
Benedict Evans: "
How do you segment without fragmenting? Apple achieved this pretty easily with the iPod by varying the storage, but that wouldn't be meaningful for the iPhone. The cheap one has to run the apps, but people still have to have a reason to buy the expensive one. What you
can do is vary the
Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting."
Like I said: iOS 6 Starter, iOS6 Home, iOS 6 Professional, and iOS 6 Ultimate. Microsoft got blasted for confusing and arbitrary segmentation - rightfully so - but as usual, Apple gets a free pass when it does the exact same thing. At least Microsoft uses different names and forces OEMs to be clear about what they're shipping. I've said it before: I find calling all these different versions "iOS 6" without modifiers
pretty scummy and misleading.
Member since:
2005-11-13
And what features are missing for developers to take advantage of? I know things like Siri are missing in older devices, but (AFAIK) Siri doesn't yet have any exposed APIs for developers to use anyway (which is a real shame). I don't know if the maps app does or not. But I'm curious to know what features devs are missing out on, and how the situation would be any different if Apple had said 'Well, iOS6 won't be supported at all on these older devices.' I mean, the original iPad only has 256mb of RAM, so there's only so much they can cram in there, but at least SOMETHING is better than nothing.
The issue at hand is that you have Fandroids looking at this situation and saying, 'See? It's fragmentation... the same thing that's happening on Android!' Ummm, no it isn't.