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Apple Leaves Journalists Jonesing
Hodejo1 writes "Apple traditionally has big product announcements in the early spring, so around February both the mainstream press and the tech blogs began to circulate their favorite rumors (the iWatch, iTV). They also announced the date of the next Apple event, which this year was in March — except it didn't happen. 'Reliable sources' then confirmed it would be in April, then May and then — nothing. In withdrawal and with a notoriously secretive Apple offering no relief the tech journalists started to get cranky. The end result is a rash of petulant stories that insist Apple is desperate for new products, in trouble (with $150 billion dollars in the bank, I should be in such trouble) and in decline. The only ones desperate seem to be editors addicted to traffic-generating Apple announcements. Good news is on the horizon, though, as the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference starts June 10th."
This was in evidence last night, as Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke to the press at the All Things D conference. Cook's statements were mostly the sort of vague, grandiose talk that gets fed to investors on an earnings call, but it's generating article after article because, hey, it's Tim Cook.
Apple doesn't seem to have any new products on the horizon this year and the last lot were already a generation behind their competitors in many areas. For example Samsung just released the GS4, but Apple hasn't even been able to hint at a 5S. Hipsters getting new phones don't want last year's model. Apple is all about features.
They also have a problem with patents, as in they don't have any good ones. There are some design patents that everyone else is either invalidating or working around, but nothing like the tech patents that their competitors have. In the past Apple has just ignored them and tried to tie everyone up in litigation to avoid paying, but things are coming to a head now. It was never a sustainable strategy.
Having money in the bank isn't that helpful if you lose market share. At best you can throw it into advertising, but ultimately you need new products and it appears that Apple's R&D is coming up short right now. Even the last gen products were pretty much more of the same, lacking features that they could have implemented like NFC but appeared to forgo to shave an extra 0.5mm off the thickness.
Then there is iOS. They painted themselves into a corner on that. They can't easily introduce real multitasking, can't break away from iTunes or support standard protocols like MTP. They are stuck with a bunch of odd resolutions and encouraged developers to target them all directly, resulting in debacles like the black bars when they went widescreen. On top of all that they are having to poor time and money into Apple Maps just to bring it back up to where Google Maps was before they ditched it, and in the mean time Google is steaming ahead.
Obviously Apple won't go bankrupt any time soon but it seems clear that they do have some serious issues at the moment.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm a Mac fan, and I think the iPhone is all right. I'm not an Apple hater.
That said, I completely agree. We are now reporting about non-news as news?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's sort of like having a small child or a puppy. It's when everything is quiet that you start to wonder what they're up to.
I have to disagree with you here. I think Apple created their own timing. The only thing they waited on was broadband internet access. When it was introduced, the iPod blew people away;
There were plenty of MP3 players around before the ipod (and good ones too!). What Apple seems to have is the ability to create a religious following for their products. I don't think this is necessarilly down to the product itself - the original ipod really was nothing special compared to the competition - the user interface wasn't significantly better, the size wasn't significantly different, the battery life wasn't signficantly different, yet somehow they managed to become the "defacto" MP3 player.
The iPhone is another good example - when people go on about how the iphone took the market because it was so much better than everything else, I think they forget what the _original_ iphone was like - it was marketted as a smartphone, but it lacked most of the features that other smartphones had - there was no tethering, no 3G(*), no apps. About the only thing that beat the competition was the web browser they integrated into it.
(* I know the US-centric crowd say that no 3G was never a big deal because there were no 3G networks anywhere in the world at that time, but this is patently untrue - across europe 3G was commonplace and the introduction of a fantastic new smartphone that didn't have 3G struck a lot of us as a complete WTF).
the iPad did something that Microsoft failed to do for over 10 years: get a tablet to be accepted and used by the general public.
There are 3 factors here I think, in addition to the aforementioned way that Apple seems to be able to sell anything, irrespective of how it compares to the competition:
1. Technology. 10 years before the ipad, it wasn't possible to make a device that small and light. It simply wasn't. So the MS tablets were always big and heavy - that wasn't MS's fault, the technology simply wasn't there and Apple would've had the same problems at that time.
2. User interface. MS has always tried to shoe-horn their existing software into new markets instead of developing whole new systems where necessarilly. MS's tablets always had their desktop UI shoehorned onto them, whereas Apple realised that wasn't going to work and built a new UI. We can see the continuation of MS's problems with the way they've now produced a UI for tablets and tried to shoehorn it inappropriately onto the desktop. If MS had started off on the tablet market and moved into the desktop market they would've probably never managed to make the desktop take off because they seem to be unable to see that their existing software isn't always suitable for all situations. This has nothing to to with timing and everything to do with MS just being generally terrible at this stuff.
3. Smartphones. At the point that Apple launched their tablet, people had had several years to get used to browsing the web on their phones with decent browsers using mobile apps, etc., so a move towards a tablet for content consumption was reasonable. Without that experience I think people would be a lot less inclined to ditch the keyboard and compatibility with their normal desktop software.
That all being said, whilst Apple was about the first to market with something the size and performance of an ipad, the other manufacturers certainly weren't far behind - if apple hadn't launched the ipad I'm pretty sure someone else would've done the equivalent at around that time.
Google wouldn't have even considered creating Android. MS and Google were happy with the status quo in terms of computing devices. Apple really introduced the computing appliance.
Android was in development for a long time before Apple released the iPhone, as were various other similar projects (for example, OpenMoko; which was never taken seriously by the industry, but basically got quite a long way towards producing somethi
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