sounds so dumb to those of us who do know the topic, and do know what we're on about. It's also why it's not scared people off Android and why Android is powering ahead in terms of developer numbers and handset sales, because people who do know what they're on about know that the fragmentation argument is little more than a troll made by people who simply don't know what they are talking about.