- Androids are outselling iPhones (globally, maybe not AT&T specifically) - iPhones currently don't have real 4G, which is over 3x faster than 3G on AT&T's network - Android users now consume more data, faster, and put more strain on the wireless network at any given time, compared to iPhone users - Skype is available on all major platforms and works over even 3G; quality is surely better on 4G/LTE.
And yet, they're blocking Facetime "out of an overriding concern for the impact this expansion may have on our network and the overall customer experience"??
Logic fail, AT&T. Just admit you're being greedy bastards and think iPhone users are more easily ripped off, that way you'll just be extortionists without also being liars.
The manufacturers are doing their damnest to make buying US cars for Canadian use as unattractive as possible.
That includes US dealers outright refusing to sell if they know you're Canadian, to Canadian dealerships not honouring the warranty on a Canadian-registered, US-bought vehicle.
Consumers love those things, but consumers eat whatever crap is put before them. Customers on the other hand require a bit of respect and insist the manufacturers design to their specs not the other way around.
(Bolded for emphasis)
You aren't describing a customer, you're describing a business client-vendor relationship.
Customers are halfway between client and consumer: they can't dictate every spec and customization so it's unique to them (a client OTOH pays enough to make it worth the vendor's time and effort), but they *can* customize from a limited set of pre-set options. Apple just happens to provide options that are more limited.
I will assume the app and reviews were on an app store or traditional aggregation website. It didn't have the ability to filter or sort by critical ratings first?
"Enhanced Forensic Access to iPhone/iPad/iPod Devices running iOS 4" [...] Protected file system dumps can be extracted from iPhone devices equipped with on-board hardware encryption and running iOS 4.x. Supported devices include iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (both GSM and CDMA models), first-gen iPad, and latest releases of iPod Touch (3rd and 4th generation).
Maybe it works unofficially on these, but iOS5 and the iPhone 4S have been out for almost a year now. I imagine the ability to break into these would be a significant product feature they'd want to promote--if they had it.
Not to mention tape-delaying major live events like the opening and closing ceremonies.
It wasn't just the "time difference"; in Vancouver 2010 (Pacific time zone), they still tape-delayed at least the opening ceremonies for Americans on the west coast.
Their viewership numbers were still through the roof in both Vancouver and London, but that's clearly more a case of captive audience than a working strategy. Those who VPNed to the UK to stream British coverage were a direct loss in eyeball-to-advertising metrics, but that audience is merely in the thousands, more intelligent, and less susceptible to advertising, so sadly NBC probably doesn't care about those lost viewers at all.
People with diplomatic immunity can still be arrested. They just can't be prosecuted. The most that a host nation can do is expel them and send them out on the next flight home.
Case in point: Andrey Knyazev was arrested for drunk driving after causing a crash that killed a woman in Ottawa, Canada in 2001. He claimed diplomatic immunity, and returned home after Russia refused to lift immunity. He then stood trial in Russia, and was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison. A *Russian* prison, mind you, not a comparatively cushy Canadian one.
Might want to re-check the Vancouver Olympic coverage.
Lots of complaints online about NBC's coverage there, particularly from west-coasters suffering from tape-delay of events (especially the opening ceremonies) happening in their own time zone.
And when I said "dramas" I was being inclusive of the sitcoms and all the other primetime entertainment. BBC does produce some good shows. Like Doctor Who and..... well that's all I've got (that's currently airing).
Top Gear. It's only the most-watched regular TV show on the planet, with a regular viewership more than the entire US population.
Not that it's a drama, but since you're arguing against a fee that pays for more than just drama shows, it is a valid example of another good BBC-produced TV show.
NBC tape-delayed the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which is on Pacific Time. Not sure if it was for the entire USA, but the West Coast definitely got a TD'ed opening ceremonies.
I was watching the closing ceremonies live in Canada, could even choose between over half a dozen stations (several English and French which covered different sports during the actual Games, and even got one with Chinese and Mandarin narrators). I switched to an NBC affiliate during a commercial break and it was showing a volleyball final, which the US team wasn't even playing. I'm sorry but that was pathetic.
NBC will fuck up the Rio Olympics just as badly. Americans living near the Canadian border might be lucky if they can get over-the-air broadcasts of CBC, which won the rights for the 2016 Games. True, a lot of Americans took to proxies to get real Olympics over the internet, , but it's too bad Americans as a whole keep rewarding NBC with such high Olympic viewership.
I have several IOS devices, and the only "password" you can put into it is the simple 4 character unlock code. You should certainly know that all encryption is based on keeping something secret that's very difficult to guess. If the only secret you're keeping is a 4 digit key, you're completely hosed to brute force attacks.
FYI iOS hasn't been limited to a 4-number password and has been able to use a long, variable-length alphanumeric passcode for over 2 years now, with the release of iOS4. If you used an Apple iPhone config utility to set policies (meant for enterprise, but any user could download the tool), you could use alphanumeric passwords 3 years ago under iOS 3.x.
For a small enough body, the drilling itself would contribute to pushing the asteroid away. That drilled material is being expelled after all (either mechanically or vapourized by laser).
My first line absolutely dismisses your claiming I somehow "honestly think Apple deserves to be paid billions..." I said no such thing, I implied no such thing. My not engaging in the merits of these lawsuits means exactly that.
After correcting a couple of dates in Enderandrew's comment, I speculated on an alternate history of what might have happened had the iPhone not been released, or if it hadn't taken off.
My point is that the products were already converging in that direction and contrary to what you think Apple being absent would not stop such products from appearing in the market
[Bolded for emphasis]
And you put words in my mouth (brain...) again. I never said things weren't converging or wouldn't, in fact if you read it again I implied just the opposite, except that it would've taken longer without the iPhone. Different features would be introduced piecemeal, by different vendors, running on different OSes and UIs, and then spread across several models and price points for each vendor.
I maintain that there wouldn't have been an iPhone-like "converged" touchscreen smartphone for a few years, or at the very least a couple of years. I don't see how anyone can honestly dispute this, because in real-life, after iPhone was live-demo'd in Jan 2007, it took almost 21 months for Android to get to v1.0. RIM released its first all-touchscreen phone, the Storm, about a month after *that*, and it was a user experience disaster. Remember this is *with* major competitive motivation from the iPhone and its "obvious" smartphone features, suggesting which features to fast-track convergence for. It is logical to assume that in the iPhone's absence it could indeed had taken "a few" years.
For yet more support that it would have taken longer without the iPhone, again I point to the tablet market. For almost 10 years (and 3 years after the iPhone) tablet makers couldn't come up with anything consumers wanted, until the iPad came along and again made things "obvious" for everyone. Only HP with WebOS was anywhere close by the time the iPad was released (Courier was nowhere near production, Google didn't consider Android tablet-ready until v3.0 a year later).
Apple did not solve the problem of touchscreen cellphones being expensive. If it wasn't for the cellphone operators hiding the purchase price from the consumer with their pricing plans you would see that if anything Apple only made them more expensive.
Of course iPhone-calibre smartphones would be more expensive. This only reinforces my alt-history speculation that iPhone-like features would've been introduced piecemeal and slowly--few would be willing to pay. US carriers were also notorious for locking features out unless the user paid for it, like Bluetooth and data. Carriers charging expensive data plans were part of the reason the Prada, F700 and original BB Storm didn't have wifi. Consumers wouldn't pay more for a touchscreen phone, plus an extra $15/mo for 20 MB of data (from a traditional Blackberry plan in 2009), if all they had was a WAP browser. They *would* be willing to pay an extra $30/mo for unlimited data, if they had a good browser. The original iPhone started off with a good browser, and funny thing, it took off even though it only had 2G bandwidth, because iPhones could use the many wifi hot spots across the US.
Now, tell me how anything I've written in these last three comments remotely implies that I "honestly think Apple deserves to be paid billions" through litigation.
I'm not going to weigh in on the merits of the look-and-feel design lawsuits, just wanted to point a few things out:
The Prada was revealed in Sept. 2006 for design award consideration, and won for that year, not 2005. Prada was officially announced Dec 2006, the iPhone in January 2007 (not 2006). The Samsung F700 was announced Feb 2007 (not at CEBIT 2006 as some sites have falsely claimed).
The Prada's UI was vastly inferior to the iPhone. Based on video reviews on Youtube, Prada's main apps like contacts and calendar looked like they'd been mapped straight from a traditional candybar phone--large narrow font, scrollbars the reviewer had a hard time using... and it still used a T9 typing interface instead of a keyboard. The browser was never mentioned in a review except to say it sucked.
In short, the Prada barely took advantage of the full-front touchscreen at all. Reviews said the Samsung F700's browser was crap, too.
All this to say, the first iPhone's UI and features (even if crippled in some ways--2G, no copy-paste, no native apps, etc) played a big part in its uptake. And if the iPhone had never come onto the scene when it did, or hadn't taken off, there wouldn't have been as much competitive urgency to release good all-touchscreen phones. So even with cheaper displays and better mobile processors by 2007, much like tablets before the iPad, pricey touchscreen phones would've staggered along with low adoption rates for a few more years before large numbers of consumers started bothering with them.
Tablet makers had 3 years between iPhone showing what an all-touch UI could be, and the iPad being introduced, to get their act together. Not to mention rumours of an Apple tablet several years before that. Everyone who thought they'd enter the tablet space, should have known they'd target consumers, not business/enterprise, and tried to beat them to the punch.
And yet not one of the major players had the guts go it alone and ditch Windows in its various forms and do something groundbreaking, so they stuck with a UI paradigm, hardware design, and price points that users had soundly rejected.
As a result, not one bothered to market their stuff during "America's Next Top Model." Nice slight, btw, implying it's a fashion item aimed at airheads, but Apple ads also ran during manly American sports like football, basketball and baseball, and of course other prime time TV shows... how many tablet ads ran there before the iPad crashed their party?
Tablets had been around for 10 years. That's 6.7 Moore's Law computing generations. If they couldn't come up with anything consumers wanted in that time, even after the iPhone hinted at the direction Apple would take, they never would.
As for price, I said it in another comment: The initial $499 price was not only half what everyone was expecting, but quite cheap at the time when you factor in the size of the screen, component miniaturization, fanless operation, convenience, ease of use, etc. It couldn't have been "ridiculously overpriced" at introduction when no one could match its size or quality at any lower price for over a year on hardware alone.
They said the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone were fads when they came out. I think the GUI was called a fad, when PCs were DOS and Windows was a poor joke. Fashion plays a large part of Apple's success but, like marketing, it only gets the initial sale--if the product is a pain to use they won't come back when it's time to replace it.
Wikipedia has this as part of their definition of "fad": "Though the term trend may be used interchangeably with fad, a fad is generally considered a fleeting behavior whereas a trend is considered to be a behavior that evolves into a relatively permanent change."
Of the Apple products I mentioned, only the translucent-shelled iMac can qualify as a fad, since they were around for only 4 years before solid-coloured iMacs replaced it (not a bad run, that's 2.67 Moore's Law generations). The iPods are still kicking strong 11 years later, the iPhone over 5 years. The iPhone will take the lion's share of mobile phone profits (not revenue or market share) for at least a few more years.
None of this is "fleeting behaviour" otherwise fads would include Laserdiscs, VCRs, DVD players, CD-ROM drives, and for sure the HD-DVD format (2 years).
Slashdot Mirror
Their thinking simply doesn't make any sense.
- Androids are outselling iPhones (globally, maybe not AT&T specifically)
- iPhones currently don't have real 4G, which is over 3x faster than 3G on AT&T's network
- Android users now consume more data, faster, and put more strain on the wireless network at any given time, compared to iPhone users
- Skype is available on all major platforms and works over even 3G; quality is surely better on 4G/LTE.
And yet, they're blocking Facetime "out of an overriding concern for the impact this expansion may have on our network and the overall customer experience"??
Logic fail, AT&T. Just admit you're being greedy bastards and think iPhone users are more easily ripped off, that way you'll just be extortionists without also being liars.
Couldn't Apple have payed their wage slaves better so they wouldn't want to risk their jobs by thieving?
Right, because well-paid people and employees never steal from anyone.
The manufacturers are doing their damnest to make buying US cars for Canadian use as unattractive as possible.
That includes US dealers outright refusing to sell if they know you're Canadian, to Canadian dealerships not honouring the warranty on a Canadian-registered, US-bought vehicle.
Consumers love those things, but consumers eat whatever crap is put before them. Customers on the other hand require a bit of respect and insist the manufacturers design to their specs not the other way around.
(Bolded for emphasis)
You aren't describing a customer, you're describing a business client-vendor relationship.
Customers are halfway between client and consumer: they can't dictate every spec and customization so it's unique to them (a client OTOH pays enough to make it worth the vendor's time and effort), but they *can* customize from a limited set of pre-set options. Apple just happens to provide options that are more limited.
I will assume the app and reviews were on an app store or traditional aggregation website. It didn't have the ability to filter or sort by critical ratings first?
Someone should tell these people: http://www.elcomsoft.com/iphone-forensic-toolkit.html
From your linked site:
"Enhanced Forensic Access to iPhone/iPad/iPod Devices running iOS 4"
[...]
Protected file system dumps can be extracted from iPhone devices equipped with on-board hardware encryption and running iOS 4.x. Supported devices include iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (both GSM and CDMA models), first-gen iPad, and latest releases of iPod Touch (3rd and 4th generation).
In other words, they don't support the latest-generation iPhone (4S) or iOS (5), nor the last two generations of iPad. According to Apple, as of June 2012 almost 80% of the 365 million iOS devices sold had been upgraded to iOS5.
Maybe it works unofficially on these, but iOS5 and the iPhone 4S have been out for almost a year now. I imagine the ability to break into these would be a significant product feature they'd want to promote--if they had it.
Irrelevant if the work gets done and employee satisfaction is high. Staring idly at a monitor is not productivity.
Unfortunately, MBA-logic response to that is "Who cares about employee satisfaction, obviously we're not giving them enough work to do."
Not to mention tape-delaying major live events like the opening and closing ceremonies.
It wasn't just the "time difference"; in Vancouver 2010 (Pacific time zone), they still tape-delayed at least the opening ceremonies for Americans on the west coast.
Their viewership numbers were still through the roof in both Vancouver and London, but that's clearly more a case of captive audience than a working strategy. Those who VPNed to the UK to stream British coverage were a direct loss in eyeball-to-advertising metrics, but that audience is merely in the thousands, more intelligent, and less susceptible to advertising, so sadly NBC probably doesn't care about those lost viewers at all.
Looks like it's passive GPS and accelerometer sensors only, with no video recording and no link to the OBDII connector.
As such, it can't detect if you use your turn signals when turning or changing lanes. Huge fail on detecting "safe" driving.
IMHO someone who changes lanes on a multi-lane highway without signaling just as dangerous as someone going maybe 20% over the speed limit.
People with diplomatic immunity can still be arrested. They just can't be prosecuted. The most that a host nation can do is expel them and send them out on the next flight home.
Case in point: Andrey Knyazev was arrested for drunk driving after causing a crash that killed a woman in Ottawa, Canada in 2001. He claimed diplomatic immunity, and returned home after Russia refused to lift immunity. He then stood trial in Russia, and was convicted and sentenced to 4 years in prison. A *Russian* prison, mind you, not a comparatively cushy Canadian one.
Might want to re-check the Vancouver Olympic coverage.
Lots of complaints online about NBC's coverage there, particularly from west-coasters suffering from tape-delay of events (especially the opening ceremonies) happening in their own time zone.
And when I said "dramas" I was being inclusive of the sitcoms and all the other primetime entertainment. BBC does produce some good shows. Like Doctor Who and..... well that's all I've got (that's currently airing).
Top Gear. It's only the most-watched regular TV show on the planet, with a regular viewership more than the entire US population.
Not that it's a drama, but since you're arguing against a fee that pays for more than just drama shows, it is a valid example of another good BBC-produced TV show.
NBC tape-delayed the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which is on Pacific Time. Not sure if it was for the entire USA, but the West Coast definitely got a TD'ed opening ceremonies.
I was watching the closing ceremonies live in Canada, could even choose between over half a dozen stations (several English and French which covered different sports during the actual Games, and even got one with Chinese and Mandarin narrators). I switched to an NBC affiliate during a commercial break and it was showing a volleyball final, which the US team wasn't even playing. I'm sorry but that was pathetic.
NBC will fuck up the Rio Olympics just as badly. Americans living near the Canadian border might be lucky if they can get over-the-air broadcasts of CBC, which won the rights for the 2016 Games. True, a lot of Americans took to proxies to get real Olympics over the internet, , but it's too bad Americans as a whole keep rewarding NBC with such high Olympic viewership.
I have several IOS devices, and the only "password" you can put into it is the simple 4 character unlock code. You should certainly know that all encryption is based on keeping something secret that's very difficult to guess. If the only secret you're keeping is a 4 digit key, you're completely hosed to brute force attacks.
FYI iOS hasn't been limited to a 4-number password and has been able to use a long, variable-length alphanumeric passcode for over 2 years now, with the release of iOS4. If you used an Apple iPhone config utility to set policies (meant for enterprise, but any user could download the tool), you could use alphanumeric passwords 3 years ago under iOS 3.x.
A border patrol vigilante is busy trying to figure out how to load a magazine clip into his assault rifle flatscreen.
There's an app for that.
For a small enough body, the drilling itself would contribute to pushing the asteroid away. That drilled material is being expelled after all (either mechanically or vapourized by laser).
My first line absolutely dismisses your claiming I somehow "honestly think Apple deserves to be paid billions..." I said no such thing, I implied no such thing. My not engaging in the merits of these lawsuits means exactly that.
After correcting a couple of dates in Enderandrew's comment, I speculated on an alternate history of what might have happened had the iPhone not been released, or if it hadn't taken off.
My point is that the products were already converging in that direction and contrary to what you think Apple being absent would not stop such products from appearing in the market
[Bolded for emphasis]
And you put words in my mouth (brain...) again. I never said things weren't converging or wouldn't, in fact if you read it again I implied just the opposite, except that it would've taken longer without the iPhone. Different features would be introduced piecemeal, by different vendors, running on different OSes and UIs, and then spread across several models and price points for each vendor.
I maintain that there wouldn't have been an iPhone-like "converged" touchscreen smartphone for a few years, or at the very least a couple of years. I don't see how anyone can honestly dispute this, because in real-life, after iPhone was live-demo'd in Jan 2007, it took almost 21 months for Android to get to v1.0. RIM released its first all-touchscreen phone, the Storm, about a month after *that*, and it was a user experience disaster. Remember this is *with* major competitive motivation from the iPhone and its "obvious" smartphone features, suggesting which features to fast-track convergence for. It is logical to assume that in the iPhone's absence it could indeed had taken "a few" years.
For yet more support that it would have taken longer without the iPhone, again I point to the tablet market. For almost 10 years (and 3 years after the iPhone) tablet makers couldn't come up with anything consumers wanted, until the iPad came along and again made things "obvious" for everyone. Only HP with WebOS was anywhere close by the time the iPad was released (Courier was nowhere near production, Google didn't consider Android tablet-ready until v3.0 a year later).
Apple did not solve the problem of touchscreen cellphones being expensive. If it wasn't for the cellphone operators hiding the purchase price from the consumer with their pricing plans you would see that if anything Apple only made them more expensive.
Of course iPhone-calibre smartphones would be more expensive. This only reinforces my alt-history speculation that iPhone-like features would've been introduced piecemeal and slowly--few would be willing to pay. US carriers were also notorious for locking features out unless the user paid for it, like Bluetooth and data. Carriers charging expensive data plans were part of the reason the Prada, F700 and original BB Storm didn't have wifi. Consumers wouldn't pay more for a touchscreen phone, plus an extra $15/mo for 20 MB of data (from a traditional Blackberry plan in 2009), if all they had was a WAP browser. They *would* be willing to pay an extra $30/mo for unlimited data, if they had a good browser. The original iPhone started off with a good browser, and funny thing, it took off even though it only had 2G bandwidth, because iPhones could use the many wifi hot spots across the US.
Now, tell me how anything I've written in these last three comments remotely implies that I "honestly think Apple deserves to be paid billions" through litigation.
Don't put words in my mouth. You didn't even read the very first line in my comment, did you?
I'm not going to weigh in on the merits of the look-and-feel design lawsuits, just wanted to point a few things out:
The Prada was revealed in Sept. 2006 for design award consideration, and won for that year, not 2005. Prada was officially announced Dec 2006, the iPhone in January 2007 (not 2006). The Samsung F700 was announced Feb 2007 (not at CEBIT 2006 as some sites have falsely claimed).
The Prada's UI was vastly inferior to the iPhone. Based on video reviews on Youtube, Prada's main apps like contacts and calendar looked like they'd been mapped straight from a traditional candybar phone--large narrow font, scrollbars the reviewer had a hard time using... and it still used a T9 typing interface instead of a keyboard. The browser was never mentioned in a review except to say it sucked.
In short, the Prada barely took advantage of the full-front touchscreen at all. Reviews said the Samsung F700's browser was crap, too.
All this to say, the first iPhone's UI and features (even if crippled in some ways--2G, no copy-paste, no native apps, etc) played a big part in its uptake. And if the iPhone had never come onto the scene when it did, or hadn't taken off, there wouldn't have been as much competitive urgency to release good all-touchscreen phones. So even with cheaper displays and better mobile processors by 2007, much like tablets before the iPad, pricey touchscreen phones would've staggered along with low adoption rates for a few more years before large numbers of consumers started bothering with them.
If this emulator project had received $2.5 billion in funding too, I'm sure version 1 would've been out the door much sooner.
The only reason to ever use the Facebook app is because it's the only way to upload photos. Without that, may as well use the mobile version.
The Youtube app never let you upload videos from the phone, so indeed, there's less reason to keep it as a discrete app.
Tablet makers had 3 years between iPhone showing what an all-touch UI could be, and the iPad being introduced, to get their act together. Not to mention rumours of an Apple tablet several years before that. Everyone who thought they'd enter the tablet space, should have known they'd target consumers, not business/enterprise, and tried to beat them to the punch.
And yet not one of the major players had the guts go it alone and ditch Windows in its various forms and do something groundbreaking, so they stuck with a UI paradigm, hardware design, and price points that users had soundly rejected.
As a result, not one bothered to market their stuff during "America's Next Top Model." Nice slight, btw, implying it's a fashion item aimed at airheads, but Apple ads also ran during manly American sports like football, basketball and baseball, and of course other prime time TV shows... how many tablet ads ran there before the iPad crashed their party?
Tablets had been around for 10 years. That's 6.7 Moore's Law computing generations. If they couldn't come up with anything consumers wanted in that time, even after the iPhone hinted at the direction Apple would take, they never would.
As for price, I said it in another comment: The initial $499 price was not only half what everyone was expecting, but quite cheap at the time when you factor in the size of the screen, component miniaturization, fanless operation, convenience, ease of use, etc. It couldn't have been "ridiculously overpriced" at introduction when no one could match its size or quality at any lower price for over a year on hardware alone.
The cognitive dissonance occurs when people realize that the world's premier global festival is a "private" event ....
... which the local taxpayers are forced to pay off for the next decade or two. Truly an amazing deal.
"Windows 8 style UI"
shall become known as "Wait-style UI" or "Weight-style UI"
They said the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone were fads when they came out. I think the GUI was called a fad, when PCs were DOS and Windows was a poor joke. Fashion plays a large part of Apple's success but, like marketing, it only gets the initial sale--if the product is a pain to use they won't come back when it's time to replace it.
Wikipedia has this as part of their definition of "fad":
"Though the term trend may be used interchangeably with fad, a fad is generally considered a fleeting behavior whereas a trend is considered to be a behavior that evolves into a relatively permanent change."
Of the Apple products I mentioned, only the translucent-shelled iMac can qualify as a fad, since they were around for only 4 years before solid-coloured iMacs replaced it (not a bad run, that's 2.67 Moore's Law generations). The iPods are still kicking strong 11 years later, the iPhone over 5 years. The iPhone will take the lion's share of mobile phone profits (not revenue or market share) for at least a few more years.
None of this is "fleeting behaviour" otherwise fads would include Laserdiscs, VCRs, DVD players, CD-ROM drives, and for sure the HD-DVD format (2 years).