Apple knows that they can't compete or provide a good enough advertising platform in the mobile space so they make sure nobody else can compete.. if here is no competition they MUST be best right?
Which is fine until people look at their incomes from say, Android apps and realise that iAd isn't making them as much money. Which platform do they make apps for next time?
Apple could really do the App Store right, but they just see all their competitors making a little from it and want to bury them without realising that ultimately it will come back on them.
The thing is that playing that game is just a bad thing for your customers and your reputation. In effect, you fight your competitors by damaging your customers. They will not thank you for it.
Apple are doing themselves enough harm by playing the opposite game. I know a developer who's doing no more iPhone development as a result of the Flash decision. He feels that developers should have a choice in their tools and is going to do Android development instead.
Let's say that iAd doesn't deliver for either advertisers or for application hosters. They gear up their apps for it and watch as their Admob ads make more money on Android. Are they more or less likely to do another app on iPhone? Is a developer going to look at all these decisions and decide that they can reasonably risk some investment in building an iPhone app?
For me, it's about the difference between fair and unfair competition. And Daring Direball's a blowhard fanboy.
Google weren't "dicks" to Apple. They just presented fair competition to people out there who could choose between Android, iPhone and others.
The thing with unfair competition is that it rarely serves you well in anything but the short term.
Doing this doesn't just harm Google, it harms Apple's partners and customers too. Developers are going to have to spend the money converting the app to iAd and have no idea if it will perform as well as Admob. In some cases, they might decide that it might not be worth it, or might decide that if Steve Jobs is going to keep screwing them around that they'll be out of there.
Re:First official ad-blocking and auto-paging brow
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Safari 5 Released
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· Score: 1
Which of course makes it pretty easy to check the user agent string and act accordingly. You don't have to code for dozens of ad blockers. You'll see Wordpress extensions for dealing with Reader quite soon.
Re:Apparently it's even faster than Chrome 5
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Safari 5 Released
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· Score: 1
I presume it's down to it basically being an abstracted Mac application. They have a bunch of dlls in the install folder which relate to the APIs on OSX. So rather than having to recode it for Win 32, they can use a lot of what's there from the Mac.
Maybe Steve has a point about porting apps?;)
Reader Mode Will Get Broken
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Safari 5 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not sure why Apple is doing this, but publishers aren't going to like it. They'll find ways to scuttle it or to embed ads.
Right now, ad-blocking is a fringe activity. Places like Ars Technica suffer quite badly, but most sites don't. But Apple are giving people a heads up that lots of Safari readers won't be looking at ads - they'll be just getting the content.
I know a lot of people don't like ads, but it's what keeps a lot of sites running and "free". Without the revenue from ads, a lot of them will disappear.
Exactly. When I go to see clients, I carry some paper notebooks, a couple of biros, sometimes my razor too.
I go and see people in places like London, and I'm hauling my Thinkpad up and down underground stations and on and off trains. It's not a problem. A woman might have problems with a 3kg laptop, but a man shouldn't, and to be honest, you can buy a lighter weight laptop for less than cheap laptop + iPad.
But the main thing is that I know that a laptop is a better prepared computer than an iPad. Client wants to give me some video files on USB? I can do that. Open up a weird file format?
You are seriously stretching the similarity here. The iPad is significantly more portable than a notebook (even a thin 13" notebook, like a MacBook Pro). Even if you ignore the process of disconnecting the cords and putting it into a bag or sleeve as well as carrying any accessories (like power adapter), and just focus on transporting it, the experience is not even remotely comperable.
Yes, an iPad is more portable. The question is whether it is more portable enough.
To put it another way, when would I use an iPad that I couldn't use a laptop?
To give you an example of the sort of thing I'm looking for: if I go into town with my family, I have a phone in my pocket. If we stop for coffee, I can look up cinema showtimes. I can go to the city, visit a museum and then look up the nearby restaurants. The phone works for such situations in a way that a laptop doesn't.
So, what's the situations where an iPad does the things my laptop can't? I'm not talking about improvement in weight or size. I know it's lighter and smaller, but my laptop is small enough and light enough for me anyway so that's not going to get me to get an iPad.
Because a laptop doesn't need a case. It needs a bags, with accessories and so on.
The iPad has long enough battery life you don't need to pack power cords "just in case", and really have nothing else to bring with it. It's still much more portable than a laptop and easier to drag around an office or into meetings.
Bag, case, whatever. Let's abstract this down to what the problem is: The iPad means I still have to use a hand to carry it, whether holding it, having it under my arm, in a bag, case, whatever. It's the same problem in that sense as a laptop.
The differences are then down to weight. I can carry my laptop just fine. In the bag. With a power charger. So weight isn't a problem.
Power isn't like bandwidth, because what goes into power (coal, oil, whatever) costs money and the the use of it is carefully analysed by power companies to match what they produce to what is used (to the point that they increase the supply to the grid just before TV ad breaks in the UK when people go to the toilet and make cups of tea).
Bandwidth is more fixed. A tower and the network is set up for an amount of throughput that might struggle at certain times of day, but at night is just sitting idle.
A fixed amount of data doesn't make sense because watching a YouTube video at 2am isn't likely to be a problem in the way it is at 6pm. The best answer for AT&T would be to leave it unlimited and just throttle connections at peak time, if they're having network issues. That's what my old ISP did with Torrents - You'd struggle to get 200kbps before 11pm, then it would go up to 2mbps. A lot of users just set up the torrents and went to bed.
There's quite a lot of media companies that make very pretty brochure sites and because they were brought up on Flash when HTML was very limited, never seem to look at the alternatives.
A restaurant site near me has rotating display of images, and it's done in Flash, despite the fact there are js libraries that do that very well. Worst thing is that it doesn't even degrade to a single image when there's no Flash.
Spot on. I've learnt how to spot fanboys. Not every Apple user is one, most are not. But once they start trying to argue a little too hard in Apple's defence, I just walk away.
The only people I've met like them in the Microsoft world are MVPs. Then again, they at least get paid for it.
Even some of YouTube isn't going HTML5 (the C4 shows in the UK with unskippable ads).
People need to get a grip. It's sold 2m units (which is a rounding error in PC ownership numbers). There's plenty of stock all over the UK. Most people aren't even going to check how their sites look on an iPad with those numbers.
And to be honest, the reviews from people after the initial euphoria aren't great. OT: are the iPad sales including those retail stores that have bought stock?
That's a really fair minded post. I bought a Mac because people recommended it and just couldn't see much benefit over Windows (so I sent it back).
But a friend of mine says a similar thing. He does LAMP development for a living but he uses a Mac because he gets the whole UNIX setup plus he can install Photoshop, MS Office and can watch movies (I know that's possible under Linux but takes some hacking).
I am absolutely incredulous that a multi-million dollar organisation like News International has surveyed the current situation regarding the provision of news and decided the best thing for it is a paywall. It just beggars belief. How the fuck do these guys even feed themselves let alone run a business!?
What happens with businesses facing revolution is that they assume what's happening is a fad, and after that, think they can change things back to how they were.
It's why Rupert Murdoch's so keen on the iPad. He thinks that it means he can sell an app and make a fortune, just like in the old days. Pity it isn't going to work.
That's not fanboyism. That's liking Windows because it's the best tool for you. That's a rational way to look at products; does the product meet my requirements in terms of features, aesthetics, service etc.
Fanboyism is more about associating yourself with Apple. So if Apple produce a dud product, or Steve Jobs does a complete u-turn on how apps should be delivered, you don't say "hang on, didn't he say that web apps were the best way to do things?", you either just ignore it or come up with a ridiculous defence of Apple.
And most Apple users aren't Fanboys. I've got 2 friends who just prefer OSX. They'll tell me about things on their Mac if I ask, or they'll write about something new that they like on their Mac, but they'll also point out things they don't like and don't harp on at Windows users about how they should get a Mac.
The iPad i interpret as a very dangerous product, from a lineup perspective... people are asking 'what does it do, that i can't already do'. 1 million units sold, great...what about next quarter?
The interesting thing to read are reviews by owners on blogs of their "my 1st 2 weeks with the iPad". The tech reviewers are all "wow, it's amazing", but the reviews by owners feel quite subdued. There's lots of criticisms about stuff, a certain sense of "it's quite good", but there's no strong sense of people really loving it. And a friend of mine recently told me the he loved his on day 1 and 2, and hasn't touched it in 10 days.
Personally I think that the large tablet is just a bad form factor far more than Apple not doing it right. I played with an HP tablet once and it worked fine, but they never sold.
Add in that large SD cards are going to kill the iPod classic for most people, that Nano is dealing with commodity MP3 players all over from people like Sansa, that iPhone is facing Android and it looks like a less than rosy future.
And we just don't know if Steve Jobs can pull another rabbit out of the hat like iPhone and iPod. Maybe we've been through one of those phases of revolution in computing and it's now going to be some years of refinement.
The only fanboys on Windows have a rational reason for their fanboyism. Either they're an MS evangelist (paid by MS), an MVP (title and perks dependant upon MS) or sales people (getting paid).
But even amongst.net developers, you'll get some healthy discussion about Windows or features in.net and Visual Studio. No-one defends it with religious fervour.
WHOOSH!! That's the sound of your anti-Windows comments going straight over the head of a *primarily Linux user* like me. But I do use XP and never had it fall off a network (unless the network or an IP address was maybe configured wrongly) and Flash never appears to have crashed it - made it chug a little occasionally but that's better than not being able to play any Flash... whoops, sorry, a bit below the belt, that one...
I just never see this picture that anti-Windows guys paint of it. I run 2 machines. One on XP, one on Vista 64 (yes, I should upgrade it). My father runs Vista. I've worked in businesses with anything from a few to hundreds of PCs. And I've just rarely seen problems with it. In a decade, on 2 PCs (1 laptop and 1 desktop) at home, I've had 2 BSODs. Total downtime/work loss? 30 minutes, at worst.
I personally don't care what people use. I happen to prefer Windows, I also quite like Ubuntu and found it more straightforward than OSX. But I've yet to see any evidence since WinXP that there's huge problems with it.
There's a huge amount of competition for iPhone now, the iPods are competing with a range of generic products and I remain to be convinced about the iPad. A price like this says that someone is convinced that Apple is going to come out with the next amazing device a couple of times in the next decade. Which is asking a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple knows that they can't compete or provide a good enough advertising platform in the mobile space so they make sure nobody else can compete.. if here is no competition they MUST be best right?
Which is fine until people look at their incomes from say, Android apps and realise that iAd isn't making them as much money. Which platform do they make apps for next time?
Apple could really do the App Store right, but they just see all their competitors making a little from it and want to bury them without realising that ultimately it will come back on them.
The thing is that playing that game is just a bad thing for your customers and your reputation. In effect, you fight your competitors by damaging your customers. They will not thank you for it.
Apple are doing themselves enough harm by playing the opposite game. I know a developer who's doing no more iPhone development as a result of the Flash decision. He feels that developers should have a choice in their tools and is going to do Android development instead.
Let's say that iAd doesn't deliver for either advertisers or for application hosters. They gear up their apps for it and watch as their Admob ads make more money on Android. Are they more or less likely to do another app on iPhone? Is a developer going to look at all these decisions and decide that they can reasonably risk some investment in building an iPhone app?
For me, it's about the difference between fair and unfair competition. And Daring Direball's a blowhard fanboy.
Google weren't "dicks" to Apple. They just presented fair competition to people out there who could choose between Android, iPhone and others.
The thing with unfair competition is that it rarely serves you well in anything but the short term.
Doing this doesn't just harm Google, it harms Apple's partners and customers too. Developers are going to have to spend the money converting the app to iAd and have no idea if it will perform as well as Admob. In some cases, they might decide that it might not be worth it, or might decide that if Steve Jobs is going to keep screwing them around that they'll be out of there.
Which of course makes it pretty easy to check the user agent string and act accordingly. You don't have to code for dozens of ad blockers. You'll see Wordpress extensions for dealing with Reader quite soon.
I presume it's down to it basically being an abstracted Mac application. They have a bunch of dlls in the install folder which relate to the APIs on OSX. So rather than having to recode it for Win 32, they can use a lot of what's there from the Mac.
Maybe Steve has a point about porting apps? ;)
Not sure why Apple is doing this, but publishers aren't going to like it. They'll find ways to scuttle it or to embed ads.
Right now, ad-blocking is a fringe activity. Places like Ars Technica suffer quite badly, but most sites don't. But Apple are giving people a heads up that lots of Safari readers won't be looking at ads - they'll be just getting the content.
I know a lot of people don't like ads, but it's what keeps a lot of sites running and "free". Without the revenue from ads, a lot of them will disappear.
Exactly. When I go to see clients, I carry some paper notebooks, a couple of biros, sometimes my razor too.
I go and see people in places like London, and I'm hauling my Thinkpad up and down underground stations and on and off trains. It's not a problem. A woman might have problems with a 3kg laptop, but a man shouldn't, and to be honest, you can buy a lighter weight laptop for less than cheap laptop + iPad.
But the main thing is that I know that a laptop is a better prepared computer than an iPad. Client wants to give me some video files on USB? I can do that. Open up a weird file format?
You are seriously stretching the similarity here. The iPad is significantly more portable than a notebook (even a thin 13" notebook, like a MacBook Pro). Even if you ignore the process of disconnecting the cords and putting it into a bag or sleeve as well as carrying any accessories (like power adapter), and just focus on transporting it, the experience is not even remotely comperable.
Yes, an iPad is more portable. The question is whether it is more portable enough.
To put it another way, when would I use an iPad that I couldn't use a laptop?
To give you an example of the sort of thing I'm looking for: if I go into town with my family, I have a phone in my pocket. If we stop for coffee, I can look up cinema showtimes. I can go to the city, visit a museum and then look up the nearby restaurants. The phone works for such situations in a way that a laptop doesn't.
So, what's the situations where an iPad does the things my laptop can't? I'm not talking about improvement in weight or size. I know it's lighter and smaller, but my laptop is small enough and light enough for me anyway so that's not going to get me to get an iPad.
I heard it's going to get a 2.2 upgrade when that comes out. Which won't be long, so probably worth the wait rather than getting it with 1.6.
Because a laptop doesn't need a case. It needs a bags, with accessories and so on. The iPad has long enough battery life you don't need to pack power cords "just in case", and really have nothing else to bring with it. It's still much more portable than a laptop and easier to drag around an office or into meetings.
Bag, case, whatever. Let's abstract this down to what the problem is: The iPad means I still have to use a hand to carry it, whether holding it, having it under my arm, in a bag, case, whatever. It's the same problem in that sense as a laptop.
The differences are then down to weight. I can carry my laptop just fine. In the bag. With a power charger. So weight isn't a problem.
I think it's going to get an upgrade when 2.2 comes out. Personally, I'd wait for that to happen before rushing out.
Power isn't like bandwidth, because what goes into power (coal, oil, whatever) costs money and the the use of it is carefully analysed by power companies to match what they produce to what is used (to the point that they increase the supply to the grid just before TV ad breaks in the UK when people go to the toilet and make cups of tea).
Bandwidth is more fixed. A tower and the network is set up for an amount of throughput that might struggle at certain times of day, but at night is just sitting idle.
A fixed amount of data doesn't make sense because watching a YouTube video at 2am isn't likely to be a problem in the way it is at 6pm. The best answer for AT&T would be to leave it unlimited and just throttle connections at peak time, if they're having network issues. That's what my old ISP did with Torrents - You'd struggle to get 200kbps before 11pm, then it would go up to 2mbps. A lot of users just set up the torrents and went to bed.
There's quite a lot of media companies that make very pretty brochure sites and because they were brought up on Flash when HTML was very limited, never seem to look at the alternatives.
A restaurant site near me has rotating display of images, and it's done in Flash, despite the fact there are js libraries that do that very well. Worst thing is that it doesn't even degrade to a single image when there's no Flash.
Spot on. I've learnt how to spot fanboys. Not every Apple user is one, most are not. But once they start trying to argue a little too hard in Apple's defence, I just walk away.
The only people I've met like them in the Microsoft world are MVPs. Then again, they at least get paid for it.
Even some of YouTube isn't going HTML5 (the C4 shows in the UK with unskippable ads).
People need to get a grip. It's sold 2m units (which is a rounding error in PC ownership numbers). There's plenty of stock all over the UK. Most people aren't even going to check how their sites look on an iPad with those numbers.
And to be honest, the reviews from people after the initial euphoria aren't great. OT: are the iPad sales including those retail stores that have bought stock?
That's a really fair minded post. I bought a Mac because people recommended it and just couldn't see much benefit over Windows (so I sent it back). But a friend of mine says a similar thing. He does LAMP development for a living but he uses a Mac because he gets the whole UNIX setup plus he can install Photoshop, MS Office and can watch movies (I know that's possible under Linux but takes some hacking).
That's the thing: they're not "suing their customers". They're suing people who didn't want to hand over any money for it.
You can find some other arguments for why copyright infringement is OK, but that isn't one of them.
Thanks! Plays great.
Gone from the UK too. But I do now have your Africa 2010 World Cup following app... Could you release Falling Blocks away from the store?
I am absolutely incredulous that a multi-million dollar organisation like News International has surveyed the current situation regarding the provision of news and decided the best thing for it is a paywall. It just beggars belief. How the fuck do these guys even feed themselves let alone run a business!?
What happens with businesses facing revolution is that they assume what's happening is a fad, and after that, think they can change things back to how they were.
It's why Rupert Murdoch's so keen on the iPad. He thinks that it means he can sell an app and make a fortune, just like in the old days. Pity it isn't going to work.
That's not fanboyism. That's liking Windows because it's the best tool for you. That's a rational way to look at products; does the product meet my requirements in terms of features, aesthetics, service etc.
Fanboyism is more about associating yourself with Apple. So if Apple produce a dud product, or Steve Jobs does a complete u-turn on how apps should be delivered, you don't say "hang on, didn't he say that web apps were the best way to do things?", you either just ignore it or come up with a ridiculous defence of Apple.
And most Apple users aren't Fanboys. I've got 2 friends who just prefer OSX. They'll tell me about things on their Mac if I ask, or they'll write about something new that they like on their Mac, but they'll also point out things they don't like and don't harp on at Windows users about how they should get a Mac.
The iPad i interpret as a very dangerous product, from a lineup perspective... people are asking 'what does it do, that i can't already do'. 1 million units sold, great...what about next quarter?
The interesting thing to read are reviews by owners on blogs of their "my 1st 2 weeks with the iPad". The tech reviewers are all "wow, it's amazing", but the reviews by owners feel quite subdued. There's lots of criticisms about stuff, a certain sense of "it's quite good", but there's no strong sense of people really loving it. And a friend of mine recently told me the he loved his on day 1 and 2, and hasn't touched it in 10 days.
Personally I think that the large tablet is just a bad form factor far more than Apple not doing it right. I played with an HP tablet once and it worked fine, but they never sold.
Add in that large SD cards are going to kill the iPod classic for most people, that Nano is dealing with commodity MP3 players all over from people like Sansa, that iPhone is facing Android and it looks like a less than rosy future.
And we just don't know if Steve Jobs can pull another rabbit out of the hat like iPhone and iPod. Maybe we've been through one of those phases of revolution in computing and it's now going to be some years of refinement.
The only fanboys on Windows have a rational reason for their fanboyism. Either they're an MS evangelist (paid by MS), an MVP (title and perks dependant upon MS) or sales people (getting paid).
But even amongst .net developers, you'll get some healthy discussion about Windows or features in .net and Visual Studio. No-one defends it with religious fervour.
WHOOSH!! That's the sound of your anti-Windows comments going straight over the head of a *primarily Linux user* like me. But I do use XP and never had it fall off a network (unless the network or an IP address was maybe configured wrongly) and Flash never appears to have crashed it - made it chug a little occasionally but that's better than not being able to play any Flash... whoops, sorry, a bit below the belt, that one...
I just never see this picture that anti-Windows guys paint of it. I run 2 machines. One on XP, one on Vista 64 (yes, I should upgrade it). My father runs Vista. I've worked in businesses with anything from a few to hundreds of PCs. And I've just rarely seen problems with it. In a decade, on 2 PCs (1 laptop and 1 desktop) at home, I've had 2 BSODs. Total downtime/work loss? 30 minutes, at worst.
I personally don't care what people use. I happen to prefer Windows, I also quite like Ubuntu and found it more straightforward than OSX. But I've yet to see any evidence since WinXP that there's huge problems with it.
Very sound advice.
I'm quite amazed that their stock is rising.
There's a huge amount of competition for iPhone now, the iPods are competing with a range of generic products and I remain to be convinced about the iPad. A price like this says that someone is convinced that Apple is going to come out with the next amazing device a couple of times in the next decade. Which is asking a lot.