You "don't hear apple, mercedes benz, bmw, or their customers complaining"? Take you earplugs out. Have you owned a BMW. My first was my last.
"They run Palm and Pocket PC. Of course nobody is really interested. OS X on a phone is something else."
PalmOS sucks and has for a long time. WM5 is really quite good, at least on some devices, and I'm sure you've never run it. Symbian actually dominates the market however. It seems you don't know much about smartphones.
iPhone doesn't really run OS X. OS X runs mac apps and the iPhone will not run mac apps. Frankly, it's just branding gone wrong. Until the iPhone actually exists and it's OS proves itself, only a fanboy would claim it is superior to existing platforms.
Valid criticism of a product, particularly when it helps a manufacturer improve its offering, isn't FUD. They are straight facts.
I'd love to see Apple improve the deficiencies of the current prototype...err...product. It needs 3G data, GPS, memory slot, no vendor lockin, 3rd party app support, and a $100 price reduction. There is competition in the market, after all, and the iPhone as it stands isn't that good.
I completely agree with you, except that the style that the iPhone offers won't win over many of those mid-level managers either. Buyers of smartphones, both business users and others, want the full keyboards to do messaging and the iPhone doesn't offer that.
The iPhone is an image device from the world's most successful boutique electronics company. It will not be effective competition for a Blackberry IMO.
If you've ever text messaged on a soft keyboard you wouldn't be saying that. Touchscreens suck for text messaging and phone functions. Yes, they've been tried before and they've failed. Most today have slideout keyboards because users value function of thinness. Apple values style over substance however.
The iPhone is a great iPod with a questionable phone integrated into it. For the price, the storage capacity is disappointing.
You seem to be the only one saying this. Yes, one notable/.'er has a famous "lame" quote about the iPod. Apparently, according to you, that was a market prediction from the entire community.
"The fact is, there is no phone like this out there, and a lot of people will want it once they see what it can do."
What? Of course there are phones like it already. There are no phones with its combination of screen size and overall size and there are no phones with an iPod dock connector, but there is nothing the iPhone does that isn't done by phones already on the market today. As a phone, there are many available that are superior to the iPhone.
"You guys are treating it as just a cell phone when it's really an iPod, cell phone, and miniature Mac in your pocket."
It is NOT a miniature Mac in your pocket. It does NOT run Mac software and it does NOT support 3rd party apps. It is inferior in this regard to every other smartphone in the market today and it is certainly NOT a pocketable computer. It IS a cellphone, though arguably a poor one, and a superior iPod. Many other cellphones integrate music and video including many full-keyboard smartphones.
"I hereby predict the FUDsters (initiated by cell phone manufacturers frightened of what Apple unveiled on Tuesday) are wrong and that Apple will be highly successful with the iPhone."
Be a fanboy with your head stuck in the sand. Criticisms of the device aren't FUD, they're real and they're valid.
In fine fashion, you've assumed that the iPhone "just works" in a way that other phones don't. The Newton didn't "just work" and no other touchscreen-only phone has "just worked" in an acceptable manner. There are real technical obstacles to the current device's success. Touchscreen-only phones suck!
Regardless, for a device so centered around internet connectivity, the omission of 3G data isn't simply a lack of "bells, whistles, and radios", it's a glaring omission. Furthermore, a device with such a great screen and multitouch interface screams for a GPS reciever and Apple has not provided nor offered a means to integrate one. It seems so easy when it's Apple to dismiss glaring shortcomings when others wouldn't be given such consideration.
It seems very likely that the iPhone v2 will be the first one of real interest (much like the iPod).
Considering the price of a T-mobile Dash with a 2 year contract and the cost of 4/8GB of flash, I'm also curious of the justification for the iPhone pricing. The Dash has only half the screen and no multitouch but it has a full keyboard, same size and same comm capabilities. It's only $200 with contract and arguably a more capable device for everything but web browsing and video.
No way insurance for such an expensive device with such a large, vulnerable screen will be that cheap. The cell companies change insurance rates for certain phones.
"Remember, nobody was going to spend $300 on an MP3 player named the iPod..."
No, I don't remember that.
"Once non-Slashdot people start seeing the likes of Paris Hilton and Shaq using the iPhone, it will gain traction."
Paris is too dumb to use a phone without a real keypad. Where would she have her swarovski crystals glued on?
The fact is that phones with entirely touchscreen-driven interfaces have failed in the market so far so the iPhone has history against it. There are plenty of phones in the iPhone price range that have succeeded. It's not the money, it's the function that will determine its success.
EDGE is not 3G. It's a minor improvement over GPRS and, in my experience with T-mobile, provides modest improvements in data rates (but good improvements in range). My EDGE data rates are stuck in the dialup range. The device has no 3G capability, though Apple could obviously change that. The US GSM market doesn't have widespread 3G yet.
There may be memory card expansion that would be a nice bonus. With 4 or 8 GB i think the device has adequate storage. An SD slot would be great.
There seems to be one of a few buttons but no call/end for example. Tactile feedback for phone funtions won't exist though.
Widgets may be a good way to get certain apps easily. Never having done them, I've heard they are easy to develop. Still, blackjacks have a lot of 3rd party software. The point is that the iPhone is still just a smartphone; it doesn't fundamentally change what is done with such a device. My opinion is that it is a clearly superior multimedia platform, but perhaps an inferior phone/texting device. Hopefully it will be good for communications too.
The good news is that it has an iPod docking connector and a real headphone jack. That alone gets me excited. Presumably it will work with iPod car kits.
I don't see how that's relevant. We haven't seen a real iPhone yet much less a development environment for it. Without that, how are you claiming that you know what it's like based solely on experience with Apple or NeXT tools?
Sure, I'd expect some benefit for Mac programming experience but the iPhone is an entirely new platform.
"If the development experience is anything like XCode+Interface Builder for this device, you'll see an explosion of software in the first week the tools are available."
Perhaps, but taking advantage of the multitouch interface is an unknown at this point. The device runs Widgets so you can develop those now. It hardly takes Mac programming experience to do those, however. Did familiarlity with Windows development tools produce an explosion of Windows Mobile software?
I agree. My point was that, while it may share a lot of OS X underpinnings, it's not OS in the "Mac" sense. It's an entirely new platform and existing mac apps won't just port over.
"Let's say your word processor just timed out saving to the network and in the meantime you'd switched to another document. You'd better hope you're not typing at 120wpm not looking at the screen, or you may inadvertently dismiss the dialog and not find out your save failed and you just lost a couple of hours work."
Anyone who puts himself in a situation of losing "a couple of hours work" regardless of how he does it deserves what he gets. Not looking a the screen while performing save operations on valuable data is stupid. No GUI is capable of saving an idiot from himself.
Perhaps, when you compose your idiot strawmans, you should be clearer as to what you precisely mean.
It's an intriguing device but it's not clear to me how it's "revolutionary". Compared to a Samsung Blackjack:
- about the same size, though 37.5% heavier, without memory expansion but with adequate flash integrated - gives up ALL buttons in favor of a double screen and interesting, new multitouch interface. - offers no integrated apps that the blackjack doesn't (though the double-size screen is good for content) - fails to offer any 3G data capabilities
I'm also not sure why you think existing Mac development experience is valuable since the Mac GUI is notably absent. Claiming that this device runs OS X is like claiming that Windows Mobile Smartphones run Windows. The device is a new form factor with a substantially different display, a totally new input method, and most likely and new binary format.
I'm as curious about it as any, but it's still just a smartphone with some interesting, different features and some potentially serious liabilities. I sure hope the device has a real iPod dock connector and headphone jack. The only "revolutionary" aspect of the device is the multitouch interface which is new to the market but not originally from Apple. Hopefully the interface will be compelling rather than infuriating.
No, because it's better than many smartphones today, if it's to be believed, and it's adequate for nightly charging.
The fatal flaw, if there is one, is likely the total lack of buttons. The claim that texting will be better than with a true thumb keyboard and the total lack of tactile feedback are real questions. Most other products have really suffered with this approach.
"THATS why it dominates on the Mac, when Premiere and Avid were well entrenched leaders for... well, a decade. They dropped the ball."
I think the real reasons are far more complicated. Avid switched to NT because MacOS at the time was inadequate and stagnating. Adobe was much more dominant on the PC than the mac. There were other forces involved other than just technical merit that swung the market toward FCP on the mac platform.
Premiere is an application more like a PC--supports anything but perhaps nothing well. Avid is a system that likes to be sold as a dedicated workstation. It's understandable to be why neither prefers to run on OS X at this point.
I guess if not being 'retarded' is 'advanced' then that makes sense. I see no reason for the default behavior to be so wrong in this case. Apparently some "guru" inside Apple feels otherwise.
"...corporate purchasing policies are set by Windows-loving IT people who don't really understand the needs of the production staff..."
Spoken like a true mac fanboy lacking any understanding of the history of the platform. Avid was originally a mac application but switched to Windows because MacOS was so obsolete. Avid was once held up as a shining example of the superiority of the mac platform for "creative professionals". Now that it's Windows it sucks sweaty balls and is forced upon the production staff by "Windows-loving IT people".
We don't really buy x86's, we buy computers that use them and x86 only dominates a small, but significant, portion of computing platforms. All that's necessary to set the x86 out to pasture is to render the platform they dominate obsolete. I'm not suggesting that it needs to be done because I defend the x86 as useful and desirable product, but it's far more likely that the desktop will go away than it will adopt a revolutionary new processor but continue in its current form. Either way, it would be good news because it would mean that we will have better devices in the future than we have today. Competition is always good.
No it doesn't, it just pretends to. It remains on in order to monitor additional button presses and that explains its terrible "off" standby times. The iPod NEVER turns off.
No, it's just the bitter RISC evangelists that were rendered moot long ago saying that. Claiming that the internal design of modern processors is "RISC" is arbitrary and meaningless. What happened was that the imminent demise of x86 predicted by RISC lovers didn't happen because Intel developed an architecture that separated instruction decoding from execution and further advanced x86 performance beyong what RISC architects thought possible. Rather than admit they were wrong, RISC people declared that Intel "cheated" by using a RISC core with a hardware translator and they declared victory instead. Meanwhile, Intel cleaned their clocks with x86. What remains today are x86's and RISC processors who share very similar internal designs; those designs attributable more from Intel's work than the other way around.
Actually, all you need is a platform that replaces the desktop PC itself. If everything that the typical user wants to do can be done on a device other than a desktop, then the x86 itself is no longer required. Embedded systems rarely use x86.
There have been many attempts to do that, of course, and they've all failed. That doesn't mean that a solution won't come along that eventually succeeds.
I agree that the synergy is important, but x86 dominated before Windows was an established monopoly. NT ran on many processors and shipped for a time that way. Alpha Windows NT has x86 emulators and I believe MIPS did as well (perhaps it was even a feature for all platforms). Microsoft cancelled NT for alternate architectures because x86 was too dominant to make a business case for supporting other systems.
Of course, NT was mainstream Windows for a long time and Win95 was uniprocessor x86 only. It was a combination of factors that led to x86 dominance: IBM's blessing, the creation of a robust clone market, the lack of an open alternate platform, x86 performance that was "good enough", a massive library of x86-only software, AND ultimately Windows domination.
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You "don't hear apple, mercedes benz, bmw, or their customers complaining"? Take you earplugs out. Have you owned a BMW. My first was my last.
"They run Palm and Pocket PC. Of course nobody is really interested. OS X on a phone is something else."
PalmOS sucks and has for a long time. WM5 is really quite good, at least on some devices, and I'm sure you've never run it. Symbian actually dominates the market however. It seems you don't know much about smartphones.
iPhone doesn't really run OS X. OS X runs mac apps and the iPhone will not run mac apps. Frankly, it's just branding gone wrong. Until the iPhone actually exists and it's OS proves itself, only a fanboy would claim it is superior to existing platforms.
Valid criticism of a product, particularly when it helps a manufacturer improve its offering, isn't FUD. They are straight facts.
I'd love to see Apple improve the deficiencies of the current prototype...err...product. It needs 3G data, GPS, memory slot, no vendor lockin, 3rd party app support, and a $100 price reduction. There is competition in the market, after all, and the iPhone as it stands isn't that good.
I completely agree with you, except that the style that the iPhone offers won't win over many of those mid-level managers either. Buyers of smartphones, both business users and others, want the full keyboards to do messaging and the iPhone doesn't offer that.
The iPhone is an image device from the world's most successful boutique electronics company. It will not be effective competition for a Blackberry IMO.
If you've ever text messaged on a soft keyboard you wouldn't be saying that. Touchscreens suck for text messaging and phone functions. Yes, they've been tried before and they've failed. Most today have slideout keyboards because users value function of thinness. Apple values style over substance however.
The iPhone is a great iPod with a questionable phone integrated into it. For the price, the storage capacity is disappointing.
"There "wasn't a market" for the iPod, either."
/.'er has a famous "lame" quote about the iPod. Apparently, according to you, that was a market prediction from the entire community.
You seem to be the only one saying this. Yes, one notable
"The fact is, there is no phone like this out there, and a lot of people will want it once they see what it can do."
What? Of course there are phones like it already. There are no phones with its combination of screen size and overall size and there are no phones with an iPod dock connector, but there is nothing the iPhone does that isn't done by phones already on the market today. As a phone, there are many available that are superior to the iPhone.
"You guys are treating it as just a cell phone when it's really an iPod, cell phone, and miniature Mac in your pocket."
It is NOT a miniature Mac in your pocket. It does NOT run Mac software and it does NOT support 3rd party apps. It is inferior in this regard to every other smartphone in the market today and it is certainly NOT a pocketable computer. It IS a cellphone, though arguably a poor one, and a superior iPod. Many other cellphones integrate music and video including many full-keyboard smartphones.
"I hereby predict the FUDsters (initiated by cell phone manufacturers frightened of what Apple unveiled on Tuesday) are wrong and that Apple will be highly successful with the iPhone."
Be a fanboy with your head stuck in the sand. Criticisms of the device aren't FUD, they're real and they're valid.
In fine fashion, you've assumed that the iPhone "just works" in a way that other phones don't. The Newton didn't "just work" and no other touchscreen-only phone has "just worked" in an acceptable manner. There are real technical obstacles to the current device's success. Touchscreen-only phones suck!
Regardless, for a device so centered around internet connectivity, the omission of 3G data isn't simply a lack of "bells, whistles, and radios", it's a glaring omission. Furthermore, a device with such a great screen and multitouch interface screams for a GPS reciever and Apple has not provided nor offered a means to integrate one. It seems so easy when it's Apple to dismiss glaring shortcomings when others wouldn't be given such consideration.
It seems very likely that the iPhone v2 will be the first one of real interest (much like the iPod).
Considering the price of a T-mobile Dash with a 2 year contract and the cost of 4/8GB of flash, I'm also curious of the justification for the iPhone pricing. The Dash has only half the screen and no multitouch but it has a full keyboard, same size and same comm capabilities. It's only $200 with contract and arguably a more capable device for everything but web browsing and video.
No way insurance for such an expensive device with such a large, vulnerable screen will be that cheap. The cell companies change insurance rates for certain phones.
"Remember, nobody was going to spend $300 on an MP3 player named the iPod..."
No, I don't remember that.
"Once non-Slashdot people start seeing the likes of Paris Hilton and Shaq using the iPhone, it will gain traction."
Paris is too dumb to use a phone without a real keypad. Where would she have her swarovski crystals glued on?
The fact is that phones with entirely touchscreen-driven interfaces have failed in the market so far so the iPhone has history against it. There are plenty of phones in the iPhone price range that have succeeded. It's not the money, it's the function that will determine its success.
EDGE is not 3G. It's a minor improvement over GPRS and, in my experience with T-mobile, provides modest improvements in data rates (but good improvements in range). My EDGE data rates are stuck in the dialup range. The device has no 3G capability, though Apple could obviously change that. The US GSM market doesn't have widespread 3G yet.
There may be memory card expansion that would be a nice bonus. With 4 or 8 GB i think the device has adequate storage. An SD slot would be great.
There seems to be one of a few buttons but no call/end for example. Tactile feedback for phone funtions won't exist though.
Widgets may be a good way to get certain apps easily. Never having done them, I've heard they are easy to develop. Still, blackjacks have a lot of 3rd party software. The point is that the iPhone is still just a smartphone; it doesn't fundamentally change what is done with such a device. My opinion is that it is a clearly superior multimedia platform, but perhaps an inferior phone/texting device. Hopefully it will be good for communications too.
The good news is that it has an iPod docking connector and a real headphone jack. That alone gets me excited. Presumably it will work with iPod car kits.
I don't see how that's relevant. We haven't seen a real iPhone yet much less a development environment for it. Without that, how are you claiming that you know what it's like based solely on experience with Apple or NeXT tools?
Sure, I'd expect some benefit for Mac programming experience but the iPhone is an entirely new platform.
"If the development experience is anything like XCode+Interface Builder for this device, you'll see an explosion of software in the first week the tools are available."
Perhaps, but taking advantage of the multitouch interface is an unknown at this point. The device runs Widgets so you can develop those now. It hardly takes Mac programming experience to do those, however. Did familiarlity with Windows development tools produce an explosion of Windows Mobile software?
I agree. My point was that, while it may share a lot of OS X underpinnings, it's not OS in the "Mac" sense. It's an entirely new platform and existing mac apps won't just port over.
"Let's say your word processor just timed out saving to the network and in the meantime you'd switched to another document. You'd better hope you're not typing at 120wpm not looking at the screen, or you may inadvertently dismiss the dialog and not find out your save failed and you just lost a couple of hours work."
Anyone who puts himself in a situation of losing "a couple of hours work" regardless of how he does it deserves what he gets. Not looking a the screen while performing save operations on valuable data is stupid. No GUI is capable of saving an idiot from himself.
Perhaps, when you compose your idiot strawmans, you should be clearer as to what you precisely mean.
It's an intriguing device but it's not clear to me how it's "revolutionary". Compared to a Samsung Blackjack:
- about the same size, though 37.5% heavier, without memory expansion but with adequate flash integrated
- gives up ALL buttons in favor of a double screen and interesting, new multitouch interface.
- offers no integrated apps that the blackjack doesn't (though the double-size screen is good for content)
- fails to offer any 3G data capabilities
I'm also not sure why you think existing Mac development experience is valuable since the Mac GUI is notably absent. Claiming that this device runs OS X is like claiming that Windows Mobile Smartphones run Windows. The device is a new form factor with a substantially different display, a totally new input method, and most likely and new binary format.
I'm as curious about it as any, but it's still just a smartphone with some interesting, different features and some potentially serious liabilities. I sure hope the device has a real iPod dock connector and headphone jack. The only "revolutionary" aspect of the device is the multitouch interface which is new to the market but not originally from Apple. Hopefully the interface will be compelling rather than infuriating.
No, because it's better than many smartphones today, if it's to be believed, and it's adequate for nightly charging.
The fatal flaw, if there is one, is likely the total lack of buttons. The claim that texting will be better than with a true thumb keyboard and the total lack of tactile feedback are real questions. Most other products have really suffered with this approach.
iPhone does EDGE, not EVDO. EDGE is not "quite a lot faster than GPRS", it's an incremental improvement only.
"THATS why it dominates on the Mac, when Premiere and Avid were well entrenched leaders for... well, a decade. They dropped the ball."
I think the real reasons are far more complicated. Avid switched to NT because MacOS at the time was inadequate and stagnating. Adobe was much more dominant on the PC than the mac. There were other forces involved other than just technical merit that swung the market toward FCP on the mac platform.
Premiere is an application more like a PC--supports anything but perhaps nothing well. Avid is a system that likes to be sold as a dedicated workstation. It's understandable to be why neither prefers to run on OS X at this point.
"anything 'advanced' is off by default"
I guess if not being 'retarded' is 'advanced' then that makes sense. I see no reason for the default behavior to be so wrong in this case. Apparently some "guru" inside Apple feels otherwise.
"...corporate purchasing policies are set by Windows-loving IT people who don't really understand the needs of the production staff..."
Spoken like a true mac fanboy lacking any understanding of the history of the platform. Avid was originally a mac application but switched to Windows because MacOS was so obsolete. Avid was once held up as a shining example of the superiority of the mac platform for "creative professionals". Now that it's Windows it sucks sweaty balls and is forced upon the production staff by "Windows-loving IT people".
Go on believing what Steve tells you to.
Any fool who types for 2 hours straight without looking at his screen should get ripped by his boss. That's ridiculous.
No GUI will work for users who refuse to look at their displays.
We don't really buy x86's, we buy computers that use them and x86 only dominates a small, but significant, portion of computing platforms. All that's necessary to set the x86 out to pasture is to render the platform they dominate obsolete. I'm not suggesting that it needs to be done because I defend the x86 as useful and desirable product, but it's far more likely that the desktop will go away than it will adopt a revolutionary new processor but continue in its current form. Either way, it would be good news because it would mean that we will have better devices in the future than we have today. Competition is always good.
No it doesn't, it just pretends to. It remains on in order to monitor additional button presses and that explains its terrible "off" standby times. The iPod NEVER turns off.
No, it's just the bitter RISC evangelists that were rendered moot long ago saying that. Claiming that the internal design of modern processors is "RISC" is arbitrary and meaningless. What happened was that the imminent demise of x86 predicted by RISC lovers didn't happen because Intel developed an architecture that separated instruction decoding from execution and further advanced x86 performance beyong what RISC architects thought possible. Rather than admit they were wrong, RISC people declared that Intel "cheated" by using a RISC core with a hardware translator and they declared victory instead. Meanwhile, Intel cleaned their clocks with x86. What remains today are x86's and RISC processors who share very similar internal designs; those designs attributable more from Intel's work than the other way around.
Actually, all you need is a platform that replaces the desktop PC itself. If everything that the typical user wants to do can be done on a device other than a desktop, then the x86 itself is no longer required. Embedded systems rarely use x86.
There have been many attempts to do that, of course, and they've all failed. That doesn't mean that a solution won't come along that eventually succeeds.
I agree that the synergy is important, but x86 dominated before Windows was an established monopoly. NT ran on many processors and shipped for a time that way. Alpha Windows NT has x86 emulators and I believe MIPS did as well (perhaps it was even a feature for all platforms). Microsoft cancelled NT for alternate architectures because x86 was too dominant to make a business case for supporting other systems.
Of course, NT was mainstream Windows for a long time and Win95 was uniprocessor x86 only. It was a combination of factors that led to x86 dominance: IBM's blessing, the creation of a robust clone market, the lack of an open alternate platform, x86 performance that was "good enough", a massive library of x86-only software, AND ultimately Windows domination.