That's a fair extrapolation except it doesn't actually result in Apple's lunch being eaten, because Apple doesn't compete on cost alone, or even primarily.
If another handset manufacturer wants to shoehorn Android into their hardware, their design will be confined by the software, they will still spend money customizing the software, and they will still spend money debugging and supporting the software.
In the PC universe, Apple doesn't compete with Microsoft, it competes with PC manufacturers. PC manufacturers have traditionally been hamstrung by their dependence on Windows, or in general, on OS software they didn't write and don't employ the talent to develop.
If handset manufacturers strike the same deal, what makes you think the outcome will suddenly reverse? Especially since, just as Apple had in the PC market, it now has a whopping head-start in terms of integration and developer support, and has acquired all the hardware and software talent it needs to custom-design everything from the CPU on up?
What I'm seeing here is that you're arguing a false choice. You're asserting that the only contact a developer is "allowed" to have when developing for the iPhone is with an ostensibly inferior tech support agent or a public forum devoid of Apple devs.
Thirty seconds of your lazy ass in a search engine would invalidate your claim.
You want to make this about Linux, then get offended at your own proffered stereotype? Have fun with that.
If you don't think the GP was repeating a tired old Linux stereotype, then what do you think it was? It certainly has no bearing on the reality of Android development, so do you think it's just a coincidence that the analogy he made up happens to be exactly the same as what trolls say about Linux, the OS that Android is based on?
Yes, it is a coincidence. Compared to the major device platform players who have their stuff together, the Android SDK docs are like being airdropped into a field with only your wits and perhaps a wooden spoon for digging.
But why am I wasting my breath - if you honestly think an open IRC channel is superior to a developer phone-support incident, then you're probably not a software developer, you're a hobbyist with a shiny new underdog to root for, at the expense of common sense.
Actually, I've been developing software professionally for a decade.
Then you should have enough brains not to present a false dichotomy as a real argument, and not to conveniently delete the valid critique of this craptastic SDK in favor of extending your truculent rant about "Linux stereotypes". The docs are inferior, the support, as it is offered and as it exists in the real world, is inferior, and the distribution infrastructure is incredibly inferior.
And yes, I do honestly think that IRC channels and newsgroups where you can have unlimited direct contact with developers are better than a couple of phone support incidents with someone whose job is talking on the phone, not writing code. If you disagree, I can't help but suspect that you're the hobbyist here, more comfortable with dialing 800 numbers than speaking to developers as peers -- or perhaps just one of Apple's favorite customers, the kind who thinks everything is better when you're paying for it.
Type "iphone developer forum" into google and look at the first three hits. The point is, as I said before, you get mixed and unmixed forums AND direct phone support. Also, if you think Google would waste their actual API coders' time by shoving them onto an IRC channel for hours a day, you're deluding yourself. Google would use the same intermediates Apple does, except their time would not be not spent as efficiently, because it's pissed away in DCC chat sessions instead of documented, searchable, user-rated forums.
You're telling me that the Android OS is going to "eat Apple's lunch" by competing on lower hardware cost? Someone appears to have stirred your brains up with a spoon!!
I'm not sure if you've ever dealt with real support from a company but having someone on the phone who knows wtf they are doing and works with you until its resolved is a little different than posting to newsgroups.
I'm not sure if you've ever dealt with a real support from a developer, but having someone on the newsgroup (or IRC) who knows WTF they are doing and works with you until it's resolved is a little different than phoning tech support.
Yeah. For one thing, it's not just "tech support". It's "developer support". It's the person on the phone's JOB to help you solve your problem; they've been practicing it eight hours a day nonstop; they have direct contact with the people who wrote the APIs and even the people who designed the hardware, and when you're speaking to them, you have their FULL attention.
Especially when there's no limit on the number of "incidents" you can get help with, and especially when your questions can be answered by fellow application developers in addition to the people who wrote the library you're trying to use.
Sure is great to have both!
With android you get left standing naked in the middle of a field with nothing, not even a pair of shoes and told that if you look around and dig around you can find information on how to build some shoes, cloths, eventually maybe a compass and a map to find your way out of the field to your destination.
That's a nice glib stereotype of all things Linux-related, and there's even a grain of truth when it comes to, say, getting your Wi-Fi working in Gentoo or whatever.
You want to make this about Linux, then get offended at your own proffered stereotype? Have fun with that.
But that stereotype is hilariously inaccurate when it comes to Android development, as anyone can see if they spend a few minutes browsing the SDK documentation, reading tutorials, or looking at the official support forums. It's too bad you didn't do that before posting.
Indeed. A shame. Because the differences kind of jump out. Just to pick a few at random:
* The Android SDK sample code is incredibly bare-bones. * It also offers near zero guidance in creating 3D OpenGL ES content. * And it's not sprinked through with "Programming Guides" that provide an ordered tour of the API sections, like Apple has. (The Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, and Web Kit Objective-C Programming Guide spring to mind for me.) * It's also not as well integrated with the rest of their IDE, which is not as well integrated with their UI construction toolkit.
"Developer friendly" may be their intention, but unless they actually deliver better tools, they're just spouting empty words. Reams of source code and the keys to the kingdom do not constitute better tools - they demand them.
Apple has been writing API docs for decades. Give Google two more years and maybe they'll have foundation docs as good as what was shipping with Xcode before the iPhone even existed.
But why am I wasting my breath - if you honestly think an open IRC channel is superior to a developer phone-support incident, then you're probably not a software developer, you're a hobbyist with a shiny new underdog to root for, at the expense of common sense.
Because there's no "standard" for representing Emoji in data outside Japan. There is talk of adding the Emoji set to Unicode, but that will take at least a year to ratify. In the meantime, if you're in the US and you have Emoji enabled on your iPhone, and you try to send a character to ANY other mobile phone, it will get dropped or garbled and cause confusion.
If Apple could convince every other carrier and handset maker in the country to add support for it, they might. But they would rather wait for it to become part of a _real_ standard (e.g. Unicode), so they don't risk deploying it only to have it break fifty times between now and then.
That's the thing... Apple doesn't live on trendiness. It's marketing department is just taking advantage of the "trendsetter" nature of it's high-profile customers. For many years Apple was the bastion of artsy multimedia types who didn't care about computing for it's own sake or about games, and wanted a system that suited their work. Their image as "trendy" arose from that legacy, via the effort of a "classy" marketing angle that transplants that trendiness from the high-profilers - to the product - to you.
So if Apple doesn't live on trendiness, what does it live on? Generally, it lives on careful, jealously-guarded innovation, making a superior product, and selling it at a premium. As long as they continue to do that, they are invulnerable to trends. There will always be people who buy the Honda Civic and there will always be people who buy the BMW 700.
Same way Microsoft is invulnerable to trends simply because it is so incredibly large and tightly integrated with personal and business computing all over the developed world. People have been calling Microsoft HORRIBLE things for more than a decade now. Under such withering scorn you'd expect them to evaporate, right? No: They provide THE de-facto product that computer users need, or think they need. They can coast on that, under heaps of abuse, for the next ten or twenty years if they want. (And they probably will.)
I'm sorry, but your post is clearly a Type II and III troll:
- Type I: Hilarious Type II: Inflammatory Type III: Clearly Wrong
- That you were modded "insightful" for this is the same reason I went to the dark side years ago. P.S.: An iPhone is not even sold to you by Apple. It's sold to you by AT&T. Furthermore, you're allowed to use it any way you like. You just can't expect full warranty coverage for doing so.
This was one of the reasons Apple extricated itself from the major trade shows years ago, and completed the transition last year: Sometimes they have something big to announce, sometimes they don't. The fact that there's a trade show scheduled is not an indicator of one or the other.
That's amusing. You wisely declare that the best measure of the value of a computer hardware company's offering is in the time you will spend fixing "major screw-ups", post-purchase, and therefore reliability, functionality, and real security are the real value.
And then you choose to reject Apple's hardware, well-established as reliable, functional, and offering real (relative) security, because they "lack support" for "hacking".
Most of us out here in the working world, who use computers as a means to accomplish our tasks, consider "hacking" to be A DIRECT PATH TO the "major screw-ups" that one must spend much time and therefore waste much money fixing. Those major screw-ups constitute the very learning experiences that "hacking" offers, and fixing those screw-ups, exploring why they happened and how they can be avoided, is a crucial part of the process. If you LIKE dicking around in the registry, or recompiling every damn thing on your hard drive because you had to patch your kernel for the tenth time this month, then you are clearly not even _interested_ in "reliability, functionality, and real security" as most of the world knows it, and as Apple delivers it. You are interested in being a member of the console-using, computer-hacking crowd.
Why in the world would Apple WANT to support such a fickle, self-contradictory, computing-for-its-own-sake crowd?
Products come with restrictions, pal. If you really lived up to your professed ideal, you wouldn't be here. You'd have your net connection shut off, because you are disallowed from, for example, using it to distribute kiddie pr0n or pirate software.
What Palm has done is actually very clever. They made a device and said, "Hey Apple, we're too lazy to write our own media management software, can we just use yours?" And Apple said, "No, bugger off." And Palm said, "Screw you we're doing it anyway." And Apple said, "You're exploiting a device ID weakness in our software. We're patching it. And we said, bugger off."
What part is the clever part? The part where suddenly a whole bunch of proto-libertarian geeks like you think APPLE is doing something that in your words "should be illegal".
You're being played. By a couple of marketing strategists at Palm.
What PALM DID was much more arguably illegal, and assholish, than what Apple has done in its defense.
But everyone loves a chic new underdog, right? Before the iPhone, about three years ago, Palm was a despised relic that had taken a great line of devices that trumped the Newton... and then drove it thoroughly into the ground. Why do they suddenly get a free pass, when all they have done is create an ugly stepson of an iPhone?
The people, acting collectively via the power of the state, have an obvious vested interest in providing universal access to basic education. Democracy, among many other things, is WORTHLESS without educated minds to drive it. If you think it is an expression of "freedom" to relegate something as life-defining as education to the realm of for-profit cabals, simply on the basis that they would provide better "choice" of what and how to teach, you no longer have a grasp on what "freedom" is. Next you'll be trading a cow for magic beans.
And, your comparison of education to ISP service is execrable.
... Which is why Dell basically Fails It. The marketing and styling of Apple is complementary to a larger package, and is there to cement their brand image. It's why BMW commercials feature men in expensive suits shifting gears with hands that bear expensive watches, and Toyota minivans are driven in their ads by cheerful soccer moms. The Product's The Thing.
Dell fails it because spit and polish and an incongruous white-canvas interview with their twitchy designer does not, in itself, improve margins. The lesson Dell should have learned - but pretty much can't, due to it's position in the marketplace - is that when Apple releases hardware, they release it in a small set of configurations that REMAINS STATIC FOR MOST OF A YEAR. The margins on the hardware are slim at first, and then as the year progresses and they negotiate better deals for parts and production, the margins open up HUGELY. Yet people will buy it because it's still the latest and greatest _from_Apple_, and what they seek is an Apple machine.
Dell simply cannot command that sort of attention from the customers who seek them out. Those customers are comparison shopping. Dell wishes it could differentiate itself, but hey...... they decided to go against grain with the Adamo, and gave their engineers carte blanche to produce the nicest laptop they could imagine, and those engineers came up with a product that looks like someone fished the metal cage out of a french-fry vat and stomped on it.
Dell just does not employ the right people for making a Macbook Air - especially for making it first. Those people were just not hired. Apples and oranges, man.
The important thing to take away from this writeup is the fact that, after the author gave a presentation about his game in front of a crowd, he instantly made a handful of sales.
Anyone relying on (or griping about) their position in the App Store listings as an unfair arbiter of their sales needs to account for that simple phenomenon. There is a world outside the app store; a world that must be reached.
Compare it to other media forms: What sells movies? The position of their name on the marquee? No. TV trailers, signage, radio spots, web ads, product tie-ins...
What sells books? Their relative position on the shelf? Not usually. Interviews, book tours, reviews, a good name...
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store. The only reason a handful of them have become rich is because they are/were pioneers exploring a shiny new UI and form factor. These rags-to-riches stories will fade away, and the usual approach, of advertising in and around established channels, will reassert itself.
Also keep in mind that this is a PLATFORM, and it will move and expand, leaving obsolescence in its wake. Like any good platform game, you need to run and jump to keep up.
These opt-in social networks are self-fulfilling prophecies. The more you fret about them, the more they will matter to low-grade HR goons.
LinkedIn contains only enough information to obscure the difference between a competent worker and a job-hopping nincompoop, and a six-hour barrage of interviews will weed the latter out eventually anyway. If you're in the first category, why would you let these other people ride on your good name? (And if you're in the second category... good luck with that.)
No, your surest bets as both an employer and an employee remain:
1. Recruiters and/or recruitment exercises 2. Personal applications 3. Personal referrals
Do you see a recruiter passing you over because a web search reveals you have fewer than 10 "livejournal friends"? Then why would you obsess over LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, blah blah? News flash: The internet isn't real life. Two phone calls, to your last two resume listings respectively, will take an HR man four minutes to complete and will steer your name to the interview docket or the trash can.
And if Apple SOLD iPod firmware upgrades instead of handing them out gratis for iPod users, then suddenly they would be in the "portable media player OS" market, right?
And gosh, all of a sudden the only thing keeping their iPod OS tied to their hardware would be "a piece of unnecessary DRM", right?
Because some John Q. Hax0r like yourself could diddle the firmware package and get it installed (sans a few features, plus a few drivers) on your Creative Nomad?... Which then, according to you, would be adequate justification for STARTING A BUSINESS whose model is selling Nomads with hacked iPod firmware on them, and if Apple wanted to stop you then too bad, because all software is DRM and DRM is evil?
Your self-serving assertions don't fly in the legal or business world, and your tired hyperbole about personal property rights has no bearing on what Psystar is doing. They are a business leveraging one of Apple's own products against them, and Apple has a legal right to dictate terms about how and whether its own products are used by its competitors. The determination of what "market" the companies are in, though open to interpretation, can subsequently be nailed down in court, and you have a STEEP hill to climb if you're going to prove that Apple is in two separate "hardware" and "software" markets.
Well Hell's Bells, why didn't you mention you were living in AUSTRALIA earlier? That explains both your perspective and your comma abuse.
I too did the "one-man-IT-department" thing, for eight years. Surprise surprise. Since you've told me your story, I'll tell you mine.
The ecosystem I maintained was between 25 and 50 systems for an education consulting and curriculum development company. (The company grew.) 3/4 of the machines were Macs, with the rest split between Linux and Windows boxes. In the pre-OS X days we got by with a bunch of proprietary Mac-only apps for DNS, DHCP, mail, web serving, and file sharing. Then around 10.2 we switched all our Macs to OS X and all our services to the UNIX standards. From my perspective, it was the Windows boxes that needed the most attention, and mostly due to software issues, but they also experienced brutal hardware failures.
I had to open every single Windows box we had at least once. Whether this action voided the warranty (which it usually DID NOT) was irrelevant to me: I knew what I was doing, and I knew how to make the repairs in a matter of hours. I kept two spare machines on hand at all times and, because I was working less than 50 miles from the Silicon Valley, components were easily available and cheap.
Over the same timespan of eight years, across 60 or 70 macs, I made exactly three support calls, experienced only three dead machines (a Quadra, an iMac and an iBook), and only opened a Mac box about two dozen times - mostly to configure RAM or juggle hard drives. The only reason there was any turnover rate to speak of is that the graphic designers kept wanting faster machines, compelling us to GIVE AWAY the old hardware as bonuses. The CEO carried a lowly iBook in her luggage for three years before she damaged the hinge and decided to upgrade, and I repaired that and gave the laptop to my wife, who gave it to her sister, who is STILL using it, after FIVE YEARS.
By contrast, the most stable Windows system we ever had was a top-of-the-line HP Kayak series machine. Beautiful dual-CPU all-SCSI 2 beast, but after two years the bearings in the fans became terribly loud, and the cramped interior case design choked the motherboard with dust. So I had to open it up. The lesser brands did not fare so well. The Dell boxes that the Flash developers worked on were actually LESS stable than the mixed-hardware monstrosities I kept in the basement for hosting our Windows-based product to the world. (I chose my parts carefully.)
Now I work in the Silicon Valley. I have had face-to-face conversations with the people responsible for negotiating prices on binned parts. You think a chip is a chip is a chip, and that any devices with the same model number are equally reliable, but you are WRONG. I have met the quality engineers who solder the microscopic diagnostic heads onto part samples from various manufacturers in order to verify their claims. The truth is, some computer makers are willing to accept a certain failure rate so they can sell a box at a certain price. And some have nigher standards than others.
Being a hardware guy, I'm surprised you don't know this already.
But hey, I can understand, you're not exactly in the thick of it over there. Hardware may be a matter of taking what you can get from the handful of bigshots offering, and paying through the nose for the assurance that they will act quickly when one of their craptastic boxes emits magic smoke. I have no idea why your Macs are failing as much as your Dells (Do you use them underwater? On the backs of trucks? In the sauna?), but it should be obvious to you from even a cursory internet search that your experience is NOT the norm. In any case, given their success, I'm sure that as Apple spreads its tentacles further across the globe more shops will petition to offer support, and your turnaround times will decrease.
Since you profess to be the big shot for your company's IT structure, I suggest you put your foot down and switch
Per machine, Mac's have the highest support cost, not to mention the highest downtime due to the fact that it takes an authorised "Apple" repair centre 5 days to replace a power supply in an Imac,
Reference to the study or GTFO. And learn when and when not to use your apostrophes and commas.
Dell or Toshiba will replace a motherboard with 24 hours of making a support call so just one incident of failed HW per year tends to give Mac's the highest downtime and Macs have at least one hardware failure a year.
If you need a third-party 24-hour turnaround support contract for grunt-level hardware like Dells, you should be running your own IT group, whose proficiency had better make the turnaround time of outsourced hardware repair irrelevant for the average employee. If John Q. Pencilpusher's iMac starts blowing smoke, you should have a replacement with the drive swapped on his desk within a couple of hours. Furthermore your pulled-from-the-ass estimate of "five days" is an assertion that clearly depends on what "authorized repair centre" you contract with.
Mac's have the same failure rate as any other PC using consumer components (because they use the same components (Seagate HDD, Intel Processor, Foxconn Motherboard) as any other manufacturer),
No, they don't. And they don't even when they use "the same" components. Those components - drives, memory, chipsets, displays, CPUs - and the individual components soldered onto a motherboard - are binned according to their quality before they are sold to computer manufacturers. Each manufacturer decides which quality bin - and therefore what sort of failure rate - is acceptable to them, and buys according to their target price. Apple consistently buys from the higher quality bins. Furthermore Apple tests its components more often and more thoroughly throughout the assembly process. In some cases they own and operate the actual factories. Dell and HP do not, and Toshiba does just about everything on contract. Your "one failure per year" assertion doesn't jibe with any real-world numbers. Hell, Consumer Reports doesn't even agree with you.
we overestimate and say that each machine will have three HW failures a year and plan accordingly for the machine to be out of commission for the average repair time, for mac's that 5 business days per incident. While we are on HW, Mac HW diagnostic programs are a joke.
Step one of your math is wrong, so these additional steps are worthless. Though your complaint about hardware diagnostic software is duly noted.
Also I spend more time just getting Mac users to connect to the Windows and Linux servers than I do fixing complex XP and Vista problems.
Well now that's just incompetence.
Put a Mac in an mixed environment where real tech support is needed and every minute of downtime costs money and the true cost of operation sky-rockets. Not to mention that just like everything else Mac related, an extended HW warranty (a must for any piece of HW to be used in a business) is more expensive then any of their competitors.
Why does it surprise you that more expensive hardware garners a more expensive support contract?
Slashdot Mirror
"Insightful"? Really? I'll remember to look for you at the next "town hall meeting" about health care.
That's a fair extrapolation except it doesn't actually result in Apple's lunch being eaten, because Apple doesn't compete on cost alone, or even primarily.
If another handset manufacturer wants to shoehorn Android into their hardware, their design will be confined by the software, they will still spend money customizing the software, and they will still spend money debugging and supporting the software.
In the PC universe, Apple doesn't compete with Microsoft, it competes with PC manufacturers. PC manufacturers have traditionally been hamstrung by their dependence on Windows, or in general, on OS software they didn't write and don't employ the talent to develop.
If handset manufacturers strike the same deal, what makes you think the outcome will suddenly reverse? Especially since, just as Apple had in the PC market, it now has a whopping head-start in terms of integration and developer support, and has acquired all the hardware and software talent it needs to custom-design everything from the CPU on up?
What I'm seeing here is that you're arguing a false choice. You're asserting that the only contact a developer is "allowed" to have when developing for the iPhone is with an ostensibly inferior tech support agent or a public forum devoid of Apple devs.
Thirty seconds of your lazy ass in a search engine would invalidate your claim.
You want to make this about Linux, then get offended at your own proffered stereotype? Have fun with that.
If you don't think the GP was repeating a tired old Linux stereotype, then what do you think it was? It certainly has no bearing on the reality of Android development, so do you think it's just a coincidence that the analogy he made up happens to be exactly the same as what trolls say about Linux, the OS that Android is based on?
Yes, it is a coincidence. Compared to the major device platform players who have their stuff together, the Android SDK docs are like being airdropped into a field with only your wits and perhaps a wooden spoon for digging.
But why am I wasting my breath - if you honestly think an open IRC channel is superior to a developer phone-support incident, then you're probably not a software developer, you're a hobbyist with a shiny new underdog to root for, at the expense of common sense.
Actually, I've been developing software professionally for a decade.
Then you should have enough brains not to present a false dichotomy as a real argument, and not to conveniently delete the valid critique of this craptastic SDK in favor of extending your truculent rant about "Linux stereotypes". The docs are inferior, the support, as it is offered and as it exists in the real world, is inferior, and the distribution infrastructure is incredibly inferior.
And yes, I do honestly think that IRC channels and newsgroups where you can have unlimited direct contact with developers are better than a couple of phone support incidents with someone whose job is talking on the phone, not writing code. If you disagree, I can't help but suspect that you're the hobbyist here, more comfortable with dialing 800 numbers than speaking to developers as peers -- or perhaps just one of Apple's favorite customers, the kind who thinks everything is better when you're paying for it.
Type "iphone developer forum" into google and look at the first three hits. The point is, as I said before, you get mixed and unmixed forums AND direct phone support. Also, if you think Google would waste their actual API coders' time by shoving them onto an IRC channel for hours a day, you're deluding yourself. Google would use the same intermediates Apple does, except their time would not be not spent as efficiently, because it's pissed away in DCC chat sessions instead of documented, searchable, user-rated forums.
Now quit playing politics.
You're telling me that the Android OS is going to "eat Apple's lunch" by competing on lower hardware cost? Someone appears to have stirred your brains up with a spoon!!
I'm not sure if you've ever dealt with real support from a company but having someone on the phone who knows wtf they are doing and works with you until its resolved is a little different than posting to newsgroups.
I'm not sure if you've ever dealt with a real support from a developer, but having someone on the newsgroup (or IRC) who knows WTF they are doing and works with you until it's resolved is a little different than phoning tech support.
Yeah. For one thing, it's not just "tech support". It's "developer support". It's the person on the phone's JOB to help you solve your problem; they've been practicing it eight hours a day nonstop; they have direct contact with the people who wrote the APIs and even the people who designed the hardware, and when you're speaking to them, you have their FULL attention.
Especially when there's no limit on the number of "incidents" you can get help with, and especially when your questions can be answered by fellow application developers in addition to the people who wrote the library you're trying to use.
Sure is great to have both!
With android you get left standing naked in the middle of a field with nothing, not even a pair of shoes and told that if you look around and dig around you can find information on how to build some shoes, cloths, eventually maybe a compass and a map to find your way out of the field to your destination.
That's a nice glib stereotype of all things Linux-related, and there's even a grain of truth when it comes to, say, getting your Wi-Fi working in Gentoo or whatever.
You want to make this about Linux, then get offended at your own proffered stereotype? Have fun with that.
But that stereotype is hilariously inaccurate when it comes to Android development, as anyone can see if they spend a few minutes browsing the SDK documentation, reading tutorials, or looking at the official support forums. It's too bad you didn't do that before posting.
Indeed. A shame. Because the differences kind of jump out. Just to pick a few at random:
* The Android SDK sample code is incredibly bare-bones.
* It also offers near zero guidance in creating 3D OpenGL ES content.
* And it's not sprinked through with "Programming Guides" that provide an ordered tour of the API sections, like Apple has. (The Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, and Web Kit Objective-C Programming Guide spring to mind for me.)
* It's also not as well integrated with the rest of their IDE, which is not as well integrated with their UI construction toolkit.
"Developer friendly" may be their intention, but unless they actually deliver better tools, they're just spouting empty words. Reams of source code and the keys to the kingdom do not constitute better tools - they demand them.
Apple has been writing API docs for decades. Give Google two more years and maybe they'll have foundation docs as good as what was shipping with Xcode before the iPhone even existed.
But why am I wasting my breath - if you honestly think an open IRC channel is superior to a developer phone-support incident, then you're probably not a software developer, you're a hobbyist with a shiny new underdog to root for, at the expense of common sense.
Because there's no "standard" for representing Emoji in data outside Japan. There is talk of adding the Emoji set to Unicode, but that will take at least a year to ratify. In the meantime, if you're in the US and you have Emoji enabled on your iPhone, and you try to send a character to ANY other mobile phone, it will get dropped or garbled and cause confusion.
If Apple could convince every other carrier and handset maker in the country to add support for it, they might. But they would rather wait for it to become part of a _real_ standard (e.g. Unicode), so they don't risk deploying it only to have it break fifty times between now and then.
Make sense?
That's the thing ... Apple doesn't live on trendiness. It's marketing department is just taking advantage of the "trendsetter" nature of it's high-profile customers. For many years Apple was the bastion of artsy multimedia types who didn't care about computing for it's own sake or about games, and wanted a system that suited their work. Their image as "trendy" arose from that legacy, via the effort of a "classy" marketing angle that transplants that trendiness from the high-profilers - to the product - to you.
So if Apple doesn't live on trendiness, what does it live on? Generally, it lives on careful, jealously-guarded innovation, making a superior product, and selling it at a premium. As long as they continue to do that, they are invulnerable to trends. There will always be people who buy the Honda Civic and there will always be people who buy the BMW 700.
Same way Microsoft is invulnerable to trends simply because it is so incredibly large and tightly integrated with personal and business computing all over the developed world. People have been calling Microsoft HORRIBLE things for more than a decade now. Under such withering scorn you'd expect them to evaporate, right? No: They provide THE de-facto product that computer users need, or think they need. They can coast on that, under heaps of abuse, for the next ten or twenty years if they want. (And they probably will.)
I'm sorry, but your post is clearly a Type II and III troll:
-
Type I: Hilarious
Type II: Inflammatory
Type III: Clearly Wrong
-
That you were modded "insightful" for this is the same reason I went to the dark side years ago.
P.S.: An iPhone is not even sold to you by Apple. It's sold to you by AT&T.
Furthermore, you're allowed to use it any way you like. You just can't expect full warranty coverage for doing so.
This was one of the reasons Apple extricated itself from the major trade shows years ago, and completed the transition last year: Sometimes they have something big to announce, sometimes they don't. The fact that there's a trade show scheduled is not an indicator of one or the other.
Have you seen them [apple] contribute to a GPLed project lately? Didn't think so.
Does http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/license.html count?
Yes. Yes it does. GP is flat wrong, and needs a spanking. Apple also contributes to the LLVM project, which is GPLed. And others.
That's amusing. You wisely declare that the best measure of the value of a computer hardware company's offering is in the time you will spend fixing "major screw-ups", post-purchase, and therefore reliability, functionality, and real security are the real value.
And then you choose to reject Apple's hardware, well-established as reliable, functional, and offering real (relative) security, because they "lack support" for "hacking".
Most of us out here in the working world, who use computers as a means to accomplish our tasks, consider "hacking" to be A DIRECT PATH TO the "major screw-ups" that one must spend much time and therefore waste much money fixing. Those major screw-ups constitute the very learning experiences that "hacking" offers, and fixing those screw-ups, exploring why they happened and how they can be avoided, is a crucial part of the process. If you LIKE dicking around in the registry, or recompiling every damn thing on your hard drive because you had to patch your kernel for the tenth time this month, then you are clearly not even _interested_ in "reliability, functionality, and real security" as most of the world knows it, and as Apple delivers it. You are interested in being a member of the console-using, computer-hacking crowd.
Why in the world would Apple WANT to support such a fickle, self-contradictory, computing-for-its-own-sake crowd?
Products come with restrictions, pal. If you really lived up to your professed ideal, you wouldn't be here. You'd have your net connection shut off, because you are disallowed from, for example, using it to distribute kiddie pr0n or pirate software.
What Palm has done is actually very clever. They made a device and said, "Hey Apple, we're too lazy to write our own media management software, can we just use yours?" And Apple said, "No, bugger off." And Palm said, "Screw you we're doing it anyway." And Apple said, "You're exploiting a device ID weakness in our software. We're patching it. And we said, bugger off."
What part is the clever part? The part where suddenly a whole bunch of proto-libertarian geeks like you think APPLE is doing something that in your words "should be illegal".
You're being played. By a couple of marketing strategists at Palm.
What PALM DID was much more arguably illegal, and assholish, than what Apple has done in its defense.
But everyone loves a chic new underdog, right? Before the iPhone, about three years ago, Palm was a despised relic that had taken a great line of devices that trumped the Newton ... and then drove it thoroughly into the ground. Why do they suddenly get a free pass, when all they have done is create an ugly stepson of an iPhone?
"AT&T currently offers two types of prepaid plans: GoPhone, its "pay as you go" plan, and Pick Your Plan, ... "
I swear, I misread that as "Pick Your Pain", and did not even pause...
"Their presentation basically restated, bullet by bullet, everything that had been leaked to date. Nothing new or inspiring..."
I've got an idea for you.
Stop poring over the rumor sites and spoiling the surprise for yourself.
The people, acting collectively via the power of the state, have an obvious vested interest in providing universal access to basic education. Democracy, among many other things, is WORTHLESS without educated minds to drive it. If you think it is an expression of "freedom" to relegate something as life-defining as education to the realm of for-profit cabals, simply on the basis that they would provide better "choice" of what and how to teach, you no longer have a grasp on what "freedom" is. Next you'll be trading a cow for magic beans.
And, your comparison of education to ISP service is execrable.
... Which is why Dell basically Fails It. The marketing and styling of Apple is complementary to a larger package, and is there to cement their brand image. It's why BMW commercials feature men in expensive suits shifting gears with hands that bear expensive watches, and Toyota minivans are driven in their ads by cheerful soccer moms. The Product's The Thing.
Dell fails it because spit and polish and an incongruous white-canvas interview with their twitchy designer does not, in itself, improve margins. The lesson Dell should have learned - but pretty much can't, due to it's position in the marketplace - is that when Apple releases hardware, they release it in a small set of configurations that REMAINS STATIC FOR MOST OF A YEAR. The margins on the hardware are slim at first, and then as the year progresses and they negotiate better deals for parts and production, the margins open up HUGELY. Yet people will buy it because it's still the latest and greatest _from_Apple_, and what they seek is an Apple machine.
Dell simply cannot command that sort of attention from the customers who seek them out. Those customers are comparison shopping. Dell wishes it could differentiate itself, but hey ... ... they decided to go against grain with the Adamo, and gave their engineers carte blanche to produce the nicest laptop they could imagine, and those engineers came up with a product that looks like someone fished the metal cage out of a french-fry vat and stomped on it.
Dell just does not employ the right people for making a Macbook Air - especially for making it first. Those people were just not hired. Apples and oranges, man.
TL;DR
The important thing to take away from this writeup is the fact that, after the author gave a presentation about his game in front of a crowd, he instantly made a handful of sales.
Anyone relying on (or griping about) their position in the App Store listings as an unfair arbiter of their sales needs to account for that simple phenomenon. There is a world outside the app store; a world that must be reached.
Compare it to other media forms: What sells movies? The position of their name on the marquee? No. TV trailers, signage, radio spots, web ads, product tie-ins...
What sells books? Their relative position on the shelf? Not usually. Interviews, book tours, reviews, a good name...
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store. The only reason a handful of them have become rich is because they are/were pioneers exploring a shiny new UI and form factor. These rags-to-riches stories will fade away, and the usual approach, of advertising in and around established channels, will reassert itself.
Also keep in mind that this is a PLATFORM, and it will move and expand, leaving obsolescence in its wake. Like any good platform game, you need to run and jump to keep up.
These opt-in social networks are self-fulfilling prophecies. The more you fret about them, the more they will matter to low-grade HR goons.
LinkedIn contains only enough information to obscure the difference between a competent worker and a job-hopping nincompoop, and a six-hour barrage of interviews will weed the latter out eventually anyway. If you're in the first category, why would you let these other people ride on your good name? (And if you're in the second category ... good luck with that.)
No, your surest bets as both an employer and an employee remain:
1. Recruiters and/or recruitment exercises
2. Personal applications
3. Personal referrals
Do you see a recruiter passing you over because a web search reveals you have fewer than 10 "livejournal friends"? Then why would you obsess over LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, blah blah? News flash: The internet isn't real life. Two phone calls, to your last two resume listings respectively, will take an HR man four minutes to complete and will steer your name to the interview docket or the trash can.
Oh my god! They actually spoke with a PATENT LAWYER about patent law?? Isn't that, like, cheating?
What are you doing on Slashdot?!
Well, the good news is, the Woz already found a way for you: http://atariwiki.strotmann.de/xwiki/bin/view/Code/6502Relocator
And if Apple SOLD iPod firmware upgrades instead of handing them out gratis for iPod users, then suddenly they would be in the "portable media player OS" market, right?
And gosh, all of a sudden the only thing keeping their iPod OS tied to their hardware would be "a piece of unnecessary DRM", right?
Because some John Q. Hax0r like yourself could diddle the firmware package and get it installed (sans a few features, plus a few drivers) on your Creative Nomad? ... Which then, according to you, would be adequate justification for STARTING A BUSINESS whose model is selling Nomads with hacked iPod firmware on them, and if Apple wanted to stop you then too bad, because all software is DRM and DRM is evil?
Your self-serving assertions don't fly in the legal or business world, and your tired hyperbole about personal property rights has no bearing on what Psystar is doing. They are a business leveraging one of Apple's own products against them, and Apple has a legal right to dictate terms about how and whether its own products are used by its competitors. The determination of what "market" the companies are in, though open to interpretation, can subsequently be nailed down in court, and you have a STEEP hill to climb if you're going to prove that Apple is in two separate "hardware" and "software" markets.
Well Hell's Bells, why didn't you mention you were living in AUSTRALIA earlier? That explains both your perspective and your comma abuse.
I too did the "one-man-IT-department" thing, for eight years. Surprise surprise. Since you've told me your story, I'll tell you mine.
The ecosystem I maintained was between 25 and 50 systems for an education consulting and curriculum development company. (The company grew.) 3/4 of the machines were Macs, with the rest split between Linux and Windows boxes. In the pre-OS X days we got by with a bunch of proprietary Mac-only apps for DNS, DHCP, mail, web serving, and file sharing. Then around 10.2 we switched all our Macs to OS X and all our services to the UNIX standards. From my perspective, it was the Windows boxes that needed the most attention, and mostly due to software issues, but they also experienced brutal hardware failures.
I had to open every single Windows box we had at least once. Whether this action voided the warranty (which it usually DID NOT) was irrelevant to me: I knew what I was doing, and I knew how to make the repairs in a matter of hours. I kept two spare machines on hand at all times and, because I was working less than 50 miles from the Silicon Valley, components were easily available and cheap.
Over the same timespan of eight years, across 60 or 70 macs, I made exactly three support calls, experienced only three dead machines (a Quadra, an iMac and an iBook), and only opened a Mac box about two dozen times - mostly to configure RAM or juggle hard drives. The only reason there was any turnover rate to speak of is that the graphic designers kept wanting faster machines, compelling us to GIVE AWAY the old hardware as bonuses. The CEO carried a lowly iBook in her luggage for three years before she damaged the hinge and decided to upgrade, and I repaired that and gave the laptop to my wife, who gave it to her sister, who is STILL using it, after FIVE YEARS.
By contrast, the most stable Windows system we ever had was a top-of-the-line HP Kayak series machine. Beautiful dual-CPU all-SCSI 2 beast, but after two years the bearings in the fans became terribly loud, and the cramped interior case design choked the motherboard with dust. So I had to open it up. The lesser brands did not fare so well. The Dell boxes that the Flash developers worked on were actually LESS stable than the mixed-hardware monstrosities I kept in the basement for hosting our Windows-based product to the world. (I chose my parts carefully.)
Now I work in the Silicon Valley. I have had face-to-face conversations with the people responsible for negotiating prices on binned parts. You think a chip is a chip is a chip, and that any devices with the same model number are equally reliable, but you are WRONG. I have met the quality engineers who solder the microscopic diagnostic heads onto part samples from various manufacturers in order to verify their claims. The truth is, some computer makers are willing to accept a certain failure rate so they can sell a box at a certain price. And some have nigher standards than others.
Being a hardware guy, I'm surprised you don't know this already.
But hey, I can understand, you're not exactly in the thick of it over there. Hardware may be a matter of taking what you can get from the handful of bigshots offering, and paying through the nose for the assurance that they will act quickly when one of their craptastic boxes emits magic smoke. I have no idea why your Macs are failing as much as your Dells (Do you use them underwater? On the backs of trucks? In the sauna?), but it should be obvious to you from even a cursory internet search that your experience is NOT the norm. In any case, given their success, I'm sure that as Apple spreads its tentacles further across the globe more shops will petition to offer support, and your turnaround times will decrease.
Since you profess to be the big shot for your company's IT structure, I suggest you put your foot down and switch
I smell a troll.
Per machine, Mac's have the highest support cost, not to mention the highest downtime due to the fact that it takes an authorised "Apple" repair centre 5 days to replace a power supply in an Imac,
Reference to the study or GTFO. And learn when and when not to use your apostrophes and commas.
Dell or Toshiba will replace a motherboard with 24 hours of making a support call so just one incident of failed HW per year tends to give Mac's the highest downtime and Macs have at least one hardware failure a year.
If you need a third-party 24-hour turnaround support contract for grunt-level hardware like Dells, you should be running your own IT group, whose proficiency had better make the turnaround time of outsourced hardware repair irrelevant for the average employee. If John Q. Pencilpusher's iMac starts blowing smoke, you should have a replacement with the drive swapped on his desk within a couple of hours. Furthermore your pulled-from-the-ass estimate of "five days" is an assertion that clearly depends on what "authorized repair centre" you contract with.
Mac's have the same failure rate as any other PC using consumer components (because they use the same components (Seagate HDD, Intel Processor, Foxconn Motherboard) as any other manufacturer),
No, they don't. And they don't even when they use "the same" components. Those components - drives, memory, chipsets, displays, CPUs - and the individual components soldered onto a motherboard - are binned according to their quality before they are sold to computer manufacturers. Each manufacturer decides which quality bin - and therefore what sort of failure rate - is acceptable to them, and buys according to their target price. Apple consistently buys from the higher quality bins. Furthermore Apple tests its components more often and more thoroughly throughout the assembly process. In some cases they own and operate the actual factories. Dell and HP do not, and Toshiba does just about everything on contract. Your "one failure per year" assertion doesn't jibe with any real-world numbers. Hell, Consumer Reports doesn't even agree with you.
we overestimate and say that each machine will have three HW failures a year and plan accordingly for the machine to be out of commission for the average repair time, for mac's that 5 business days per incident. While we are on HW, Mac HW diagnostic programs are a joke.
Step one of your math is wrong, so these additional steps are worthless. Though your complaint about hardware diagnostic software is duly noted.
Also I spend more time just getting Mac users to connect to the Windows and Linux servers than I do fixing complex XP and Vista problems.
Well now that's just incompetence.
Put a Mac in an mixed environment where real tech support is needed and every minute of downtime costs money and the true cost of operation sky-rockets. Not to mention that just like everything else Mac related, an extended HW warranty (a must for any piece of HW to be used in a business) is more expensive then any of their competitors.
Why does it surprise you that more expensive hardware garners a more expensive support contract?