Now I'm thinking even if the replacement doesn't show the issue right away, it will once my 15 day warranty is up.
I doubt it. Judging by the reviews and comments around the web there are a small number of defective devices (especially the 16 GB versions, for some reason), but they are a small minority. It's unlikely you'd have gotten two bad ones in a row. The couple of dozen owned by people I know -- including my own -- are all trouble-free.
This is why reporting bugs to the software developers is stupid. Post the bug into the public, so they have no choice but to upgrade. Corporations are run by people who want to spend as little as possible to make as much money as possible. They won't patch bugs unless they are forced. They need to be forced.
Not untrue, but too broad. There are companies who not only do fix the bugs reported to them, but even thank those who give them the reports with large checks.
Granted that they're the exception, and Oracle is clearly not one of them.
I would buy a "Samsung Galaxy Fuck You Apple". Not sure what it is or what it costs, but I'm pretty sure I need at least two of them. Are the specs going to be better than the "Google Nexus Fuck You Apple" or the "HTC Retribution Fuck You Apple"?
Check out this conceptual design for a new Samsung tablet. It assiduously avoids infringing Apple's "rounded rectangle" patent minefield by choosing a novel "twin galaxy" shape.
Heh. When I mentioned "commercial software", I actually meant "WoW". However, I haven't played in nearly a year, in fact don't even have it installed on my MacBook right now, so I don't think it'll be a problem.
Dang. I've been doing it wrong for 13 years. Thanks for letting me know.
1. Support 3rd party hardware. Apple and Microsoft are willing to let companies make drivers for their hardware and put their own license on them
2005 called and wants its argument back. It's not absolutely perfect, but Linux hardware support is generally excellent these days. Outside of niche devices virtually everything works great. WiFi was a particularly thorny problem for a few years, being both widely problematic and obviously very important due to the situation with a few widely-used chipsets, but that seems to have ceased being an issue.
2. Consistent UI. People get stuck, they try to find instructions the instructions need to be consistent with their system.
Meh. People who aren't knowledgeable enough to figure things out on their own use Ubuntu, and there is plenty of information out there for Ubuntu.
3. The little features matter too. Time to put your system to sleep and wake up. Does that keyboard light work, How quickly can you connect to a wireless network. Does your screen leave artifacts floating around, consistent Copy and Paste.
Umm, everything you just said works great for me, and has for many years, on many machines. And not just on the high-end ThinkPads I've always used; I've installed Ubuntu for people on low-end Acers and e-Machines, and everything just works, at least in the last 3-4 years.
Either you've had some exceptionally bad luck or your experience is out of date.
Running on Linux fulltime for 3 years and counting... I find it funny how in so many people's measure the non-commercial linux offering with commercial metrics. Linux fills my niche pretty well, employees at Google would agree with me too. The desktop is a viable alternative, I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.
Market domination is not the only way to succeed.
Linux has been my desktop/laptop OS since 1999, until about a year and a half ago when I got a MacBook from my employer. OS X has been quite decent, and it's actually been nice to be able to get more commercial software for it, but I find I miss many things from Linux as well. I'm still using Linux as my desktop OS.
My irritation with Apple's courtroom antics reached a threshold last week, though, and I've decided that when my two-year laptop refresh cycle is up I'm going to switch back to a ThinkPad running Linux. I'll miss some aspects of OS X, but it'll be a relief to get back to a proper window manager with usable virtual desktops, focus-follows-mouse, etc., and a machine which doesn't hide so much of its operation from me.
The excursion into OS X land was pleasant, but it won't bother me in the slightest to go back.
I think that's common... in my experience it's actually women who feel most strongly in favor of circumcision. When my boys were born I didn't really care either way that much (sorry, I don't think it's as horrific as some here do, and neither do I think it's hugely beneficial or important), but my wife was quite insistent that they be circumcised. She didn't really have any argument other than "uncircumcised penises look funny". Oh, she also cited hygiene, but the "look funny" argument seemed to be the more important one.
I've come across the same attitude from nearly every other American woman with whom I've discussed the topic -- which isn't a huge number, penis alteration not being a common lunch conversation topic and all -- but probably a couple dozen or so.
We all hate screaming children, especially those of us who fly with them.
Benadryl. Seriously. Yeah, yeah, it seems terrible to "drug your child"... but it's safe stuff that you give them many times for many other reasons (fevers and whatnot), and it will not only make the flight more pleasant for you and your neighbors, but for your child as well. Don't overdo it, just a normal dose will make the child sleepy enough to overcome the strangeness of the environment -- which is what is keeping the tired kid from going to sleep anyway -- and let him nod off.
Speaking as someone who flies all the time for work, I've never been asked by a flight attendant to put away my paper book
I have, but just once. And the same flight attendant angrily shushed my travel companions who were talking. She felt it was really, really important that everyone pay very close attention to the safety briefing. What a pain. And this was in the business cabin (flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong), where nearly everyone in the cabin spent more time sleeping in airline seats than in beds.
You only learn from reviews what something can't do, not what it can. I usually only look at negative reviews myself, and possibly fact-check against positive reviews.
I find value in both positive and negative reviews, but I think the key is to go in looking for facts, not testimonials. "This product is great!" isn't useful at all, and my eyes just skip right over it. Specific unexpected problems or benefits are helpful, as are detailed comparisons with competing products. Average ratings are also helpful, but only to quickly narrow the candidate list, and only if there are enough reviews.
I do have some hope for Google's integration of Google+ with their review systems (local and shopper). I've had a few experiences now of looking up restaurants and finding reviews written by people I know... and that is tremendously helpful. If I know the person well I can filter their comments through my knowledge of their biases. If I don't know them well, at least I know they're a real person.
Open source has eroded the market for commercial development tools -- but that never was a significant part of the overall market, and, as your quote even points out, this is largely because of the revitalization of the small software provider, meaning that free dev tools are contributing to the overall growth of the industry.
It's not clear to me that they are by and large making money at it without violating at least the spirit if not the letter of the open-source licenses they're using.
Cite? I can cite huge numbers of companies making massive amounts of money and fully complying with both spirit and letter. I can name a small handful of small players who violate the spirit. I can't think of anyone really getting away with violating the letter of the licenses.
1: More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
2: None of them have >50% market share.
Nice. If you can't win the argument on the current question, try to change it.
1 and 2 mean the exact same thing.
In what bizarro world?
1 means the majority of people choose to buy a non-Apple smartphone, meaning they buy a Samsung, an HTC, a Motorola, etc. Something other than an iPhone.
2 means the majority of people choosing to buy a specific vendor's device.
If it helps, here's a car analogy:
1. People are primarily choosing to buy something other than a Yugo.
2. None of the Yugo's competitors have a majority of the market.
What makes no sense to me is why you'd even care about 2. Apple's market share could be zero and yet it could still be true that no single vendor has a majority of the market. So what? How does that mean anything at all to Apple or about Apple?
The question was whether or not Apple's share of the market was declining
No it wasn't. You jumped into the thread in reply top my comment: "iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow." That's sales, not market share. It's you that tried to "change the question" because you "couldn't win the argument".
Unbelievable. The point of the poster you responded to was that many people who previously purchased iPhones were choosing another option. You jumped in to say that iPhone sales are growing... but that in no way contradicts the post you responded to! Sales are indeed growing, but only because the smartphone market is growing. Apple's boat is being lifted by the rising tide, even though it is actually sinking slowly (relative to the other manufacturers).
My posts have been on the point of the thread throughout. You keep looking for some way to change the question to one more favorable to your viewpoint.
At least you're not alone. This is a consistent pattern by the Apple fanboys (note that I like Apple products myself -- I'm typing this on a MacBook Air, and I own an iPhone 4 -- though given their litigious nature, I'm reconsidering my decision to use their products). To begin with, they crowed that the iPhone had the largest share of the market. When that was no longer true, they began saying that the iPhone was generating the most profits. When that was no longer true, they shifted to arguing that Apple sold more phones than any other vendor. Now that that is no longer true, you're arguing that no other vendor has a majority of the market share (though it's not really clear how that is at all relevant to Apple). I guess this is a screwed-up version of the argument that if the market is broken down by specific model, the iPhone 4S is the biggest seller ever (at the moment). That argument at least makes sense... though it's not relevant to anything AFAICT.
Here, I'll help you out. Here's an argument you can hang your hat on, probably for quite a while: the current iOS version is the smartphone OS version with the largest market share. The fact that so many Android device manufacturers have done and continue to do a lousy job of upgrading their devices while pretty much all iOS phones get upgraded as soon as a new version comes out makes that true, and will continue to make it true until something changes.
There you go. There's an argument you can win for Apple which even has some real-world relevance.
Yes, they're playing by the rules. More precisely, I'd say they're exploiting the rules. But is that really because they're being honest and law-abiding, or is it because that's the best route to achieving their goals?
I think it's the latter.
The US wants to make an example of him, and that example would not be provided by an unexplained death or a quiet disappearance. The goal is to run him through a very public legal gauntlet and visibly slap him down hard, pour encourager les autres not to publicize the United States' misdeeds in the future.
Oh, and regarding your claim that the US hasn't asked for him, there's no way we can know if they have or have not. However, there are plenty of indications that they want him and that the Swedes are willing to hand him over.
But, pinko commie open source was going to kill the software industry and leave all of us software engineers starving. How could it actually contribute to the growth of the industry?
More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
Same can be said of every other phone manufacturer. None of them have >50% market share.
Nice. If you can't win the argument on the current question, try to change it. The question was whether or not Apple's share of the market was declining -- and it unquestionably is.
On your new question, yay for you! I think you've finally hit on a question that you can continue winning indefinitely, because a free commodity market, like the market for Android phones, will always be shared among multiple companies. It's very unlikely that any of them will ever achieve >50% market share -- and that's a good thing!
What's happening here is and will inevitably be a reprise of what happened in the personal computer market. Apple is a hardware vendor who provides unique (and high-quality) software, and uses that software to motivate purchase of their hardware. As long as Apple's software is clearly superior, that model works fantastically well, but when the competition has equally good software which is available to a variety of hardware manufacturers, then it becomes a losing strategy, at least on a market share basis. Why? Because competition works, and it works exceptionally well in the hardware arena, it drives cost down and quality up.
So, what's going to happen is that Apple's market share will continue to decline, until it settles comfortably into a highly-profitable niche. My prediction is that Apple will keep 10-15% of the smartphone market forever. Apple will maintain high profit margins and continue being a healthy company, though unless they can continue finding other markets they can "own" for a while in their way, they're going to decline significantly in size and wealth.
It's also worth pointing out that if Apple actually succeeded in owning the phone, tablet and related markets in the way they'd like to, it would be bad for them. Their particular "walled garden" approach is one that, if it got a monopoly position, would clearly constitute violation of anti-trust laws, because of the way Apple integrates all of their products so closely, especially including the iTunes market.
Also, what kind of startup are you doing where you need incredibly high download speeds?
I think it's more likely that the goal is incredibly high speeds up and down. Think about Google's beginning, hosted in a dorm at Stanford. They needed to be able to download the whole Internet, and to serve searches to everyone. They needed extremely fast Internet service, but they also had no idea how to make any money at it, so being able to get essentially free very high-speed (for the time) Internet was essential to being able to start their business.
So people are not turning away from the iPhone, nor is Apple dying. QED.
Well, if you bury your head deeply enough in the sand you can say people are not turning away from the iPhone. And I'd actually agree that "turning away" isn't the right phrase. More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
Oh, and Apple is certainly not dying. Anyone who says that is just stupid. Once companies achieve a certain size they never really die -- and certainly not quickly.
The confusion here is over some (very similar) names. Google Voice is a telephony product that allows you to get a virtual phone number which is dynamically routed to some number of other phones, can be used to make calls through your computer and has automatic transcription of voicemails to e-mail messages. Google Voice Search is more or less equivalent to Siri.
the bottomline is that I'm not buying another iPhone
+1
This ruling just helped me make a decision. My wife's phone is due for an upgrade pretty soon and we've been debating whether to get her an iPhone 5 to replace her current iPhone 4, but... no. It'll be a minor inconvenience because we share an Audible account and I already have the limit of Android devices on that account, but I can deal with that.
Odds are, not many people will choose to avoid Apple products because of this, and your decision and mine by themselves are clearly meaningless, but I'm still not going to give them any more of my money.
Removing the antenna and some of the buttons is only subjectively good
Apple didn't "innovate" by removing the antenna. Lots of phones had already done away with the visible antenna; that was an industry-wide improvement following the development of fractal antennas, which provide better reception, can handle a wide variety of frequencies and have a flat, compact form factor that's most easily embedded inside the body of the device.
iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow.
In absolute numbers, yes, but their share of the smartphone market is declining. Their growth is driven by the growth of the market, but they're gradually losing ground.
Unless, of course, they can kill the competition with lawsuits.
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Now I'm thinking even if the replacement doesn't show the issue right away, it will once my 15 day warranty is up.
I doubt it. Judging by the reviews and comments around the web there are a small number of defective devices (especially the 16 GB versions, for some reason), but they are a small minority. It's unlikely you'd have gotten two bad ones in a row. The couple of dozen owned by people I know -- including my own -- are all trouble-free.
This is why reporting bugs to the software developers is stupid. Post the bug into the public, so they have no choice but to upgrade. Corporations are run by people who want to spend as little as possible to make as much money as possible. They won't patch bugs unless they are forced. They need to be forced.
Not untrue, but too broad. There are companies who not only do fix the bugs reported to them, but even thank those who give them the reports with large checks.
Granted that they're the exception, and Oracle is clearly not one of them.
I would buy a "Samsung Galaxy Fuck You Apple". Not sure what it is or what it costs, but I'm pretty sure I need at least two of them. Are the specs going to be better than the "Google Nexus Fuck You Apple" or the "HTC Retribution Fuck You Apple"?
Check out this conceptual design for a new Samsung tablet. It assiduously avoids infringing Apple's "rounded rectangle" patent minefield by choosing a novel "twin galaxy" shape.
Heh. When I mentioned "commercial software", I actually meant "WoW". However, I haven't played in nearly a year, in fact don't even have it installed on my MacBook right now, so I don't think it'll be a problem.
Linux doesn't do well as a Desktop OS.
Dang. I've been doing it wrong for 13 years. Thanks for letting me know.
1. Support 3rd party hardware. Apple and Microsoft are willing to let companies make drivers for their hardware and put their own license on them
2005 called and wants its argument back. It's not absolutely perfect, but Linux hardware support is generally excellent these days. Outside of niche devices virtually everything works great. WiFi was a particularly thorny problem for a few years, being both widely problematic and obviously very important due to the situation with a few widely-used chipsets, but that seems to have ceased being an issue.
2. Consistent UI. People get stuck, they try to find instructions the instructions need to be consistent with their system.
Meh. People who aren't knowledgeable enough to figure things out on their own use Ubuntu, and there is plenty of information out there for Ubuntu.
3. The little features matter too. Time to put your system to sleep and wake up. Does that keyboard light work, How quickly can you connect to a wireless network. Does your screen leave artifacts floating around, consistent Copy and Paste.
Umm, everything you just said works great for me, and has for many years, on many machines. And not just on the high-end ThinkPads I've always used; I've installed Ubuntu for people on low-end Acers and e-Machines, and everything just works, at least in the last 3-4 years.
Either you've had some exceptionally bad luck or your experience is out of date.
^ This
Running on Linux fulltime for 3 years and counting... I find it funny how in so many people's measure the non-commercial linux offering with commercial metrics. Linux fills my niche pretty well, employees at Google would agree with me too. The desktop is a viable alternative, I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.
Market domination is not the only way to succeed.
Linux has been my desktop/laptop OS since 1999, until about a year and a half ago when I got a MacBook from my employer. OS X has been quite decent, and it's actually been nice to be able to get more commercial software for it, but I find I miss many things from Linux as well. I'm still using Linux as my desktop OS.
My irritation with Apple's courtroom antics reached a threshold last week, though, and I've decided that when my two-year laptop refresh cycle is up I'm going to switch back to a ThinkPad running Linux. I'll miss some aspects of OS X, but it'll be a relief to get back to a proper window manager with usable virtual desktops, focus-follows-mouse, etc., and a machine which doesn't hide so much of its operation from me.
The excursion into OS X land was pleasant, but it won't bother me in the slightest to go back.
Dude, I'm glad I'm not you.
I think that's common... in my experience it's actually women who feel most strongly in favor of circumcision.
Wait, so because they don't like the look of it, people should be mutilated?
I made no comment on the validity of the argument. If you don't like it, take it up with someone who has that opinion, not me.
my mother did it to me
I think that's common... in my experience it's actually women who feel most strongly in favor of circumcision. When my boys were born I didn't really care either way that much (sorry, I don't think it's as horrific as some here do, and neither do I think it's hugely beneficial or important), but my wife was quite insistent that they be circumcised. She didn't really have any argument other than "uncircumcised penises look funny". Oh, she also cited hygiene, but the "look funny" argument seemed to be the more important one.
I've come across the same attitude from nearly every other American woman with whom I've discussed the topic -- which isn't a huge number, penis alteration not being a common lunch conversation topic and all -- but probably a couple dozen or so.
If you use too large a dose, Benadryl has the result you describe.
We all hate screaming children, especially those of us who fly with them.
Benadryl. Seriously. Yeah, yeah, it seems terrible to "drug your child"... but it's safe stuff that you give them many times for many other reasons (fevers and whatnot), and it will not only make the flight more pleasant for you and your neighbors, but for your child as well. Don't overdo it, just a normal dose will make the child sleepy enough to overcome the strangeness of the environment -- which is what is keeping the tired kid from going to sleep anyway -- and let him nod off.
Speaking as someone who flies all the time for work, I've never been asked by a flight attendant to put away my paper book
I have, but just once. And the same flight attendant angrily shushed my travel companions who were talking. She felt it was really, really important that everyone pay very close attention to the safety briefing. What a pain. And this was in the business cabin (flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong), where nearly everyone in the cabin spent more time sleeping in airline seats than in beds.
You only learn from reviews what something can't do, not what it can. I usually only look at negative reviews myself, and possibly fact-check against positive reviews.
I find value in both positive and negative reviews, but I think the key is to go in looking for facts, not testimonials. "This product is great!" isn't useful at all, and my eyes just skip right over it. Specific unexpected problems or benefits are helpful, as are detailed comparisons with competing products. Average ratings are also helpful, but only to quickly narrow the candidate list, and only if there are enough reviews.
I do have some hope for Google's integration of Google+ with their review systems (local and shopper). I've had a few experiences now of looking up restaurants and finding reviews written by people I know... and that is tremendously helpful. If I know the person well I can filter their comments through my knowledge of their biases. If I don't know them well, at least I know they're a real person.
Open source has eroded the market for commercial development tools -- but that never was a significant part of the overall market, and, as your quote even points out, this is largely because of the revitalization of the small software provider, meaning that free dev tools are contributing to the overall growth of the industry.
It's not clear to me that they are by and large making money at it without violating at least the spirit if not the letter of the open-source licenses they're using.
Cite? I can cite huge numbers of companies making massive amounts of money and fully complying with both spirit and letter. I can name a small handful of small players who violate the spirit. I can't think of anyone really getting away with violating the letter of the licenses.
1: More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
2: None of them have >50% market share.
Nice. If you can't win the argument on the current question, try to change it.
1 and 2 mean the exact same thing.
In what bizarro world?
1 means the majority of people choose to buy a non-Apple smartphone, meaning they buy a Samsung, an HTC, a Motorola, etc. Something other than an iPhone.
2 means the majority of people choosing to buy a specific vendor's device.
If it helps, here's a car analogy:
1. People are primarily choosing to buy something other than a Yugo.
2. None of the Yugo's competitors have a majority of the market.
What makes no sense to me is why you'd even care about 2. Apple's market share could be zero and yet it could still be true that no single vendor has a majority of the market. So what? How does that mean anything at all to Apple or about Apple?
The question was whether or not Apple's share of the market was declining
No it wasn't. You jumped into the thread in reply top my comment: "iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow." That's sales, not market share. It's you that tried to "change the question" because you "couldn't win the argument".
Unbelievable. The point of the poster you responded to was that many people who previously purchased iPhones were choosing another option. You jumped in to say that iPhone sales are growing... but that in no way contradicts the post you responded to! Sales are indeed growing, but only because the smartphone market is growing. Apple's boat is being lifted by the rising tide, even though it is actually sinking slowly (relative to the other manufacturers).
My posts have been on the point of the thread throughout. You keep looking for some way to change the question to one more favorable to your viewpoint.
At least you're not alone. This is a consistent pattern by the Apple fanboys (note that I like Apple products myself -- I'm typing this on a MacBook Air, and I own an iPhone 4 -- though given their litigious nature, I'm reconsidering my decision to use their products). To begin with, they crowed that the iPhone had the largest share of the market. When that was no longer true, they began saying that the iPhone was generating the most profits. When that was no longer true, they shifted to arguing that Apple sold more phones than any other vendor. Now that that is no longer true, you're arguing that no other vendor has a majority of the market share (though it's not really clear how that is at all relevant to Apple). I guess this is a screwed-up version of the argument that if the market is broken down by specific model, the iPhone 4S is the biggest seller ever (at the moment). That argument at least makes sense... though it's not relevant to anything AFAICT.
Here, I'll help you out. Here's an argument you can hang your hat on, probably for quite a while: the current iOS version is the smartphone OS version with the largest market share. The fact that so many Android device manufacturers have done and continue to do a lousy job of upgrading their devices while pretty much all iOS phones get upgraded as soon as a new version comes out makes that true, and will continue to make it true until something changes.
There you go. There's an argument you can win for Apple which even has some real-world relevance.
Yes, they're playing by the rules. More precisely, I'd say they're exploiting the rules. But is that really because they're being honest and law-abiding, or is it because that's the best route to achieving their goals?
I think it's the latter.
The US wants to make an example of him, and that example would not be provided by an unexplained death or a quiet disappearance. The goal is to run him through a very public legal gauntlet and visibly slap him down hard, pour encourager les autres not to publicize the United States' misdeeds in the future.
Oh, and regarding your claim that the US hasn't asked for him, there's no way we can know if they have or have not. However, there are plenty of indications that they want him and that the Swedes are willing to hand him over.
But, pinko commie open source was going to kill the software industry and leave all of us software engineers starving. How could it actually contribute to the growth of the industry?
More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
Same can be said of every other phone manufacturer. None of them have >50% market share.
Nice. If you can't win the argument on the current question, try to change it. The question was whether or not Apple's share of the market was declining -- and it unquestionably is.
On your new question, yay for you! I think you've finally hit on a question that you can continue winning indefinitely, because a free commodity market, like the market for Android phones, will always be shared among multiple companies. It's very unlikely that any of them will ever achieve >50% market share -- and that's a good thing!
What's happening here is and will inevitably be a reprise of what happened in the personal computer market. Apple is a hardware vendor who provides unique (and high-quality) software, and uses that software to motivate purchase of their hardware. As long as Apple's software is clearly superior, that model works fantastically well, but when the competition has equally good software which is available to a variety of hardware manufacturers, then it becomes a losing strategy, at least on a market share basis. Why? Because competition works, and it works exceptionally well in the hardware arena, it drives cost down and quality up.
So, what's going to happen is that Apple's market share will continue to decline, until it settles comfortably into a highly-profitable niche. My prediction is that Apple will keep 10-15% of the smartphone market forever. Apple will maintain high profit margins and continue being a healthy company, though unless they can continue finding other markets they can "own" for a while in their way, they're going to decline significantly in size and wealth.
It's also worth pointing out that if Apple actually succeeded in owning the phone, tablet and related markets in the way they'd like to, it would be bad for them. Their particular "walled garden" approach is one that, if it got a monopoly position, would clearly constitute violation of anti-trust laws, because of the way Apple integrates all of their products so closely, especially including the iTunes market.
Also, what kind of startup are you doing where you need incredibly high download speeds?
I think it's more likely that the goal is incredibly high speeds up and down. Think about Google's beginning, hosted in a dorm at Stanford. They needed to be able to download the whole Internet, and to serve searches to everyone. They needed extremely fast Internet service, but they also had no idea how to make any money at it, so being able to get essentially free very high-speed (for the time) Internet was essential to being able to start their business.
When it comes to web-browsing, office applications
Office applications, maybe, but web browsing? Both iOS and Android have excellent browsers.
In absolute numbers, yes
So people are not turning away from the iPhone, nor is Apple dying. QED.
Well, if you bury your head deeply enough in the sand you can say people are not turning away from the iPhone. And I'd actually agree that "turning away" isn't the right phrase. More like, primarily choosing to buy something else.
Oh, and Apple is certainly not dying. Anyone who says that is just stupid. Once companies achieve a certain size they never really die -- and certainly not quickly.
The confusion here is over some (very similar) names. Google Voice is a telephony product that allows you to get a virtual phone number which is dynamically routed to some number of other phones, can be used to make calls through your computer and has automatic transcription of voicemails to e-mail messages. Google Voice Search is more or less equivalent to Siri.
the bottomline is that I'm not buying another iPhone
+1
This ruling just helped me make a decision. My wife's phone is due for an upgrade pretty soon and we've been debating whether to get her an iPhone 5 to replace her current iPhone 4, but... no. It'll be a minor inconvenience because we share an Audible account and I already have the limit of Android devices on that account, but I can deal with that.
Odds are, not many people will choose to avoid Apple products because of this, and your decision and mine by themselves are clearly meaningless, but I'm still not going to give them any more of my money.
Removing the antenna and some of the buttons is only subjectively good
Apple didn't "innovate" by removing the antenna. Lots of phones had already done away with the visible antenna; that was an industry-wide improvement following the development of fractal antennas, which provide better reception, can handle a wide variety of frequencies and have a flat, compact form factor that's most easily embedded inside the body of the device.
iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow.
In absolute numbers, yes, but their share of the smartphone market is declining. Their growth is driven by the growth of the market, but they're gradually losing ground.
Unless, of course, they can kill the competition with lawsuits.