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Lets not forget the price.

In Portugal during the 80-90's, Apple hardware was way much more expensive than PCs.

Only at the university I did see someone really using them, and we did have a few LCs available alongside countless VT 100, X terminals and PCs.

So Thom, you are one of those who must have the latest shiny, shiny UI then?

If IOS is a bit dated so what? Does it do what it is supposed to do? If not then it needs changing.

IMHO, there is far to many people riding roughshod over the 'If it ain't broker then don't fix it.'

Sure there will be changes to IOS, there always is.

Take the basic LandRover defender. The current model is the same shape and does the same job as the one first produced in 1948. you can see the design history in the current model that dates back to the first one.
Does it work? Yes it does. So why change it.

I fully expect that around Android 4.4 it will stop changing so much and then in a few years/months people will start saying 'boy does this Android look dated now'.
Will you be one of them Thom? I am sure we would all like to know?

There again, I and I am sure a good number of other OSNews readers would like to know that you think should be done to iOS to make it 'shiny shiny' again? It is all right criticising something but isn't it a bit more productive to make suggestions for change at the same time as saying it is dated?

I would say giving it the same functionality that Android has would be a good start

Current Land Rover defender is not the same LandRover defender of the fifties. By a long shot.

iOS is yet to introduce an reviewed interaction model. Notification dropdown and sharing dialogue are the only two that I can name, that have had any impact on how you interact with the OS since the iPhone OS. Is it refined? Yes. Has the UX changed much? No.


Yeah... Look at those changes that happened to UI since Galaxy Nexus and 4.0 were released...
Oh wait... Android 4.2 looks the same as 4.0.

Well it is getting harder to improve:
2.3 already works fine for average users
4.0 addressed all the major show-stoppers
4.1 is perceived to be better than iOS by most
4.2 even wins over die-hard Apple fans


That I don't agree with. All the mobile innovation happens on Android nowadays, and the other platforms are playing catch-up. Until that changes, Android will see every mobile paradigm and consumers decide whether that has a future.

Absolutely. The latest version of iOS is klunky and amateurish compared to Android and WP8. Apple captured people's imaginations by releasing revolutionary hardware and software. It's no longer doing that. Its releases are purely evolutionary (more pixels, smaller, lighter, stronger); and while these advances aren't trivial, they just aren't enough to hold off the competition anymore. Its UI design is stale and dated. Apple has to do something revolutionary in order to convince people that it's still innovating but, quite frankly, the market is betting against that possibility. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs. Apple peaked last year and, while I don't doubt that the company's future is secure thanks to its immense cash hoard and devoted fan base of dumb, fashion-oriented lemmings, its market share in key markets is going to continue to slide, in my opinion.

P.S. The Maps and senior staff outflow debacles have undermined confidence in the Apple brand, as well.

Edited 2013-01-19 11:27 UTC

I have a question...how do you stand the WinPhone appstore?

Because I had a friend that got one despite my warnings (I had the misfortune of getting a couple of games that use GFWL and I figured if they couldn't even copy Valve correctly the odds of them copying Apple correctly were virtually nil) and sure enough just a month after getting the phone he ended up putting it on eBay just to recoup some of his costs because the appstore is such a mess.

So I am curious if you feel the same as he did, which was the hardware and OS was nice, it was a shame that the appstore was so horribly broken it made it at least for him not worth owning.

And I do agree Win2K was incredible which is what makes Win 8 so painful for me. Win 7 was the first OS since Win2K that truly impressed me, in fact I would argue its as close to perfection as one can get on a desktop or laptop. Incredible memory management that learns as you use it, breadcrumbs and jumplists making getting back to where you were working at simple and intuitive, a sane driver subsystem that can kill and restart drivers without a crash, intelligent application caching, its truly top shelf.

Which is what makes Win 8 so painful as its like they fired everybody that made this good thing and replaced them with somebody whose idea of OSes is cheap Chinese knockoffs. in fact i think that is the perfect description of Win 8, its a Chinese knockoff. Like a Chinese knockoff it has a few superficial things that look like the original but once you actually use it the experience is just wrong and fake and bad. And like a Chinese knockoff the iconography doesn't even follow conventions or make any sense!

This is revisionist history. The 'stagnant' Apple you speak of owned desktop publishing, graphics, CD Rom development, digital audio editing, was a major player in handheld, handwriting recognition, and object-oriented computing. Macs were priced higher than a Windows 95 machine but still had far more built in features, reliability, and resale value, so the value proposition was strong for Mac or it's mid-90's clones.

At least in the US. I know this is a European site and I notice the difference in markets. I know Apple did not have the success in Europe that it did in the US. I do wish you would remember this, being that Apple is a very american company.

In my opinion, the business of clones, backward engineering, and 3rd party developer relations is what doomed the original mac to small market share. Microsoft's design hurt them (and still does). The company is run by dorks, for dorks, the kind of people who see no difference between a plastic fork and anything else. Apple appeals to a sense of both engineering grace and human touch, sight, hearing, etc. Apple considers people's senses, like a great designer. Very european, actually ;-)

The same playbook has been played by Android, but it's still just the chaos of java/linux trying to compete with the ultra-organized (and now wildly rich) Apple. The App store, the itunes media empire, the jillions of ipods around the world... it was an amazing strategy and it's still crushing competitors in the way. Android exists by being the non-Apple iOS in my opinion. Most people that have android don't even know, it's just "a smartphone". It's like the last people to get a smartphone on the planet get an android for free.

I saiz, boy (short for fanboi ), you got it all wrong (to quote famous foghorn leghorn). When you start a post with a statement so out of touch with reality (bolded section) it doesn't surprise to see a such nonsense in the follow up. Android exists because it is free and because of that it is seeing huge acceleration in development and adoption.

This is revisionist history. It bases the whole analysis on a very atypical and always ~shrinking (relatively to the emergence of others) market.
Oh, and Apple barely survived the 90s.

BTW, there's also more to the world than US and Europe :p


iOS didn't even allow for 3rd party apps in its first year, there was no strategy to the appstore... iTunes reach is, again, limited geographically.
iPod is, again, a thing of a few atypical markets. And even in them, people don't seem to realise that iPod had a very slow start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg - and 2005 was a time when most of the world was already starting to leapfrog dedicated audio players, going to mobile phones (in 2007 or so I read a report about how ~20% of European mobile subscribers uses their phones for music listening - that 20% alone already means more people than all iPods ever made)

Edited 2013-01-25 23:55 UTC