The big problem with OS/2 was IBM. There was roughly half of IBM backing OS/2. But the other half, as well as the bulk of the rest of the computer industry, was behind Windows. And that pretty much included IBM's own PC division.
But hey... it lived on in ATMs for another decade or more.
OS/2 2.0 was 32-bit... kinda-sorta. You still had to write PDDs (physical device drivers) in 16-bit protected mode. Trust me on this... it was nothing like 32-bit deep down. But for applications, sure, they supported 32-bit before Microsoft did.
It's possible. Back in the old days, there were good and bad. Most of the early Soundblasters were terribly noisy -- they just didn't care. The Advance Gravis Ultra Max, the first real sample-based sound card, suffered from a bad power coupling... I did some hacks to mine to improve it.
It got better... the Turtle Beach Tahiti was very quiet, the Ensoniq AudioPCI (at least the version before Creative Labs bought them) was also quite good. In both cases, these were companies with experience doing professional audio systems (TB had a dedicated PC DAW system, Ensoniq made keyboards).
I designed a multimedia-centric PowerPC system ("PIOS One") back in the short days of the CHRP standard, which had great detail given to keeping the audio system isolated from the generic PC power supply issues. It also had a digital audio expansion port, proprietary in those days. The Mac Clone was put to death before this shipped.
So yeah, it's possible. But it's hit or miss, on any given motherboard.
Must have been some evil slow CPU, or horribly coded MP3 decoder. Back in the late 90s, my company at the time had MP3 decoding, no hardware help, on a 90MHz ColdFire, with CPU left over. And that was only because the ColdFire lacked hardware floating point.
The big reason for audio chips was MIDI Synthesis. A basic MIDI synthesizer usually has 32 independent voices; a good one will have hundreds. This was prohibitive to do in software back in the day, particularly when sound chips were on the ISA bus. Once they moved to PCI, software started to dominate. Ensoniq's AudioPCI, for example, did soft synthesis way back in the early 90s.
The other things was standardization: Intel speced out the AC97 Audio CODEC standard, oddly enough back in 1997. This was both a register, pinout, and bus interface spec, which meant that it was fairly safe for motherboard vendors to put the DMA engine into a chipset, to drive just the audio CODEC. Of course, they didn't both building hardware synth engines into the chipset, though they certainly could have. With the CPU around to do the synthesis, these remained simple.
Add-on sound is largely a specialty thing these days. Its important for recording, particularly if you want your PC/laptop to hook into real mics, not those craptastic electeret mics from Rat Shack. A good USB or Firewire interface will have 48V phantom power, much better preamps, more than two channels of input, much better power conditioning, etc.
Nope. The iPhone 4 fixed things for a little while, but Apple was really far behind. Every high end smart phone in 2009-2010 had at least an 800x480 display... Apple waited until halfway though 2010 to match or exceed that. Apple still doesn't have real keyboards (even as an option), memory card slots, etc. They didn't even match the CPU performance in the iPhone 4 (about 800MHz, based on benchmarks against the iPad).. most high end smartphones are 1GHz, and will be going to dual core and faster clocks long before the next iPhone upgrade. Similarly, they at least matched the 512MB of RAM that was fairly common over the last year, but new phones are already going to 1GB -- increasingly important when you can multitask. They've also matched last year's best cellphone cameras, but not this year's. Also, not iPhone with a larger display.. some people like the 4+" screens. And while IPS is nice, OLED is better still for media viewing. Apple caught up to some Android phones, lost on some points, won on others.. but that's lucky to last out the year.
And let's not even mention the actual phone part. Apple's having trouble with their single antenna shorting across a finger... sure, an exaggerated problem, but they're still not implementing diversity antennas in their devices, much less MIMO. The iPhone 4 was the first iPhone to actually fully support HSPA speeds... after some "4G" (more or less) phones are already on the market. Ok, so AT&T's not rolling out LTE until next summer, thus the iPhone 5 or whatever, but Apple could have supported HSPA+, which AT&T finished upgrading last summer. Again, they're not even serious about playing catch up on issues that are important for many users.
It's not all bad... they did a nice job on the battery life, something HTC could learn. And that, even with a fairly power hungry IPS display, though her phone did blank the screen very quickly, so I suspect there's some power paranoia going on somewhere in there. On a weekend camping even, my sister's iPhone 4 was easily outlasting my Droid, not 2:1 but a healthy win. Of course, I had four spare batteries, so I was the one with a still-working phone that last day. That's another problem with the iPhone that Apple will never fix.
They have *every* interest in seeing your phone be "just good enough" that you don't leave their service, and "just bad enough" that you want to buy an upgrade phone, and sign a new 2 year contract with them, as soon as you are able. If they spend time upgrading your software once they've already got your money, they're eating into the profits they've made.
Well, it's not the carriers actually making the upgrade, it's the hardware OEMs. Motorola does the Droid port, Verizon pushes it to my phone.
And it's very much in Motorola's interest to keep me happy (which I am). Quite a bit more-so, in fact, for any Android phone maker, simply because there's no single vendor lock-in. Apple, RIM, HP/Palm, they all have you locked-in based on your apps (and in Apple's case, video or e-books). But I can drop the Droid, pick up a Samsung or HTC or other Android phone, and my whole environment, including all apps, will magically just appear on my new device.
Verizon doesn't have the same interest in the device itself, and sure, they'd like to get me back under contract next year when my 2-year Droid contract runs out. But there are various ways to do that. It doesn't cost them measurably to keep my Droid up-to-date on software, and the fact is, treating me as an intelligent smart-phone user is in their long-term best interest. If I get too much crap from them, I can easily move to another carrier once the contract is up. If they really know their smart phone customers, they're not the same people happy with a Nokia soap-bar phone that barely lasts out the contract. They're going to get my upgrade by offering me good service now and a very good upgrade path next year. The Droid is a great phone... way more rugged than my old Palm Treo, I don't think it'll be falling apart next November.
Give me something much better, and keep the good service, and I'll probably keep Verizon, contract or not. Piss me off, and I'm off to Sprint or T-Mo... assuming either of these has actually improved their coverage in my area. AT&T... no, they're already doing too much messing with their Android offerings. Not interested. And their network sucks.
The real question is whether the vendor/network will offer the upgrade. The answer is pretty much "yes" for higher-end models, but not necessarily for every device. That's one problem with the way Android is built -- it requires a customized compile of the OS for each phone. This is easily fixed, and will hopefully be done so.
And sure, some phones are not upgradeable in practice.. they're too weak to run a new release of the OS. Like iPhone 3 and 3GS users trying to run iOS 4. And of course, Apple just blew off all older models of the iPhone and iPod.
Control isn't what wins a market. In fact, there are very few mature markets that have ever been controlled by proprietary solutions. I can think of one: video gaming consoles. And the only reason that's dominated by proprietary systems: the manufacturers sell the hardware below cost, and make up revenue on the software.
Apple is not going away, probably not RIM either. But neither has a chance of dominating the market again. Proprietary systems offer too much lock-down and too few user choices.
And in fact, Apple absolutely can't do anything to really compete with Android. Android devices are competing with Apple's iPhone, but they're also increasingly going downscale. Apple can't release a low cost iPhone, because their whole business is based on being a premium brand. People pay Apple way too much money for that Apple logo, and that's why Apple's profits are much more akin to a software company's than to a hardware company's -- they really are selling you the software, with a fairly normal device in a very nicely made case. Same reason Cadillac or Mercedes don't produce down-scale vehicles... cheaper models would hurt profits. They're all selling exclusivity.
That's can't happen in the Android market. Some CE companies, like Sony and Panasonic, are getting on board, and will probably only offer top-tier products. But the traditional cellphone companies, HTC, Motorola, etc. are hitting all price points, just as they always have. And with China going huge on Android (it's the basis of China Mobile's OPhone... China Moble has more customers than the USA has people), low cost Chinese Android phones are pretty much a foregone conclusion.
In shot, its the same dynamic that allowed the PC and Windows to dominate, hardware and software. Apple moved to use bog standard PCs hidden inside their Mac casework, and while they're getting Samsung to design custom versions of their ARM SOCs, and may do their own eventually, they're still building on the same ARM embedded gene pool as everyone else (eg, Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, Marvell, etc). You can even run Android on the older iPhones, and pretty soon, on the iPhone 4 as well. Remind you of anything?
RIM's in worse shape, because their OS and hardware are not up to the standard set by Apple and the various Android suppliers. They're fixing the OS -- they bought QNX, which is going into their tablet now and will replace Blackberry OS in the next generation. Maybe that's
Not even remotely true. In fact, there are JVMs (not necessarily in phones yet) that can pull implicit threads out of not explicitly threaded code. Sun's MAJC project was one of these, there are others. It's hardly an issue for the near future anyway.. you don't need anything like that on a dual-headed ARM -- particularly when you have real multitasking, as on Android, each core will have plenty of work to do when the phone gets busy.
And of course, how the JVM actually handles threads, whether they're real or simulated, is entirely hidden to applications written in Java. Decisions the JVM and OS make on today's phones will be tuned differently for true SMP systems. That's actually true of native systems, too... the kernel is ultimately in charge of how threads are handled, anyway.
Objective-C is essentially a proprietary language, and will live or die entirely on Apple's fortunes. That's not to suggest it's going to fail any time soon, not as long as Apple can keep selling the same stuff for twice the price. But it's useless outside Apple's walled garden.
Android is a significant improvement over the iOS in many areas -- the iOS bar was not all that high. WebOS also trumps the iOS in most areas, its just unfortunate that Palm was in no position to really see it successful. Hopefully HP will do better.
iOS is "slick" in many little details, in a way that Android isn't, but that doesn't really add much to its usefulness. Meanwhile, iOS is still rooted in desktop metaphors for things like notifications... do you really need a pop up notification, which has to be answered, on a device that could have a few dozen interesting things happening while its in your pocket? Of course, that wasn't even possible until iOS 4... they're still largely thinking single tasking. And Apple's iron hand is still there -- only Apple can create daemons, even if apps can now more or less get background messages.
In short, this last year had Apple playing catch up. iOS and the iPhone had fallen far behind Android and the available devices. They haven't fully caught up yet, though iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 certainly helped. But mark this -- this is the pattern we're going to see every year from now on: Apple catches up a little, Android + Devices push farther ahead than they did last year. Just as on the MacOS, at some point Apple won't even be trying to catch up in some areas.
Of course, Apple fans will accept that, since Steve says it ain't so.
After all, they actually understand the concept of "free software" and all that entails. The need for Android was to ensure that mobile search (search, of course, being Google's bread and butter) didn't fall under the control of a small number of proprietary systems. After all, when they started this, every smart phone OS was at least some degree proprietary, some (iOS, BlackBerryOS, Palm's WebOS) fully so.
The open source release is the driving factor behind Android's success. They had to sell to the OEMs, after all, and that's what did it. The OEMs clearly could not compete on their own against Apple or the other proprietary brands, or they would have already done so. It was intentional, to allow their choice of the level of customizations they wanted. And most of those really aren't that terrible... hacking in Bing! is a bad idea, but changing the UI shell, not that big of a deal. You can find other alternates in the Android Market, if you don't like what your phone came with.
And Google isn't losing control of the source development. If there are things OEMs do that really bother them, they can change the OS to compensate. OEMs could fight some of that, but is that kind of development really in their best interest.
The big success of Google is based on one significant thing: people actually want their stuff. No one has to pay Verizon to inflict Google Search on their customers... the customers want this. Thus, the availability of "Google Experience" phones, like my Droid 1 -- assurance that Verizon didn't muck with it. In fact, had Verizon not launched with that, I might well have gone to a different carrier for my Android phone. Verizon, after all, had the worst reputation in the business for meddling in phone firmware and options. Thankfully, AT&T stole that crown away, though the way Verizon's playing, they might be after it again.
But that's clearly Google's other option: advertising themselves. They've built their reputation, they've build Android, without any actual Google ads at all. Again, people want their stuff. Sure, Verizon and others have active ad campaigns, which help, but that success is also based on a fair degree of cooperation with Google. If they got too radical with mods and user lock-outs, Google certainly has the cash and clout to quash that.
Just because it takes Apple a year to deliver a new phone... with some serious bugs included, does not mean every new Android phone has anything close to these issues.
Also, you seem to misunderstand system development. The very first time you design an Android phone, you may have a small number of unknown problems and bugs to work around. But keep in mind, there are only, actually, a handful of different ARM SOCs on the market, and those bugs have all long been worked out. So the development issues are over fairly minor differences.
And the next model that comes along is much like the first, with a few specific differences, maybe a faster clock speed, make a larger screen, etc. Not much of a system/software issue... it's mostly about parts supply and the mechanicals. This is why Motorola and HTC churn out a new Android phone every month or two. And so far, with fewer bugs on introduction that Apple...
While that's what he said, they're not mutually exclusive. Android devices offer hardware choice entirely because of openness. This doesn't require open source -- Windows was open, too, from the hardware developer's perspective. But the open source factor is a big reason why Android grew as fast as it did among the hardware suppliers.
If Apple sold iPhones, iPads, and iPods below cost, content to make profit only on content, Android devices would have a big problem. But in fact, Apple sells the same stuff for higher prices, and still makes money on content. So Android devices will continue to out-pace Apple on units... and Apple probably still beats everyone else on profit.
Until the last generation. Both the PS3 and the X-Box 360 hit the ground at 3.2GHz, in 2006 and 2005, respectively. The X-Box 360 also had three hyperthreaded cores, also pretty advanced for 2005.
Intel didn't release Quad Core (Clovertown... really two dual cores in a single chip carrier) until late 2006, and didn't have 3.0GHz until that next summer. Of course, all of the x86s were more powerful.. but the consoles did briefly have the clock speed lead. And still do, at least on the average.
The video game market developed a different dynamic... one that's more or less kept it proprietary. The trick is that every entrant is making money from licenses developers pay to write applications. This allows them to introduce new consoles at or below actual cost.
This was actually tried back in the early 1990s, with the 3DO platform. The idea was that different hardware companies would build 3DO compatible systems, and establish a multi-vendor platform for video games. Panasonic was the first licensee. The problem was immediately obvious... 3DO was collecting royalties on titles, but Panasonic had to make a profit on their platform, put up against those from other companies that were sold below cost. 3DO eventually would up sharing royalties with Panasonic, but the model basically failed.
This kind of model of course requires a locked platform and rich developers, which is why it doesn't usually work in other markets.
Toshiba tried this with HD-DVD. They were collecting the disc royalties, so they were able to sell early HD-DVD players below cost, compared to Blu-Ray players, which actually had to be profitable on their own... except of course the PS-3, which was riding the whole video game tradition. This is why, while anyone could license HD-DVD, only Toshiba made players (other than a couple Samsung Blu-Ray players that could also support basic HD-DVD functions.. and priced themselves way out of the market).
An open-enough platform always dominates, once a technology matures. The IBM PC was the driving force in the second wave of the personal computer; as much in spite of Microsoft as because of it.
The simple fact, it's about the hardware. If everyone is proprietary, one proprietary brand might dominate. So we had Apple and Commodore doing very, very well in the 8-bit years. The open platform was CP/M, but it didn't really evolve into a competitive form.
Going beyond that, these same players largely had 16/32-bit systems.. Apple's the only proprietary survivor left on the desktop.. and they only survived by using the identical hardware everyone else uses.
There's no reason to believe the "palmtop" will be any different. And particularly, despite their lead in "consumer-oriented smart phone/PDA" devices, Apple can't compete against Android any more than they can compete against WIndows PCs. There will be 25-50 Android models (or more) for every Apple iPhone, iPad, or iPod they put out. No way Apple can compete.
And one other key factor -- they won't even try.
Why would they? Apple is the most profitable PC company, largely by casting themselves as a high-end consumer electronics company. They're not trying to be Dell or HP, they're trying to be Sony, back in Sony's golden age. They can't lower the price of Mac PCs or iPhones enough to compete with HTC or Motorola or HP or Dell. And if they did, they'd make less money, damage the brand (if Rolex sold a $100 watch, the $10,000 model would be less valuable as a result), and have other competition problems. For one... models. Apple only makes a couple of PCs and one iPhone model every year. They tell you what you want, if you want an Apple product, as if other company's products weren't worthy of competition.
To get more market share, they need higher volumes, which means lower prices, which means the end to the "high end" brand they've worked really hard to establish since the 70s (when they were selling the same thing as Commodore for 3x-4x the price). Apple's going to stick with the high profits, and as long as they have enough market share to keep the platform viable (a problem Apple faced with the Mac once before, which lead to the PC-based Macs of today), they're not even going to try to compete for market share, at least not the way other companies will.
Good point... if you factor in Apple's iOS (UNIX-but-not-Linux based), it's pretty bad news on smartphones if you're not *nix based. iOS is healthy, Android is kicking butt. Everyone but Nokia in the non-Unix SymbianOS world has left, and Nokia is increasingly talking about MeeGo (which is pretty much just a Linux distro) as their future. Windows Mobile has been failing for a few years, to the point where most OEMs lost much interest, and MS had to replace it with their ZunePhone, er, iClone, er, Windows Phone 7... still unsettled success. RIM isn't dead yet, but they're definitely behind, and moving to QNX, rather than Blackberry OS, on their tablets... and eventually, their phones (QNX, while not UNIX-derived, is a POSIX compliant microkernel).
So really, Microsoft is all alone, going against the greater world of UNIX-derived OSs, Their use is still increasing... hardly the sign of something that's "end of life". One would tend to think of an end-of-life product as maybe failing in some or all of its markets, even when pushed by the world's largest software company, even failing against a free OS mostly promoted by techno-hippies who have trouble coming up with beer money...
Linux evolves... continuously, and according to need.
Look at the original-ish versions of Linux... much closer to original UNIX.. they even failed to do simple things like play glitch-free music from a PC sound card. It was, after all, a well know fact, back in the 80s and early 90s, that UNIX simply could not do realtime, even Windows-class "soft" realtime. Every UNIX workstation with the need to play audio used a DSP with its own memory buffers.
Today, you can string together a gstreamer sequence from any shell and not just play back, but even transcode (within machine limits) in realtime. Just one example.
Anything reasonably good to Linux users will become part of Linux. That's both a blessing and a curse... it does mean that any cool new stuff -- cmake, new compilers, new languages, whatever, gradually become a part of the GNU/Linux gene pool. In this way, Linux never gets outdated. It also never directly courts end-users other than existing and traditional Linux types (programmers, power users) unless some other organization makes a concerted effort to push it there in some way (Google/Android, MeeGo, Ubuntu, etc).
On Window, things get added to drive [a] Microsoft's dominance, and [b] the acceptability to customers of an enforced (and paid) upgrade, and [c] demands of the hardware OEMs. This is actually more of a balancing act than a prioritized list; unbalance it too much (Vista, for example, tilted way too much toward "a" and away from "b") and they have problems. But in particular, the "getting paid" part makes Windows change in 3-year jumps, rather than Linux's continual progress. And it doesn't really guarantee any specific "progress" or "evolution", other than those defined by these criteria (eg, Microsoft makes driver changes all the time to force OEMs to write new drivers and thus remain under Microsoft's dominance -- this is change for certain, but not necessarily progress).
... this sounds like a crap move. But you have to consider just why Oracle went after Google. Practically every cellphone vendor has some models with Java support. So just about anyone using Android already has a Java license of some kind. And it's hard to imagine Google didn't make this announcement only after talking to strategic partners in the Android business.
As well, as long as they're not actually making Android devices (Google-branded Nexus devices are made by existing phone makers, not Google), it's hard to imagine just how Oracle manages to really sue Google on this, regardless of the actual truth behind the open source licenses Sun put in place ages ago. Oracle seems hell-bent on making Java irrelevant, rather than making money on it. Google doesn't want to move off Java, but if their Dalvik JIT is violating the original FOSS license (which seems to be Oracle's entre into the lawsuit business here), they could migrate developers to other technologies using the same JIT. Or do a cleanroom Java, for that matter. Only a small hill to climb for a company as powerful as Google.
Apple does have the lock on proprietary docking connector solutions. I've had iPod, Zune, and Sansa devices, each with their own proprietary connectors, and the iPod/iPhone wins by far. Not unexpected.
Thing is, that's the wrong answer.. the real solution to getting stuff out of a non-Apple device is Bluetooth, not a docking connector. I bought myself an Altec-Lansing "Soundblade", to dock up my Droid, and it's a great solution. And thing is, if I get a different smartphone or PMP, that device still works. Buy the Apple dock, and you're pretty much SOL if you upgrade to a non-Apple device sometime in the future. And if you don't like that, buy a Parrot Party, or a zillion other solutions... all without the "Apple Tax".
And of course, the other reason... 7-11 can get $35 for an emergency iPhone charging solution.. Apple users are used to overpaying. They can't get anything close to that for a $0.85 (actual price at Monoprice.com) USB cable.
Actually, it's an entirely different reason. Apple user need just need emergency cables far more than any other phone users.
Don't get me wrong... I was impressed with the battery life of my sister's iPhone 4. We did the "Susan G. Komen" 3-Day walk this year. She got a free daily charge the first night, but on the second night, they screwed up (the AT&T booth, offering free charges) and didn't get hers charges. My Droid was fat and happy... I brought four spare batteries along, just in case.
Everyone who doesn't have an iPhone has that option. Those who know they need extra power bring it along... thus, the need for emergency charging cables is much less. iPhone and iPod users don't have that option, so even seasoned users know, for extended use, power can be a problem.
Apple's connector is nice idea, but it's not rugged. I'm happy with the idea of the standard USB connector, which doesn't preclude other options.
And really, Apple's connector is increasingly a dinosaur. The standard USB connector is much better for charging and USB access. Apple doesn't support Firewire anymore, and RS-232 as well is kind of pointless, given pretty much every phone does Bluetooth (which can bridge to a serial protocol on your PC, if you need that).
The headphone jack is useful, but I don't need a dock connector for audio; Bluetooth does that just dandy, too. Plus, the power needed to send audio over a Bluetooth class 1 connection is very small compared to the power used on headphones, even.. so using Bluetooth for speakers actually keeps my phone alive longer.
Analog video is so 90s... high end smart phones this year do HDMI. Which will suffice until a suitable wireless standard is out. As usual, Apple's playing catch-up here... as they have been for the last year or so, despite seeming so far ahead of other smartphones. That ended when Android and WebOS came out.
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The big problem with OS/2 was IBM. There was roughly half of IBM backing OS/2. But the other half, as well as the bulk of the rest of the computer industry, was behind Windows. And that pretty much included IBM's own PC division.
But hey... it lived on in ATMs for another decade or more.
OS/2 2.0 was 32-bit... kinda-sorta. You still had to write PDDs (physical device drivers) in 16-bit protected mode. Trust me on this... it was nothing like 32-bit deep down. But for applications, sure, they supported 32-bit before Microsoft did.
It's possible. Back in the old days, there were good and bad. Most of the early Soundblasters were terribly noisy -- they just didn't care. The Advance Gravis Ultra Max, the first real sample-based sound card, suffered from a bad power coupling... I did some hacks to mine to improve it.
It got better... the Turtle Beach Tahiti was very quiet, the Ensoniq AudioPCI (at least the version before Creative Labs bought them) was also quite good. In both cases, these were companies with experience doing professional audio systems (TB had a dedicated PC DAW system, Ensoniq made keyboards).
I designed a multimedia-centric PowerPC system ("PIOS One") back in the short days of the CHRP standard, which had great detail given to keeping the audio system isolated from the generic PC power supply issues. It also had a digital audio expansion port, proprietary in those days. The Mac Clone was put to death before this shipped.
So yeah, it's possible. But it's hit or miss, on any given motherboard.
Must have been some evil slow CPU, or horribly coded MP3 decoder. Back in the late 90s, my company at the time had MP3 decoding, no hardware help, on a 90MHz ColdFire, with CPU left over. And that was only because the ColdFire lacked hardware floating point.
The big reason for audio chips was MIDI Synthesis. A basic MIDI synthesizer usually has 32 independent voices; a good one will have hundreds. This was prohibitive to do in software back in the day, particularly when sound chips were on the ISA bus. Once they moved to PCI, software started to dominate. Ensoniq's AudioPCI, for example, did soft synthesis way back in the early 90s.
The other things was standardization: Intel speced out the AC97 Audio CODEC standard, oddly enough back in 1997. This was both a register, pinout, and bus interface spec, which meant that it was fairly safe for motherboard vendors to put the DMA engine into a chipset, to drive just the audio CODEC. Of course, they didn't both building hardware synth engines into the chipset, though they certainly could have. With the CPU around to do the synthesis, these remained simple.
Add-on sound is largely a specialty thing these days. Its important for recording, particularly if you want your PC/laptop to hook into real mics, not those craptastic electeret mics from Rat Shack. A good USB or Firewire interface will have 48V phantom power, much better preamps, more than two channels of input, much better power conditioning, etc.
Nope. The iPhone 4 fixed things for a little while, but Apple was really far behind. Every high end smart phone in 2009-2010 had at least an 800x480 display... Apple waited until halfway though 2010 to match or exceed that. Apple still doesn't have real keyboards (even as an option), memory card slots, etc. They didn't even match the CPU performance in the iPhone 4 (about 800MHz, based on benchmarks against the iPad).. most high end smartphones are 1GHz, and will be going to dual core and faster clocks long before the next iPhone upgrade. Similarly, they at least matched the 512MB of RAM that was fairly common over the last year, but new phones are already going to 1GB -- increasingly important when you can multitask. They've also matched last year's best cellphone cameras, but not this year's. Also, not iPhone with a larger display.. some people like the 4+" screens. And while IPS is nice, OLED is better still for media viewing. Apple caught up to some Android phones, lost on some points, won on others.. but that's lucky to last out the year.
And let's not even mention the actual phone part. Apple's having trouble with their single antenna shorting across a finger... sure, an exaggerated problem, but they're still not implementing diversity antennas in their devices, much less MIMO. The iPhone 4 was the first iPhone to actually fully support HSPA speeds ... after some "4G" (more or less) phones are already on the market. Ok, so AT&T's not rolling out LTE until next summer, thus the iPhone 5 or whatever, but Apple could have supported HSPA+, which AT&T finished upgrading last summer. Again, they're not even serious about playing catch up on issues that are important for many users.
It's not all bad... they did a nice job on the battery life, something HTC could learn. And that, even with a fairly power hungry IPS display, though her phone did blank the screen very quickly, so I suspect there's some power paranoia going on somewhere in there. On a weekend camping even, my sister's iPhone 4 was easily outlasting my Droid, not 2:1 but a healthy win. Of course, I had four spare batteries, so I was the one with a still-working phone that last day. That's another problem with the iPhone that Apple will never fix.
They have *every* interest in seeing your phone be "just good enough" that you don't leave their service, and "just bad enough" that you want to buy an upgrade phone, and sign a new 2 year contract with them, as soon as you are able. If they spend time upgrading your software once they've already got your money, they're eating into the profits they've made.
Well, it's not the carriers actually making the upgrade, it's the hardware OEMs. Motorola does the Droid port, Verizon pushes it to my phone.
And it's very much in Motorola's interest to keep me happy (which I am). Quite a bit more-so, in fact, for any Android phone maker, simply because there's no single vendor lock-in. Apple, RIM, HP/Palm, they all have you locked-in based on your apps (and in Apple's case, video or e-books). But I can drop the Droid, pick up a Samsung or HTC or other Android phone, and my whole environment, including all apps, will magically just appear on my new device.
Verizon doesn't have the same interest in the device itself, and sure, they'd like to get me back under contract next year when my 2-year Droid contract runs out. But there are various ways to do that. It doesn't cost them measurably to keep my Droid up-to-date on software, and the fact is, treating me as an intelligent smart-phone user is in their long-term best interest. If I get too much crap from them, I can easily move to another carrier once the contract is up. If they really know their smart phone customers, they're not the same people happy with a Nokia soap-bar phone that barely lasts out the contract. They're going to get my upgrade by offering me good service now and a very good upgrade path next year. The Droid is a great phone... way more rugged than my old Palm Treo, I don't think it'll be falling apart next November.
Give me something much better, and keep the good service, and I'll probably keep Verizon, contract or not. Piss me off, and I'm off to Sprint or T-Mo... assuming either of these has actually improved their coverage in my area. AT&T... no, they're already doing too much messing with their Android offerings. Not interested. And their network sucks.
Every Android phone is upgradeable.
The real question is whether the vendor/network will offer the upgrade. The answer is pretty much "yes" for higher-end models, but not necessarily for every device. That's one problem with the way Android is built -- it requires a customized compile of the OS for each phone. This is easily fixed, and will hopefully be done so.
And sure, some phones are not upgradeable in practice.. they're too weak to run a new release of the OS. Like iPhone 3 and 3GS users trying to run iOS 4. And of course, Apple just blew off all older models of the iPhone and iPod.
Technology is like that.
Control isn't what wins a market. In fact, there are very few mature markets that have ever been controlled by proprietary solutions. I can think of one: video gaming consoles. And the only reason that's dominated by proprietary systems: the manufacturers sell the hardware below cost, and make up revenue on the software.
Apple is not going away, probably not RIM either. But neither has a chance of dominating the market again. Proprietary systems offer too much lock-down and too few user choices.
And in fact, Apple absolutely can't do anything to really compete with Android. Android devices are competing with Apple's iPhone, but they're also increasingly going downscale. Apple can't release a low cost iPhone, because their whole business is based on being a premium brand. People pay Apple way too much money for that Apple logo, and that's why Apple's profits are much more akin to a software company's than to a hardware company's -- they really are selling you the software, with a fairly normal device in a very nicely made case. Same reason Cadillac or Mercedes don't produce down-scale vehicles... cheaper models would hurt profits. They're all selling exclusivity.
That's can't happen in the Android market. Some CE companies, like Sony and Panasonic, are getting on board, and will probably only offer top-tier products. But the traditional cellphone companies, HTC, Motorola, etc. are hitting all price points, just as they always have. And with China going huge on Android (it's the basis of China Mobile's OPhone... China Moble has more customers than the USA has people), low cost Chinese Android phones are pretty much a foregone conclusion.
In shot, its the same dynamic that allowed the PC and Windows to dominate, hardware and software. Apple moved to use bog standard PCs hidden inside their Mac casework, and while they're getting Samsung to design custom versions of their ARM SOCs, and may do their own eventually, they're still building on the same ARM embedded gene pool as everyone else (eg, Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, Marvell, etc). You can even run Android on the older iPhones, and pretty soon, on the iPhone 4 as well. Remind you of anything?
RIM's in worse shape, because their OS and hardware are not up to the standard set by Apple and the various Android suppliers. They're fixing the OS -- they bought QNX, which is going into their tablet now and will replace Blackberry OS in the next generation. Maybe that's
Not even remotely true. In fact, there are JVMs (not necessarily in phones yet) that can pull implicit threads out of not explicitly threaded code. Sun's MAJC project was one of these, there are others. It's hardly an issue for the near future anyway.. you don't need anything like that on a dual-headed ARM -- particularly when you have real multitasking, as on Android, each core will have plenty of work to do when the phone gets busy.
And of course, how the JVM actually handles threads, whether they're real or simulated, is entirely hidden to applications written in Java. Decisions the JVM and OS make on today's phones will be tuned differently for true SMP systems. That's actually true of native systems, too... the kernel is ultimately in charge of how threads are handled, anyway.
Objective-C is essentially a proprietary language, and will live or die entirely on Apple's fortunes. That's not to suggest it's going to fail any time soon, not as long as Apple can keep selling the same stuff for twice the price. But it's useless outside Apple's walled garden.
Android is a significant improvement over the iOS in many areas -- the iOS bar was not all that high. WebOS also trumps the iOS in most areas, its just unfortunate that Palm was in no position to really see it successful. Hopefully HP will do better.
iOS is "slick" in many little details, in a way that Android isn't, but that doesn't really add much to its usefulness. Meanwhile, iOS is still rooted in desktop metaphors for things like notifications... do you really need a pop up notification, which has to be answered, on a device that could have a few dozen interesting things happening while its in your pocket? Of course, that wasn't even possible until iOS 4... they're still largely thinking single tasking. And Apple's iron hand is still there -- only Apple can create daemons, even if apps can now more or less get background messages.
In short, this last year had Apple playing catch up. iOS and the iPhone had fallen far behind Android and the available devices. They haven't fully caught up yet, though iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 certainly helped. But mark this -- this is the pattern we're going to see every year from now on: Apple catches up a little, Android + Devices push farther ahead than they did last year. Just as on the MacOS, at some point Apple won't even be trying to catch up in some areas.
Of course, Apple fans will accept that, since Steve says it ain't so.
After all, they actually understand the concept of "free software" and all that entails. The need for Android was to ensure that mobile search (search, of course, being Google's bread and butter) didn't fall under the control of a small number of proprietary systems. After all, when they started this, every smart phone OS was at least some degree proprietary, some (iOS, BlackBerryOS, Palm's WebOS) fully so.
The open source release is the driving factor behind Android's success. They had to sell to the OEMs, after all, and that's what did it. The OEMs clearly could not compete on their own against Apple or the other proprietary brands, or they would have already done so. It was intentional, to allow their choice of the level of customizations they wanted. And most of those really aren't that terrible... hacking in Bing! is a bad idea, but changing the UI shell, not that big of a deal. You can find other alternates in the Android Market, if you don't like what your phone came with.
And Google isn't losing control of the source development. If there are things OEMs do that really bother them, they can change the OS to compensate. OEMs could fight some of that, but is that kind of development really in their best interest.
The big success of Google is based on one significant thing: people actually want their stuff. No one has to pay Verizon to inflict Google Search on their customers... the customers want this. Thus, the availability of "Google Experience" phones, like my Droid 1 -- assurance that Verizon didn't muck with it. In fact, had Verizon not launched with that, I might well have gone to a different carrier for my Android phone. Verizon, after all, had the worst reputation in the business for meddling in phone firmware and options. Thankfully, AT&T stole that crown away, though the way Verizon's playing, they might be after it again.
But that's clearly Google's other option: advertising themselves. They've built their reputation, they've build Android, without any actual Google ads at all. Again, people want their stuff. Sure, Verizon and others have active ad campaigns, which help, but that success is also based on a fair degree of cooperation with Google. If they got too radical with mods and user lock-outs, Google certainly has the cash and clout to quash that.
Just because it takes Apple a year to deliver a new phone... with some serious bugs included, does not mean every new Android phone has anything close to these issues.
Also, you seem to misunderstand system development. The very first time you design an Android phone, you may have a small number of unknown problems and bugs to work around. But keep in mind, there are only, actually, a handful of different ARM SOCs on the market, and those bugs have all long been worked out. So the development issues are over fairly minor differences.
And the next model that comes along is much like the first, with a few specific differences, maybe a faster clock speed, make a larger screen, etc. Not much of a system/software issue... it's mostly about parts supply and the mechanicals. This is why Motorola and HTC churn out a new Android phone every month or two. And so far, with fewer bugs on introduction that Apple...
While that's what he said, they're not mutually exclusive. Android devices offer hardware choice entirely because of openness. This doesn't require open source -- Windows was open, too, from the hardware developer's perspective. But the open source factor is a big reason why Android grew as fast as it did among the hardware suppliers.
If Apple sold iPhones, iPads, and iPods below cost, content to make profit only on content, Android devices would have a big problem. But in fact, Apple sells the same stuff for higher prices, and still makes money on content. So Android devices will continue to out-pace Apple on units... and Apple probably still beats everyone else on profit.
Until the last generation. Both the PS3 and the X-Box 360 hit the ground at 3.2GHz, in 2006 and 2005, respectively. The X-Box 360 also had three hyperthreaded cores, also pretty advanced for 2005.
Intel didn't release Quad Core (Clovertown ... really two dual cores in a single chip carrier) until late 2006, and didn't have 3.0GHz until that next summer. Of course, all of the x86s were more powerful.. but the consoles did briefly have the clock speed lead. And still do, at least on the average.
The video game market developed a different dynamic... one that's more or less kept it proprietary. The trick is that every entrant is making money from licenses developers pay to write applications. This allows them to introduce new consoles at or below actual cost.
This was actually tried back in the early 1990s, with the 3DO platform. The idea was that different hardware companies would build 3DO compatible systems, and establish a multi-vendor platform for video games. Panasonic was the first licensee. The problem was immediately obvious... 3DO was collecting royalties on titles, but Panasonic had to make a profit on their platform, put up against those from other companies that were sold below cost. 3DO eventually would up sharing royalties with Panasonic, but the model basically failed.
This kind of model of course requires a locked platform and rich developers, which is why it doesn't usually work in other markets.
Toshiba tried this with HD-DVD. They were collecting the disc royalties, so they were able to sell early HD-DVD players below cost, compared to Blu-Ray players, which actually had to be profitable on their own ... except of course the PS-3, which was riding the whole video game tradition. This is why, while anyone could license HD-DVD, only Toshiba made players (other than a couple Samsung Blu-Ray players that could also support basic HD-DVD functions.. and priced themselves way out of the market).
It's not precisely open technology, but close.
An open-enough platform always dominates, once a technology matures. The IBM PC was the driving force in the second wave of the personal computer; as much in spite of Microsoft as because of it.
The simple fact, it's about the hardware. If everyone is proprietary, one proprietary brand might dominate. So we had Apple and Commodore doing very, very well in the 8-bit years. The open platform was CP/M, but it didn't really evolve into a competitive form.
Going beyond that, these same players largely had 16/32-bit systems.. Apple's the only proprietary survivor left on the desktop.. and they only survived by using the identical hardware everyone else uses.
There's no reason to believe the "palmtop" will be any different. And particularly, despite their lead in "consumer-oriented smart phone/PDA" devices, Apple can't compete against Android any more than they can compete against WIndows PCs. There will be 25-50 Android models (or more) for every Apple iPhone, iPad, or iPod they put out. No way Apple can compete.
And one other key factor -- they won't even try.
Why would they? Apple is the most profitable PC company, largely by casting themselves as a high-end consumer electronics company. They're not trying to be Dell or HP, they're trying to be Sony, back in Sony's golden age. They can't lower the price of Mac PCs or iPhones enough to compete with HTC or Motorola or HP or Dell. And if they did, they'd make less money, damage the brand (if Rolex sold a $100 watch, the $10,000 model would be less valuable as a result), and have other competition problems. For one ... models. Apple only makes a couple of PCs and one iPhone model every year. They tell you what you want, if you want an Apple product, as if other company's products weren't worthy of competition.
To get more market share, they need higher volumes, which means lower prices, which means the end to the "high end" brand they've worked really hard to establish since the 70s (when they were selling the same thing as Commodore for 3x-4x the price). Apple's going to stick with the high profits, and as long as they have enough market share to keep the platform viable (a problem Apple faced with the Mac once before, which lead to the PC-based Macs of today), they're not even going to try to compete for market share, at least not the way other companies will.
Good point... if you factor in Apple's iOS (UNIX-but-not-Linux based), it's pretty bad news on smartphones if you're not *nix based. iOS is healthy, Android is kicking butt. Everyone but Nokia in the non-Unix SymbianOS world has left, and Nokia is increasingly talking about MeeGo (which is pretty much just a Linux distro) as their future. Windows Mobile has been failing for a few years, to the point where most OEMs lost much interest, and MS had to replace it with their ZunePhone, er, iClone, er, Windows Phone 7... still unsettled success. RIM isn't dead yet, but they're definitely behind, and moving to QNX, rather than Blackberry OS, on their tablets... and eventually, their phones (QNX, while not UNIX-derived, is a POSIX compliant microkernel).
So really, Microsoft is all alone, going against the greater world of UNIX-derived OSs, Their use is still increasing... hardly the sign of something that's "end of life". One would tend to think of an end-of-life product as maybe failing in some or all of its markets, even when pushed by the world's largest software company, even failing against a free OS mostly promoted by techno-hippies who have trouble coming up with beer money...
Linux evolves... continuously, and according to need.
Look at the original-ish versions of Linux... much closer to original UNIX.. they even failed to do simple things like play glitch-free music from a PC sound card. It was, after all, a well know fact, back in the 80s and early 90s, that UNIX simply could not do realtime, even Windows-class "soft" realtime. Every UNIX workstation with the need to play audio used a DSP with its own memory buffers.
Today, you can string together a gstreamer sequence from any shell and not just play back, but even transcode (within machine limits) in realtime. Just one example.
Anything reasonably good to Linux users will become part of Linux. That's both a blessing and a curse... it does mean that any cool new stuff -- cmake, new compilers, new languages, whatever, gradually become a part of the GNU/Linux gene pool. In this way, Linux never gets outdated. It also never directly courts end-users other than existing and traditional Linux types (programmers, power users) unless some other organization makes a concerted effort to push it there in some way (Google/Android, MeeGo, Ubuntu, etc).
On Window, things get added to drive [a] Microsoft's dominance, and [b] the acceptability to customers of an enforced (and paid) upgrade, and [c] demands of the hardware OEMs. This is actually more of a balancing act than a prioritized list; unbalance it too much (Vista, for example, tilted way too much toward "a" and away from "b") and they have problems. But in particular, the "getting paid" part makes Windows change in 3-year jumps, rather than Linux's continual progress. And it doesn't really guarantee any specific "progress" or "evolution", other than those defined by these criteria (eg, Microsoft makes driver changes all the time to force OEMs to write new drivers and thus remain under Microsoft's dominance -- this is change for certain, but not necessarily progress).
... this sounds like a crap move. But you have to consider just why Oracle went after Google. Practically every cellphone vendor has some models with Java support. So just about anyone using Android already has a Java license of some kind. And it's hard to imagine Google didn't make this announcement only after talking to strategic partners in the Android business.
As well, as long as they're not actually making Android devices (Google-branded Nexus devices are made by existing phone makers, not Google), it's hard to imagine just how Oracle manages to really sue Google on this, regardless of the actual truth behind the open source licenses Sun put in place ages ago. Oracle seems hell-bent on making Java irrelevant, rather than making money on it. Google doesn't want to move off Java, but if their Dalvik JIT is violating the original FOSS license (which seems to be Oracle's entre into the lawsuit business here), they could migrate developers to other technologies using the same JIT. Or do a cleanroom Java, for that matter. Only a small hill to climb for a company as powerful as Google.
Apple does have the lock on proprietary docking connector solutions. I've had iPod, Zune, and Sansa devices, each with their own proprietary connectors, and the iPod/iPhone wins by far. Not unexpected.
Thing is, that's the wrong answer.. the real solution to getting stuff out of a non-Apple device is Bluetooth, not a docking connector. I bought myself an Altec-Lansing "Soundblade", to dock up my Droid, and it's a great solution. And thing is, if I get a different smartphone or PMP, that device still works. Buy the Apple dock, and you're pretty much SOL if you upgrade to a non-Apple device sometime in the future. And if you don't like that, buy a Parrot Party, or a zillion other solutions... all without the "Apple Tax".
And of course, the other reason... 7-11 can get $35 for an emergency iPhone charging solution.. Apple users are used to overpaying. They can't get anything close to that for a $0.85 (actual price at Monoprice.com) USB cable.
Actually, it's an entirely different reason. Apple user need just need emergency cables far more than any other phone users.
Don't get me wrong... I was impressed with the battery life of my sister's iPhone 4. We did the "Susan G. Komen" 3-Day walk this year. She got a free daily charge the first night, but on the second night, they screwed up (the AT&T booth, offering free charges) and didn't get hers charges. My Droid was fat and happy... I brought four spare batteries along, just in case.
Everyone who doesn't have an iPhone has that option. Those who know they need extra power bring it along... thus, the need for emergency charging cables is much less. iPhone and iPod users don't have that option, so even seasoned users know, for extended use, power can be a problem.
Apple's connector is nice idea, but it's not rugged. I'm happy with the idea of the standard USB connector, which doesn't preclude other options.
And really, Apple's connector is increasingly a dinosaur. The standard USB connector is much better for charging and USB access. Apple doesn't support Firewire anymore, and RS-232 as well is kind of pointless, given pretty much every phone does Bluetooth (which can bridge to a serial protocol on your PC, if you need that).
The headphone jack is useful, but I don't need a dock connector for audio; Bluetooth does that just dandy, too. Plus, the power needed to send audio over a Bluetooth class 1 connection is very small compared to the power used on headphones, even.. so using Bluetooth for speakers actually keeps my phone alive longer.
Analog video is so 90s... high end smart phones this year do HDMI. Which will suffice until a suitable wireless standard is out. As usual, Apple's playing catch-up here... as they have been for the last year or so, despite seeming so far ahead of other smartphones. That ended when Android and WebOS came out.
Apple could add an adapter, or a second port.. they aren't required to get rid of the docking connector.