There's a possibility of that happening, but I have a feeling that Android has enough momentum that this lock-down will lead to more adoption in the long run. It may slow things down temporarily because of a less diverse range of hardware offerings, but if you have three makers whose buyers are anywhere near as loyal as iPhone owners tend to be, it'll mean lots and lots of repeat sales every couple of years.
What smart phone owner is going to buy a WP7 or BBY device these days? Someone who loves their current phone and depends on the apps that they've got installed? Or someone who sees their device as a commodity that is uncannily similar but distressingly different other devices bearing the same OS? I think the new restrictions from Google--delayed release to the unwashed masses, tighter hardware restrictions--will help remove or at least minimize that uncanny valley between the various Android phones.
I never suggested that the changes are bad for end user. What I was saying, actually, is that these sorts of market numbers will mean a lot more if (when?) they hold up for new device sales under the more restrictive rules.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Right now, buying an Android phone doesn't necessarily mean anything. Your hardware specs might prevent your favorite app from running, or it may not be upgradable to the latest revision. Android is not Android is not Android. Once the lock-down has been in effect a little while, and once phone makers and carriers have to meet additional (hardware spec, upgradeability, etc) metrics to license the Android brand name, maybe limiting Android to two or three premium hardware vendors, then if their numbers exceed those of the iPhone or BBY installations, I'll be impressed.
I'm not saying it's unlikely, but with a free, fractured and fscked up ecosystem, talking about Android adoption levels with any level of pride would be like talking about, oh, what batteries are most common in phones. Woo hoo! Sony lithium polymer! Who cares?
The one downside of nuclear rockets is that if we had another Challenger-esque disaster, this time with, say, plutonium fuel, the repercussions would be much, much, much more immense. Just to be sure, we'd have to launch all rockets from tiny little atolls in the middle of the ocean.
Citation? I had the same question and I had not heard that the spent fuel pool fires were no longer an issue. I'd really appreciate a link to an authoritative source.
I remember Infocom was great about this. If you pirated one of their games, you got the game, which was fun and all, but if you bought the game, you got all sorts of additional knick-knacks which really added to the enjoyment of the game. In some cases, the stuff really helped; for Planetfall, for example, if you didn't buy the game, you had to ask around to find someone who had the star chart that was included so you could configure the right ro, theta and phi coordinates to reach the planet.
Other times it wasn't such a big deal. A friend of mine pirated Infidel, and I remember working with him to map out the territory--it was a fair amount of work--and then he got a legit copy for his birthday. The map we had spent hours putting together was included in the box!
I don't agree. The one time I tried torrenting something, I wanted to see an episode of a show that I had missed. This was before the broadcaster put anything on their web site. Anyway, my system spent three days downloading the damn file (since I didn't have anything to share, I guess I got last priority in the torrent queues), and when I finally fired it up, it was in Spanish.
I tossed it and didn't watch the show again until they started hosting the episodes on-line. Suffice to say, I haven't been willing to waste time searching for stuff on the torrents since. I know people who swear by it--one guy I know claims to have downloaded more songs than he could possibly listen to in his lifetime--but the time cost was too great for me to even consider trying that again.
Of course, the silly thing about that is that the sheer amount of time it takes to duplicate tapes was probably enough of a hindrance to "housewives", while Macrovision's protections did nothing to stop the real pirates--the ones who actually made a profit selling thousands of unlicensed copies of movies--from doing their thing.
Now that's just silly. There's like a gazillion apps in the app store, and if they want to do something custom, they can get a $99 dev license or jailbreak their device. Most people want to decide from a reasonable list, and that's what apple provides.
I'd suggest that their DRM really only works because of the low price of apps. Sure you can get around it, but if it's going to cause you problems in the future--i.e. with further updates--that are going to make you waste time and effort, and you can avoid that waste by spending $0.99, that's what most people are going to do.
I can't cite anything, but I'm absolutely certain that I read somewhere that pirated apps can be easily installed on jailbroken phones.
So a combination of low price and just-annoying-enough DRM is probably the real key.
This reminds me of the guy Colbert interviewed regarding the Large Hadron Collider who thought there was a 50% chance that it would destroy the universe. When questioned as to how he got those odds, he said, "Well, there's two options... either it will happen or it won't happen. 50%."
Love Apple, hate them or something in between: nobody is going to beat the iPad, no matter how great a device they build, until they are able to build a competing "ecosystem" like Apple has done with the iTMS/AppStore. Nerds care about the specifications, but nerds aren't the target market anymore; everyone else is. And everyone else is more interested in what you can *do* with the damn thing.
I like the part where they're supposedly doing a live video call to the port, but the window shows the QuickTime scrub bar indicating that it's a snippet of video with a beginning and an end instead of a live stream.
No, because they're so distracted with a thousand different product lines in their other businesses that they don't know how to make a pad that'll sell. The device itself might be GREAT, but the brilliance of what Apple did was they built an ecosystem first. Love it or hate it (walled gardens and all), without it, the iPod Touch would be just another MP3 player with a cool interface. The iPhone would be just another touch-screen smartphone, and the iPad would have failed just like all the other tablets that came before it.
The tech is cool and all, but it's the business that made it a success. You can't just say, "Me too!" and have your device be a success, regardless of specifications. Hell, I'm still worn out from the MHz wars of the 90s and early 00s. It's hard to get excited about some new chip when you know they've got another one, twice as fast, ready for release six months from now. I just want to know, does it do what I want it to?
Oh, and don't forget... Samsung's tablet is not alone. It's competing against [some huge number] of other generic android-based tablets. How can they possibly differentiate?
I'm right between your argument and the GP's. I'm annoyed at Google for indicating they're going to drop support for h.264 (they can afford whatever future royalties will come), and I'm annoyed at Apple for saying they're not going to support WebM (they've got the resources to drop a few lines of code into their products to support it). I mean, all modern browsers support JPG, GIF and PNG; why can't we support even two major standards without everyone getting in a snit?
Your first point is spot on. You could argue that there are actually 18 models of iPad now ([black/white] * [16/32/64 GB] * [wifi/ATT/Verizon]), but they're all just variations on one platform. The great majority of what goes into all of them is identical.
The phone line is similar, and my guess is that it won't be long before the iPod line is streamlined with just the touch and the nano.
Yeah, they make computers, too, and it's a bit more complex, but it's nothing compared to the mid-90s, when it was impossible for a non-geek to be able to determine which system was the best option for their use. I had a Quadra 650 that, when I had a repair done, it came out slower. I looked at the system info, and they'd replaced the motherboard with a Centris 650, with slower CPU, bus and video. Someone less geeky would probably just have chalked it up to their imagination. What hassle.
But now they've got a handful of simple product lines. With all the options, it may seem somewhat complex, but you just have to go to Samsung's cell phone listing page to see what a morass looks like. 183 phones. 183 barely-differentiated products. Nine Android smartphones, what looks like a few dozen feature phones--including those with touch screens--and a whole pile of basic phones. How could any of that be profitable? That's definitely not a business I'd want to be in.
You know what's funny? For so long, people would post the latest Dell or HP or whatever, with the exact same options as a competing Mac/Book/Pro and decry Apple for charging too much. It turns out we know now exactly how those guys were doing it. Two ways: (1) they were bleeding money and (2) they were getting kickbacks from companies like Intel. When something appears too good to be true, it probably is.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a possibility of that happening, but I have a feeling that Android has enough momentum that this lock-down will lead to more adoption in the long run. It may slow things down temporarily because of a less diverse range of hardware offerings, but if you have three makers whose buyers are anywhere near as loyal as iPhone owners tend to be, it'll mean lots and lots of repeat sales every couple of years.
What smart phone owner is going to buy a WP7 or BBY device these days? Someone who loves their current phone and depends on the apps that they've got installed? Or someone who sees their device as a commodity that is uncannily similar but distressingly different other devices bearing the same OS? I think the new restrictions from Google--delayed release to the unwashed masses, tighter hardware restrictions--will help remove or at least minimize that uncanny valley between the various Android phones.
I never suggested that the changes are bad for end user. What I was saying, actually, is that these sorts of market numbers will mean a lot more if (when?) they hold up for new device sales under the more restrictive rules.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Right now, buying an Android phone doesn't necessarily mean anything. Your hardware specs might prevent your favorite app from running, or it may not be upgradable to the latest revision. Android is not Android is not Android. Once the lock-down has been in effect a little while, and once phone makers and carriers have to meet additional (hardware spec, upgradeability, etc) metrics to license the Android brand name, maybe limiting Android to two or three premium hardware vendors, then if their numbers exceed those of the iPhone or BBY installations, I'll be impressed.
I'm not saying it's unlikely, but with a free, fractured and fscked up ecosystem, talking about Android adoption levels with any level of pride would be like talking about, oh, what batteries are most common in phones. Woo hoo! Sony lithium polymer! Who cares?
If only I could run that on my iPad, I'd be able to multitask on it, too!
Wake me up in six months, when the implications of Google's recent policy changes have been realized.
What could possibly go wrong?
The one downside of nuclear rockets is that if we had another Challenger-esque disaster, this time with, say, plutonium fuel, the repercussions would be much, much, much more immense. Just to be sure, we'd have to launch all rockets from tiny little atolls in the middle of the ocean.
That crash, of course, is more commentary on /.'s new bloated Javascript interface.
Citation? I had the same question and I had not heard that the spent fuel pool fires were no longer an issue. I'd really appreciate a link to an authoritative source.
I remember Infocom was great about this. If you pirated one of their games, you got the game, which was fun and all, but if you bought the game, you got all sorts of additional knick-knacks which really added to the enjoyment of the game. In some cases, the stuff really helped; for Planetfall, for example, if you didn't buy the game, you had to ask around to find someone who had the star chart that was included so you could configure the right ro, theta and phi coordinates to reach the planet.
Other times it wasn't such a big deal. A friend of mine pirated Infidel, and I remember working with him to map out the territory--it was a fair amount of work--and then he got a legit copy for his birthday. The map we had spent hours putting together was included in the box!
Didn't read the article, but the summary doesn't call it theft. It calls the act "piracy" and "illegal copying", but not theft.
I don't agree. The one time I tried torrenting something, I wanted to see an episode of a show that I had missed. This was before the broadcaster put anything on their web site. Anyway, my system spent three days downloading the damn file (since I didn't have anything to share, I guess I got last priority in the torrent queues), and when I finally fired it up, it was in Spanish.
I tossed it and didn't watch the show again until they started hosting the episodes on-line. Suffice to say, I haven't been willing to waste time searching for stuff on the torrents since. I know people who swear by it--one guy I know claims to have downloaded more songs than he could possibly listen to in his lifetime--but the time cost was too great for me to even consider trying that again.
Of course, the silly thing about that is that the sheer amount of time it takes to duplicate tapes was probably enough of a hindrance to "housewives", while Macrovision's protections did nothing to stop the real pirates--the ones who actually made a profit selling thousands of unlicensed copies of movies--from doing their thing.
Now that's just silly. There's like a gazillion apps in the app store, and if they want to do something custom, they can get a $99 dev license or jailbreak their device. Most people want to decide from a reasonable list, and that's what apple provides.
So don't update the OS? For most people OS updates are a nuisance anyways.
Oh yeah, just leave nasty things like that pdf exploit in there. Real good idea.
That PDF exploit is the easiest way to jailbreak it! Maybe she's a power user ;)
I'd suggest that their DRM really only works because of the low price of apps. Sure you can get around it, but if it's going to cause you problems in the future--i.e. with further updates--that are going to make you waste time and effort, and you can avoid that waste by spending $0.99, that's what most people are going to do.
I can't cite anything, but I'm absolutely certain that I read somewhere that pirated apps can be easily installed on jailbroken phones.
So a combination of low price and just-annoying-enough DRM is probably the real key.
This reminds me of the guy Colbert interviewed regarding the Large Hadron Collider who thought there was a 50% chance that it would destroy the universe. When questioned as to how he got those odds, he said, "Well, there's two options... either it will happen or it won't happen. 50%."
Love Apple, hate them or something in between: nobody is going to beat the iPad, no matter how great a device they build, until they are able to build a competing "ecosystem" like Apple has done with the iTMS/AppStore. Nerds care about the specifications, but nerds aren't the target market anymore; everyone else is. And everyone else is more interested in what you can *do* with the damn thing.
Well, half a second.
I like the part where they're supposedly doing a live video call to the port, but the window shows the QuickTime scrub bar indicating that it's a snippet of video with a beginning and an end instead of a live stream.
No, because they're so distracted with a thousand different product lines in their other businesses that they don't know how to make a pad that'll sell. The device itself might be GREAT, but the brilliance of what Apple did was they built an ecosystem first. Love it or hate it (walled gardens and all), without it, the iPod Touch would be just another MP3 player with a cool interface. The iPhone would be just another touch-screen smartphone, and the iPad would have failed just like all the other tablets that came before it.
The tech is cool and all, but it's the business that made it a success. You can't just say, "Me too!" and have your device be a success, regardless of specifications. Hell, I'm still worn out from the MHz wars of the 90s and early 00s. It's hard to get excited about some new chip when you know they've got another one, twice as fast, ready for release six months from now. I just want to know, does it do what I want it to?
Oh, and don't forget... Samsung's tablet is not alone. It's competing against [some huge number] of other generic android-based tablets. How can they possibly differentiate?
I'm right between your argument and the GP's. I'm annoyed at Google for indicating they're going to drop support for h.264 (they can afford whatever future royalties will come), and I'm annoyed at Apple for saying they're not going to support WebM (they've got the resources to drop a few lines of code into their products to support it). I mean, all modern browsers support JPG, GIF and PNG; why can't we support even two major standards without everyone getting in a snit?
not all are financial
Yeah, I'm sure writing Trumpet Winsock totally got him laid.
Your first point is spot on. You could argue that there are actually 18 models of iPad now ([black/white] * [16/32/64 GB] * [wifi/ATT/Verizon]), but they're all just variations on one platform. The great majority of what goes into all of them is identical.
The phone line is similar, and my guess is that it won't be long before the iPod line is streamlined with just the touch and the nano.
Yeah, they make computers, too, and it's a bit more complex, but it's nothing compared to the mid-90s, when it was impossible for a non-geek to be able to determine which system was the best option for their use. I had a Quadra 650 that, when I had a repair done, it came out slower. I looked at the system info, and they'd replaced the motherboard with a Centris 650, with slower CPU, bus and video. Someone less geeky would probably just have chalked it up to their imagination. What hassle.
But now they've got a handful of simple product lines. With all the options, it may seem somewhat complex, but you just have to go to Samsung's cell phone listing page to see what a morass looks like. 183 phones. 183 barely-differentiated products. Nine Android smartphones, what looks like a few dozen feature phones--including those with touch screens--and a whole pile of basic phones. How could any of that be profitable? That's definitely not a business I'd want to be in.
You know what's funny? For so long, people would post the latest Dell or HP or whatever, with the exact same options as a competing Mac/Book/Pro and decry Apple for charging too much. It turns out we know now exactly how those guys were doing it. Two ways: (1) they were bleeding money and (2) they were getting kickbacks from companies like Intel. When something appears too good to be true, it probably is.