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Avoiding BlackBerry's Fate: How Apple Could End Up In a Similar Position (marco.org)
It's almost unbelievable today that BlackBerry ruled the smartphone market once. The Canadian company's handset, however, started to lose relevance when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. At the time, BlackBerry said that nobody would purchase an iPhone, as there's a battery trade-off. Wittingly or not, Apple could end up in a similar position to BlackBerry, argues Marco Arment. Arment -- who is best known for his Apple commentary, Overcast and Instapaper apps, and co-founding Tumblr -- says that Apple's strong stand on privacy is keeping it from being the frontrunner in the advanced AI, a category which has seen large investments from Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon in the recent years. He adds that privacy cannot be an excuse, as Apple could utilize public data like the web, mapping databases, and business directories. He writes: Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for. If they're right -- and that's a big "if" -- I'm worried for Apple. Today, Apple's being led properly day-to-day and doing very well overall. But if the landscape shifts to prioritise those big-data AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: what they're able to do, despite being very good at it, won't be enough anymore, and they won't be able to catch up. Where Apple suffers is big-data services and AI, such as search, relevance, classification, and complex natural-language queries. Apple can do rudimentary versions of all of those, but their competitors -- again, especially Google -- are far ahead of them, and the gap is only widening. And Apple is showing worryingly few signs of meaningful improvement or investment in these areas. Apple's apparent inaction shows that they're content with their services' quality, management, performance, advancement, and talent acquisition and retention. One company that is missing from Mr. Arment's column is Microsoft. The Cortana-maker has also placed large bets on AI. According to job postings on its portal, it appears, for instance, that Microsoft is also working on Google Home-like service.
You think so?
I should point out of course, that Siri is NOT an Apple invention. They bought it. I agree though, it does work reasonably well.
I personally find the "OK Google" more useful as it more fits the way that I use my phone day to day. Especially when in the car.
My head unit supports Carplay and Android Auto. Honestly, Apple's current state of Carplay is why I switched back to Android. After doing so is when I discovered that "OK Goggle" is pretty damn good in the car.
Then again, machine learning is a core competence of Google. It would be silly to think that Apple would be able to roll out a product of similar polish.
Android is so fragented it is frustrating for everyone. Carriers and Manufactureres are allowed to screw it up and Google does not care.
Pure android is awesome, the Crap that HTC and Samsung does to it makes it suck, then the carriers add on their crap to make it suck more.
Google needs to say, "NO" you ship a clean android and your add on crap is in the application world that CAN BE UNINSTALLED by the end user. They also need to demand that at least all updates to the OS be pushed to phones within 30 days of release, none of this bullshit like AT&T pulls with security updates showing 6-12 months later.
Please google Force these companies to stop making android a steaming turd.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I am actually surprised how far behind so many curves Apple is and yet people still love it. Take wireless charging, from the last I read, Apple is looking at it for the iPhone 7. I mean, seriously? My Galaxy S4 wirelessly charges. Not to mention the iOS is clunky and not really very nice. I'll give 1 example, I have an iPhone 5s and you can't arrange any given desktop how you want it. Every app icon has to listed from the top and packed up tight from top to bottom. I don't want it that way, I'd like to put the app icons on the screen where I want them (as you can and always have been able to on the Andriod, at least as far back as I started using Android for years). These sorts of slow uptakes in the marketplace might seem trivial and insignificant, but it's also these slow to market changes that killed BlackBerry (i.e. touch screens, virtual keyboards, etc). By the time RIM woke-up, it was too late and they were pushed aside. Just my 2 cents....
Lots of PC laptops hit or beat the size/wight of the Macbooks. The screen is a bit dodgy since the Macbook Pros (I assume you mean the Pros, since the Airs have crappy low-res TN panels) are specialized for photo/video/graphics work, which is a pretty limited market. There are a few dozen PC laptops which will hit 100% sRGB like the MBPs, or close to it. Up from about 4-5 just 7 years ago. And a few which surpass it by targeting AdobeRGB. A couple of them even claim to calibrate the screen like the MBPs do. If this is what you need, you know what to look for. If you don't need all that color gamut, then you're spending a lot of money just to get slightly more saturated colors which (unless you get an AdobeRGB screen) don't even match the color gamut we used to get on CRTs. Also, pretty much every external monitor can hit 100% sRGB, so it really boils down to a question of if you really need that color gamut on your laptop screen for it to be worth paying the price premium for it.
The higher resolution screens aren't as necessary PC laptops because Windows uses subpixel rendering (MS calls it ClearType) to effectively triple the horizontal resolution of the screen. Many decades ago, Apple made the choice not to go down that route. Subpixel rendering aliases fonts to align with the subpixel grid - it shifts the letters slightly left or right to line them up with the subpixels. Since one of Apple's core demographics was page layout graphics artists, Apple decided to eschew subpixel rendering in order to prioritize accuracy. A Mac will display a page render with the fonts positioned more accurately, even if it is blurrier (their rendering engine, a great great grandson of Postscript, will anti-alias the font's pixels for any exact location on the screen). If you've still got one of those old 1024x768 LCDs around, try connecting it to a Windows PC, then to a Mac. The fonts on the Mac will look like blurry crap compared to the PC. Consequently, the only way for the Macbooks to improve the appearance of fonts was by cranking up screen resolution, while higher resolution is less important for Windows PCs.
As for the Macbook chassis, nobody else designs theirs that way because it's a stupid design. There are no vent holes on the bottom. Airflow comes in through a few vent holes along the sides, runs across the mainboard, and is vented out by the fan. This means the air gets heated up by other components before it reaches the hottest components, reducing heat transfer rate. On PC laptops, there are vent holes placed underneath the hottest parts, so fresh cool air contacts those parts first maximizing heat transfer to the air (heat transfer rate is proportional to temperature differential). Also, if you spill liquid into the laptop, it'll drain out of most PC laptops through those vent holes (although not all are designed to channel water away from vital components). The bottom half of a Macbook OTOH makes a nice bathtub unless it's tilted so water can drain out those side vents. The Macbook chassis is the epitome of prioritizing form over function. If you've ever wondered why Apple won't put a decent GPU into their 15" MBP, this is why - they can't because it would overheat.
I know a lot of you think the iPhone's introduction was like the second coming of Christ, but RIM/Blackberry increased in market share from 2007 to 2009 immediately after the iPhone was released. RIM's decline actually correlates closer with Android's rise in popularity.
The big losers in the early smartphone days were Nokia (Symbian was dated and badly needed an overhaul, which never happened) and Microsoft (who started off with a good lead from Windows Mobile on PDAs, but squandered it).
As for privacy, Apple has shown they're more than happy to violate their users' privacy when it's in their self-interest. When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations, so they couldn't locate you if you had the GPS turned off. The first year they paid for a wifi database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record the SSID and location of every hotspot on Earth like Google did? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who scoured the Earth recording the locations of every SSID, and used a chunk of their data plan to transmit this data back to themselves.