That's a very boxy looking snake, especially the head. They really need to get a cover or something to smooth it over, cause there are a lot of planes on that snake.
Yes, i read the link. The Nook didn't used to be as good as the Kindle, but now it's better, and you think that's a _bad_ thing? Consumer reports _still_ rates the most recent eInk Nook higher than the most recent eInk Kindle. In fact i'm not sure what caused the change, but the article is indeed out of date and the Nook is now rated two points higher than the nearest Kindle instead of one. Whatever changes Amazon has made since the CNN article was posted haven't been enough.
Amazon does indeed have a color tablet coming out, and B&N has an even better tablet coming out, so Amazon remains a step behind in that area. The Nook Color got rave reviews from those willing to take the trouble to root it (which actually just consists of putting new firmware on an SD card) not to mention selling well in general, and the new version looks even more promising. Meanwhile the Kindle Fire has been getting mixed reviews.
We could argue the fine points back and forth forever, but it's clear that the various versions of the Nook are competitive with the various versions of the Kindle, and there are a lot of people who actually prefer the Nook.
As i said before, your basic position isn't untenable, you just keeping making exaggerated arguments that aren't supported by the facts.
I'd lend more credence to your claims if so many parts of your argument weren't... completely wrong.
Their stores constantly lose money [...] Just about everything they do today loses them money - their stores, their website, and their ereader. These are well know facts. Look them up.
I'm confused, if everything they do loses money, how did they post over $30 million in profits last year? (psst, it's a fact, i just looked it up.)
just about any comparison between the Nook and Kindle comes out in favor of the Kindle.
Funny, that's not what i heard. It's also not what my girlfriend decided either after comparing the Kindle and Nook on her own. And although i made sure not to influence her before the purchase i was quite happy she made the choice she did since the Nook deal nicely with a lot more formats than the Kindle, making it easier to transfer books to the device.
Don't get me wrong, i love Android, but i'm pretty sure they're not in violation of #5. Not given the number of times i've had to sit there waiting while pretty much everything in the page has been loaded _except_ for the main text =P
Why do you say that? Are your privy to some financial information that the rest of us are unaware of? While Borders was busy paying Amazon to run their online store for them Barnes & Noble was building up their own online presence. And rather than depending on just physical books they jumped into the eBook business and have been marketing their own reader. Certainly all businesses can fail, but unlike a lot of their competitors B&N has actually been working at keeping up with the times.
So Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to be compatible with both phones and tablets. Do you have set a specific flag when you build the code depending on what kind of device you want to put it on? Or is it relatively device agnostic? Can it determine the screen size by querying the hardware and figure out what to do automagically on its own?
Yeah! "Cupcake", "Eclair", "Ice Cream", what the hell kind of names are those? Sounds more like something from a dinner menu than a release list!
The OSS movement really needs to take a page from the book of professional companies like Microsoft. They know how to give their product versions classy names, like "Mango". See how much better that is?
Google just spent almost $13 billion on buying Motorola. I know it would have been a far bigger regulatory hurdle, but they could have bought all (or even just half) of the music industry instead. Then send a note to Apple: "Stop suing people over Android or the iTunes store will lose access to half (or more) of its music." Yeah, i'm sure there would be legal issues involved that i don't know about, but it's a nice dream.
It took about 5-10 minutes of searching to find the exact reference, but here you go.
So technically speaking the passwords _weren't_ encrypted. I remember when that bit of news came my friends and i were all very curious to know what kind of salt (if any) they were using, but we're all geeks at a software company so we're a bit more clued in about such things. In fact i don't remember if the salt question ever got answered.
As for why it keeps getting brought up, especially in this thread, it's because people keep asking why Sony was treated more harshly than Valve seems to be getting treated now. The answer is that Sony took forever to say anything about what was going on and the made a habit of releasing partial bits of information, some of which were confusing or misleading. The encryption issue is just one of those bits the handling of which upset people.
PSN was hacked between April 17th and 19th. It took a day or three before they shut down the servers without saying a word. It was three more days before they admitted there had been a data intrusion, and another three days before they admitted that user data had been compromised and days more before they admitted that personally identifiable information had been compromised.
If Valve starts dribbling out more bits of previously unrevealed information over the next few weeks (not just details on the aspects they've already confirmed) then the amount of goodwill currently being displayed will erode very fast.
Most of us don't feel that it's possible to prevent all security intrusions, but it is possible for companies to be responsible and forthright about it when it happens.
In the period between when the exec, a reasonable authority figure in this case, said the credit card info was unencrypted and when it was confirmed that it actually was encrypted it was entirely reasonable for everyone to be worried and pissed off at Sony. Finding out the truth later is a pretty good reason to stop worrying (as much) but it provides an entirely different reason to be pissed off at Sony.
Stop trying to sell android tablets to people that want iPads and start making tablets for people that want more than just an iPad!
Believe it or not, there are people interested in tablets but who don't like the iOS interface. In fact given that there are about twice as many people who own an Android phone as who own an iPhone it seems likely that there could be an equally big market for a well done Android tablet. I don't disagree that they should _also_ try to do things that the iPad doesn't, but there's plenty of room in the market for regular tablets as well and there's no reason they shouldn't try to fulfill both needs.
Read the sentence i wrote after the one you quoted, "(Even if they don't think they're getting paid enough, they're still getting paid a lot by the standards of you and me.)"
I couldn't find the slashdot article talking about the complaints about how little they were getting paid, but here's one about how much they _are_ getting paid, and that's _not_ counting bonuses.
Even without the bonuses low to mid six figure salaries are nothing to sneeze at, regardless of whether you think it's fair compensation or not. The relevant bit to this conversation being there's no way an "average joe" can afford the initial investment to hire a team of such people to get in on the high frequency trading game in the first place. Even the "schmucks" of that industry who you may argue are getting ripped off are still making far more than i do.
There are a large number of people in the US who would be happy to impose tariffs on products from countries with poor environmental or human rights records. All else being equal the US government would be happy to do the same. It would be something they could brag about to the voters at the next election cycle, both because it's what "we" want and because it would help support local farms and manufacturing.
The problem is the people who don't want this are 1) a bunch of corporations in the US who make money from selling stuff someone else made rather than making stuff themselves, 2) pretty much all the corporations in China and, most importantly, 3) the government of China.
Trying to impose such tariffs would trigger a monumental legal and political battle, spearheaded by the government of the people the environmental protections would actually be protecting. Which means that it's never going to happen.
If that made any sense at all, we could all do the same thing and we'd all be rich, right?
No, only those of use with millions (or by this point possibly billions) to invest in office space a block away from the stock market, dedicated high speed fiber, massive high performance servers, and teams of highly paid analysts and mathematicians to write the trading algorithms. (Even if they don't think they're getting paid enough, they're still getting paid a lot by the standards of you and me.)
I'm not saying this is a productive industry and the way our entire economy ought to be heading, just that there are reasons why the the average joe can't get rich using the same methods.
Ahhh, that's a nice simple, easy to understand graph, thanks!
It looks like the amount is going up by about 2 ppm per year. Let's assume for the moment that that continues forever, we don't run out of oil, we don't increase or decrease our use of oil, and neither us nor any new natural process develops a way to handle the higher concentrations of CO2. (Yeah, totally not going to happen, especially on the time scales i'm about to use, but just in theory.)
According to Wikipedia's section on carbon dioxide toxicity In about 300 years about 20% of the human race will start feeling drowsy and just generally crappy. In 800 years pretty much everyone will feel crappy all the time, and a lot of people will have constant nausea and headaches. In 2,300 years we'll exceed the US federal regulations for an eight hour work day. In 10,000 years it will be strong enough to act as a narcotic, so we'll all be high all the time, and suffer from high blood pressure and "temporary" hearing loss. In 15,000 years we'll exceed the federal regulations for ten minutes of exposure. In 20,000 years we'll reach the point where it is "immediately dangerous to life and health". At 25,000 years, "it causes stimulation of the respiratory center, dizziness, confusion and difficulty in breathing accompanied by headache and shortness of breath. Panic attacks may also occur at this concentration." Finally at 40,000 years, "it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes."
Obviously we'd start seeing negative long terms effects very early on in that process. But if we somehow kept on as we are going, no more and no less, then in 40,000 years the air would be completely toxic. If suddenly exposed to it you'd pass out after 5-10 minutes and presuming no help was forthcoming you would never wake up again, and i doubt humans are unique in that regard. That level of CO2 would almost certainly kill off most animal life on the planet. Of course i expect we'd actually kill off everything a lot sooner than that, but i don't know if there's been any studies of the toxic effects of long term exposure to high levels of CO2
40,000 years may seem like a long time to us, but from a geological and evolutionary perspective that's nothing. Being human we'll change what we're doing one way or another long before that, but it's an interesting way to put the current rate of change in perspective.
Uh, i'm confused, in the very next section after the one you linked, "Warmest Decades", it lists 1990-1999 as being 0.313 degrees over the mean, while 2000-2009 is 0.513 degrees over the mean. So it looks like we're about 0.1 degrees behind the predicted rate of increase, but that doesn't seem like a great reasons to celebrate to me, especially given that we've only got a single data point on the scale they were talking about.
Now if I write a tablet app I need to host it through the Google, Amazon and B&N marketplaces. Though right now I think I would skip B&N as their claim of "over a thousand apps" is not that impressive.
Er, what? Having "over a thousand apps" for the Nook might be a valid reason to skip _buying_ the Nook. (Realistically of course it depends on what those thousand+ apps are, what you plan to do with it, and if you're willing to go through the fairly painless process of creating a boot SD card so you can access Google's marketplace.)
However i can't think of any reason why that would discourage you from hosting your app through B&N. As far as i'm aware putting an app up on different markets doesn't require significant rewriting or anything. And if you put it up on the Google marketplace you're competing with 500,000 or so other apps, whereas on the B&N store you're only competing with "over 1000" other apps. If i had an app i would jump at the chance to get it on the B&N store, especially if you believe their claims that the original Nook Color is second in sales only to the iPad.
Reduced competition, not so good for the buyers but great for the sellers.
I was just going to ask if that would be one of the options. Because if they actually use a system "by which people determine who should speak based on who most people are looking at" you know the guy who springs for the giant slab with huge glowing letters on it is going to get to speak all the time.
And it does indeed appear that all phones that are part of the OS are getting lumped together. The article complains about Windows 7 getting lumped together with Windows Mobile, but there's a similar problem for all the OSes besides iOS. Apple doesn't sell crappy hardware, so i'm not surprised Apple came in head and shoulders above everyone else. If they broke the results down both by OS versions and by phone models the results would be much more interesting and informative. As it is the results are practically meaningless.
I don't know about the writer, but in my case it's because i've tried friends' iPods and iPhones, and they do not make me more happy, just more frustrated. I'm interested in what makes _me_ happy, not what statistically makes other people happy.
Maybe that's because i got a top line Android phone that is in every way comparable to an iPhone. Do you actually have a study to back up your statistics or are you just making things up? If there is such a study did it differentiate between people who were willing to pay for a quality phone and people who just went with Android because they could get a cheap phone that way?
Alternately there are people who become totally invested in the things they own and can see no fault with them, and there are people who can enjoy a product but still analyze its strengths and weaknesses from a mostly neutral perspective. Perhaps one of those groups is more attracted to either Android or iPhone than the other?
That ad for what you can do with the iPhone was actually an ad for what you can do with iOS. That works fine for Apple because if they convince you to use iOS the only product you're going to buy is an iPhone.
On the other hand if Motorola puts out an ad highlighting all the things you can do with Android then even if they convince you to get an Android phone there's no guarantee you'll by _their_ Android phone.
This isn't an insurmountable problem, they could split the time between what's good about Android and what's good about their phone, or talk about features of Android without mentioning they're features that _all_ Android phones have. But it probably seems safer to the executives to only focus on what's cool about _their_ phone.
And of course the other thing is that i believe historically commercials that have gone with the whiz-bang appeal have done better than commercials that tried to be informative. As a nerd this always bothered me because i'm more interested in facts than presentation. (Not that i don't enjoy a well done presentation, but i try not to let my purchasing habits be influenced by it.) But i guess the majority of the male 18-35 demographic that commercials always try to aim at doesn't think the same way.
So another question to ask is, what demographic is the Apple commercial appealing to? And is it actually more successful overall than the Android commercials? The iPhone is certainly selling well above any individual Android model, but it's selling well below the total Android ecosystem. If one company switched to similar informative commercials would they actually see an increase in sales? Or is the iPhone's dominance as a single model due to some other factor? Again, as i nerd i actually like the tack the Apple commercial is taking (even if i get offended at all the times they imply, or even state outright, that you can't do the same thing on Android when you most certainly can) but historically appealing to people like me hasn't usually led to widespread market success.
So given all the differences between the Apple/iOS/Apple/iPhone model and the Google/Android/Dozens of companies/hundreds of phones model it's hard to say when comparing marketing strategies and measures of success is valid and when it's comparing, well, apples to oranges.
I've been thinking about switching my money from my primary checking account over to a credit union, though if i do i may very well keep my BoA account with a minimal amount of money in it and just not use it. It's the same account my parents helped me set up as a teen at what was then our local Seafirst bank. Despite having been bought out by BoA decades ago (or maybe because i felt like it was killed rather than having the chance to become disenamored of it like BoA later) i still feel rather attached to the account. But i'm strangely sentimental like that.
There was an overlapping window when i would use Google for most searches, but switch back to Alta Vista whenever i wanted to be able to search for an exact word/phrase including punctuation. Eventually Alta Vista dropped the ability to handle punctuation (maybe at the time of the CMGI sale? I dunno) and i pretty much stopped using Alta Vista from that point on.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very boxy looking snake, especially the head. They really need to get a cover or something to smooth it over, cause there are a lot of planes on that snake.
Yes, i read the link. The Nook didn't used to be as good as the Kindle, but now it's better, and you think that's a _bad_ thing? Consumer reports _still_ rates the most recent eInk Nook higher than the most recent eInk Kindle. In fact i'm not sure what caused the change, but the article is indeed out of date and the Nook is now rated two points higher than the nearest Kindle instead of one. Whatever changes Amazon has made since the CNN article was posted haven't been enough.
Amazon does indeed have a color tablet coming out, and B&N has an even better tablet coming out, so Amazon remains a step behind in that area. The Nook Color got rave reviews from those willing to take the trouble to root it (which actually just consists of putting new firmware on an SD card) not to mention selling well in general, and the new version looks even more promising. Meanwhile the Kindle Fire has been getting mixed reviews.
We could argue the fine points back and forth forever, but it's clear that the various versions of the Nook are competitive with the various versions of the Kindle, and there are a lot of people who actually prefer the Nook.
As i said before, your basic position isn't untenable, you just keeping making exaggerated arguments that aren't supported by the facts.
Their stores constantly lose money [...] Just about everything they do today loses them money - their stores, their website, and their ereader. These are well know facts. Look them up.
I'm confused, if everything they do loses money, how did they post over $30 million in profits last year? (psst, it's a fact, i just looked it up.)
just about any comparison between the Nook and Kindle comes out in favor of the Kindle.
Funny, that's not what i heard. It's also not what my girlfriend decided either after comparing the Kindle and Nook on her own. And although i made sure not to influence her before the purchase i was quite happy she made the choice she did since the Nook deal nicely with a lot more formats than the Kindle, making it easier to transfer books to the device.
Dressing up as an animal is bad? Are they going to be going after kids for wearing animal costumes next Halloween?
And a better question, has anyone told PETA about the furry community yet?
Don't get me wrong, i love Android, but i'm pretty sure they're not in violation of #5. Not given the number of times i've had to sit there waiting while pretty much everything in the page has been loaded _except_ for the main text =P
Why do you say that? Are your privy to some financial information that the rest of us are unaware of? While Borders was busy paying Amazon to run their online store for them Barnes & Noble was building up their own online presence. And rather than depending on just physical books they jumped into the eBook business and have been marketing their own reader. Certainly all businesses can fail, but unlike a lot of their competitors B&N has actually been working at keeping up with the times.
So Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to be compatible with both phones and tablets. Do you have set a specific flag when you build the code depending on what kind of device you want to put it on? Or is it relatively device agnostic? Can it determine the screen size by querying the hardware and figure out what to do automagically on its own?
Yeah! "Cupcake", "Eclair", "Ice Cream", what the hell kind of names are those? Sounds more like something from a dinner menu than a release list!
The OSS movement really needs to take a page from the book of professional companies like Microsoft. They know how to give their product versions classy names, like "Mango". See how much better that is?
Agreed, and the subject has been brought up on Slashdot before.
Google just spent almost $13 billion on buying Motorola. I know it would have been a far bigger regulatory hurdle, but they could have bought all (or even just half) of the music industry instead. Then send a note to Apple: "Stop suing people over Android or the iTunes store will lose access to half (or more) of its music." Yeah, i'm sure there would be legal issues involved that i don't know about, but it's a nice dream.
It took about 5-10 minutes of searching to find the exact reference, but here you go.
So technically speaking the passwords _weren't_ encrypted. I remember when that bit of news came my friends and i were all very curious to know what kind of salt (if any) they were using, but we're all geeks at a software company so we're a bit more clued in about such things. In fact i don't remember if the salt question ever got answered.
As for why it keeps getting brought up, especially in this thread, it's because people keep asking why Sony was treated more harshly than Valve seems to be getting treated now. The answer is that Sony took forever to say anything about what was going on and the made a habit of releasing partial bits of information, some of which were confusing or misleading. The encryption issue is just one of those bits the handling of which upset people.
PSN was hacked between April 17th and 19th. It took a day or three before they shut down the servers without saying a word. It was three more days before they admitted there had been a data intrusion, and another three days before they admitted that user data had been compromised and days more before they admitted that personally identifiable information had been compromised.
If Valve starts dribbling out more bits of previously unrevealed information over the next few weeks (not just details on the aspects they've already confirmed) then the amount of goodwill currently being displayed will erode very fast.
Most of us don't feel that it's possible to prevent all security intrusions, but it is possible for companies to be responsible and forthright about it when it happens.
In the period between when the exec, a reasonable authority figure in this case, said the credit card info was unencrypted and when it was confirmed that it actually was encrypted it was entirely reasonable for everyone to be worried and pissed off at Sony. Finding out the truth later is a pretty good reason to stop worrying (as much) but it provides an entirely different reason to be pissed off at Sony.
Stop trying to sell android tablets to people that want iPads and start making tablets for people that want more than just an iPad!
Believe it or not, there are people interested in tablets but who don't like the iOS interface. In fact given that there are about twice as many people who own an Android phone as who own an iPhone it seems likely that there could be an equally big market for a well done Android tablet. I don't disagree that they should _also_ try to do things that the iPad doesn't, but there's plenty of room in the market for regular tablets as well and there's no reason they shouldn't try to fulfill both needs.
$750 with the extra RAM. It's a tablet priced like a full-size laptop, in this economy.
It looks nice, but it's toast.
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Read the sentence i wrote after the one you quoted, "(Even if they don't think they're getting paid enough, they're still getting paid a lot by the standards of you and me.)"
I couldn't find the slashdot article talking about the complaints about how little they were getting paid, but here's one about how much they _are_ getting paid, and that's _not_ counting bonuses.
Even without the bonuses low to mid six figure salaries are nothing to sneeze at, regardless of whether you think it's fair compensation or not. The relevant bit to this conversation being there's no way an "average joe" can afford the initial investment to hire a team of such people to get in on the high frequency trading game in the first place. Even the "schmucks" of that industry who you may argue are getting ripped off are still making far more than i do.
There are a large number of people in the US who would be happy to impose tariffs on products from countries with poor environmental or human rights records. All else being equal the US government would be happy to do the same. It would be something they could brag about to the voters at the next election cycle, both because it's what "we" want and because it would help support local farms and manufacturing.
The problem is the people who don't want this are 1) a bunch of corporations in the US who make money from selling stuff someone else made rather than making stuff themselves, 2) pretty much all the corporations in China and, most importantly, 3) the government of China.
Trying to impose such tariffs would trigger a monumental legal and political battle, spearheaded by the government of the people the environmental protections would actually be protecting. Which means that it's never going to happen.
If that made any sense at all, we could all do the same thing and we'd all be rich, right?
No, only those of use with millions (or by this point possibly billions) to invest in office space a block away from the stock market, dedicated high speed fiber, massive high performance servers, and teams of highly paid analysts and mathematicians to write the trading algorithms. (Even if they don't think they're getting paid enough, they're still getting paid a lot by the standards of you and me.)
I'm not saying this is a productive industry and the way our entire economy ought to be heading, just that there are reasons why the the average joe can't get rich using the same methods.
Ahhh, that's a nice simple, easy to understand graph, thanks!
It looks like the amount is going up by about 2 ppm per year. Let's assume for the moment that that continues forever, we don't run out of oil, we don't increase or decrease our use of oil, and neither us nor any new natural process develops a way to handle the higher concentrations of CO2. (Yeah, totally not going to happen, especially on the time scales i'm about to use, but just in theory.)
According to Wikipedia's section on carbon dioxide toxicity In about 300 years about 20% of the human race will start feeling drowsy and just generally crappy. In 800 years pretty much everyone will feel crappy all the time, and a lot of people will have constant nausea and headaches. In 2,300 years we'll exceed the US federal regulations for an eight hour work day. In 10,000 years it will be strong enough to act as a narcotic, so we'll all be high all the time, and suffer from high blood pressure and "temporary" hearing loss. In 15,000 years we'll exceed the federal regulations for ten minutes of exposure. In 20,000 years we'll reach the point where it is "immediately dangerous to life and health". At 25,000 years, "it causes stimulation of the respiratory center, dizziness, confusion and difficulty in breathing accompanied by headache and shortness of breath. Panic attacks may also occur at this concentration." Finally at 40,000 years, "it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes."
Obviously we'd start seeing negative long terms effects very early on in that process. But if we somehow kept on as we are going, no more and no less, then in 40,000 years the air would be completely toxic. If suddenly exposed to it you'd pass out after 5-10 minutes and presuming no help was forthcoming you would never wake up again, and i doubt humans are unique in that regard. That level of CO2 would almost certainly kill off most animal life on the planet. Of course i expect we'd actually kill off everything a lot sooner than that, but i don't know if there's been any studies of the toxic effects of long term exposure to high levels of CO2
40,000 years may seem like a long time to us, but from a geological and evolutionary perspective that's nothing. Being human we'll change what we're doing one way or another long before that, but it's an interesting way to put the current rate of change in perspective.
Uh, i'm confused, in the very next section after the one you linked, "Warmest Decades", it lists 1990-1999 as being 0.313 degrees over the mean, while 2000-2009 is 0.513 degrees over the mean. So it looks like we're about 0.1 degrees behind the predicted rate of increase, but that doesn't seem like a great reasons to celebrate to me, especially given that we've only got a single data point on the scale they were talking about.
Now if I write a tablet app I need to host it through the Google, Amazon and B&N marketplaces. Though right now I think I would skip B&N as their claim of "over a thousand apps" is not that impressive.
Er, what? Having "over a thousand apps" for the Nook might be a valid reason to skip _buying_ the Nook. (Realistically of course it depends on what those thousand+ apps are, what you plan to do with it, and if you're willing to go through the fairly painless process of creating a boot SD card so you can access Google's marketplace.)
However i can't think of any reason why that would discourage you from hosting your app through B&N. As far as i'm aware putting an app up on different markets doesn't require significant rewriting or anything. And if you put it up on the Google marketplace you're competing with 500,000 or so other apps, whereas on the B&N store you're only competing with "over 1000" other apps. If i had an app i would jump at the chance to get it on the B&N store, especially if you believe their claims that the original Nook Color is second in sales only to the iPad.
Reduced competition, not so good for the buyers but great for the sellers.
I was just going to ask if that would be one of the options. Because if they actually use a system "by which people determine who should speak based on who most people are looking at" you know the guy who springs for the giant slab with huge glowing letters on it is going to get to speak all the time.
And it does indeed appear that all phones that are part of the OS are getting lumped together. The article complains about Windows 7 getting lumped together with Windows Mobile, but there's a similar problem for all the OSes besides iOS. Apple doesn't sell crappy hardware, so i'm not surprised Apple came in head and shoulders above everyone else. If they broke the results down both by OS versions and by phone models the results would be much more interesting and informative. As it is the results are practically meaningless.
I don't know about the writer, but in my case it's because i've tried friends' iPods and iPhones, and they do not make me more happy, just more frustrated. I'm interested in what makes _me_ happy, not what statistically makes other people happy.
Maybe that's because i got a top line Android phone that is in every way comparable to an iPhone. Do you actually have a study to back up your statistics or are you just making things up? If there is such a study did it differentiate between people who were willing to pay for a quality phone and people who just went with Android because they could get a cheap phone that way?
Alternately there are people who become totally invested in the things they own and can see no fault with them, and there are people who can enjoy a product but still analyze its strengths and weaknesses from a mostly neutral perspective. Perhaps one of those groups is more attracted to either Android or iPhone than the other?
That ad for what you can do with the iPhone was actually an ad for what you can do with iOS. That works fine for Apple because if they convince you to use iOS the only product you're going to buy is an iPhone.
On the other hand if Motorola puts out an ad highlighting all the things you can do with Android then even if they convince you to get an Android phone there's no guarantee you'll by _their_ Android phone.
This isn't an insurmountable problem, they could split the time between what's good about Android and what's good about their phone, or talk about features of Android without mentioning they're features that _all_ Android phones have. But it probably seems safer to the executives to only focus on what's cool about _their_ phone.
And of course the other thing is that i believe historically commercials that have gone with the whiz-bang appeal have done better than commercials that tried to be informative. As a nerd this always bothered me because i'm more interested in facts than presentation. (Not that i don't enjoy a well done presentation, but i try not to let my purchasing habits be influenced by it.) But i guess the majority of the male 18-35 demographic that commercials always try to aim at doesn't think the same way.
So another question to ask is, what demographic is the Apple commercial appealing to? And is it actually more successful overall than the Android commercials? The iPhone is certainly selling well above any individual Android model, but it's selling well below the total Android ecosystem. If one company switched to similar informative commercials would they actually see an increase in sales? Or is the iPhone's dominance as a single model due to some other factor? Again, as i nerd i actually like the tack the Apple commercial is taking (even if i get offended at all the times they imply, or even state outright, that you can't do the same thing on Android when you most certainly can) but historically appealing to people like me hasn't usually led to widespread market success.
So given all the differences between the Apple/iOS/Apple/iPhone model and the Google/Android/Dozens of companies/hundreds of phones model it's hard to say when comparing marketing strategies and measures of success is valid and when it's comparing, well, apples to oranges.
I've been thinking about switching my money from my primary checking account over to a credit union, though if i do i may very well keep my BoA account with a minimal amount of money in it and just not use it. It's the same account my parents helped me set up as a teen at what was then our local Seafirst bank. Despite having been bought out by BoA decades ago (or maybe because i felt like it was killed rather than having the chance to become disenamored of it like BoA later) i still feel rather attached to the account. But i'm strangely sentimental like that.
There was an overlapping window when i would use Google for most searches, but switch back to Alta Vista whenever i wanted to be able to search for an exact word/phrase including punctuation. Eventually Alta Vista dropped the ability to handle punctuation (maybe at the time of the CMGI sale? I dunno) and i pretty much stopped using Alta Vista from that point on.