So when you say it never had a chance to live, you are referring to for yourself right? Because the "package" seems to have worked out just well for all the hundreds of thousands of iPhones Apple has sold so far with the first model...
None of Apple's commercials about the iPhone has ever said that. The commercials just demonstrate what the device can do. Thats it. So how is that unethical?
And even if it DID say that how would it be unethical? Are people without free will? Are you not insulting people by assuming they can't resist such sales pitches?
....not being anti-pop and giving popular culture a chance.
There isn't much music out there thats better. The whole "if its popular it must suck" meme has gone WAYY too far. Ever consider that something might be unpopular because it SUCKS?
Alright I'm pulling up a chair here. Can you please explain to us all why Apple's iPhone marketing campaign is UNETHICAL? Did Steve Jobs kill some baby seals to get the commercials made? Were kittens thrown against the wall on every bad take? I'm seriously curious, how could a marketing campaign that includes a disembodied hand, voice and product be unethical?
Yes I do absolutely because those other devices still have software counterparts who's interfaces suck. There have been cheaper than iPod MP3 Players out for YEARS and Apple still dominates. The iTunes Music Store has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. Steve Jobs himself said less than 3% of music stored on iPods comes from the iTunes Music Store. That means people are getting most of their music from their own CD collections or from pirated music and those two sources will work on ANY DAP not just an iPod. Yet people still keep buying iPods over everything else. Why is that?
Because iTunes is so braindead simple to use. If you have to be a geek to figure out how to get your music onto a supermarket bought $30 MP3 Player than its sales are going to continue to pale in comparison to Apple's. Interfaces is King here. Features are not. Every DAP on the market has a bare minimum of features. No large amount of people give a crap about whether a device suports Ogg Vorbis or whether or not the device has a TPM chip in it or if it has a removeable battery or not. What they DO care about is how much effort is needed to get the music from the CD/computer to the DAP. Thats it right there. The competition just has a chronic case of "Not getting it". They throw out devices with more and more features than the iPod has but fail to improve the interfaces. Its basically a bunch of wasted effort as the frustrations of Creative's CEO can show you.
Sometimes I think its just a mental block that most technical people have. They don't get that most other humans are social creatures and don't want to spend hours with their equipment figuring out how to get it to work. They really can't see whats special about iTunes and the iPod because they never valued good interfaces in the first place. This makes it almost TOO easy for Apple to dominate. Hell look at Apple's iPhone interface vs Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm OS. Not even in the same ballpark.
I had a Treo 700p with a 2GB SD card full of music that I used as my MP3 player. I just bought an iPhone. My office is full of people I encouraged to buy Treos yet not ONE of them could figure out how to load music onto their phones. The iPhone makes it ridiculously easy to do this. The product simply isn't good enough if only geeks can figure out how to use all of its functions.
You don't get it because by definition of being a Slashdot regular you are a geek and geeks don't put much value in easy to use interfaces. If there isn't a REASON to tinker, it doesn't attract you. Likewise this is exactly why Apple DOES have a cult following.
They are in fact shipping daily. AT&T stores don't have enough storage room to store a week's worth of iPhones. I got in line at an AT&T store on friday and 10 minutes after I got in line they told everyone they were sold out. They only had like maybe 60 phones in stock.
You should have qualified your article title as "10 Fatal iPhone Flaws For ME" as they are largely irreleant to the tens of millions who will be buying it.
I'd much rather have a distant dad if we got to live in a huge house and I got to drive a luxury car while in high school at the expense of having him around while growing up. I can always get to know the guy after I'm an adult. I can't go back and make myself a rich kid though. Nothing can ever give me those years of not having everything back.
And no, I'm not being sarcastic or trolling. I'm just being REALLY materialistic.
Apple hasn't paid any tech sites to report on anything. This is genuine demand for information about the device. And for the last time it doesn't MATTER that there are other devices out there with better specs if the interface is ASS.
"Why else would Apple cripple a brand new platform that could fuel a rush of developers for them except to appease AT&T?"
Its actually for the reasons that they stated. I know the Slashdot set is rife with conspiracy theories but Apple and AT&T simply want to avoid the nightmare that other phones cause, such as Treos and WMobile devices of being returned when the user installs some instable 3rd party app and of course they go home and reload everything that was on the first phone onto the second phone causing another return, repeat repeat repeat.
Your definition of "class" is true. Its 100% true as Karl Marx described it. The only problem is he was wrong. There aren't just two classes. There are 3. His and your refusal to acknowledge that does not make you right. Yes those who own the means of production are the truly wealthy and everyone else works for them. But a "worker" who makes $250,000 a year has very little in common with someone who makes $19,000 a year. Their concerns are as different from each other as a middle class person's is from a deca millionaires. This is why Marx's foretold economic revolutions never took place. There's plenty for the poor to gain by revolting, but the middle class would have a lot to lose and so they declined to join in. Without the middle class participating the revolutions could not take place.
The failure of the old school definiton of class into two systems is that it tries to lump way too many people together under one banner. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/writer/executive who's making anyhere from $250,000 a year up to say $5 million a year lives in an entirely diferrent world from a school teacher/cop/fireman/factory worker/garbage man/retail clerk/fast food worker who makes anywhere from $19,000 to $130,000 a year. The former group lives in a better neighborhood, sends their kids to better schools, enjoys more travel and better vacations, has a much nicer house some with a second home, has substantial savings and a much better retirement plan and can make choices about where to work and who to work for. The bottom half of the latter group is working hard just to scrape out a living and make ends meet. They have few real chocies on what to do with their lives. They don't have adequate healthcare and no buffer of savings in the bank if they lose their job. Their children rarely go on to higher education.
The third group of course are the obviously wealthy. Those who are so rich that from birth they never have to work a day in their lives if they don't want to. This equals at least $15 million in the bank with additional money from investments/interest coming in all the time.
The two groups are not alike. They do not share class interests. They don't eat at the same places, they don't party at the same places and they don't live in the same places. They're extremely different from each other. Those who cling to Marx's distinction of class as being between only 2 parties are bitter, very very bitter, that the middle class actually exists. They want anyone who's not part of the "rich" class to team up together and gang up on the rich and take back whats "rightfully theirs" or some such. If this large nebulous class of "workers" is divided between the "middle class" and the "really poor" than that revolution can't happen. Not while our middle class is as large as it is because it means way too many people are satisified with what they have and know they have far too much to lose if they were to engage in an economy wrecking "revolution."
So to recap, there's an old school definition of class that contains only 2 divisions. Capital owning robber barrons on one side and ALL the people who work for them on the other side. The "modern" definition of economic class has 3 divisions. The capital owning class, the highly educated and highly paid middle class, and the working poor. Good luck with trying to get well educated and well paid middle class folks to consider themselves the same as a high school drop out garbage man or fast food worker. You've got your work cut out for you.
How can any report of more than a certain lenght possibly NOT display anyone's political slant? Even a robot would be programmed by someone with a slant and would display an indirect slant of its own. How can a HUMAN possibly report on something without slant? The very choosing of the topic of the report itself is indicative of a slant (i.e. populists are very interested in issues of class divides, elitists are not).
Please explain to me how downloading an.exe file and double-clicking it to install is "just flat out not easy for regular folks."
Alright. Its hard. They don't do it. If it wasn't hard, more Smartphone owners would do it.
Can you please explain to me why so few Smartphone/PDA users install 3rd party apps on their own?
BTW, of the 3 apps you mentioned, only Skype is a consumer application. The other two, ssh and VNC are programs that the average person would never seek to use. You are still in the geek mindset here. Its hard to get out of that mindset at times isn't it?
Running OS X I'm sure it is but its not the type of thing you want to risk. This isn't a teenage demonstration of bravado here. This phone is a big deal for Apple and Apple isn't taking any chances.
The overwhelming majority of users who just want a stable device will be very thankful of that btw.
Done right they're a great idea. The problem is for the most part they're not an easy thing to install for regular users. As I've said to you before most folks don't even sync their smartphones/PDAs with the provided syncing software. In order to install programs you have to be doing that much at least first.
Palm and Microsoft thought, rightly so, that if they could turn their respective products into large platforms that attracted large numbers of developers that users would follow. It turns out however that most users were simply intersted in the basic functions of the devices, Calenders, Addressbook, ToDos, Memos and not much else. I even had to show my co-workers how to install Google Maps on their devices and that can be done straight on the device via the web browser going to http://www.google.com/gmm
I personally on my Treo 700p have over a dozen 3rd party apps installed. I've been a Smartphone user for the past 5 years. I started with the Palm OS Kyocera 6035 green brick phone, then the clamshell Palm OS Kyocera 7135. than the Handspring Treo 600, Palm Treo 650 and now Palm Treo 700p. I have ALWAYS had to show others with these same devices how to install programs or setup their email. Its just flat out not easy for regular folks. I'm a geek. I suspect you are a geek as well. We like to tinker and figure this stuff out, everyone else doesn't have the patience. Thats where the iPhone comes in.
The iPhone makes it BRAIN dead easy to use and install 3rd party apps. Apple will make it as easy as can be as most app installation and phone OS updates will take place via iTunes. The phone will also sync with Outlook on PCs for PIM functions and Addressbook, Mail.app and iCal on the Mac for PIM functions. Right now my Treo 700p is my convergence device. I have a 2GB SD card in it and I use it to play MP3s so its a phone, PDA and "iPod" for me as I can sync it on my Mac with iTunes using a program called "The Missing Sync." Its just nowhere near as elegant as an iPhone would be. I pretty much FULLY use my Treo. Very few regular folks who own Treos do the same. The same goes for Windows Mobile device folks. With the iPhone regular folks will get more full use of their device than they would with anything else. So I am pretty confident in predicting that the iPhone will see exponentially higher 3rd party software usage by regular folks than all other smartphones/PDAs combined. Its only a matter of time for Apple to lineup the big players in the software industry to provide iPhone versions of their apps and offer them all via iTunes. None of this hunt and peck stuff we currently do with current Smartphones of going to this software vendor's website or that software vendor's website. It'll all be centralized via iTunes. AJax/Safari apps on the other hand will still utilize the "hunt and peck" method of distribution as Steve himself mentioned during the keynote when he said the apps will be offered from the developers own servers.
The 3rd party software may not cause issues right away. It may be months down the road and by then the software is no longer the obvious culprit.
And even though most people don't install 3rd party software on their phone, those who DO make up a disproportionate number of those who need new phones and support.
He is real. One thing he left out though was in addition to bricking phones, crappilly made 3rd party apps can cause instability and resets that cause the customer to return the phone for a new unit. If they reload the same software it keeps happening again and again and again....
I'm pretty sure Apple AND AT&T want to avoid that.
Are you aware that desktop computer sales in the entire industry are down vs laptop sales? Apple is focusing where the money is, on laptops. Desktops are thus not in the limelight anymore. But they DO recieve regular updates. A quarter delay in new desktops however is not a big issue. Apple entireing a new line of business that in just a few years could DOUBLE the earnings of the company _IS_ a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
So when you say it never had a chance to live, you are referring to for yourself right? Because the "package" seems to have worked out just well for all the hundreds of thousands of iPhones Apple has sold so far with the first model...
None of Apple's commercials about the iPhone has ever said that. The commercials just demonstrate what the device can do. Thats it. So how is that unethical?
And even if it DID say that how would it be unethical? Are people without free will? Are you not insulting people by assuming they can't resist such sales pitches?
....not being anti-pop and giving popular culture a chance.
There isn't much music out there thats better. The whole "if its popular it must suck" meme has gone WAYY too far. Ever consider that something might be unpopular because it SUCKS?
Alright I'm pulling up a chair here. Can you please explain to us all why Apple's iPhone marketing campaign is UNETHICAL? Did Steve Jobs kill some baby seals to get the commercials made? Were kittens thrown against the wall on every bad take? I'm seriously curious, how could a marketing campaign that includes a disembodied hand, voice and product be unethical?
My guess is their criteria is whats best for making money, not what soothes the civil rights sensibilities of the average paranoid slashdotter.
Yes I do absolutely because those other devices still have software counterparts who's interfaces suck. There have been cheaper than iPod MP3 Players out for YEARS and Apple still dominates. The iTunes Music Store has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. Steve Jobs himself said less than 3% of music stored on iPods comes from the iTunes Music Store. That means people are getting most of their music from their own CD collections or from pirated music and those two sources will work on ANY DAP not just an iPod. Yet people still keep buying iPods over everything else. Why is that?
Because iTunes is so braindead simple to use. If you have to be a geek to figure out how to get your music onto a supermarket bought $30 MP3 Player than its sales are going to continue to pale in comparison to Apple's. Interfaces is King here. Features are not. Every DAP on the market has a bare minimum of features. No large amount of people give a crap about whether a device suports Ogg Vorbis or whether or not the device has a TPM chip in it or if it has a removeable battery or not. What they DO care about is how much effort is needed to get the music from the CD/computer to the DAP. Thats it right there. The competition just has a chronic case of "Not getting it". They throw out devices with more and more features than the iPod has but fail to improve the interfaces. Its basically a bunch of wasted effort as the frustrations of Creative's CEO can show you.
Sometimes I think its just a mental block that most technical people have. They don't get that most other humans are social creatures and don't want to spend hours with their equipment figuring out how to get it to work. They really can't see whats special about iTunes and the iPod because they never valued good interfaces in the first place. This makes it almost TOO easy for Apple to dominate. Hell look at Apple's iPhone interface vs Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm OS. Not even in the same ballpark.
I had a Treo 700p with a 2GB SD card full of music that I used as my MP3 player. I just bought an iPhone. My office is full of people I encouraged to buy Treos yet not ONE of them could figure out how to load music onto their phones. The iPhone makes it ridiculously easy to do this. The product simply isn't good enough if only geeks can figure out how to use all of its functions.
"why would any company opt to cut themselves out of that market."
Because the iPod is over 78% of the DAP market thats why.
You don't get it because by definition of being a Slashdot regular you are a geek and geeks don't put much value in easy to use interfaces. If there isn't a REASON to tinker, it doesn't attract you. Likewise this is exactly why Apple DOES have a cult following.
You just aren't the target market.
They are in fact shipping daily. AT&T stores don't have enough storage room to store a week's worth of iPhones. I got in line at an AT&T store on friday and 10 minutes after I got in line they told everyone they were sold out. They only had like maybe 60 phones in stock.
You should have qualified your article title as "10 Fatal iPhone Flaws For ME" as they are largely irreleant to the tens of millions who will be buying it.
And underneath the smooth touch screen LAUNCHER its still the same lame Windows Mobile underneath.
Care to fail again?
I'd much rather have a distant dad if we got to live in a huge house and I got to drive a luxury car while in high school at the expense of having him around while growing up. I can always get to know the guy after I'm an adult. I can't go back and make myself a rich kid though. Nothing can ever give me those years of not having everything back.
And no, I'm not being sarcastic or trolling. I'm just being REALLY materialistic.
So we all have to conduct our lives the way you want us to? Whatever happened to "different strokes for different folks?"
If someone likes working all the time, why not respect that and move on with your life?
Apple hasn't paid any tech sites to report on anything. This is genuine demand for information about the device. And for the last time it doesn't MATTER that there are other devices out there with better specs if the interface is ASS.
"Why else would Apple cripple a brand new platform that could fuel a rush of developers for them except to appease AT&T?"
Its actually for the reasons that they stated. I know the Slashdot set is rife with conspiracy theories but Apple and AT&T simply want to avoid the nightmare that other phones cause, such as Treos and WMobile devices of being returned when the user installs some instable 3rd party app and of course they go home and reload everything that was on the first phone onto the second phone causing another return, repeat repeat repeat.
...into thinking you were dead huh?
Your definition of "class" is true. Its 100% true as Karl Marx described it. The only problem is he was wrong. There aren't just two classes. There are 3. His and your refusal to acknowledge that does not make you right. Yes those who own the means of production are the truly wealthy and everyone else works for them. But a "worker" who makes $250,000 a year has very little in common with someone who makes $19,000 a year. Their concerns are as different from each other as a middle class person's is from a deca millionaires. This is why Marx's foretold economic revolutions never took place. There's plenty for the poor to gain by revolting, but the middle class would have a lot to lose and so they declined to join in. Without the middle class participating the revolutions could not take place.
The failure of the old school definiton of class into two systems is that it tries to lump way too many people together under one banner. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/writer/executive who's making anyhere from $250,000 a year up to say $5 million a year lives in an entirely diferrent world from a school teacher/cop/fireman/factory worker/garbage man/retail clerk/fast food worker who makes anywhere from $19,000 to $130,000 a year. The former group lives in a better neighborhood, sends their kids to better schools, enjoys more travel and better vacations, has a much nicer house some with a second home, has substantial savings and a much better retirement plan and can make choices about where to work and who to work for. The bottom half of the latter group is working hard just to scrape out a living and make ends meet. They have few real chocies on what to do with their lives. They don't have adequate healthcare and no buffer of savings in the bank if they lose their job. Their children rarely go on to higher education.
The third group of course are the obviously wealthy. Those who are so rich that from birth they never have to work a day in their lives if they don't want to. This equals at least $15 million in the bank with additional money from investments/interest coming in all the time.
The two groups are not alike. They do not share class interests. They don't eat at the same places, they don't party at the same places and they don't live in the same places. They're extremely different from each other. Those who cling to Marx's distinction of class as being between only 2 parties are bitter, very very bitter, that the middle class actually exists. They want anyone who's not part of the "rich" class to team up together and gang up on the rich and take back whats "rightfully theirs" or some such. If this large nebulous class of "workers" is divided between the "middle class" and the "really poor" than that revolution can't happen. Not while our middle class is as large as it is because it means way too many people are satisified with what they have and know they have far too much to lose if they were to engage in an economy wrecking "revolution."
So to recap, there's an old school definition of class that contains only 2 divisions. Capital owning robber barrons on one side and ALL the people who work for them on the other side. The "modern" definition of economic class has 3 divisions. The capital owning class, the highly educated and highly paid middle class, and the working poor. Good luck with trying to get well educated and well paid middle class folks to consider themselves the same as a high school drop out garbage man or fast food worker. You've got your work cut out for you.
How can any report of more than a certain lenght possibly NOT display anyone's political slant? Even a robot would be programmed by someone with a slant and would display an indirect slant of its own. How can a HUMAN possibly report on something without slant? The very choosing of the topic of the report itself is indicative of a slant (i.e. populists are very interested in issues of class divides, elitists are not).
So presentation matters to you more than content?
Please explain to me how downloading an .exe file and double-clicking it to install is "just flat out not easy for regular folks."
Alright. Its hard. They don't do it. If it wasn't hard, more Smartphone owners would do it.
Can you please explain to me why so few Smartphone/PDA users install 3rd party apps on their own?
BTW, of the 3 apps you mentioned, only Skype is a consumer application. The other two, ssh and VNC are programs that the average person would never seek to use. You are still in the geek mindset here. Its hard to get out of that mindset at times isn't it?
Running OS X I'm sure it is but its not the type of thing you want to risk. This isn't a teenage demonstration of bravado here. This phone is a big deal for Apple and Apple isn't taking any chances.
The overwhelming majority of users who just want a stable device will be very thankful of that btw.
Done right they're a great idea. The problem is for the most part they're not an easy thing to install for regular users. As I've said to you before most folks don't even sync their smartphones/PDAs with the provided syncing software. In order to install programs you have to be doing that much at least first.
Palm and Microsoft thought, rightly so, that if they could turn their respective products into large platforms that attracted large numbers of developers that users would follow. It turns out however that most users were simply intersted in the basic functions of the devices, Calenders, Addressbook, ToDos, Memos and not much else. I even had to show my co-workers how to install Google Maps on their devices and that can be done straight on the device via the web browser going to http://www.google.com/gmm
I personally on my Treo 700p have over a dozen 3rd party apps installed. I've been a Smartphone user for the past 5 years. I started with the Palm OS Kyocera 6035 green brick phone, then the clamshell Palm OS Kyocera 7135. than the Handspring Treo 600, Palm Treo 650 and now Palm Treo 700p. I have ALWAYS had to show others with these same devices how to install programs or setup their email. Its just flat out not easy for regular folks. I'm a geek. I suspect you are a geek as well. We like to tinker and figure this stuff out, everyone else doesn't have the patience. Thats where the iPhone comes in.
The iPhone makes it BRAIN dead easy to use and install 3rd party apps. Apple will make it as easy as can be as most app installation and phone OS updates will take place via iTunes. The phone will also sync with Outlook on PCs for PIM functions and Addressbook, Mail.app and iCal on the Mac for PIM functions. Right now my Treo 700p is my convergence device. I have a 2GB SD card in it and I use it to play MP3s so its a phone, PDA and "iPod" for me as I can sync it on my Mac with iTunes using a program called "The Missing Sync." Its just nowhere near as elegant as an iPhone would be. I pretty much FULLY use my Treo. Very few regular folks who own Treos do the same. The same goes for Windows Mobile device folks. With the iPhone regular folks will get more full use of their device than they would with anything else. So I am pretty confident in predicting that the iPhone will see exponentially higher 3rd party software usage by regular folks than all other smartphones/PDAs combined. Its only a matter of time for Apple to lineup the big players in the software industry to provide iPhone versions of their apps and offer them all via iTunes. None of this hunt and peck stuff we currently do with current Smartphones of going to this software vendor's website or that software vendor's website. It'll all be centralized via iTunes. AJax/Safari apps on the other hand will still utilize the "hunt and peck" method of distribution as Steve himself mentioned during the keynote when he said the apps will be offered from the developers own servers.
The 3rd party software may not cause issues right away. It may be months down the road and by then the software is no longer the obvious culprit.
And even though most people don't install 3rd party software on their phone, those who DO make up a disproportionate number of those who need new phones and support.
He is real. One thing he left out though was in addition to bricking phones, crappilly made 3rd party apps can cause instability and resets that cause the customer to return the phone for a new unit. If they reload the same software it keeps happening again and again and again....
I'm pretty sure Apple AND AT&T want to avoid that.
Are you aware that desktop computer sales in the entire industry are down vs laptop sales? Apple is focusing where the money is, on laptops. Desktops are thus not in the limelight anymore. But they DO recieve regular updates. A quarter delay in new desktops however is not a big issue. Apple entireing a new line of business that in just a few years could DOUBLE the earnings of the company _IS_ a big deal.