It's not about a billion writes, but about being able to take an impact as a portable device is moved around. Most people need that reliability more than capacity. Most people need the additional speed of solid state, better instant on, more than more capacity. Most people need mobility, small size, more than capacity.
An example of this is iPad. Lower capacities than a typical notebook, but mobile, rugged, small, instant on. The lack of a hard drive is one of the things people love about iPad even if they aren't conscious of it. They love the benefits.
Yeah, there will be hard disks for a while yet, but they are going to become minority real fast.
I don't use tabs except for the rare times I use Windows. I always thought they were a hack to make up for Windows' fucking lousy window management. This seems to confirm that, since you can get these Tab Candy tabs by turning tabs off in Safari on a Mac and just using Exposé. These are also how iPad tabs work: you only see them as an overview.
Encode your video in H.264 Baseline Profile and it will play on everything. Baseline Profile is DVD-quality, 640x480. Players with smaller screens will scale it down. The bigger HD H.264 profiles will not play on everything, because not all devices can play HD yet. Devices with smaller screens will scale the video down.
You don't get to express your individuality with a choice of codec, because video consumers only have one: H.264. If your video is not H.264, the consumer cannot see it. That is the reason H.264 exists, that is why it has that ISO/IEC name starting with an H instead of its previous name, which was Advanced Video Coding. Making a universal meeting place for video content is why we have ISO standardization of video codecs, so there is a common playback and capture codec for consumers. In the same way that you had to use MPEG-2 video on a DVD Player, you have to use MPEG-4 H.264 video on the video players has succeeded it: iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Blu-Ray, iTunes, iPod, Zune, YouTube (although they will transcode nonstandard codecs to H.264 automatically), QuickTime Player, FlashPlayer, Safari, Chrome, IE9, Mac OS, Ubuntu, various set-tops and other devices.
To stream well on 3G it will have to be very low-bandwidth. Typically, a version is encoded for Wi-Fi and a separate version for 3G.
Apple has a lot of information about video authoring and encoding for mobile devices on their developer site. Apple has forgotten more about this topic than most companies will ever know: QuickTime is the backbone of audio video authoring, MPEG-4 is a standardization of the QuickTime file format, Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro video editor, iMovie is the most popular consumer video editor, WebKit the most video-savvy browser core, and of course they run iTunes Store are the maker of the iPod. So you can follow their advice and get the job done right. Their advice will also apply to Android and other smartphones because when it comes to video they are all iPods.
> Consumers, on the other hand, get the short end of the stick... those hundreds of gigs of DivX everyone has laying around are useless
You have it backwards. H.264 enables consumers to choose video playback, video capture, and video editing tools from any manufacturer and still have universal compatibility. They can still create and share video with anyone, they can still purchase commercial video from any source and it all works. And it does all that entirely for free. That is the benefit of standardization. That is why ISO MPEG-4 H.264 exists in the first place.
DivX and other non-standard codecs are what give consumers the "short end of the stick." They require you to maintain a collection of software codecs, they require huge CPU resources, and they require you to transcode in order to accomplish any kind of sharing. So if you have a collection of videos stored in a nonstandard codec, your best option is to encode them in H.264 so you can play them on standard video players.
They cobbled their network together from a bunch of smaller ones. It varies in quality depending on where you are in the country. Any arbitrary user may be in a great area or have no coverage at all. They are the newest carrier in spite of the old name.
San Francisco is a special case. It's a very small city, but it is made up of 11 hills that are hard to cover, it was almost all built in 1906 after the earthquake, most of the city is only 2 stories tall, the infrastructure is ancient, and there is a political movement here to get rid of all the cell towers, and failing that to slow down or stop new ones from going up, because as you know they are irradiating our kids.
I thought maybe AT&T was getting the runaround since they are from Texas, but I looked into it and they provide same sex partner benefits and were honored by HRC as being one of the best places to work if you are GLBT, and have many diversity-oriented awards so they probably get treated well by the government here. But it was even hard for Google to come in here and get things done when they were trying to do municipal Wi-Fi, so it is probably just a tough town for infrastructure.
> Now, as for why the majority of these people *must* have an iPhone so badly, I refuse to speculate as it would probably > result in some unfavorable comments about the Apple faithful.
It's no great mystery. It's the best phone. You heard about it reinventing the smartphone, right? You only need to work your brain to figure out why people would pay the same price for a phone that is not the best phone. Same as it's not hard to figure out why people buy iPods, but you have to wonder why they bought Zunes when Zunes were available. To save $10? What was the reason? Hard to say. But why people bought iPods was they had iTunes and great design and were easy to use and easy to put music and movies on there and they got smaller and cheaper and added more features year after year. With iPhone, for many people that is the first computer they ever mastered. It's the first computer they ever installed a native application onto, or bought a native application for. And they loaded their first one up with native apps, Web apps, music, movies, podcasts, books, contacts, calendars, emails and they did things with their phone that they never thought was possible, and it very rarely crashed or asked them to do any kind of I-T work and yeah, for $99 or $199 they want another one. No mystery at all.
And "Apple faithful" is so out-of-date. There are many iPhone users for whom iPhone was their first Apple product, they did not even have an iPod. And 40% of iPad users bought one instead of a Windows PC.
People who bought Apple products in 1996 were "Apple faithful" and true fanboys, because the company had been poorly managed into the ground and was on the ropes like Microsoft is today. But people who buy Apple products in 2010 are just people. Regular consumers. They go to the mall and check out what is in the Apple Store and they try the devices and they like them, they find them useful. They prefer to go to Apple Store instead of Best Buy where choosing devices can be like doing your taxes, all spec sheets and mumbo jumbo. And Apple has a reputation for making the best phone and the best devices. Doesn't take a fanboy to buy the best and like it, it takes a fanboy to buy the worst and like it. For example, people who are running Windows 7 right now and looking forward to the release of Windows Phone 7 are the Microsoft faithful. Most Microsoft users are still running XP and wondering what the fuck happened to Bill Gates.
> As for why the Android repeat number is so low, I posit that if they limited the survey group to Android users that bought > an Android phone that was equivalently priced with the iPhone, you'd see a dramatically higher percentage.
The reason the Android number is so low is that Android is not made for consumers. It's too much like a PC, which most people fucking hate. They think of the PC as a kind of torture device they have to endure at work. They were sold an Android device as being "just like an iPhone" but they can't do 10% of the things their friends are doing with their iPhones because 1) they don't have a CS degree, and 2) Android is missing stuff compared to iPhone. Even the very low level of technical prowess it takes to just sync your iTunes music with your Android phone (download Missing Sync, etc.) is way beyond most consumers. It has to be made 1000 times easier to do everything than it currently is on Android. Or, consumers should be warned away from the Nerd Phone and let a much smaller Android user base of hardcore nerds give it a 90% satisfaction rating.
> Not to mention, all Android users having to face iPhone envy because it was the "in" thing
iPhone is $99. Nobody has to face iPhone envy. Just buy yourself a fucking iPhone. And if you have envy, it's not because it's the in thing, it's because it's better, it came first, and everyone else has been copying it for some time but moving at a much slower pace.
I read the Droid X review at Anandtech. I think that thing is a fucking train wreck, and you couldn't pay me to use one. But
> Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?
That's the whole idea with open standards. Did you know nearly every photograph has been, at one point or another, in JPEG format? Duh. All the camcorders make MPEG-4, which is a standardized QuickTime container. All the editors edit MPEG-4. All the players play MPEG-4. That is the whole idea with MPEG-4. That is why Apple gave the container away. Before MPEG-4, it was the QuickTime container that was universal in that same way. It was standardized not just to make it vendor neutral, but also because it was practical and possible to update media and tools and players that used QuickTime containers to use MPEG-4 containers. It's not practical to switch to another container. That would be like trying to replace Unix on the Internet. No, we cannot even switch to WebM. That would be a bigger project than the Great Wall of China. WebM is not even standardized.
The codecs are a separate issue from the container. There are licensing fees for some commercial use of H.264. In theory, H.264 could be displaced as the consumer codec by something like Google VC-8. However, in practice, the patents on H.264 will expire before that could happen, and VC-8 is vulnerable to submarine patents which are much worse than H.264's patent pool.
Professional content producers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's what is in all the tools, and consumers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's in all their still and video cameras, and they're going to upload it directly and share it directly from the devices without transcoding, and they're going to watch it on their smartphones and media players and tablets and set-top boxes which all have hardware H.264 decoding and which cannot support software codecs. And they're going to watch it on their PC's, which even though they can support software codecs, also have hardware H.264 decoding in their GPU's and so get 10 times the battery life playing H.264 as any other codec. All of the activity I just mentioned is totally 100% royalty-free. Even the professional creatives and producers pay no royalties at all. It's only the sellers of video like Apple with iTunes and the sellers of video encoders like Apple with QuickTime Pro that pay royalties, and the royalties are very small and cannot go up more than 10% every 5 years, and they do not go to patent trolls, they go directly to the people at many different organizations who created and standardized the codec.
So in short, no matter what your politics, you are I and everyone else is stuck with MPEG-4 containers, that is all that has existed since the dawn of digital video. They just used to be called QuickTime containers. They are not going away any more than Unix is going away. And no matter what your politics, we are all stuck with H.264, because that is what was deployed as the consumer standard for video codecs 10 years ago, and it has universal deployment and it's how most Web video is displayed today and for some years now, even if you view it in FlashPlayer. It's all of YouTube and iTunes, it's Netflix and Hulu. It's Canon SLR's and Flip camcorders and iPods and Droid phones. It's WebKit and IE9. It's Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. The small costs associated with some commercial use of MPEG-4 H.264 (selling video, selling encoders) are well worth what we get for it.
> Sorry, but the vast majority of [Windows] users have Adobe Reader installed to view PDF files
Mac users hardly ever have Adobe Reader because the built-in PDF tools are better. Smartphone and iPad users definitely don't have Adobe Reader, but they can all view PDF. This is not 1995. PDF is Portable Document Format. It is not brain surgery to create a PDF you can share with any arbitrary user. If you choose to make Adobe Reader documents instead of standard PDF, then you can't complain that everyone else should use Reader. You have it 180 degrees backwards. Viewing the PDF in any reader the recipient chooses is the DEFAULT, PDF is standardized for that purpose. Adobe Reader always supports a newer version of PDF than the standard. It's your responsibility to know which end of your ass is up and create the standardized version, not your responsibility to act as an Adobe salesman and bully other people into downloading Acrobat to view your shitty document.
Nothing on Windows is accurate enough for proofing. It has no color management. It has many other problems.
You should create a standardized version of PDF, not the latest version that can only be viewed in Acrobat. A standardized PDF can be viewed with full-fidelity on many platforms. Most smartphones can view PDF. The user interface on all Apple products is PDF, they breathe PDF. It is really, really rare for a Mac user to use Acrobat.
iAds are not on the Web, they're in native apps. So it's not Adblock Plus that is protecting you, but rather your N900's complete lack of software. But on the other hand, you could use an iPhone and just not use App Store and get the same deal.
You just go to oo.apple.com on an iOS device and you're opted out of targeted iAds. You choose apps without ads to avoid seeing ads altogether.
It's possible not only to use and enjoy an iOS device without iAds, you can even use one without App Store, because iOS fully supports the HTML5 API. You can install apps locally from any server.
Truly, there is a lot of sour grapes and ignorant bigotry coming from a lot of grumpy nerds whenever iOS is mentioned. If you don't like it, don't use it. Stop whining like little babies that other people like it. All these assumptions and misinformation is just tiresome. Become informed or STFU.
You're not forced to download anything. If you only want to use apps without ads, that is not just possible, it's easy. Very few paid apps even have ads. Ads are to support free apps.
Safari on iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod) doesn't have extensions. On iOS, instead of an extension, the developer just creates a whole other browser, and that has to be audited to be deployed. Although you may be able to write this for Safari on Mac/Windows, those extensions have to be signed to run, and signatures can be revoked immediately, so even if you got this deployed, at the first sign of trouble it stops running on 100% of systems. There is very little point in tagging a wall that can repaint itself instantly.
One problem with modern communication is the tendency to paint with too broad a brush. You found an attack vector in Chrome, that is real work, a scientific result. Don't fuck that up those hours of work by spending 1 second trumpeting an assumption that it works everywhere else. Either do the work to create the same extension on all other browsers or don't even fucking mention any other browser.
There is hardly any money in the music industry anymore. Bootlegging is a tax that most artists can't afford to pay. You have to appeal to a million listeners to get 100,000 to pay. So artists like Lady Gaga have to appeal to a billion to get a million to pay. So the stuff that's being hurt is the stuff with more limited appeal, more niche stuff. Artists who would have sold 100,000 a decade ago now get out of the business, or don't get in at all, or they die from lack of health care in the US. A lot of the infrastructure is gone. Music studios are gone. Local music scenes are much less than they were. The best part of record companies is gone. Live shows cost a fortune, with most going to insurance and security. There are ways you can say it is better for really entrepreneurial artists, but again, that's just a fraction, maybe 10%. Same for artists who can produce their own stuff, it's better in some ways but that's a small fraction.
In the past, no matter how you listened to music, whether buying CD or listening to FM, or even playing the jukebox at a diner, some money made it back to the producer of that music, incentivizing more music production. Now, there are a lot of ways to listen to music now where no money goes to the producer. The difference between low money and no money is profound.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
By "increased transparency" they don't mean transparent but rather translucent. You can see the print on the other side of a page through the page on a paper book, as well as in many digital presentations, including iBooks and many of the book readers that preceded it.
Multitouch is cheaper than mouse, and more useful to kids. Not just because they live in the 21st century, but because young kids can handle touch better than mouse. The mouse hardware may be cheaper, but it requires much more complicated software which makes mouse more expensive. And the Web works better with touch. Painting is better with touch. With touch you can emulate many real devices.
But then again, OLPC is about serving the philanthropic needs of adults, not the practical needs of kids. So a mouse and command line will make the adults feel better, when the kids would be better off with iPod touch, which is the cheapest ticket to computing by far ($99 per year and no admin costs) and kids take to it immediately. Web, email, VoIP, SMS, podcasts, music, movies, ePub, HTML5 apps, App Store apps, built-in accessibility for blind kids, no setup required, and 5 nines reliability.
> OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature
Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. The only difference between Mac OS and iOS is the user and application interfaces. One is mouse and one is multitouch. The bottom 3/4 are the same. The xnu kernel runs on iPod and Xserve and everything in-between. Yes it runs great on ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It ran great on PowerPC G4 500MHz. Secondly, the core of OS X is open source. OLPC could easily see what is going on there. Third, OLPC uses fucking Windows. They shipped fucking Windows. That is fat and proprietary. So the idealistic notion of Sugar is just an idealistic notion. By any measure, free OS X is better than cheap Windows.
When IE9 is released, every PC, smartphone, and tablet will support HTML5/MPEG-4 out-of-the-box. Every set-top box and console game already supports MPEG-4, and they are all in the process of getting HTML5. The HTML5/MPEG-4 Web is the consumer Web and it is already here. The fact that Firefox can't support it means they are on borrowed time, getting by in the shadow of IE6-IE8.
Right now the Web is split in 2 layers: a modern HTML5/MPEG-4 layer that runs on non-PC and a legacy IE6/Flash layer that runs on PC. That is why PC users are incredulous that iPad can be used to surf the Web. They see Flash all over the place and don't understand that the same IE6/Flash page they are viewing appears as HTML5/MPEG-4 on iPad. IE9 will finish what Safari/Chrome for Windows started and bring the PC onto the modern Web. Essentially IE9 will mobilize the PC. Publishers are already chafing to drop the IE6/Flash legacy right now because it costs so much to maintain and they want to run just one modern website. People who only use a PC to access the Web (no smartphone, iPod, tablet, set-top, etc.) are rare right now and getting rarer every day.
If you think Firefox is going to survive the "mobilization" of the Web with didactic open source philosophy screeds and WebM/Ogg support, you are insane. WebM has only 2 practical purposes: drive Firefox users to Chrome and video publishers to YouTube. Standards are new to the Web... HTML5 may be the first successful markup standard. But in audio video, standards are historically very successful. MPEG-4 is the 3rd successful audio video standard... 4th if you count MP3, and 5th if you count CD-DA. There were unsuccessful ones years ago that spanked everyone in audio video so hard they learned their lesson. We got a taste of that recently when even the entire weight of Microsloth could not break the consumer audio video standards: VC-1 in Windows went nowhere, VC-1 in "HD-DVD" sold only 150,000 players. But they did pretty much kill the optical disc, which was at the end of its life anyway. MPEG-4 is an online CD/DVD. To audio video publishers, MPEG-4 is as important as CD/DVD. MPEG-4 is as important to audio video publishers as UTF-8 is to text publishers. And it's not something that's happening in the future, it happened already at the turn of the century. The incredibly slow, mind-numbing, reason-defying slowness of Microsoft has just hidden this from PC people. Consumer electronics is all MPEG-4 for many years now. MPEG-4 is what is on Blu-Ray, it's your Hulu stream, it's your Netflix stream, it's your iTunes+iPod, it's in your smartphone and your GPU.
So all the HTML5 standard markup support in the world doesn't matter if Mozilla can't play MPEG-4 standard audio video. The Web is not about PC's and I-T people anymore, it's about consumer electronics devices and consumers. It's not just text and graphics and whatever exotic nonstandard thing you want to embed or plug-in or download to show your techiness, it's the whole range of human expression in rigorously standardized formats that require zero I-T work to decode. The Web is now native HTML5 code, UTF-8 text, JPEG photos, PNG/SVG graphics, and MPEG-4 audio video. All W3C/ISO standard.
Perhaps the most foolish part is Mozilla says they don't want to pay MPEG-4 license fees, but those license fees could never amount to more than what they get from Google for just 10% of their user's searches. If they lose only 10% of the Firefox user base because those users can't see standard audio video, then their gambit has lost. They could be gaining users right now by pressing the MPEG-4 advantage over IE8, but they are missing that chance and handing those users to Safari and Chrome. When you consider that the vast majority of video that plays today in Firefox via Flash (the ultimate closed system) is MPEG-4 H.264, Mozilla is cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're making a mistake of historic proportions. We'll mark this as the beginning of the end for Firefox one day in the near future when writing its obituary.
The hysteria around iPhone is fucking ridiculous. iPhone apps are written in either C or HTML5. C is cross-platform, apps are easily ported to any other C platform, e.g. any Unix, Windows, PlayStation, Wii, Xbox, and even many set-top boxes potentially. That is why Pac-Man and DOOM run on iPhone even though both were written many years before iPhone existed. If any phone maker other than Apple had any fucking clue, iPhone apps could easily be ported to other phones. Native apps could be written for iPhone and other handsets like for many years apps have run on both Mac and Windows, like for many years all Unix systems have run the same apps. But nobody else offers a C API yet other than Apple, in spite of most phones running Unix. HTML5 of course can be authored in such a way that it installs and runs on everything, although you'll need to use a 3rd party browser on Microsoft platforms.
So iPhone apps are not an exclusive club which you can only enter by buying an iPhone. The BBC writing an iPhone app is not forcing you to buy an iPhone, or even encouraging you. And they can easily charge and make the cost of development back. Tell your non-Apple handset maker to provide a fucking C API and if they don't then buy a phone that does next time or STFU. Your destiny is in your own hands.
We just got the first 300 plus dpi screen in iPhone 4, and obviously that will come to other devices. At that point, you don't care about the pixels anymore because you can't see them. What is onscreen does not appear to be made out of pixels, it appears to be made out of curves and lines. Most photographic prints are less than 300 dpi. Most people have never seen an image with higher resolution than an iPhone 4 screen. We don't talk about the shape of the pixels in a chemical photo print, we talk about the image that is shown there. We're entering that time in onscreen images now also. As great as pixels are, they are better when you can't see them.
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Actually, it was a great idea to change the company field since it maintained accuracy.
The problem is the apps that were poorly coded and assumed that Java would be owned by Sun for the next thousand years. They deserved to break.
It's not about a billion writes, but about being able to take an impact as a portable device is moved around. Most people need that reliability more than capacity. Most people need the additional speed of solid state, better instant on, more than more capacity. Most people need mobility, small size, more than capacity.
An example of this is iPad. Lower capacities than a typical notebook, but mobile, rugged, small, instant on. The lack of a hard drive is one of the things people love about iPad even if they aren't conscious of it. They love the benefits.
Yeah, there will be hard disks for a while yet, but they are going to become minority real fast.
Is there any future in which it matters? Why would anybody work in that ghetto?
I don't use tabs except for the rare times I use Windows. I always thought they were a hack to make up for Windows' fucking lousy window management. This seems to confirm that, since you can get these Tab Candy tabs by turning tabs off in Safari on a Mac and just using Exposé. These are also how iPad tabs work: you only see them as an overview.
Encode your video in H.264 Baseline Profile and it will play on everything. Baseline Profile is DVD-quality, 640x480. Players with smaller screens will scale it down. The bigger HD H.264 profiles will not play on everything, because not all devices can play HD yet. Devices with smaller screens will scale the video down.
You don't get to express your individuality with a choice of codec, because video consumers only have one: H.264. If your video is not H.264, the consumer cannot see it. That is the reason H.264 exists, that is why it has that ISO/IEC name starting with an H instead of its previous name, which was Advanced Video Coding. Making a universal meeting place for video content is why we have ISO standardization of video codecs, so there is a common playback and capture codec for consumers. In the same way that you had to use MPEG-2 video on a DVD Player, you have to use MPEG-4 H.264 video on the video players has succeeded it: iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Blu-Ray, iTunes, iPod, Zune, YouTube (although they will transcode nonstandard codecs to H.264 automatically), QuickTime Player, FlashPlayer, Safari, Chrome, IE9, Mac OS, Ubuntu, various set-tops and other devices.
To stream well on 3G it will have to be very low-bandwidth. Typically, a version is encoded for Wi-Fi and a separate version for 3G.
Apple has a lot of information about video authoring and encoding for mobile devices on their developer site. Apple has forgotten more about this topic than most companies will ever know: QuickTime is the backbone of audio video authoring, MPEG-4 is a standardization of the QuickTime file format, Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro video editor, iMovie is the most popular consumer video editor, WebKit the most video-savvy browser core, and of course they run iTunes Store are the maker of the iPod. So you can follow their advice and get the job done right. Their advice will also apply to Android and other smartphones because when it comes to video they are all iPods.
http://developer.apple.com/
> Consumers, on the other hand, get the short end of the stick... those hundreds of gigs of DivX everyone has laying around are useless
You have it backwards. H.264 enables consumers to choose video playback, video capture, and video editing tools from any manufacturer and still have universal compatibility. They can still create and share video with anyone, they can still purchase commercial video from any source and it all works. And it does all that entirely for free. That is the benefit of standardization. That is why ISO MPEG-4 H.264 exists in the first place.
DivX and other non-standard codecs are what give consumers the "short end of the stick." They require you to maintain a collection of software codecs, they require huge CPU resources, and they require you to transcode in order to accomplish any kind of sharing. So if you have a collection of videos stored in a nonstandard codec, your best option is to encode them in H.264 so you can play them on standard video players.
They cobbled their network together from a bunch of smaller ones. It varies in quality depending on where you are in the country. Any arbitrary user may be in a great area or have no coverage at all. They are the newest carrier in spite of the old name.
San Francisco is a special case. It's a very small city, but it is made up of 11 hills that are hard to cover, it was almost all built in 1906 after the earthquake, most of the city is only 2 stories tall, the infrastructure is ancient, and there is a political movement here to get rid of all the cell towers, and failing that to slow down or stop new ones from going up, because as you know they are irradiating our kids.
I thought maybe AT&T was getting the runaround since they are from Texas, but I looked into it and they provide same sex partner benefits and were honored by HRC as being one of the best places to work if you are GLBT, and have many diversity-oriented awards so they probably get treated well by the government here. But it was even hard for Google to come in here and get things done when they were trying to do municipal Wi-Fi, so it is probably just a tough town for infrastructure.
> Now, as for why the majority of these people *must* have an iPhone so badly, I refuse to speculate as it would probably
> result in some unfavorable comments about the Apple faithful.
It's no great mystery. It's the best phone. You heard about it reinventing the smartphone, right? You only need to work your brain to figure out why people would pay the same price for a phone that is not the best phone. Same as it's not hard to figure out why people buy iPods, but you have to wonder why they bought Zunes when Zunes were available. To save $10? What was the reason? Hard to say. But why people bought iPods was they had iTunes and great design and were easy to use and easy to put music and movies on there and they got smaller and cheaper and added more features year after year. With iPhone, for many people that is the first computer they ever mastered. It's the first computer they ever installed a native application onto, or bought a native application for. And they loaded their first one up with native apps, Web apps, music, movies, podcasts, books, contacts, calendars, emails and they did things with their phone that they never thought was possible, and it very rarely crashed or asked them to do any kind of I-T work and yeah, for $99 or $199 they want another one. No mystery at all.
And "Apple faithful" is so out-of-date. There are many iPhone users for whom iPhone was their first Apple product, they did not even have an iPod. And 40% of iPad users bought one instead of a Windows PC.
People who bought Apple products in 1996 were "Apple faithful" and true fanboys, because the company had been poorly managed into the ground and was on the ropes like Microsoft is today. But people who buy Apple products in 2010 are just people. Regular consumers. They go to the mall and check out what is in the Apple Store and they try the devices and they like them, they find them useful. They prefer to go to Apple Store instead of Best Buy where choosing devices can be like doing your taxes, all spec sheets and mumbo jumbo. And Apple has a reputation for making the best phone and the best devices. Doesn't take a fanboy to buy the best and like it, it takes a fanboy to buy the worst and like it. For example, people who are running Windows 7 right now and looking forward to the release of Windows Phone 7 are the Microsoft faithful. Most Microsoft users are still running XP and wondering what the fuck happened to Bill Gates.
> As for why the Android repeat number is so low, I posit that if they limited the survey group to Android users that bought
> an Android phone that was equivalently priced with the iPhone, you'd see a dramatically higher percentage.
The reason the Android number is so low is that Android is not made for consumers. It's too much like a PC, which most people fucking hate. They think of the PC as a kind of torture device they have to endure at work. They were sold an Android device as being "just like an iPhone" but they can't do 10% of the things their friends are doing with their iPhones because 1) they don't have a CS degree, and 2) Android is missing stuff compared to iPhone. Even the very low level of technical prowess it takes to just sync your iTunes music with your Android phone (download Missing Sync, etc.) is way beyond most consumers. It has to be made 1000 times easier to do everything than it currently is on Android. Or, consumers should be warned away from the Nerd Phone and let a much smaller Android user base of hardcore nerds give it a 90% satisfaction rating.
> Not to mention, all Android users having to face iPhone envy because it was the "in" thing
iPhone is $99. Nobody has to face iPhone envy. Just buy yourself a fucking iPhone. And if you have envy, it's not because it's the in thing, it's because it's better, it came first, and everyone else has been copying it for some time but moving at a much slower pace.
I read the Droid X review at Anandtech. I think that thing is a fucking train wreck, and you couldn't pay me to use one. But
> Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?
That's the whole idea with open standards. Did you know nearly every photograph has been, at one point or another, in JPEG format? Duh. All the camcorders make MPEG-4, which is a standardized QuickTime container. All the editors edit MPEG-4. All the players play MPEG-4. That is the whole idea with MPEG-4. That is why Apple gave the container away. Before MPEG-4, it was the QuickTime container that was universal in that same way. It was standardized not just to make it vendor neutral, but also because it was practical and possible to update media and tools and players that used QuickTime containers to use MPEG-4 containers. It's not practical to switch to another container. That would be like trying to replace Unix on the Internet. No, we cannot even switch to WebM. That would be a bigger project than the Great Wall of China. WebM is not even standardized.
The codecs are a separate issue from the container. There are licensing fees for some commercial use of H.264. In theory, H.264 could be displaced as the consumer codec by something like Google VC-8. However, in practice, the patents on H.264 will expire before that could happen, and VC-8 is vulnerable to submarine patents which are much worse than H.264's patent pool.
Professional content producers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's what is in all the tools, and consumers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's in all their still and video cameras, and they're going to upload it directly and share it directly from the devices without transcoding, and they're going to watch it on their smartphones and media players and tablets and set-top boxes which all have hardware H.264 decoding and which cannot support software codecs. And they're going to watch it on their PC's, which even though they can support software codecs, also have hardware H.264 decoding in their GPU's and so get 10 times the battery life playing H.264 as any other codec. All of the activity I just mentioned is totally 100% royalty-free. Even the professional creatives and producers pay no royalties at all. It's only the sellers of video like Apple with iTunes and the sellers of video encoders like Apple with QuickTime Pro that pay royalties, and the royalties are very small and cannot go up more than 10% every 5 years, and they do not go to patent trolls, they go directly to the people at many different organizations who created and standardized the codec.
So in short, no matter what your politics, you are I and everyone else is stuck with MPEG-4 containers, that is all that has existed since the dawn of digital video. They just used to be called QuickTime containers. They are not going away any more than Unix is going away. And no matter what your politics, we are all stuck with H.264, because that is what was deployed as the consumer standard for video codecs 10 years ago, and it has universal deployment and it's how most Web video is displayed today and for some years now, even if you view it in FlashPlayer. It's all of YouTube and iTunes, it's Netflix and Hulu. It's Canon SLR's and Flip camcorders and iPods and Droid phones. It's WebKit and IE9. It's Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. The small costs associated with some commercial use of MPEG-4 H.264 (selling video, selling encoders) are well worth what we get for it.
> Sorry, but the vast majority of [Windows] users have Adobe Reader installed to view PDF files
Mac users hardly ever have Adobe Reader because the built-in PDF tools are better. Smartphone and iPad users definitely don't have Adobe Reader, but they can all view PDF. This is not 1995. PDF is Portable Document Format. It is not brain surgery to create a PDF you can share with any arbitrary user. If you choose to make Adobe Reader documents instead of standard PDF, then you can't complain that everyone else should use Reader. You have it 180 degrees backwards. Viewing the PDF in any reader the recipient chooses is the DEFAULT, PDF is standardized for that purpose. Adobe Reader always supports a newer version of PDF than the standard. It's your responsibility to know which end of your ass is up and create the standardized version, not your responsibility to act as an Adobe salesman and bully other people into downloading Acrobat to view your shitty document.
Nothing on Windows is accurate enough for proofing. It has no color management. It has many other problems.
You should create a standardized version of PDF, not the latest version that can only be viewed in Acrobat. A standardized PDF can be viewed with full-fidelity on many platforms. Most smartphones can view PDF. The user interface on all Apple products is PDF, they breathe PDF. It is really, really rare for a Mac user to use Acrobat.
But as many Slashdot readers know, QuickDraw is not important because Apple stole the GUI from Xerox.
iAds are not on the Web, they're in native apps. So it's not Adblock Plus that is protecting you, but rather your N900's complete lack of software. But on the other hand, you could use an iPhone and just not use App Store and get the same deal.
You just go to oo.apple.com on an iOS device and you're opted out of targeted iAds. You choose apps without ads to avoid seeing ads altogether.
It's possible not only to use and enjoy an iOS device without iAds, you can even use one without App Store, because iOS fully supports the HTML5 API. You can install apps locally from any server.
Truly, there is a lot of sour grapes and ignorant bigotry coming from a lot of grumpy nerds whenever iOS is mentioned. If you don't like it, don't use it. Stop whining like little babies that other people like it. All these assumptions and misinformation is just tiresome. Become informed or STFU.
You're not forced to download anything. If you only want to use apps without ads, that is not just possible, it's easy. Very few paid apps even have ads. Ads are to support free apps.
IAds are better ads. I wish they were available for websites. Google ads are the lowest-quality amateur bullshit ... Google has no fucking taste.
Safari on iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod) doesn't have extensions. On iOS, instead of an extension, the developer just creates a whole other browser, and that has to be audited to be deployed. Although you may be able to write this for Safari on Mac/Windows, those extensions have to be signed to run, and signatures can be revoked immediately, so even if you got this deployed, at the first sign of trouble it stops running on 100% of systems. There is very little point in tagging a wall that can repaint itself instantly.
One problem with modern communication is the tendency to paint with too broad a brush. You found an attack vector in Chrome, that is real work, a scientific result. Don't fuck that up those hours of work by spending 1 second trumpeting an assumption that it works everywhere else. Either do the work to create the same extension on all other browsers or don't even fucking mention any other browser.
There is hardly any money in the music industry anymore. Bootlegging is a tax that most artists can't afford to pay. You have to appeal to a million listeners to get 100,000 to pay. So artists like Lady Gaga have to appeal to a billion to get a million to pay. So the stuff that's being hurt is the stuff with more limited appeal, more niche stuff. Artists who would have sold 100,000 a decade ago now get out of the business, or don't get in at all, or they die from lack of health care in the US. A lot of the infrastructure is gone. Music studios are gone. Local music scenes are much less than they were. The best part of record companies is gone. Live shows cost a fortune, with most going to insurance and security. There are ways you can say it is better for really entrepreneurial artists, but again, that's just a fraction, maybe 10%. Same for artists who can produce their own stuff, it's better in some ways but that's a small fraction.
In the past, no matter how you listened to music, whether buying CD or listening to FM, or even playing the jukebox at a diner, some money made it back to the producer of that music, incentivizing more music production. Now, there are a lot of ways to listen to music now where no money goes to the producer. The difference between low money and no money is profound.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
By "increased transparency" they don't mean transparent but rather translucent. You can see the print on the other side of a page through the page on a paper book, as well as in many digital presentations, including iBooks and many of the book readers that preceded it.
Multitouch is cheaper than mouse, and more useful to kids. Not just because they live in the 21st century, but because young kids can handle touch better than mouse. The mouse hardware may be cheaper, but it requires much more complicated software which makes mouse more expensive. And the Web works better with touch. Painting is better with touch. With touch you can emulate many real devices.
But then again, OLPC is about serving the philanthropic needs of adults, not the practical needs of kids. So a mouse and command line will make the adults feel better, when the kids would be better off with iPod touch, which is the cheapest ticket to computing by far ($99 per year and no admin costs) and kids take to it immediately. Web, email, VoIP, SMS, podcasts, music, movies, ePub, HTML5 apps, App Store apps, built-in accessibility for blind kids, no setup required, and 5 nines reliability.
> OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature
Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. The only difference between Mac OS and iOS is the user and application interfaces. One is mouse and one is multitouch. The bottom 3/4 are the same. The xnu kernel runs on iPod and Xserve and everything in-between. Yes it runs great on ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It ran great on PowerPC G4 500MHz. Secondly, the core of OS X is open source. OLPC could easily see what is going on there. Third, OLPC uses fucking Windows. They shipped fucking Windows. That is fat and proprietary. So the idealistic notion of Sugar is just an idealistic notion. By any measure, free OS X is better than cheap Windows.
> I always imagine Apple as being evil as sin (ha!)
That is because you are a bigot who has consumed a lot of propaganda.
When IE9 is released, every PC, smartphone, and tablet will support HTML5/MPEG-4 out-of-the-box. Every set-top box and console game already supports MPEG-4, and they are all in the process of getting HTML5. The HTML5/MPEG-4 Web is the consumer Web and it is already here. The fact that Firefox can't support it means they are on borrowed time, getting by in the shadow of IE6-IE8.
Right now the Web is split in 2 layers: a modern HTML5/MPEG-4 layer that runs on non-PC and a legacy IE6/Flash layer that runs on PC. That is why PC users are incredulous that iPad can be used to surf the Web. They see Flash all over the place and don't understand that the same IE6/Flash page they are viewing appears as HTML5/MPEG-4 on iPad. IE9 will finish what Safari/Chrome for Windows started and bring the PC onto the modern Web. Essentially IE9 will mobilize the PC. Publishers are already chafing to drop the IE6/Flash legacy right now because it costs so much to maintain and they want to run just one modern website. People who only use a PC to access the Web (no smartphone, iPod, tablet, set-top, etc.) are rare right now and getting rarer every day.
If you think Firefox is going to survive the "mobilization" of the Web with didactic open source philosophy screeds and WebM/Ogg support, you are insane. WebM has only 2 practical purposes: drive Firefox users to Chrome and video publishers to YouTube. Standards are new to the Web ... HTML5 may be the first successful markup standard. But in audio video, standards are historically very successful. MPEG-4 is the 3rd successful audio video standard ... 4th if you count MP3, and 5th if you count CD-DA. There were unsuccessful ones years ago that spanked everyone in audio video so hard they learned their lesson. We got a taste of that recently when even the entire weight of Microsloth could not break the consumer audio video standards: VC-1 in Windows went nowhere, VC-1 in "HD-DVD" sold only 150,000 players. But they did pretty much kill the optical disc, which was at the end of its life anyway. MPEG-4 is an online CD/DVD. To audio video publishers, MPEG-4 is as important as CD/DVD. MPEG-4 is as important to audio video publishers as UTF-8 is to text publishers. And it's not something that's happening in the future, it happened already at the turn of the century. The incredibly slow, mind-numbing, reason-defying slowness of Microsoft has just hidden this from PC people. Consumer electronics is all MPEG-4 for many years now. MPEG-4 is what is on Blu-Ray, it's your Hulu stream, it's your Netflix stream, it's your iTunes+iPod, it's in your smartphone and your GPU.
So all the HTML5 standard markup support in the world doesn't matter if Mozilla can't play MPEG-4 standard audio video. The Web is not about PC's and I-T people anymore, it's about consumer electronics devices and consumers. It's not just text and graphics and whatever exotic nonstandard thing you want to embed or plug-in or download to show your techiness, it's the whole range of human expression in rigorously standardized formats that require zero I-T work to decode. The Web is now native HTML5 code, UTF-8 text, JPEG photos, PNG/SVG graphics, and MPEG-4 audio video. All W3C/ISO standard.
Perhaps the most foolish part is Mozilla says they don't want to pay MPEG-4 license fees, but those license fees could never amount to more than what they get from Google for just 10% of their user's searches. If they lose only 10% of the Firefox user base because those users can't see standard audio video, then their gambit has lost. They could be gaining users right now by pressing the MPEG-4 advantage over IE8, but they are missing that chance and handing those users to Safari and Chrome. When you consider that the vast majority of video that plays today in Firefox via Flash (the ultimate closed system) is MPEG-4 H.264, Mozilla is cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're making a mistake of historic proportions. We'll mark this as the beginning of the end for Firefox one day in the near future when writing its obituary.
The hysteria around iPhone is fucking ridiculous. iPhone apps are written in either C or HTML5. C is cross-platform, apps are easily ported to any other C platform, e.g. any Unix, Windows, PlayStation, Wii, Xbox, and even many set-top boxes potentially. That is why Pac-Man and DOOM run on iPhone even though both were written many years before iPhone existed. If any phone maker other than Apple had any fucking clue, iPhone apps could easily be ported to other phones. Native apps could be written for iPhone and other handsets like for many years apps have run on both Mac and Windows, like for many years all Unix systems have run the same apps. But nobody else offers a C API yet other than Apple, in spite of most phones running Unix. HTML5 of course can be authored in such a way that it installs and runs on everything, although you'll need to use a 3rd party browser on Microsoft platforms.
So iPhone apps are not an exclusive club which you can only enter by buying an iPhone. The BBC writing an iPhone app is not forcing you to buy an iPhone, or even encouraging you. And they can easily charge and make the cost of development back. Tell your non-Apple handset maker to provide a fucking C API and if they don't then buy a phone that does next time or STFU. Your destiny is in your own hands.
We just got the first 300 plus dpi screen in iPhone 4, and obviously that will come to other devices. At that point, you don't care about the pixels anymore because you can't see them. What is onscreen does not appear to be made out of pixels, it appears to be made out of curves and lines. Most photographic prints are less than 300 dpi. Most people have never seen an image with higher resolution than an iPhone 4 screen. We don't talk about the shape of the pixels in a chemical photo print, we talk about the image that is shown there. We're entering that time in onscreen images now also. As great as pixels are, they are better when you can't see them.