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Woz Fears Stifling of Startups Due to Patent Wars
An anonymous reader writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple and other tech companies' patent hoarding could prevent entrepreneurs doing the same thing that he and Steve Jobs did in starting a computer company in a garage. Woz also says the jury is still out on Tim Cook as the right CEO to lead Apple forward after Steve Jobs."
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "'Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,' he says. 'It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn't exist.'"
because it goes against the corporate way...
Be seeing you...
Of course patent chests are there to stave off the attacks of other massive companies - heck, look at the Facebook response to Yahoo's patent attack - it snaps up a quick 800 patents and uses the new ones against yahoo in retalliation - but they are also used (probably much less noticably) to swat at the small flies that the big boys want to get rid of.
What better way to make some easy cash, when a start-up has a good idea, point out that your patents invariably make their product "infringe" then come out with their product under your own name - and possibly use your new patents to broker another settlement with some other big player in THEIR new emerging technology.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
you bet. an entire industry of lawyer specializations!!!
That's why most startups don't do real business anymore: their model is to hype an idea and be bought up early, by a large corporation with its own protective patent portfolio.
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,” he says. “It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn’t exist."
I'm not a huge Apple fan but that seems pretty much true to me. They weren't all 100% original (what is?) but iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad have pretty much all created new markets or massively expanded existing ones. I mean I can't remember seeing rows of tablets on sale at my local electronics store prior to the iPad but now every company and his dog seems to have a tablet product. In fact the only tablets I remember hearing about before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens and huge price tags slapped on."
Google creates cloud print ... release the code and makes it available to everybody ... patent encumbers it and puts barbed wire around it and anybody with a similar idea
Apple creates Airprint
If you looked at the recent Apple store front displays, or even their recent TV advertisements, they're horrible. They're nowhere as good as the Steve Jobs era TV ads (the Siri ad was very robotic, and the iPad ad didn't put the human using the iPad in the limelight, but the iPad itself and how wonderful its screen is: the narration made me think it was a bank commercial when I didn't look towards the TV). Instead, the Apple storefront displays feature some preprinted image of their latest product, instead of the crazy floating balloons.
Everyone is going to forget about how apple tries to stop everyone with vague patents: lock screens, touch screens, tablets, launching applications by touching icons.
I'm trying to do the indie developer thing and I know that after these years of working full-time on a product with an upcoming initial release, the biggest threat to me isn't product failure but a frivolous patent suit burying me and likely making me give up the results of all the thousands of hours I've invested. I still plan on releasing this particular product, but the extensions and off-shoots I'll write for it will either stay private (and I'll make my money in a completely different field) or I'll end up moving to another country without software patents. It's shitty that the U.S. patent system is basically set up to force non-rich people to work for others (and thus have some indemnity), or pair up with lawyers to become pure patent trolls. In my worse moments, I've considered the latter as a sort of "this is what you've turned me into!" revenge fantasy.
When it comes to patents stifling competition is, at the minimum, part of the equation, I wonder what would happen with no patents at all, the ultimate form of competition?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As long as we have a patent system that blindly issues a patent to damn near anything applied for, even though there's no real innovation involved ... e.g. stuff that the best engineers/programmers in their field could do without much effort if given a task that needs it, then we'll be having these wars. Patents need to be limited to the kinds of innovation that that we simply would not have if the applicant had not figured it out or spent the extensive effort and cost to come up with it.
Fundamentally, patents are themselves a government sanction theft of intellectual property from those that invent it, just because they didn't invent it first. Only because we can't know whether someone did invent it, or did steal it, do we justify a patent (which is really nothing more than government sanctioned exclusivity). But our patent office is not working to filter genuine innovation from trivia ideas. A few years ago I scanned over some random patents, selecting those in areas I happened to know, and found that the vast majority were easily doable, and not innovation. The ratio was around 500 (junk) to 1 (innovation). This was one sampling, so that can be off. I only used higher numbers spanning about the last 5 years at that time.
So it's not really the corporations doing this. They have to react this way under such a system, or end up being a loser. This is why we need an epic-major overhaul of the patent system itself, and not some minor tweaks that politicians have paid lip service to.
I have written more detail about this recently here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Apple's savior is an MP3 player. They didn't invent the market, they just made it shinier than it was before.
If you've read Jobs's bio, he was ready to go nuclear on Google over Android, so yes, Apple's just as ready as anybody else to pound you into sand if you dare try to make anything resembling their products. Apple is not a good guy. If you love Apple products, they're just YOUR bad guy.
Finally, few people are qualified to tell whether the newly appointed head of a half TRILLION dollar company is going to be successful. Woz is probably more qualified than I am, but not by much. Tbh, I truly believe the only people who are really qualified to know are living in 2017, if not 2022 or so. Ask one of them.
Really? Woz is actually going to say anything about patent trolling being bad after his company has just about sued everyone who makes something with a rectangular screen for patent infringement? THAT is f'n priceless.
Whatever happened to braking up Companies that have a monopoly over industry?
There was a time when this kind of corporate behavior was kept in check.
I disagree. Apple is following the formula of Microsoft, which is to abide by no morals and have no shame.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Apple, has for the last 2 decades made over priced prototypes for others to copy. Maybe if they could get back to the roots that Woz innovated, well maybe. (disclosure I'm short the stock for what I think is a good reason)
Anyway, one of the rules of earning a patent are that it is simply an improvment on an existing thing. So wouldnt it make sense for HTC for example to patent their entire HTC one x, that will soon be released? Then all the item s in that phone are no longer patent protected from the software to chips , because the act of putting them all together in the configuration that the HTC one x, did is a clear improvement on them as pieces.
Is it not an improvement of the 3g chip or the java software when they are put together to create the phone?
I think it would hold up, I remember reading this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/15schumer.html?pagewanted=all And the main villain in it Claudio Ballard said the following, ot justify his patents “I didn’t invent the scanner; I didn’t invent networking, or computers or software,” he said. “But I am an expert at systems integration, and I created this complete end-to-end solution” for digital check processing.
You say yourself that there was no market because they sucked.
Make things that don't suck, and the market emerges.
Look, I get tired of the mindlessness of the Apple critics.
I was a smartphone user for years and held off for two years on getting an iPhone once iPhone was released because I was sure that it couldn't be that much better, that it was all hype. After all, I already HAD a smartphone that I was completely satisfied with (a high-end Treo).
Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got my first iPhone (a 3GS, some months after it had been released). I realized that I had been walking around using a Treo when I could have been about 10x as functional and connected on the go using an iPhone, which was a device in a completely different *universe* if you actually wanted to get stuff done with your phone.
Listen, everyone *knew* there was no market for tablets before iPad. That was exactly the critique and it was spot-on. But Apple executed so well (and at half the price that people had imagined) that they CREATED a market out of whole cloth. Hell, half the people on Slashdot still argue that the iPad market is non-existent and will dry up just as soon as people "wake up" and realize that the device they're using is... I don't remember how the argument goes, exactly. Useless? Overpriced? Stupid? Whatever. I dont' care. The market didn't exist until iPad.
Listen, in 2007 I was a hardcore Linux user. Slackware 2, 3 -> Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 -> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I walked around with a Treo. I was one of the few tablet users with a Toshiba Portege m200, an upgrade from the separate Thinkpad T-series and Vadem Clio tablet team I'd used previous to that.
In 2009 I finally grudgingly tried an iPhone and a day later had one of my own. By 2010 I was all Apple with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook Pro. It's not because I'm an apple fanboy. I *was* a Linux fanboy and an irrational Apple critic, and I realize that only in retrospect.
Maybe you don't like Apple products, but to question whether or not they created the market for capacitive touch low-button smartphones or capacitive touch tablets that run a mobile OS? That makes you sound like an irrational Apple critic of the same sort that I was.
Apple makes fabulous stuff. They are *not* the Apple of 1997, but most Slashdot Apple critics don't realize that because they're steadfastly trying to convince themselves either that (1) Apple is incompetent at everything but marketing (despite a decade and a half of growth) or (2) Apple is the second coming of Microsoft (who was never, ever as creative or innovative on their very best day).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I largely agree with what Woz said but..... Since Steve Jobs died they can't seem to figure out what to name the next generation iPad. I never bought an iPhone or iPad before but I did buy the latest one and I find myself having to describe which one it is instead of using an actual name. The other thing is I switched a while back to Apple because I got sick of Microsoft updating every time I turned around and I had in the past better luck with Apple. I was shocked at the Lion upgrade which made a mess of my machine. A recent update added to the mess. The worst was iTunes which some one thought it'd be cool to get rid of "Hide iTunes" and make it really slow to unhide the bottom menu bar, which is now the only way short of turning it off to get rid of iTunes, and sometimes that doesn't work so I end up having to turn off iTunes just to get out of it. I guess they want to trap you in some vain hope you'll buy more. Instead I rarely turn it on now and use my Touch for music. Across the board I've noticed Apple software released in the last year seems buggier than in the past. It feels like they are rushing stuff to market rather than doing a proper debugging. One example is Author which has lots of issues like after my first few attempts it no longer accepts Keynote files and even a reinstall couldn't sort out the mess. Also sound clips refuse to loop. There are a few other issues I just wish it was more stable. Hard to layout a book when you don't know what content it'll accept. Also they released it without iPhone or Touch support. They also dropped support for Mpeg and only support that bastard M4p format that Apple came up with. What's a pain is only Compressor 4 and I take it the latest Final Cut Pro support that format in 2K and Compressor sucks and Final Cut Pro is now iMovie Pro so I avoid it like the plague. My point is it feels like chaos is setting in. I hope I'm wrong but if not the company could be a mess in another year. Steve Jobs was the ring master and the lions don't seem to know what to do now that he's gone. They might start eating the audience if some one doesn't take control.
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,”
And I would do the same.
I'm not stupid to bash and kill my own cash cow.
Anyway, I always liestened to what this guy said all these years.
He is a good engineer, but not just it: he likes and encourages good technology no matters from who.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Seriously, what a fucking blind spot, Woz. If anything, Apple is the most vicious patent suer of all. I really hope B&N fucks Apple's patent portfolio for good.
I am particularly irritated by Woz's assertion, because it just plays into the zombie-Jobs reality distortion field.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I always thought patents were about products and not idea. There are too many "gee i think I can make something that does something interesting" and write a vague design. It has never been built and never researched. Cas in point the touch sensitive floor. IBM has not built one but they got the patent anyway. The problem is that no one else can develop it because someone already has the patent even if they never develop it themselves. Ideas are a dime a dozen and should not be patentable.
Just asking a question, not making a statement.
Apple was on the other side. Now they're the big boys. 40 years ago they blueboxed. Now the garage is jailbreaking.
The revolutionary *always* ends up becoming the new boss, same as the old boss. It's like when a country goes communist and ends up having a royal bloodline (Castro, Kim). Of course they're not going to start out at the inception and say, "I want to be king". No. It starts with a revoluion. It ends with a king a few decades later. Legions of boiled frogs love the dear leader. Duh!
That's the problem of most if not all very successful companies. I believe that's because of two things: when hugely successful you start to attract a new kind of people; people to whom power and imperial dreams are their main driving forces. Remember "world domination"? And successful, dominant companies naturally gets more interested in defending their position rather than to continue to act like a entrepreneurial company.
They are too big to fa^H^Hbreak up.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yeah, iPods, iTunes, iPhone and iPad are so new... because nobody ever heard of a walkman, online music store, mobile phone or tablet before. Nor is Apple all that succesfull, yes, they sell a LOT of a single model but in total sales, many others surpass them. (Android activations outstrip in a matter of days, total iPhone sales. iTunes sells a lot of online music but only if you don't count traditional retailers)
The parent poster claims he can't remember seeing rows of tablets before. Well, then he must not have been looking. Archos has been in the market for a long time. Of course, you could further specify that a tablet only counts if it is 8.9 inches and a certain thickness and color but most reasonable people know that tech gadgets evolve. Tablets were once laptops, then thin laptops, then those hybrid laptops whose keyboard could be hidden with a touch screen. In fact, weren't THOSE devices once called tablets?
What Apple is really good at is taking existing tech, investing a LOT in large scale production and thus beat everyone else on price. 64GB iPad when most competitors just can't afford to buy memory that cheap to compete.
But new and revolutionary? Maybe if you have blinders on and only see mainstream products but for the early adapters, the i* brandline is and always has been old hat. For example, retina display? The next thing might well be glasses type displays, holding a tablet is so last month.
And for all that mainstream innovation we get one of the most evil patent company out there. Mind you, I have long had the impression Woz is a willing slave. Jobs screwed him over so many times and still he comes back begging for more. He knows a thing or two about computers but socially, he is a tool. Crying patents will destroy innovation while defending a company that only copies and sues everyone under the sun seems to me to suggest a person with a limited grasp of the world. Gosh, a geek with problems understanding the world. How unusual.
Stop trying to excuse your need for a shiny toy with trying to think Apple is cool or nice or different. It is not. Buy your shiny and accept your dollars support slavery and patent wars and the removal of jobs from the west. Just don't be a hypocrite about it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We could patent everything and have it stolen by someone named steve/china.
WOZ country: *accepting applications* - no one named steve need apply
He's like the Porsche of Volkswagen. "You surly nazis have your car of immense engineering that'll hold the same basic design over the next 70 years & have at least 2 more generations of car based on it afterwards? Porsche out!"
Woz's always the geek, while Jobs the guy with street smarts
The geeks innovate
The lawyers? Rent seeking
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It don't think this patent debacle stifles innovation or startups, I think it does so in the US because of a broken patent system and borked legal system. Incubate your startup company somewhere where it can either fail, or grow large enough to stand up to the patent trolls before they ever find themselves in that situation.
If I started a company in the US, an attorney or patent advisor would be person #3 involved. In europe I'd be confident to run a much larger innvoation-heavy a startup with without legal advise. I'm not shitting you: you can run a company for years with dozens of employees and not even have a business card from a lawyer in your office.
Precisely.
Woz's biography (I don't remember which one it was, but it focused more on the early days leading up to the Apple II and Lisa and had Captain Crunch/Draper and Jobs' drug use and partying featured fairly prominently), as well as The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) and The Happy Hacker, were pivotal to my formative years as a technologist.
His statements here don't really make sense, within the context of the autobiography. It was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I read it right around when OSX was making its emergence (it's not on Amazon, afaik), so it didn't have the color of the iRevolution (gag) to falsely tinge things sepia.
Frankly, I can't help but think that the statements in the biography I read were right: something crucial in Woz's brain burnt themselves out when he made the Apple II. He obviously is not paying attention to the changing
Apple hasn't done anything "first" or creative since they first released the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time, and it was precisely in the direction that people wanted to go. However, it wasn't as capable as many devices on the market at the time in both computing capabilities and audio capabilities (and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better).
Apple software in particular is lacking innovation (since at least 2007). We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement) and is removing functionality in leaps and bounds (using a butchered and buggy Microsoft stack for SMB/CIFS and butchering the cups project? seriously, is that what passes for innovation?). This butchery will only be surpassed by Windows 8 in recent memory. iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities (eg. map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin; killing downloads if you switch to something else). iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hardware in the workstations is, admittedly, nice: but aside from the incrementalism of the 1990s which ultimately failed them until they switched to x86, how are they distinguishing themselves today in this department? Bigger, brighter, and more expensive displays with "Thunderbolt" technology - a technology which Apple (and Intel, for whatever reason) have let completely languished for the year and a half that it's been out, turning what has absolutely awesome potential into a completely proprietary display interface which offers nothing but cost over HDMI (or for that matter, DVI, really). The lackluster nature of iOS has done the same with the iPhone and iPad: no true multiprocessing? No contextual use with peripheral emphasis? No WiDi or similar?
("But Caimlas, you asshole", I'm sure someone will say. "We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.)
Sorry. Woz has lost the plot and is not paying attention. Apple has done some absolutely fantastic things since 2000. They've made great progress, pushing other companies to innovate and copy, and have shown even greater potential. And then, the innovation stopped: they started to be litigious bastards at almost precisely the same time.
I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005, when they were kicking ass and taking names. We'd see a lot of cool things happening. But since roughly the time of iTunes, there hasn't been much other than market daring with the iPad to come out of their company I'd consider even remotely 'innovative'. The more I have to deal with Apple products in a support role, the more I feel like they're not even giving their hardware software enough development attention to keep them running stable, with some serious engineering problems that make Windows-self-clobbering-via-antivirus seem benign.
Very disappointing statements from the Woz.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
They weren't close to pocketable, they bad horrible battery life (about 3.5 hours, IIRC) and awful UI. And no, the sound quality wasn't lesser on the iPod either.
Yeah, you did get half the storage capacity. But at either 5G (iPod) or 10G (you were going to have to pick your songs anyway. And if you wanted to fill that 10G Nomad it was going to take you a long time since they only had USB 1.1. Even if your songs were only 128kbit, it still several seconds to transfer each one. You're talking about over an hour to fill 5G, more than 2 hours 15 mins to fill 10G.
Just because you're anti-Apple doesn't mean the iPod didn't have a lot of merit to it.
So go for one of the actual trillionaires of the world, get a Rothschild to run Apple.
is full of it
"Having designed a system to translate letters into dots that could be put on a screen, he discovered a company called RCA already had a patent on it." That says it all. Doubtless Woz's method was more elegant and completely original and yet the patent applies in the most general terms to any solution to a problem. They are essentially patenting the problem. By the 19th century patents had evolved to protect innovators as they brought products to market and give them a competitive advantage to reward the time spent on research and development. The whole concept of a "patent chest" of unused and unimplemented general outlines for solving a problem is a travesty. America seems particularly focused on patents (probably due to the influence of Edison in popular culture) and this is eventually going to drive innovation to countries where it's not so easy to get sued.
This is nature's way. America is in decline, so rather than sit around and get in the way, it destroys itself. it is like the sick animal who goes into the corner to die, rather than continuing to compete for resources.
Yes, I know that these patent wars can damage in the short term, but look at it on an evolutionary timeframe.
Why is it anytime something with Apple comes up people are so quick to get into a *#*ssing match over who did what. To simply belittle and discredit the company because every aspect of their product was not 100% unique and of their own design smacks of arrogance and jealousy, perhaps because in retrospect people think "if only I had done that". The long thread on multi-touch, and the others are just more examples of this time and time again when ever apple is mentioned.
To say that apple is not innovative is simply wrong. It's equal to saying that a great author can't exist because the word "the" had been used before they didn't create it. They used the same alphabet that's been used for years! they just have a good pulisher / marketing firm!. A great composer can't happen because all the notes have been used; yes apple took things that existed and put them together in a way that gained acceptance by the masses.
Masses is a critical part of their success, the 5% of geeks need to climb off their high horse and understand that Apples success is not grown from "If your to stupid to figure it out you shouldn't have our product" but that their success is driven from "Lets make this simple for you!" it's the same approach that put AOL ontop of the ISP wars who's only downfall came from connectivity limitations causing a cascade affect.
On the subject of patents I've got nothing, the system is horrible and does quash innovation out the gate. I see patent disputes so many times a year they make my head spin. I can't stand to be forced into a patent review that reads one "line" in a patent and says "see you have phone service over a coax medium!" and insists you owe them $$. Last year I had to deal with one that was based on receiving a fax and converting it to digital medium for delivery through an ip transport system using from: to: fields for delivery between individuals. That's right! some lawfirm had an obscure patent that had a small bit about fax -> email and and felt that it applied. Your options spend $$$ to invalidate the claim or spend $$ to just make them go away.
Declaring "Sue you for round corners" on the good side?
iPhone? a jump? the only thing it did "first" was capacitive touchscreen.
same goes for a lot of other tech and "markets". they didn't create application selling.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I disagree. Apple is following the formula of Microsoft, which is to abide by no morals and have no shame.
"but Wozniak believes Appleâ(TM)s record for continued innovation means it is less guilty than any of the other large tech firms.
âoeApple is the good guy on the block of all of them,â he says. âoeIt is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies â" [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didnâ(TM)t exist.â
I'll take Woz's word over that of someone who hears "Don't be evil", sees "Don't be evil" and fucking ignores being evil
Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary. They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing. However a tablet is purely a consumer device. What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Here I do hear you, they are letting OS X go fallow. Mountain Lion is already a huge disappointment, as was Lion before it. Its cloud support is lackluster, the server parts are even more dreadful than before. OS X cannot really be recommended for developers on the desktop anymore. Think that the only halfway decent software RAID solution for OSX is the one coming from the abandoned port of ZFS all these years ago and picked up by enthusiasts. GCC is stuck at 4.2 and LLVM is not really progressing compared to the GCC behemoth. As far as I can tell, we are not sure Apple is going to ever upgrade the Mac Pro again. The list goes on.
"'Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,'
What nonesense. Apple in the 1980s was the most litigious company out there. They'd sue anyone over anything. Doing just the same now. Really aggressive litigious company.
Disappointing to read the above from Woz. Shows a real lack of insight into how Apple works.
Back in 2005, Apple was still "struggling" with the PowerPC platform. When did SMB/CIFS in OS X become a "butchered and buggy Microsoft stack"? It was based on the open source Samba stack until 10.6 and starting with 10.7, an Apple built system. Samba along with gcc were banished/limited from OS X due to GPLv3 more so then Apple's decisions.
As for iTunes... its a bloated mess nowadays. Its basically Apple's Outlook, a far cry from what Jobs called "The best damn Windows App Ever" in 2003. Its one of the many apps that requires a ground up re-work at this point.
Not all innovation is technical in nature. New ways to bring technology to people are also a domain for innovation.
If you want to build a better mousetrap, you don't focus solely on the mechanism that springs the trap - you also need to consider how to best get the mice to come to the trap.
The kind of innovation as Apple has been doing of late is making technology accessible and fashionable. Merging technology with fashion and making it very easy for non-technical people to use is something that nobody else in the Tech industry is doing well and why Apple is so successfull at the moment.
In that sense your post displays the same kind of limited horizons mindset that underpins the current stagnation of traditional tech companies like Microsoft - that of worrying far more about the mechanics of the device rather than how it's used.
As someone with a highly technical background (cut my teeth on the old Slackware Linux on floppies, can design embedded circuits and then code for them) I myself often have the particular kind of engineering blindness we can have when it comes to technology. However, mingling with people from far, far different backgrounds has made me realize that it is a form of short-sightness.
Oh, like the portable music player market? Or the mobile phone market? Yep, totally new! No such thing before Apple came along, no sirree!
Clever signature text goes here.
Finger-friendly app development.
Before iPhone there was Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, and a couple others I can't remember - all of them required the use of a stylus to properly operate. Sure, you could have used them with your finger (like my old Treo), but it was an exercise in frustration.
The iPhone ushered in an era where all OS and app functionality was built with the expectation that the user would be using his/her fingers - not a stylus. It may seem obvious now, but it wasn't always that way before the iPhone.
-ted
Lion was lackluster, but did add some nice stuff.
ML is barely an OS upgrade. It's just a chance for the OSX app team to write some stuff which works with Lion's new features (some of which are interesting), port some iOS stuff, and charge $30 for a bunch of todo / notification apps.
I'd expect the next upgrade to add some new stuff (like Lion and Leopard did), while ML is just consolidation / apps. It's kind of like Intel's "Tick Tock", without any real benefit from the "Tock".
You see, the point is that command lines are actually useful for many things.
There are other things for which they aren't useful...watching videos for example.
Interestingly, most of the things you can't do with a command line are also unproductive and distracting (unless your job is video editing, etc).
I use command lines for working and GUIs for relaxation, and don't really get the whole polarisation argument.
The parent post is not informative. It displays ridiculous ignorance. "Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time...and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better." ???
What "horrendous battery life"? Just make that one up?
"I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005" Um, it's 2012 right now, right? How long is an "innovative" new product cycle?
"iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities..." That just made me laugh. I get it, the parent post was a Stephen Colbert monolog.
Lion was anything but lack lustre, it added many fantastic updates and fixes.
Mountain Lion is not a geek's update, it makes everything iCloud smoother and more transparent. In that regard it is well worth the $30 they'll be charging for it.
Better integration is quite possibly the *most* important thing apple does, it's why they are so successful. So calling the integration updates useless (or at least without benefit) is rather foolish.
Apple knows that, specifically they know that due to the limited abilities of windows they'll never make iTunes great on windows.
That's why they've gone PC-free, you no longer need iTunes for your iDevices, and as a result iTunes for windows can sit and rot in indifference.
Hell even Microsoft manages to make far better software for mac than they do windows, so it's no great shock that iTunes on windows sucks.
Why should they? They are moving towards a computing model based on apps and consumer grade electronics, not unlike Sony if you think about it. Yes it's different, and it breaks a lot of things we are used to, but that's what Apple is all about. Think different.
Back in 2005, Apple was still "struggling" with the PowerPC platform. When did SMB/CIFS in OS X become a "butchered and buggy Microsoft stack"? It was based on the open source Samba stack until 10.6 and starting with 10.7, an Apple built system. Samba along with gcc were banished/limited from OS X due to GPLv3 more so then Apple's decisions.
As for iTunes... its a bloated mess nowadays. Its basically Apple's Outlook, a far cry from what Jobs called "The best damn Windows App Ever" in 2003. Its one of the many apps that requires a ground up re-work at this point.
It wasn't a bloated mess when Apple bought it in that is innovation baby.
You're welcome to your opinion, but your post is riddled with factual errors. As it was such a long post I'll just list the errors you made.
We have osX which is... removing functionality in leaps and bounds... butchering the cups project?
That is not reducing functionality for OSX. They only removed old obsolete stuff which is no longer in use by OSX. Michael Sweet who wrote CUPS in the first place works for Apple and was responsible for the change, so it certainly wasn't butchering.
map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin
Apple doesn't have any map navigation built in. they have a map, with a facility to mark your current location. That's not navigation. Like most app categories Apple have left navigation for third party apps. And as a result there is a good choice of excellent navigation apps available. With either streaming or offline maps. From free to premium. Including, since you mention it, up to date Garmin navigation.
Just because Android have have implemented a poor streaming navigation app into the default build, doesn't mean that's what Apple should do.
killing downloads if you switch to something else
iOS does not kill downloads if you switch to something else. Continuing downloads in the background is supported by iOS multitasking APIs.
iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hell indeed, this is more nonsense. When I bought an iPad, pre iCloud days, when I did my first iTunes sync, it loaded all my iPhone apps onto my iPad. You can also do it with iCloud.
?"We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.
Again, not true. The retina displays were introduced with the iPhone 4. Compared with the previous 3GS model, for every measure of battery life, the iPhone 4 was either the same or greater battery life.
The retina displays were introduced with the iPhone 4. Compared with the previous 3GS model, for every measure of battery life, the iPhone 4 was either the same or greater battery life.
Mostly because you couldn't make any calls with the 4
We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement)...
You moan about MacOS X being "lacklustre at context switches", while I enjoy the ease with which Grand Central Dispatch and blocks allow me to create multithreaded applications.
While the Macbook Pro and Mac OS X are fairly open and interoperable still (way ahead of the opacity of Windows, and much more able to operate/exchange with a wide variety of other systems without costly/proprietary software from Microsoft or other vendors), I very much wish that the iPhone and the iPad were a little more open.
ON the other hand, having tried both Android phones and Android tablets in the years since 2009, I stick with iDevices despite the relative closedness of the platform because the user experience is so much better. I am more productive on iDevices and I am much more willing to trust my data to them because they seem much more stable/predictable.
And yes, at this point in my life, I am a user, not a developer. I count on being able to use them, and I don't care in any practical way whether I have the access to "fix" or "improve" it myself, because the chances of my actually taking the time to do that are absolutely nil. The openness question is a nice ideological debate point and I'm not entirely on Apple's side there, but I have everyday concerns that are practical and are far more important to me than openness/closedness.
There may be a point at which openness/closedness becomes an issue that drives me to make other choices, become an activist, whatever. But we're definitely not there yet. I'm still at the point where I'm willing to buy. I've spent far more on Apple hardware and software in three years than I did in a decade of Linux and previous mobile phone use. Yes, seen from one point of view that's because Apple stuff is more expensive, but seen from my perspective it's because the results that I get using this platform in terms of productivity and reliability absolutely justify the cost.
I can't say that I ever made a Linux hardware or software purchase with which I was totally satisfied. There was always an issue, or multiple issues. In fact, I still have a CD case that has Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, Corel Draw for Linux, Applix Office for Linux, Win4Lin, VMWare, Crossover Office, and a bunch of Loki games in it, apart from a few things I'm no doubt forgetting—I know there are some more commercial productivity packages that I bought over the years in good faith. None of them work on Linux today. Most of them stopped starting at all on Linux within just a couple releases, and most never even worked properly at all even when they were new. The Corel offerings, for example, shipped with a bug that killed your document after 30 minutes or so because a counter somewhere used for autosaves hadn't been coded correctly, causing autosaves of office documents to eventually go off the beam and silently destroy your work—and to add insult to injury, they never fixed the bug, and the entire suite wouldn't even start on Linux by 2002, a year and a half after purchase, with no updates released to address this, meaning I paid $300 for an office product that I never once got a chance to productively use. Yes there were open alternatives like OpenOffice.org, but they continually had problems with basic stuff like font rendering, and then you were downloading source, setting options, creating build environments and running 2-3 day builds just to try to get something to print right again after the latest update. And I was no n00b—I wrote six books on Linux in the '90s and early '00s and before I switched to Linux in '93 I had been a longtime SunOS user, since the early Sun3 boxen.
Point of anecdote: openness only gets you so far, and I supported that market heavily, with very limited rewards. That's what eventually made it so tantalizing for me to consider switching to Mac. When someone decides they need to be productive and then they experience an option in which they can just "set it and forget it" (which is what the Apple products have been for me), you'd better have something more than *just* openness on offer.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The difference is that Apple actually makes good products that people want. Microsoft always always ALWAYS made crap and was successful only because of sleazy business dealings.
the iPhone was not the first smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen.
Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary.
You're right: it's because shills who aren't paying attention tend to explode with absolute assertions without actually paying attention to those around them.
They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing.
Everybody, except for everyone. You realize that iOS has had no improvements for many of their lackluster features in years, right? It's like a Time Capsule of software. Meanwhile, Android has surpassed iPhone in market share: when people's iPhones 'finally' die after 2 years of moderate use, they get an Android phone.
However a tablet is purely a consumer device.
Is it? I've got many Android applications would disagree. A TF101 (Asus Transformer) with Google Docs, Quickoffice, or Documents To Go seem to disagree, as do the terminals etc. available on the platform.
What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Leaving in droves, I gather. When the hardware and OS don't support what you need to do to make a full-featured application and there's a likelihood that you won't be able to get distribution based on fickle rules, and then be unable to actually sell the app outside that distributor due to the distributor owning the device, there are legitimate reasons to look.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Troll.
Apple (both OSX and iOS) use amongst developers is growing not shrinking.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple and other tech companies' patent hoarding IS PREVENTING entrepreneurs doing the same thing that he and Steve Jobs did in starting a computer company in a garage.
What a cool nickname. Seems like a short version of "The Wizard of Oz".
The LG Prada was the first phone with a capacitive touchscreen.