Good luck getting any music onto your iDevice without using iTunes. It's not just about money, it's about being locked into to one piece of horrible software, which only works on certain OSes.
Is it considered polite/acceptable in the USA for the waiter to pass plates over, or reach across the table/other people's food? It isn't in the EU.
What's this "polite" thing you speak of? Here in the US, we barely have any manners at all, and we sure as hell have no idea what proper sit-down restaurant service is supposed to look like.
There, waiters are taught to ALWAYS serve from the diners left side, and that the best kind of service is so discreet that the diner didn't even notice it happened.
Waiters are taught in Europe? Well that would definitely make a difference. We Americans aren't real big on teaching people how to behave properly.
Seriously though, the big problem here in America is the inept management. Managers here think that customers like having lots of interaction with their server. And they might be right too; I'm not sure. Obviously, it doesn't apply to people like you and me, but surely these big corporate chains have done plenty of research into what customers actually prefer on average, and will adjust their training to match (assuming giving the customers what they want doesn't cost more; annoying service from the waiter doesn't actually cost the restaurant anything unlike better-quality food and more-careful or skillful preparation).
To help you understand American culture a little better, I'd like to share a quip I heard once: "America is like a third world country that won the lottery."
One minor note about your comment about serving from the diner's left side: I guess they don't have any booths in Europe? With a lot of seating arrangements here, there's only one spot where the waiter can stand and reach the table.
Dear God do I hate that phrase. It makes me suspicious that there's some reason it shouldn't taste good. "How is everything" is such a better way to pose the question.
Sorry, I misspelled that phrase; it should read: "How's that tastin' for ya?"
I think it might be a regional thing. I heard it all the time when I lived in Arizona, for instance, but not in the northeast.
"How is everything" is a more cultured way to speak. So in southern latitudes you won't hear that.
I doubt it will be long before decent quality Android phones also ditch their headphone jack. And that would just add to the pile of reasons that I find Android to be an inferior experience.
Wow, that's some seriously deluded and kool-aid-drinking thinking there: "Androids are inferior because they'll eliminate headphone jacks, even though they haven't yet." They haven't done it yet, so what makes you think they're all going to do it? There's a ridiculous variety of Android phones out there. Where are the Apple phones with two SIM slots? There aren't any. Lots of people in Asia have Android phones with dual SIMs; it's a common feature there. Where's the Apple phone with an SDcard slot? They don't have any. But there's tons of Android phones with them, including the new Galaxy S7, and many other lesser-known ones. The nice thing about Android is there's lots of vendors (Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, Sony, etc.) so someone is bound to have a model with the features you want.
I didn't pay for my MBP, and didn't pay (extra) for my iPhone either (carrier provided). I use Apple for free (as in beer). Am I also a sucker?
Quite possibly. Your employer is (I'm assuming that's who bought your 2 MBPs. But if you're paying your own phone bills (you're a little vague here), and you think your iPhone is "free", then yes, you're definitely a sucker. I'm a little shocked anyone on Slashdot would not understand, by now, how phone subsidization plans work. You're paying extra every month (or are locked into a higher-priced plan so you don't see the extra charge) which pays for the phone during the contract period. Smart people don't buy subsidized phones these days, they buy a phone outright and get a less-expensive service with no contract, usually through a reseller.
It must be a uniquely American thing to equate massive levels of attention with good service. As a Brit now living in the US, all the unwanted interruptions you get when you're just trying to enjoy a slow, peaceful restaurant meal really took some getting used to.
I'm American, and have only lived in America, and I really hate this practice too. Drives me nuts.
A couple years ago, I lived in northern New Jersey where there's a bunch of Italian restaurants. At one, that looked family-owned, it was totally overstaffed, with some Italian-looking waiters, but a Mexican guy who I'm not sure what his position was other than "waterboy". He came around every few minutes to refill our water glasses, even though we had barely drank any water. It was the most annoying over-service ever. One of my guests (an older guy who speaks some Italian) tried thanking him with "grazi", and the guy corrected him with "gracias". My guest then asked him if this was an Italian restaurant or a Spanish one. I didn't go back to this place.
Anyway, you're completely correct about them seemingly deliberately waiting until your mouth is full of food to come over and ask "How's that tasting for ya?" and also clearing the plates before you've even finished. This stuff is epidemic.
Honestly, eating out in America is really not a fun experience. Just like going to a movie theater. Better just to buy your own food at a supermarket and cook it yourself, and watch a movie at home. America's a good country if you want to make good money and stay at home all the time to enjoy it with a big house, and come and go in a nice car (and you're healthy...). If you like going out a lot to restaurants, cafes, movies, etc., it kinda sucks.
No, Ebay is like being at a flea market. Amazon makes it much less obvious who you're dealing with when it comes to their "affiliates".
With Ebay, for instance, it's very easy for me to click one button and only look at sellers in the US or in North America. Can't do that on Amazon; I have to wade through all the Chinese sellers and can only tell something is shipping from China by looking at the estimated delivery date. Heck, on Ebay I can even filter items by the geographic distance from myself: if I want to buy an item that's within 25 miles, I can filter it that way.
With Ebay, you *know* you're dealing with some other seller (because Ebay doesn't sell or ship anything at all, they're just a website), and that policies and reputations can differ greatly. With Amazon, you really don't. It's a big mess. Is an item being sold to you by Amazon itself, by someone else but fulfilled by Amazon, or by someone completely independent? Are returns for a product free or not? It completely varies. But finding this stuff out isn't that easy.
Apple doesn't make and sell most of those accessories so they are giving any profits from them to others.
It doesn't work that way. Big American companies aren't like Asian conglomerates that have divisions for all kinds of different stuff; they focus on just a few things, and maximize the profitability of those things. If something isn't profitable enough, it gets cut.
Most likely, these accessories just don't have enough profit involved for Apple to feel it's worth it. For some small company, it is.
Apple could charge a (bigger) premium for the bigger battery and increased durability
Not very many people are willing to pay that much of a premium for these things. Even worse, they can get these things as add-ons from 3rd-party sellers, cheaper than what it'd cost from Apple, which has to have huge profit margins.
Apple could sell to market segments they currently are ignoring.
Which ones? These people are going to buy iPhones no matter what. They aren't missing out on any customers. Apple customers aren't like customers for other things, where they compare the features, prices, reliability, etc. and make a balanced decision. With Apple buyers, they have an emotional connection to Apple so that's what they buy, no matter what.
You seem to be assuming that Apple is like other companies, such as car companies, which have to worry about losing their customer to competitors. Apple doesn't.
The market segment exists for smartphones with bigger batteries and/or more rugged construction. That's not really a debate.
People who prioritize these things over "I love Apple!!!" are not Apple customers. They're going to get some other device that suits them better and doesn't cost as much. People who care about these things are obviously practical, and that means they won't be interested in an overpriced fashion statement.
If they fail to address these market segments then their competitors will sooner or later.
Their competitors can't put Apple logos on their stuff, or run iOS on their devices. Their competitors aren't Apple. Apple's customers are not going to defect because a competitor makes a device with better specs; if that were true, Apple would already be out of business because there's already much better phones than theirs out there, for less money.
People will not stick endlessly with Apple products if they can get better options elsewhere.
Yes, they will. At least for a long time, unless Apple *really* screws up, but it'll take a long time for them to trash their reputation that badly.
We've already seen that when Apple almost died prior to the return of Steve Jobs.
It took a long time for the glow to fade before Jobs came back. And they're arguably doing a much better job now than they did under Scully.
What are you talking about? It doesn't matter what people mind or don't mind, we're talking about Apple users here. They're going to buy an iPhone 7 no matter what, so why should Apple go to extra trouble to give them a model that they like better?
Samsung is far-and-away the leader in that technology, and has the Patent Portfolio to prove it. So, they have had a merry old time, DENYING Apple their AMOLED parts (or pricing them so they are deliberately out-of-the-question).
How do you expect a supplier to act when you sue them for something as stupid as rounded corners? They brought that on themselves.
They actually design for their own designers and engineers.
Designers, not engineers. Engineers are generally practical and only care about something being well-designed (from an engineering standpoint: robust, reliable, etc.), easy to manufacture, etc. It's the "designers" who come up with things like where buttons should be, and tell the engineers to make it work. The designers only relent if the engineers can't physically make it work.
Now you might have a point with your bit about the 5 Series saving space inside the device with a questionable design decision, but here again, it's the designers who are to blame, because they're the ones who demanded the thing be so small/thin/whatever in the first place. If only engineers were driving the design, the device would probably be significantly larger, have an easily-removed back panel, have a giant battery, and all the parts inside would be easily replaced for easy serviceability.
Basically, if you want to see what devices would look like if true engineers made all the design decisions, go look at military hardware.
I don't love Apple either; I find Android to be far worse as well.
I used to use iTunes on my work MBP -- I now use it on my personal MBP. Cost of switching is more then just a new phone. iOS is "good enough."
If Apple would ever pull their head out of their ass and allow jailbreaking and an USB port I wouldn't have any issues.
Why should they "pull their head out of their ass"? Suckers like you are happy to throw piles of cash at them for their overpriced, handcuffed items (iPhone and two MBPs in your case, plus an assertion that iOS is "good enough" and the cost of switching is too high). If Apple has zero risk of losing you as a customer by not allowing jailbreaking, not having a USB port, not having a headphone jack, or any other design decision they may make, why should they bother listening to your concerns?
I buy very few apps don't and I don't use iTunes ever. I don't need a bigger or better screen. Battery life is not a concern.
So you don't use any of the fancy features on an iPhone, yet you're willing to pay a gigantic premium to have an iPhone?
You're like all those old people who buy an extremely powerful $100k luxury car and then drive it 20mph under the speed limit a few times a month.
I agree with the other poster: you'd be better off with a Windows phone. They're dirt cheap, they allegedly work quite well for the limited things they do, but they have no apps, but you don't care about that anyway. And they have headphone jacks too.
Exactly. On Android, there's no shortage of ways for me to do what I want to do. I can pop out the SDcard and put it in my PC and write to it directly. Or I can use a USB cable and connect that to my PC, and use the "adb" utility to "adb push" files directly into the filesystem. Or I can use the SDcard as I said above, but use rsync to synchronize the files on my phone with those on my PC. Or I can use various GUI file management software. I'm not required to use any particular software at all, especially not bloated crapware from the phone maker.
That's overkill. All you need to do is hermetically seal the Capitol building after all the Congresspeople are in there, and lock and bar the doors so no one breaks the seal.
That's only a problem at the extremes. In my household we have 3 Galaxy S4/S5 devices, all now 2-3 years old or so. No signs of burn-in. However we also aren't heavy users of a particular game. AMOLEDs work great as long as you have typical usage patterns for a phone (i.e., don't look at the same thing for hours straight). It's not much different than the old CRT monitors: people talked about burn-in there too, but the only time people really had a problem with it was when they did something extreme, such as using the CRT on an industrial or business computer that had the exact same image on the screen all day long, never turning it off or varying it much. This generally isn't a problem with phones. Plus, not many people tend to keep phones more than, say, 5 years anyway, since they're handheld mobile devices and tend to get beat up from handling.
The market CLEARLY exists and I think Apple is leaving money on the table by ignoring it.
BS.
Anyone who wants these features is just going to buy some add-on accessories to give them these features. Either way, they're going to buy an iPhone, no matter how well or how poorly it satisfies their desire for these features.
So how is Apple "leaving money on the table"?
It's very unlikely Apple would make enough profit by having an additional phone model for these people to justify the expenses involved (engineering, inventory, etc.). It's costly for companies to have more versions of a product, so it's only worth it if it brings them more customers. This isn't going to bring them more customers; it'll just split their existing market, and it's unlikely they'd pay enough extra for the bulky model to make up for this, when they can buy 3rd-party stuff that adds these features for less.
Same here; I have a Galaxy S5. I can buy spare OEM batteries on Ebay for less than $10, and swap it out in a minute (most of the time for swapping is getting my Otterbox case off the phone; the back of the S5 comes off in a few seconds).
Even better, it's waterproof, even with the removable back.
On top of that, there's an SDcard slot. I can put a 128GB card in there if I want.
Women keep their phones in their purses. That's why women actually want bigger phones than men, on average, because men care about them fitting into their pockets, whereas women have plenty of room for a phone/phablet in their purses.
iPhones are objectively inferior. They use IPA LCD screens, whereas Samsungs use AMOLED screens that are brighter and have more vivid colors.
It probably helps a lot that Samsung is a screen manufacturer and is at the cutting edge of these technologies, whereas Apple doesn't manufacture anything at all and has to outsource everything, and has to buy their screens from someone else (like Samsung).
Samsung's cameras are better too. And here again, Samsung makes their own cameras.
Exactly, but it's really not much of a problem, because there's such a simple solution: Don't buy an iPhone 7!
Get some other (better) phone, and you'll have a headphone jack, longer-lasting battery, probably a better screen too, and you won't be restricted to Apple's walled garden and be forced to use the abomination that is iTunes.
Yeah, but it's not all-or-nothing. There's plenty of agnostics who simply acknowledge they don't know what happens in the afterlife rather than being firmly convinced there's nothing (I'm one of them). There's a big gulf between "there may be an afterlife, and I like to think there is, and perhaps there's some deity watching over us", and "this ancient book is the literal truth, along with all the supernatural events described in it, even though they're contradicted by hard evidence" (the latter is especially so for the Mormons). It's possible to be "spiritual" to some extent without being religious.
You don't need to believe in the Red Sea parting (or any Earthly events of the sort) to believe you'll meet your family in an afterlife. It's entirely possible there really is an afterlife and some deity(ies), but that those things have zero physical effect in our Earthly lives (I think there might be some religions that believe this way).
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Good luck getting any music onto your iDevice without using iTunes. It's not just about money, it's about being locked into to one piece of horrible software, which only works on certain OSes.
No, that would be bad. The Capitol is a historically significant building, and creating a vacuum in it could very well cause it to collapse.
Filling it with nitrogen or some other inert gas should be OK though.
Uh oh, I pissed off the Apple shill!!!
Go back to your Steve Jobs shrine. What a loser you are.
Is it considered polite/acceptable in the USA for the waiter to pass plates over, or reach across the table/other people's food? It isn't in the EU.
What's this "polite" thing you speak of? Here in the US, we barely have any manners at all, and we sure as hell have no idea what proper sit-down restaurant service is supposed to look like.
There, waiters are taught to ALWAYS serve from the diners left side, and that the best kind of service is so discreet that the diner didn't even notice it happened.
Waiters are taught in Europe? Well that would definitely make a difference. We Americans aren't real big on teaching people how to behave properly.
Seriously though, the big problem here in America is the inept management. Managers here think that customers like having lots of interaction with their server. And they might be right too; I'm not sure. Obviously, it doesn't apply to people like you and me, but surely these big corporate chains have done plenty of research into what customers actually prefer on average, and will adjust their training to match (assuming giving the customers what they want doesn't cost more; annoying service from the waiter doesn't actually cost the restaurant anything unlike better-quality food and more-careful or skillful preparation).
To help you understand American culture a little better, I'd like to share a quip I heard once: "America is like a third world country that won the lottery."
One minor note about your comment about serving from the diner's left side: I guess they don't have any booths in Europe? With a lot of seating arrangements here, there's only one spot where the waiter can stand and reach the table.
How's that tasting for ya?
Dear God do I hate that phrase. It makes me suspicious that there's some reason it shouldn't taste good. "How is everything" is such a better way to pose the question.
Sorry, I misspelled that phrase; it should read:
"How's that tastin' for ya?"
I think it might be a regional thing. I heard it all the time when I lived in Arizona, for instance, but not in the northeast.
"How is everything" is a more cultured way to speak. So in southern latitudes you won't hear that.
I doubt it will be long before decent quality Android phones also ditch their headphone jack. And that would just add to the pile of reasons that I find Android to be an inferior experience.
Wow, that's some seriously deluded and kool-aid-drinking thinking there: "Androids are inferior because they'll eliminate headphone jacks, even though they haven't yet." They haven't done it yet, so what makes you think they're all going to do it? There's a ridiculous variety of Android phones out there. Where are the Apple phones with two SIM slots? There aren't any. Lots of people in Asia have Android phones with dual SIMs; it's a common feature there. Where's the Apple phone with an SDcard slot? They don't have any. But there's tons of Android phones with them, including the new Galaxy S7, and many other lesser-known ones. The nice thing about Android is there's lots of vendors (Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, Sony, etc.) so someone is bound to have a model with the features you want.
I didn't pay for my MBP, and didn't pay (extra) for my iPhone either (carrier provided). I use Apple for free (as in beer). Am I also a sucker?
Quite possibly. Your employer is (I'm assuming that's who bought your 2 MBPs. But if you're paying your own phone bills (you're a little vague here), and you think your iPhone is "free", then yes, you're definitely a sucker. I'm a little shocked anyone on Slashdot would not understand, by now, how phone subsidization plans work. You're paying extra every month (or are locked into a higher-priced plan so you don't see the extra charge) which pays for the phone during the contract period. Smart people don't buy subsidized phones these days, they buy a phone outright and get a less-expensive service with no contract, usually through a reseller.
It must be a uniquely American thing to equate massive levels of attention with good service. As a Brit now living in the US, all the unwanted interruptions you get when you're just trying to enjoy a slow, peaceful restaurant meal really took some getting used to.
I'm American, and have only lived in America, and I really hate this practice too. Drives me nuts.
A couple years ago, I lived in northern New Jersey where there's a bunch of Italian restaurants. At one, that looked family-owned, it was totally overstaffed, with some Italian-looking waiters, but a Mexican guy who I'm not sure what his position was other than "waterboy". He came around every few minutes to refill our water glasses, even though we had barely drank any water. It was the most annoying over-service ever. One of my guests (an older guy who speaks some Italian) tried thanking him with "grazi", and the guy corrected him with "gracias". My guest then asked him if this was an Italian restaurant or a Spanish one. I didn't go back to this place.
Anyway, you're completely correct about them seemingly deliberately waiting until your mouth is full of food to come over and ask "How's that tasting for ya?" and also clearing the plates before you've even finished. This stuff is epidemic.
Honestly, eating out in America is really not a fun experience. Just like going to a movie theater. Better just to buy your own food at a supermarket and cook it yourself, and watch a movie at home. America's a good country if you want to make good money and stay at home all the time to enjoy it with a big house, and come and go in a nice car (and you're healthy...). If you like going out a lot to restaurants, cafes, movies, etc., it kinda sucks.
No, Ebay is like being at a flea market. Amazon makes it much less obvious who you're dealing with when it comes to their "affiliates".
With Ebay, for instance, it's very easy for me to click one button and only look at sellers in the US or in North America. Can't do that on Amazon; I have to wade through all the Chinese sellers and can only tell something is shipping from China by looking at the estimated delivery date. Heck, on Ebay I can even filter items by the geographic distance from myself: if I want to buy an item that's within 25 miles, I can filter it that way.
With Ebay, you *know* you're dealing with some other seller (because Ebay doesn't sell or ship anything at all, they're just a website), and that policies and reputations can differ greatly. With Amazon, you really don't. It's a big mess. Is an item being sold to you by Amazon itself, by someone else but fulfilled by Amazon, or by someone completely independent? Are returns for a product free or not? It completely varies. But finding this stuff out isn't that easy.
Apple doesn't make and sell most of those accessories so they are giving any profits from them to others.
It doesn't work that way. Big American companies aren't like Asian conglomerates that have divisions for all kinds of different stuff; they focus on just a few things, and maximize the profitability of those things. If something isn't profitable enough, it gets cut.
Most likely, these accessories just don't have enough profit involved for Apple to feel it's worth it. For some small company, it is.
Apple could charge a (bigger) premium for the bigger battery and increased durability
Not very many people are willing to pay that much of a premium for these things. Even worse, they can get these things as add-ons from 3rd-party sellers, cheaper than what it'd cost from Apple, which has to have huge profit margins.
Apple could sell to market segments they currently are ignoring.
Which ones? These people are going to buy iPhones no matter what. They aren't missing out on any customers. Apple customers aren't like customers for other things, where they compare the features, prices, reliability, etc. and make a balanced decision. With Apple buyers, they have an emotional connection to Apple so that's what they buy, no matter what.
You seem to be assuming that Apple is like other companies, such as car companies, which have to worry about losing their customer to competitors. Apple doesn't.
The market segment exists for smartphones with bigger batteries and/or more rugged construction. That's not really a debate.
People who prioritize these things over "I love Apple!!!" are not Apple customers. They're going to get some other device that suits them better and doesn't cost as much. People who care about these things are obviously practical, and that means they won't be interested in an overpriced fashion statement.
If they fail to address these market segments then their competitors will sooner or later.
Their competitors can't put Apple logos on their stuff, or run iOS on their devices. Their competitors aren't Apple. Apple's customers are not going to defect because a competitor makes a device with better specs; if that were true, Apple would already be out of business because there's already much better phones than theirs out there, for less money.
People will not stick endlessly with Apple products if they can get better options elsewhere.
Yes, they will. At least for a long time, unless Apple *really* screws up, but it'll take a long time for them to trash their reputation that badly.
We've already seen that when Apple almost died prior to the return of Steve Jobs.
It took a long time for the glow to fade before Jobs came back. And they're arguably doing a much better job now than they did under Scully.
What are you talking about? It doesn't matter what people mind or don't mind, we're talking about Apple users here. They're going to buy an iPhone 7 no matter what, so why should Apple go to extra trouble to give them a model that they like better?
Samsung is far-and-away the leader in that technology, and has the Patent Portfolio to prove it. So, they have had a merry old time, DENYING Apple their AMOLED parts (or pricing them so they are deliberately out-of-the-question).
How do you expect a supplier to act when you sue them for something as stupid as rounded corners? They brought that on themselves.
They actually design for their own designers and engineers.
Designers, not engineers. Engineers are generally practical and only care about something being well-designed (from an engineering standpoint: robust, reliable, etc.), easy to manufacture, etc. It's the "designers" who come up with things like where buttons should be, and tell the engineers to make it work. The designers only relent if the engineers can't physically make it work.
Now you might have a point with your bit about the 5 Series saving space inside the device with a questionable design decision, but here again, it's the designers who are to blame, because they're the ones who demanded the thing be so small/thin/whatever in the first place. If only engineers were driving the design, the device would probably be significantly larger, have an easily-removed back panel, have a giant battery, and all the parts inside would be easily replaced for easy serviceability.
Basically, if you want to see what devices would look like if true engineers made all the design decisions, go look at military hardware.
I don't love Apple either; I find Android to be far worse as well.
I used to use iTunes on my work MBP -- I now use it on my personal MBP. Cost of switching is more then just a new phone. iOS is "good enough."
If Apple would ever pull their head out of their ass and allow jailbreaking and an USB port I wouldn't have any issues.
Why should they "pull their head out of their ass"? Suckers like you are happy to throw piles of cash at them for their overpriced, handcuffed items (iPhone and two MBPs in your case, plus an assertion that iOS is "good enough" and the cost of switching is too high). If Apple has zero risk of losing you as a customer by not allowing jailbreaking, not having a USB port, not having a headphone jack, or any other design decision they may make, why should they bother listening to your concerns?
I buy very few apps don't and I don't use iTunes ever. I don't need a bigger or better screen. Battery life is not a concern.
So you don't use any of the fancy features on an iPhone, yet you're willing to pay a gigantic premium to have an iPhone?
You're like all those old people who buy an extremely powerful $100k luxury car and then drive it 20mph under the speed limit a few times a month.
I agree with the other poster: you'd be better off with a Windows phone. They're dirt cheap, they allegedly work quite well for the limited things they do, but they have no apps, but you don't care about that anyway. And they have headphone jacks too.
Exactly. On Android, there's no shortage of ways for me to do what I want to do. I can pop out the SDcard and put it in my PC and write to it directly. Or I can use a USB cable and connect that to my PC, and use the "adb" utility to "adb push" files directly into the filesystem. Or I can use the SDcard as I said above, but use rsync to synchronize the files on my phone with those on my PC. Or I can use various GUI file management software. I'm not required to use any particular software at all, especially not bloated crapware from the phone maker.
That's overkill. All you need to do is hermetically seal the Capitol building after all the Congresspeople are in there, and lock and bar the doors so no one breaks the seal.
That's only a problem at the extremes. In my household we have 3 Galaxy S4/S5 devices, all now 2-3 years old or so. No signs of burn-in. However we also aren't heavy users of a particular game. AMOLEDs work great as long as you have typical usage patterns for a phone (i.e., don't look at the same thing for hours straight). It's not much different than the old CRT monitors: people talked about burn-in there too, but the only time people really had a problem with it was when they did something extreme, such as using the CRT on an industrial or business computer that had the exact same image on the screen all day long, never turning it off or varying it much. This generally isn't a problem with phones. Plus, not many people tend to keep phones more than, say, 5 years anyway, since they're handheld mobile devices and tend to get beat up from handling.
The market CLEARLY exists and I think Apple is leaving money on the table by ignoring it.
BS.
Anyone who wants these features is just going to buy some add-on accessories to give them these features. Either way, they're going to buy an iPhone, no matter how well or how poorly it satisfies their desire for these features.
So how is Apple "leaving money on the table"?
It's very unlikely Apple would make enough profit by having an additional phone model for these people to justify the expenses involved (engineering, inventory, etc.). It's costly for companies to have more versions of a product, so it's only worth it if it brings them more customers. This isn't going to bring them more customers; it'll just split their existing market, and it's unlikely they'd pay enough extra for the bulky model to make up for this, when they can buy 3rd-party stuff that adds these features for less.
Same here; I have a Galaxy S5. I can buy spare OEM batteries on Ebay for less than $10, and swap it out in a minute (most of the time for swapping is getting my Otterbox case off the phone; the back of the S5 comes off in a few seconds).
Even better, it's waterproof, even with the removable back.
On top of that, there's an SDcard slot. I can put a 128GB card in there if I want.
Women keep their phones in their purses. That's why women actually want bigger phones than men, on average, because men care about them fitting into their pockets, whereas women have plenty of room for a phone/phablet in their purses.
iPhones are objectively inferior. They use IPA LCD screens, whereas Samsungs use AMOLED screens that are brighter and have more vivid colors.
It probably helps a lot that Samsung is a screen manufacturer and is at the cutting edge of these technologies, whereas Apple doesn't manufacture anything at all and has to outsource everything, and has to buy their screens from someone else (like Samsung).
Samsung's cameras are better too. And here again, Samsung makes their own cameras.
or 3) give up my library of apps & music bought through iTunes
That's what you get for being stupid enough to buy into the Apple ecosystem and buy stuff that only works on Apple devices. Enjoy your lock-in.
Exactly, but it's really not much of a problem, because there's such a simple solution: Don't buy an iPhone 7!
Get some other (better) phone, and you'll have a headphone jack, longer-lasting battery, probably a better screen too, and you won't be restricted to Apple's walled garden and be forced to use the abomination that is iTunes.
Yeah, but it's not all-or-nothing. There's plenty of agnostics who simply acknowledge they don't know what happens in the afterlife rather than being firmly convinced there's nothing (I'm one of them). There's a big gulf between "there may be an afterlife, and I like to think there is, and perhaps there's some deity watching over us", and "this ancient book is the literal truth, along with all the supernatural events described in it, even though they're contradicted by hard evidence" (the latter is especially so for the Mormons). It's possible to be "spiritual" to some extent without being religious.
You don't need to believe in the Red Sea parting (or any Earthly events of the sort) to believe you'll meet your family in an afterlife. It's entirely possible there really is an afterlife and some deity(ies), but that those things have zero physical effect in our Earthly lives (I think there might be some religions that believe this way).