You have a basic hardware spec (number of buttons etc) laid out by the OHSA, you have processors of varying speeds and some have keyboards and better GPUs. The market can already limit what you see based on these requirements.
Your solution is to sell to less people ? Pissing off potential customers who bought into the Android hype but didn't spend enough money on their handset, brilliant bit of marketing there.
Hell, if your app's good enough, it'll drive the spec of the handset. It's just like what they have to do in the world of PC app development, made easier due to the rapid churn of handset specs as they get steadily faster and cheaper.
Aaand we're back in PC land : "don't worry people will just buy the hardware to accommodate us, the developer." I thought that attitude died along with PC gaming and Windows Vista.
XNU and the mach kernel on which it is based is considerably younger than BSD. OSX is an os at least as modern as it's competitors. It's a solid foundation for a quite a few more years.
I was talking about tablets and smartphones actually, portable devices, not portable computers (a grey area I know.) Apple sells laptops that officially support both OSX and Windows too. The previous generation of tablets, the kind that were little more than a laptop sans keyboard, might even have been able to boot another OS quite easily but the new purpose built mobile devices have all kinds of locks on the system firmware. Like the iPad does, like Android phones do.
I just hope he uses TrueCrypt and suddenly "remembers" his password. How will they know it was the password they were looking for when they only see images of puppies?
Naked puppies ? The sick bastard. Clearly a pedophile beastialist.
Note that statement doesn't actually accuse him of being a pedophile just sort of suggest it. No indication of how or why they came to arrest him or how strong the evidence is against him, just enough to plant the idea that this person isn't worth the effort to protect or think about too much. Nice.
Apple "allows" the iPad to run other OS's just as much as android device makers "allow" it on their devices. Meaning you can do it if you hack it on and people will laugh in your face if you bitch about bricking it and losing your warranty. No mainstream company actively encourages or makes it easy to install anything other than what the portable device came with. To single out Apple for scorn just shows an irrational pettiness.
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of software patents we should be making the punitive damages much, much larger. Take it into M.A.D. territory to force a "cold" patent war.
It's a fair point, there's a lot of divx files out there but there's other options available for people who need support for legacy formats (which DivX has become IMHO.) If Apple were to take DivX on board they would be stuck with it for who knows how long and across their different devices too (iPhone, iPad,...) I can see why they rather standardize on a single format with support for it integrated into the hardware. In fact this decision was made some time ago when these devices were first introduced with h.264 support only, just like when Apple created the iMac without a floppy drive. Every new beginning gives a chance to leave some of the old clutter behind.
"The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge. That is, what is the justification for either: generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white," before the discovery of black swans) or presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the Principle of Uniformity of Nature."
Like the greeks said we're standing on a raft on the river looking backwards and this in a universe that's bound to be significantly influenced by complete randomness. After all it was created by random quantum fluctuations. How could you hope to capture in an equation a universe with random events based on so limited past observations as we can perform?
So your opinion is that you must jailbreak it to make it useful, in fact you seem to want a different product entirely so quite why you would buy it is a mystery. There's a lot of people out there however who don't feel the need to jailbreak. You are entitled to your opinion but don't sell it as fact.
> The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there
Oh? Is that why AppleTV is still merely a hobby?
There is nothing inherently difficult in being able to play available content without a lot of fuzting or bullshit.
The idea that Apple can't do what VLC has no trouble doing is of course completely absurd.
In truth it's Apple's approach that is fundementally user hostile. It's a usability failure regardless of how many excuses you want to make up. You either have to simply do without or deal with a huge bother.
It's geeks that can manage dealing with futzing with mencoder, ffmpeg or handbrake. "Apple's people" are just left out in the cold.
AppleTV is a hobby because the product category it is in hasn't broken through to the mainstream yet, it is still in a niche.
Apple isn't VLC. Apple has to worry about patents, license fees and getting sued. Even VLC doesn't play everything but a free application doesn't have to worry as much as a major corporation about the possible black eye from spotty support for a given format.
You can manage however you like. Please afford people like me the same courtesy.
720p video seems like a limit to me considering the big "Full HD" 1080p push. I know that Boxee Box is going to use 1080p FullHD as a distinguishing factor between the two pre-boxed solutions.
Boxee Box: $199, AppleTV: $99.
I may be mistaken but I think not many people (aside from geeks who are building their own HTPCs anyway) have much 1080p HD content on their PC in a format ready to be streamed. Can you even buy 1080p content officially (without ripping BD's which is itself a grey area) ? Apple itself certainly doesn't sell 1080p content through iTunes which makes it an obvious design choice.
I said it's not fair to characterize the AppleTV as "limited", that doesn't mean there aren't design choices made in function of both cost and utility the the likely customer.
Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...
Costly ? Seriously, have you even looked at prices in the App Store ?
Also known as forcing new purchases, or taking a hit to quality from conversion.
That's bull. H.264 is the standard these days, except for pirate content or patent encumbered formats like MS' video formats. I can rip my DVD's into H264 quite handily without noticeable loss of quality.
I don't like how moving files in OSX via UI requires two finder views open. Or how you can't put folders on top by sorting. Or blah blah, a million things. They don't think these things through, they do them the way Steve wants.
All platforms have issues, it just happens that OSX is for me the best choice available. It's not perfect, just the best fit. You can strive for perfection but if you can't accept anything less than perfection you will lead a very unhappy life. And some of these things are subjective, like the man said: "You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time."
I recommend PathFinder for those Finder annoyances you mentioned BTW.
Take copy/paste. Apple allegedly omitted it because for some reason with all their resources they couldn't figure out a way to implement it. I own an iPad, and the implementation they came up with isn't anything special, to be sure. Try selecting a line of text near the top of the screen; the magnifying glass goes over the edge and you can't see what you're doing.
It's so easy to implement that the first version of Windows Phone 7 also ships without copy&paste. Apple was inventing a new kind of touch device here, using fingers and gestures instead of stylus and menu's, building the API from scratch. You should be glad they took the time to take it step by step instead of half-assing it. Incremental improvement.
And yes there are plenty of problems with ALL of Apple's products but that's beside the point, no product is perfect. The point is they're better than everything else out there for the stuff I do on a daily basis. If that's not the case for you just buy something else already.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC. I've said this before: Apple doesn't implement features unless it can make them easy to use and understand and nicely designed. They don't start with a feature list and then make crappy implementations of them so they can add a bullet point to the list. They also look forward not backward and simplify where possible (eg. mandating use of h.264 instead of divx and hundreds of other formats.) If you find this approach philosophically abhorrent then use something else please and accept there are those of us that like it that way.
I don't think that's the reason people hack them anyway, they hack them because they can and for bragging rights.
This is a little 'tin foil hat' but I've thought that companies could plant those rumors to then release such a device to get press as "beating Apple to the punch" as it were. Frankly I don't see Apple doing a form factor between the iPad and iPhone, what would be the point ? The iPad was already criticized for being an overgrown iPod Touch, the in-between tablet really would be.
Other than the 7" screen, this thing not only meets but surpasses the iPad's specs.
Wow just wait 'till I get my hands on one of these. No seriously, I mean we'll have to wait since it's not actually in stores until 2011. So, um, wanna play a game on my iPad while we wait ?
So according to the summary dropping out pays off 1 out of 1000 times (that sounds high to me) and staying in college pays off 1 in 2 times ? I think its clear which is the better bet.
Some of the companies on the List of PalmOS devices : Acer, Sony, Lenovo, Samsung. Granted none were very successful (though the Sony Cliéhad a small but dedicated following) but then that was my point.
All the UNIX vendors withered but they made a shed-load of money before they did, some still do in their niche. I doubt Apple will want to dominate the smart phone business forever, just make money while there's still a lot of it to be made and then move on to the next thing. Then a platform can flower and die naturally instead of becoming an entrenched empire run by bureaucrats like MS.
If you still believe in stock prices as a measure of wealth you haven't been paying attention this past recession or the dot-com boom for that matter. It's monopoly money, a mirage. Apple is making a lot of real profits off of the iphone while Google is making nothing off of Android. Indirectly maybe through tying their services to the OS but that's keeping the status quo at best.
For me the jury is out on Android. I hope it makes it but I reserve judgement for at least another 1 to 2 years to see if the carriers fuck it up or not and fragment the platform. With their track record I'd say it's more likely they do than not.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers, so they'll get passed over.
Go ask Palm how licensing their mobile OS worked out for them. The fact this strategy worked for MS back in the 90's doesn't mean it'll work now. Here's a fun quote about that kind of thinking I read once : "Those who learn history are doomed to try and repeat it."
If you already know C then it makes sense to jump into iOS programming. There are also a lot of really good resources from Apple to get you started :
- The iOS Dev Center has very extensive documentation on everything from the OjectiveC language to Apple's GUI guidelines and everything in between. - There's a Stanford iPhone programming course you can download for free on iTunesU along with slides, assignments, etc. which is excellent. - Very active userbase around the web, if you have a problem just Google it and somebody will have already discussed it somewhere
The downside is the cost which runs at $100 for a developer license (which you can get around if you don't mind jailbreaking) and you'll need a mac to do development, unless of course you use the open source toolchain but I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. If you work for an educational institution you might get a free dev license, I know Apple sometimes do this for students but I don't know the
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You have a basic hardware spec (number of buttons etc) laid out by the OHSA, you have processors of varying speeds and some have keyboards and better GPUs. The market can already limit what you see based on these requirements.
Your solution is to sell to less people ? Pissing off potential customers who bought into the Android hype but didn't spend enough money on their handset, brilliant bit of marketing there.
Hell, if your app's good enough, it'll drive the spec of the handset. It's just like what they have to do in the world of PC app development, made easier due to the rapid churn of handset specs as they get steadily faster and cheaper.
Aaand we're back in PC land : "don't worry people will just buy the hardware to accommodate us, the developer." I thought that attitude died along with PC gaming and Windows Vista.
XNU and the mach kernel on which it is based is considerably younger than BSD. OSX is an os at least as modern as it's competitors. It's a solid foundation for a quite a few more years.
I was talking about tablets and smartphones actually, portable devices, not portable computers (a grey area I know.) Apple sells laptops that officially support both OSX and Windows too. The previous generation of tablets, the kind that were little more than a laptop sans keyboard, might even have been able to boot another OS quite easily but the new purpose built mobile devices have all kinds of locks on the system firmware. Like the iPad does, like Android phones do.
I just hope he uses TrueCrypt and suddenly "remembers" his password. How will they know it was the password they were looking for when they only see images of puppies?
Naked puppies ? The sick bastard. Clearly a pedophile beastialist.
Note that statement doesn't actually accuse him of being a pedophile just sort of suggest it. No indication of how or why they came to arrest him or how strong the evidence is against him, just enough to plant the idea that this person isn't worth the effort to protect or think about too much. Nice.
Apple "allows" the iPad to run other OS's just as much as android device makers "allow" it on their devices. Meaning you can do it if you hack it on and people will laugh in your face if you bitch about bricking it and losing your warranty. No mainstream company actively encourages or makes it easy to install anything other than what the portable device came with. To single out Apple for scorn just shows an irrational pettiness.
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of software patents we should be making the punitive damages much, much larger. Take it into M.A.D. territory to force a "cold" patent war.
It's a fair point, there's a lot of divx files out there but there's other options available for people who need support for legacy formats (which DivX has become IMHO.) If Apple were to take DivX on board they would be stuck with it for who knows how long and across their different devices too (iPhone, iPad, ...) I can see why they rather standardize on a single format with support for it integrated into the hardware. In fact this decision was made some time ago when these devices were first introduced with h.264 support only, just like when Apple created the iMac without a floppy drive. Every new beginning gives a chance to leave some of the old clutter behind.
"The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge. That is, what is the justification for either:
generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white," before the discovery of black swans) or
presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the Principle of Uniformity of Nature."
Like the greeks said we're standing on a raft on the river looking backwards and this in a universe that's bound to be significantly influenced by complete randomness. After all it was created by random quantum fluctuations.
How could you hope to capture in an equation a universe with random events based on so limited past observations as we can perform?
So your opinion is that you must jailbreak it to make it useful, in fact you seem to want a different product entirely so quite why you would buy it is a mystery. There's a lot of people out there however who don't feel the need to jailbreak. You are entitled to your opinion but don't sell it as fact.
> The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there
Oh? Is that why AppleTV is still merely a hobby?
There is nothing inherently difficult in being able to play available content without a lot of fuzting or bullshit.
The idea that Apple can't do what VLC has no trouble doing is of course completely absurd.
In truth it's Apple's approach that is fundementally user hostile. It's a usability failure regardless of how many excuses you want to make up. You either have to simply do without or deal with a huge bother.
It's geeks that can manage dealing with futzing with mencoder, ffmpeg or handbrake. "Apple's people" are just left out in the cold.
AppleTV is a hobby because the product category it is in hasn't broken through to the mainstream yet, it is still in a niche.
Apple isn't VLC. Apple has to worry about patents, license fees and getting sued. Even VLC doesn't play everything but a free application doesn't have to worry as much as a major corporation about the possible black eye from spotty support for a given format.
You can manage however you like. Please afford people like me the same courtesy.
720p video seems like a limit to me considering the big "Full HD" 1080p push. I know that Boxee Box is going to use 1080p FullHD as a distinguishing factor between the two pre-boxed solutions.
Boxee Box: $199, AppleTV: $99.
I may be mistaken but I think not many people (aside from geeks who are building their own HTPCs anyway) have much 1080p HD content on their PC in a format ready to be streamed. Can you even buy 1080p content officially (without ripping BD's which is itself a grey area) ? Apple itself certainly doesn't sell 1080p content through iTunes which makes it an obvious design choice.
I said it's not fair to characterize the AppleTV as "limited", that doesn't mean there aren't design choices made in function of both cost and utility the the likely customer.
Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...
Costly ? Seriously, have you even looked at prices in the App Store ?
Also known as forcing new purchases, or taking a hit to quality from conversion.
That's bull. H.264 is the standard these days, except for pirate content or patent encumbered formats like MS' video formats. I can rip my DVD's into H264 quite handily without noticeable loss of quality.
I don't like how moving files in OSX via UI requires two finder views open. Or how you can't put folders on top by sorting. Or blah blah, a million things. They don't think these things through, they do them the way Steve wants.
All platforms have issues, it just happens that OSX is for me the best choice available. It's not perfect, just the best fit. You can strive for perfection but if you can't accept anything less than perfection you will lead a very unhappy life. And some of these things are subjective, like the man said: "You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time."
I recommend PathFinder for those Finder annoyances you mentioned BTW.
Take copy/paste. Apple allegedly omitted it because for some reason with all their resources they couldn't figure out a way to implement it. I own an iPad, and the implementation they came up with isn't anything special, to be sure. Try selecting a line of text near the top of the screen; the magnifying glass goes over the edge and you can't see what you're doing.
It's so easy to implement that the first version of Windows Phone 7 also ships without copy&paste. Apple was inventing a new kind of touch device here, using fingers and gestures instead of stylus and menu's, building the API from scratch. You should be glad they took the time to take it step by step instead of half-assing it. Incremental improvement.
And yes there are plenty of problems with ALL of Apple's products but that's beside the point, no product is perfect. The point is they're better than everything else out there for the stuff I do on a daily basis. If that's not the case for you just buy something else already.
Tragic, of course, that people would buy something so crippled and locked down they must "jailbreak" it to make it more useful.
You're mistaking opinion for fact.
Does it bother anyone else that Apple products are so quickly hacked? I don't mean from a security standpoint, I mean because people feel the need to hack them so they can do what they want.
Doesn't that mean they should just buy something that isn't so limited in the first place? Or is this one of those "we buy a locked device because we want to hack it" sort of things...
The AppleTV isn't "limited" to most people out there, only to geeks who poo-poo any devices that do anything less than their custom Linux HTPC. I've said this before: Apple doesn't implement features unless it can make them easy to use and understand and nicely designed. They don't start with a feature list and then make crappy implementations of them so they can add a bullet point to the list. They also look forward not backward and simplify where possible (eg. mandating use of h.264 instead of divx and hundreds of other formats.) If you find this approach philosophically abhorrent then use something else please and accept there are those of us that like it that way.
I don't think that's the reason people hack them anyway, they hack them because they can and for bragging rights.
Heck, at least Jobs announced the iPad's price when he did the iPad keynote.
Apple also shipped about 60 days after showing their device off. I don't see any of these guys doing that either.
This is a little 'tin foil hat' but I've thought that companies could plant those rumors to then release such a device to get press as "beating Apple to the punch" as it were. Frankly I don't see Apple doing a form factor between the iPad and iPhone, what would be the point ? The iPad was already criticized for being an overgrown iPod Touch, the in-between tablet really would be.
Other than the 7" screen, this thing not only meets but surpasses the iPad's specs.
Wow just wait 'till I get my hands on one of these. No seriously, I mean we'll have to wait since it's not actually in stores until 2011. So, um, wanna play a game on my iPad while we wait ?
So according to the summary dropping out pays off 1 out of 1000 times (that sounds high to me) and staying in college pays off 1 in 2 times ? I think its clear which is the better bet.
Huh, how did you get modded up for that ?
Some of the companies on the List of PalmOS devices : Acer, Sony, Lenovo, Samsung. Granted none were very successful (though the Sony Cliéhad a small but dedicated following) but then that was my point.
All the UNIX vendors withered but they made a shed-load of money before they did, some still do in their niche. I doubt Apple will want to dominate the smart phone business forever, just make money while there's still a lot of it to be made and then move on to the next thing. Then a platform can flower and die naturally instead of becoming an entrenched empire run by bureaucrats like MS.
If you still believe in stock prices as a measure of wealth you haven't been paying attention this past recession or the dot-com boom for that matter. It's monopoly money, a mirage. Apple is making a lot of real profits off of the iphone while Google is making nothing off of Android. Indirectly maybe through tying their services to the OS but that's keeping the status quo at best.
For me the jury is out on Android. I hope it makes it but I reserve judgement for at least another 1 to 2 years to see if the carriers fuck it up or not and fragment the platform. With their track record I'd say it's more likely they do than not.
Apple is making exactly the same mistakes they made in the early desktop market: they're refusing to license their software to more nimble hardware manufacturers, so they'll get passed over.
Go ask Palm how licensing their mobile OS worked out for them. The fact this strategy worked for MS back in the 90's doesn't mean it'll work now.
Here's a fun quote about that kind of thinking I read once : "Those who learn history are doomed to try and repeat it."
If you already know C then it makes sense to jump into iOS programming. There are also a lot of really good resources from Apple to get you started :
- The iOS Dev Center has very extensive documentation on everything from the OjectiveC language to Apple's GUI guidelines and everything in between.
- There's a Stanford iPhone programming course you can download for free on iTunesU along with slides, assignments, etc. which is excellent.
- Very active userbase around the web, if you have a problem just Google it and somebody will have already discussed it somewhere
The downside is the cost which runs at $100 for a developer license (which you can get around if you don't mind jailbreaking) and you'll need a mac to do development, unless of course you use the open source toolchain but I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. If you work for an educational institution you might get a free dev license, I know Apple sometimes do this for students but I don't know the