“Never mind the fact that the iPod turned the entire music industry on its head. Never mind the fact that most successful notebooks today resemble designs first popularized by Apple. Never mind the fact that the blueprint of the modern day smartphone remains the original iPhone. Never mind the fact that competitors are scrambling wildly to copy the success and design of the iPad. Forget all of these things, because when it comes to Apple, the ‘what have you done for me lately?’ mentality reigns supreme.”
I think my response can be summed up in just one image:
http://techmog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/android-evolution.jpg
It’s cool to be innovators (just ask Nintendo), but as Microsoft found out with IE6, being the best on the block only buys you so much time. Your competition will eventually catch up and surpass you. While Android continues to improve by leaps and bounds, iOS is getting very stale, so Apple had better do something big. And do it soon.
Edited 2013-01-18 22:24 UTC
But then again everybody (most of them anyway) are upset if Microsoft dears to innovate in Windows. Everybody are happy to use the concepts put in place in 1995. But if Apple uses the same UI concept for 5 years then it is already stale and old and out of fashion?
That’s easily explained: Windows 8 is disliked because it forces a touch interface on a mouse/keyboard system.
Metro should have been restricted to tablets/smartphones, and Microsoft should have saved the desktop for regular PCs.
Based on my experience, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a marketing/upper management decision.
What else, really. Do you think a lone engineer turned Metro on by default? Microsoft isn’t Sony!
Of course it is a top executive decision. Milk your milking cow until it die, don’t kill it because you want a juicy steak for supper unless you believe it will die tomorrow.
There are companies where engineering also takes product decisions at the same level management or marketing would do.
Its not just that Thom the whole Metro UI is completely inconsistent with the rest of the OS, things will be in one area of the desktop and a different area in metro for no good reason, you have a completely new UI but little to nothing telling you what this or that actually DOES and trying to use search to get the answer is pointless since you have to know what the MSFT terminology is for what you are doing which if you know that you’ll know where to find it.
Check out the little animated video i linked to earlier, he lays out all the problems better than I ever could, I would merely add I had no trouble picking up Android, iOS, Linux, etc but Win 8 with its lack of context or explanation made me give up in frustration, yes its THAT bad.
Microsoft’s idea of Windows innovation is putting a tablet OS on a desktop, so of course people are going to reject it, and rightfully so. Metro on Windows 8 sucks so much ass, it’s amazing that it even went past the conception stage. It is a joke. A complete clusterf**k.
The difference between MS and Apple is that when Apple tries to innovate, they’re reasonably competent at it. MS can’t innovate shit. Hell, MS has tried to copy Apple in many areas (*cough* Zune *cough*) and they can’t even get that right.
You clearly have never used a Zune.
I think you made the opposite point of what you were going for.
Not at all. The fact that a product is not a category leader doesn’t mean that the leader is superior. Far from it. Zune was head and shoulders above the iPod in so many ways (UI design, etc).
Change can be good or bad. Microsoft’s change was bad, that’s why its getting slapped around. That isn’t to say that all change is bad.
Smart companies are always looking at how to do what the customer does today, better tomorrow. Apple has made major attempts at improvements to ios : Cut & Paste, multi-tasking, the app store and siri. Some of those are so basic as to be embarrassing, but major improvements none the less. Apple has also always been super secretive on its R&D, so no news isn’t necessarily good or bad news.
That said, it was a stupid article which could be summed up as : people who criticize apple tend to criticize apple. Then it throws un sourced numbers out of the air to indicate that Apple’s doing great because people are buying their current products. Rim and Nokia were doing great a year after the iphone too…
Those “improvements” are the marketing strategy. How else could Apple sell 5 iterations of the same phone. If thy would’ve included those features in v1 (which they mostly could) then mere CPU/memory improvements would’ve not created such a rush from consumers to get the latest and the greatest. Maybe screen update but if the software would’ve been from version 1 what it is today, then it would not have been created such an interest.
It is very regular Apple strategy to pump massive amounts of money out of a single product by initially releasing a thing with half the features intentionally and then in coming years enabling/implementing those must-have features one by one and claiming that the new is better than the old and getting the point over very clearly by not back porting the features to previous gen models.
Edited 2013-01-19 10:44 UTC
Rubbish.
The problem isn’t with Microsoft innovating, the problem is with Microsoft removing freedoms and useful functionality and forcing round-about ways of doing things in the name of innovation. The complaints are about Metro’s short-comings, not about Microsoft trying to innovate, and you seem to be terribly confused about that. You do realize that one can appreciate development and innovation while still criticizing the short-comings, yes?
That seems to be Apple’s way of innovating. So the article author was right, but the double standard goes the other way. It’s a case of projection.
Don’t try to twist what I said. It’s not innovation when Apple does it nor is it innovation when Microsoft does it.
Don’t try to twist what I said. It’s not innovation when Apple does it nor is it innovation when Microsoft does it. [/q]
Where did I say that it was what you said?
Nobody minds if MSFT innovates, what they mind is when MSFT puts out a BROKEN interface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
Watch the video, here is a guy that writes TECH ARTICLES and has written about multiple OSes and even HE can’t find what should be simple tools that everybody will need, simple things like “how to make a restore disc” and “How do i close metro Apps” because MSFT doesn’t explain anything or give ANY context for the user to learn the new UI, which leads to frustration.
I had a PC running win 8 at the shop for nearly 7 months for users to try and I can tell you he is NOT alone, none of my users could figure out how to do squat without using one of the other PCs to Google what to do which when you need a Win 7 PC just so you can Google how to use the Win 8 PC? I’m sorry but that isn’t innovation, that is just broken.
I’ve been using PCs since the VIC 20, I’m always up for trying and learning new OSes, but after a month of Win 8 I wanted to pull my hair out. its so obviously built for touch that it hurts. “Well what is wrong with that?” most will ask. Simple less than 2% of the PCs on the planet are touch and that isn’t gonna change anytime soon and using a trackpad with it is just agony, it can’t decide whether you are swiping or moving so half the time you’ll get one, half the time the other, the whole OS feels random and out of control.
That’s been almost exactly my experience with it, and I’ve mastered some of the most esoteric and backwards interfaces out there under GNU/Linux and other OSes. I got the basics of navigating Metro and the slightly tweaked classic desktop, but anything beyond web browsing seems to be purposely hidden. Using a keyboard and mouse in Metro feels like using a Nintendo WiiMote to navigate Windows 7: Inaccurate, slow, painful, and confusing.
And I get what Microsoft is trying to do, but they are trying too hard and too soon. I realized something else about Metro: It’s almost as if it’s designed to eventually work with a Kinect device for input. A lot of the touch-friendly gestures would work well with such a device, to the point that I wonder if they actually used it during development (in parallel to the version of Metro that’s on the Xbox 360).
Of course, as far as I know the Kinect isn’t fully supported on Windows 8 yet; RT doesn’t support it at all and there are only basic drivers for 8. Perhaps they realized what kind of monstrosity they had built and scrapped those plans, assuming they even had them to start with. I guess we’ll never know.
Bite your tongue! They still can’t get Kinect to work right with games, I can just imagine what it would be like as a PC interface! /moves hand to save work/ “Oh you want me to delete and shutdown? Okay”…nooooooo!
And everyone can see what “MSFT is trying to do” they are trying to turn Windows into a cellphone so the users will “get used to it” and buy their overpriced WinPhones and WinRT tablets…which they just had to cut orders in half on because nobody is gonna pay more than an iPad or Kindle for something with no apps and lousy software support..sigh.
If they don’t get Ballmer out of the big chair soon I could easily see MSFT becoming another RIM, a once great company that only has legacy customers and even they are looking at exit strategies. The sad part is if they would ape IBM instead of Apple they’d be doing great, they could backport the appstore to Win 7 and focus on selling features and support contracts to supplement their OS sales but Ballmer just can’t see past Cupertino and that is gonna be what runs the company into the ground.
And it’ll take two hours to decrypt even that gesture!!!
Totally agree.
It took me absolutely ages just to figure out how to shut down my god damned PC in Windows 8.
It’s now a game I play with guests on my media PC. I see how long it takes each of them to figure it out. Most just give up.
In case you’re wondering, you have to hover you mouse over the right side of the screen, click a totally inappropriate cog icon (which is the universal icon for settings), and then find the icon amongst five other down the bottom of the side bar.
And this is just one of many such bizarre UI decisions in Win8. It really seems like they came up with this stuff while under the influence.
Oh, you do it that way. I thought you’re supposed to log out first by clicking on your avatar on the Start screen and then clicking on the shutdown – thingie.
Oh well. Just goes to show how unintuitive that whole process is.
See what I mean Werecat? Here you are, a geek with years of exp on a site full of geeks with years of exp and nobody can figure out basic tasks without just randomly poking crap and hoping it does something that is replicable.
And we’re fricking geeks for God’s sake, we are USED to dealing with funky weird tech all damned day, how in the hell is Joe Average and Sally Secretary supposed to figure this broken mess out? I mean who in the hell thought that simply shutting down the PC should be hidden under the universal SETTINGS icon? Does that make ANY sense?
And THAT is why I’m so damned sick of the Win 8 apologists either giving us the “Oh you’re just a Luddite that refuses to accept “innovation” or learn new things” or the “Oh you just (insert bunch of keyboard crap)” excuses. I picked up how to get around your average Linux distro good enough to do basic tasks in maybe an hour, Android didn’t even take that long, maybe half an hour, but in Win 8 despite having used Windows since 3.1 and computers since 1982 I couldn’t do more than surf with the damned thing after a week! And the keyboard commanders…we are supposed to go back to printing “cheat sheets” like its 1985 again? THAT is innovation?
So I’m sorry but Win 8 is NOT new, its NOT innovative, its BROKEN. Its designed for an interface nobody has and goes bonkers if you use a normal PC interface (such as the swipe one minute move the mouse the next when you use a trackpad problem) and even if you DID have a touchscreen there is ZERO context or clues and what little context there is, like settings equal shutdown, is completely WRONG. I agree with the tech writer whose video i posted, Win 8 deserves a product recall because in its current state its just broken, its just not suitable for purpose.
Well, you are supposed to just press the power button on the computer, like every other device in the house. It is sort of perverse that we’ve become so used to needing to press a GUI button to shut down the system.
WRONG, I’m sorry and I have heard that excuse before and as a retailer I can tell you that YOU ARE WRONG and here is why:
Depending on the model SOME will shutdown when you press the button, SOME will go into hybrid sleep and SOME will go into hibernate…now quick, if you can’t use the button because its a laptop and you need to actually shut the thing down and the power puts it to sleep, what do you do?
So I’m sorry but just like the keyboard commanders and their “Oh you just need to (bunch of lame keyboard crap nobody knows or will remember) you have just 1.- Adding a problem that didn’t exist before, 2.- Adding unneeded complexity to what is supposed to be intuitive, 3.- Made what should be universal behavior completely random depending on the make and model.
So I’m sorry abut again that is NOT innovation, that is BROKEN DESIGN. Heck i built my own PC and I can tell you the default behavior on this particular motherboard is NOT shutdown when you push the button but S3 sleep!
But the thing is that the power button doesn’t actually turn the thing on or off, Windows insists on it either putting the computer to sleep or to hibernate. On my laptop is sends the machine to sleep, and that’s just not what I want when I am looking to shut the computer down.
Yes, I know you can change the functionality from the power settings, but how many Average Joes will ever find that? As such it doesn’t negate the point raised in any way — actually turning off the computer is more cumbersome than it should be.
It goes into sleep… but since something is not right it immediately wakes up. So it took me 30 minutes before I could shut down my PC… nevermind logout.
Man, that was absolutely hilarious.
That’s exactly what happened in the PC space. Apple stagnated completely – the classic Mac OS was a trainwreck, and even though some are unwilling to admit it, Windows was better. Windows 2000 was leaps and bounds better, and Windows XP just ran circles around classic Mac OS and early Mac OS X.
iOS is in danger of the same fate. I’m really hoping Apple has some cool stuff to come for iOS, because right now, going back to iOS after using Android and Windows Phone feels like going 5 years back in time.
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.
The point I was tryingto make is that the basic design tenet of the LR defender is much he same as it was 40+ years ago. Sure it has been updated but only gradually over that period.
As for a an OS such as iOS. Are the bits missing from it that are in Android things that the average punter will regard as a show stopper? I think not. IMHO a lot of the stuff that hacks rave on about are as useful to the average user as say (for example) 50% of the ‘new’ functionality that has been added to MS Office in the past few years.
That is not to say that over time there feature might become more important but what if those features are blocked by non FRAND Patents? Then Apple/Nokia/Sony couldn’t introduce them into their phones OS without a legal bun fight lasting 5+ years by which time it will all be irrelevant anyway.
I’ve gotten fed up with Android after bricking my HTC trying to put cyanogen onto it (it came with Android 2.3) and have gone back to a basic Nokia Symbian phone. I have to say, I don’t miss the ‘smart’ bits that are no longer available to me.
What HTC model was it and have you tossed it in the trash already, or do you have it lying around somewhere?
Style is not the same as design. The defender has not changed it’s style much, but the design of it has changed. The way you interact with the automobile has changed a lot. iOS has not.
A “basic Nokia Symbian” without “‘smart’ bits”? Which model is that? (you know, majority of ~classic Nokia handsets don’t run Symbian…)
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.
Quark, Adobe, Aldus, Macromedia, Digidesign, Apple Newton OS, OpenDoc….. read up on some of them. These technologies were all Apple (or the Windows version was inferior) for many years, and much money was made. Are you unfamiliar with these markets, or are you telling me that every design and marketing department wasn’t loaded with macs in the 80’s and 90’s — where you’re from? Because I’ve been seeing that since I started noticing these things back in the 80’s.
The idea that Apple became “stale” based on their OS interface only is goofy. They’ve always pushed UI consistency (even when not fully practicing it themselves).
Dude, calling me a fanboi is pretty ridiculous. A ridiculous term. I was on the internet on an Atari 24 years ago when I was a boy. I was on the web before HTML was finalized. Respect your digital elders son. Nearly everything digital you saw or heard in the 90’s was made on a mac.
Thank you for the compliment. I feel so much younger all of the sudden
… Oh well, back to reality:
Since you asked so politely as to where I was in my youth, here it is… in the ’80 we had these huge rooms called computer centers where we would have these huge boxes some of them were called computers, some were known as tape units, etc. We used to program in some weird languages called COBOL, Fortran IV etc. That is where I was in the ’80.
I suppose some people would consider me somewhat of a professional in the IT (at least they pay me as such). Now I don’t have a problem with a statement like :
“Macs were dominant among the designers”
But that was not your statement. Your statement was apple OWNED …. see a problem there. As far as I can remember, apple never owned adobe!! The rest of your post is also gibberish … OOP, really?? I mean for real??
Apple is stale because they do not have enough resources to manage both software and hardware development and have always and will always cut corners in the software side of things.
ok old grey beard i take back calling you son. you’ve been around. i too know of the giant tape machines and cobol. i also know that world is now more or less called a server closet or the cloud, and that apple has never tried to compete in that market.
corporate IT working with mainframes – of course you think of apples as toys. on that level of IT they aren’t competing.
i also remember small companies with 20 macs, pc’s and a few linux servers started to take the business from the old guys running room sized computers and a huge IT budget.
so from the home computer, consumer computing perspective (which is the only market apple exists in ) they were nearly owning those production markets.
I don’t know why I just remembered an old disc unit which had 5(?) plates, each about half an inch thick with a diameter of about 10 inches and a capacity of whopping 1 MB … good old days. Biggest accident at work: dropped a program on the floor and had to re-sort for hours (punch cards anyone?)
awesome. it is amazing how far we’ve come on hardware. software maybe not so much. to think that the worlds biggest active database might end up being Facebook is sad. no surprise though, we are all just human after all.
i moved into a house around ’99 where the previous owner had been running a data conversion company out of the huge attic. he had the most ancient machines i had ever seen in person installed in this house (not downtown). when i moved in his machines were gone, but for years i found ancient (cold war looking) tapes, connectors, and manuals. the guy was transferring data from literally decades ago into modern databases.
i started about 1984 on a tandy coco, 1986 atari xe, then a shared amiga, then mac, then windows 95, then mac osx. i wasn’t paid as an IT guy until probably 93-94 though, and never corporate. always internet startups, small business, vertical market stuff.
?
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
Android has changed so much because it needed to change. It is just now with JellyBean becoming reasonably usable w.r.t performance.
It’s always been usable, it’s just that vendors did some horrific things with it and put it on underpowered hardware. As long as you had the right phone, it was fine. Even in 2009 with the original Droid, it was light years ahead of iOS. Anything that ran stock (as opposed to skins like NonSense or Bloatoblur) ran beautifully. Maybe not as smooth as iOS, but smooth enough.
It’s like Linux… ya just gotta be using the right distro
hehe
Edited 2013-01-18 22:40 UTC
In 2009 when it was finally time to upgrade my Nokia E70 I tried stock Android in emulator on a high end PC. And it sucked, not because of underpowered hardware or Samsung’s bloatware, but because Android was garbage.
Bought Nokia N900 instead.
You tried it in an emulator? *smh* That’s like using Metro on the desktop
Well it was better than on friend’s phone.
You tried an unoptimized emulator on a non-touchscreen device, noticed that it ran poorly, and based on that you decided that it’s garbage? Uhh..
I’m sorry, but this is such an idiotic statement I wonder if you have any idea about software performance at all. If you had any idea of how difficult and slow it is to emulate a completely different microarchitecture in software, you’d know exactly why your Android usability benchmark yielded category-A bullshit results.
And I suppose you ran that in an ARM CPU emulator beforehand as well, right? Of course you didn’t. All you did was look for an excuse to bash on Android.
No, it sucked because the Android emulator has sucked for a really long time, no matter how high end the PC. You based your opinion of a touch-screen OS on a crappy, mouse-driven emulator. Congratulations!
Android 2.1 was when Android really started becoming a good phone OS, and Android has improved insanely fast in the past three years.
dumbest argument ever considering the only emulator around then was Google’s SDK, which -sadly- still sucks hard.
If you even did a tiny bit of research you’d know this though. But instead it’s easier to make ignorant complaints to booster your own personal biases.
For the record, back in 2009 I popped to a phone shop to buy an iPhone, walked out with the G1 (HTC Dream). We’re talking the /FIRST/ Android handset and a person who /WANTED/ to buy an iPhone but was swayed away from it.
If its only smooth using X phone on Y carrier with Z ROM then its’ not really smooth. The average user wont be mindful of that.
Android the brand, stood for a subpar experience, and I’ve observed this personally from many, and only recently is this sentiment starting to change with people.
However smoothness and usability are two very different things.
While Android 2.* is jerky on the UI, it’s still snappy in performance on a reasonable device.
Mind you…. iPhone4 and iOS6 don’t really play that well together. Ironically for smoothness I go to Galaxy Nexus, not my iPhone4.
I think smoothness relates to usability greatly. However you’re correct when it comes to a stuttery UI and overall performance.
That’s the tragic point of this entire thing. Android has MORE than enough hardware to accomplish the task. The OS (Gingerbread, things are much better now) was just unoptimized for the scenario.
Yeah, I’m aware. Its appalling it even passed Apple’s QA. It was such a blatant degradation in performance that I was shocked.
The GN runs ICS (maybe JB by now, I don’t know) which helps a lot, even ICS I found was a huge leap forward in UI performance.
It’s a personal observation, but I didn’t notice anything performance wise when going from iOS 5 to 6 on my iPhone 4. Nor did my wife doing the same on her 3GS. She has my 4 now and is a happy user.
Moving from iOS 3 to 4 on the iPhone 3G really was noticeable in an unpleasant way.
Have you had a reference? iPhone5 or any high end Android device? Because the issues with speed are just too obvious.(Obviously swiping thought the start screens and list of music had no negative impact)
I used the iPhone 4 for some time and didn’t notice the performance going down when I upgraded it to iOS 6. My wife didn’t complain either when I upgraded her 3GS, but she’s no expert. It’s hard for me to judge the 3GS performance as I never owned one and only used my wife’s briefly on a few occasions when setting a setting, installing an app or explaining something.
When I got an iPhone 5 (my wife sold her 3GS and got my 4) I did notice it was quicker than the iPhone 4. Of course I skipped the 4S that falls between these two models.
I know some people complain iOS 6 made their iPhone slower, but some say it’s faster while I’m a member of the group that didn’t notice anything.
I guess we need some kind of benchmark program to see what the numbers say. For some strange reason I’ve never seen any benchmarks regarding this subject.
Sadly that was more an intentional design rather than lack of optimisation.
The UI was all software rendered as Google devs thought having an OpenGL UI would cause bigger issues when switching between applications that also use OpenGL.
Whether that was a mistake on their part I don’t know.
Jelly Bean even made non ICS targeted apps run better and smother. ICS ran only ICS targeted apps smoothly.
Really? Is that why my Gingerbread phone runs so well? (Especially for a phone that cost a tenth of an iPhone).
Yes really. I’ve never seen a Gingerbread phone that performed as smoothly as an iPhone, but I’m sure somewhere in your imagination such a mythical phone exists.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. I didn’t say it performed as well as an iPhone, I said it performs well (really well, actually) and it cost 1/10 of an iPhone.
It’s not mythical, it’s sitting on my desk.
If it doesn’t perform as smoothly as an iPhone it likely doesn’t perform well at all. There’s not much of a gray area between smooth and not smooth.
I don’t think your mythical phone being not-quite-as-fast as an iPhone does much to disprove my point.
Android, still, to this day, despite Jelly Bean, still isn’t up to iPhone levels of smoothness on any device. That’s why I cited it as an example of Android’s ongoing evolution.
I doubt that you have iPhone4 with iOS6.
Granted, my Galaxy Nexus is not as smooth as my partner’s iPhone5. But considering that iPhone5 has actually a beast of a SoC, that’s not surprising.
Actually, happens I do. It does run about as well as an Android phone. Which is to say, terribly.
But it also is saddled with an OS it wasn’t really intended for. When the iPhone 4 launched, it was pretty damn smooth. It just outlived its usefulness and performance got long in the tooth.
Ok, so what you’re saying is that the iphone is dangerously close to not performing well at all since there is no other area of performing well than being an iphone.
Wow, you’re such an expert on a phone that you’ve never seen or used.
Uh…ok.
Your point: Android pretty much sucked performance-wise prior to Jelly Bean.
My point: My Gingerbread phone performs well.
Hmmm………
Yes. Precisely. iPhones and even Windows Phones all play a delicate performance balancing game. That’s why you see iOS and WP use more restricted multitasking features compared to Android, and also why the hardware selection is much more limited and refined.
Performance is a very, very fragile thing. There isn’t much below the iPhone that is still smooth. You can notice this if you try to use something like an iPhone 4 or 3GS with one of the modern iOS revisions. Its obvious the OS has gotten heavy to the point where its broken the balance of performance on the device.
I base my conclusion on two things:
1. Previous experience with Gingerbread Phones, even high specced one’s like Samsung’s Galaxy S.
2. You saying that it wasn’t as smooth as an iPhone, which led me to believe that you were glossing over some performance problems.
I don’t think you realize how many Android devices exist when you say that one device disproves my statement about Android in general.
No, not really and there are many different levels of performance.
I never said it wasn’t. Jesus, how hard is this?
I said that it is a Gingerbread phone and that it performs well. If it as as smooth as an iPhone or not (it may be, it may not) has NOTHING to do with it’s performance.
Actually, I think I know more about how many different Android devices there are than you do. Android is a selling point here and you see them everywhere.
Your experience with a handful of Android phones does not disprove my statement about Gingerbread.
Really, vague statements?
I don’t think you know the topic at hand. I replied to a comment showing a radical shift in Android and a relatively minor shift for the iPhone over a similar time period.
I mentioned that when compared to the iPhone, which got it right from the start, Android has had to come a lot further. I mentioned as part of that, that Android Gingerbread, and even Jelly Bean are still not as smooth compared to the iPhone, but things are still improving.
You can’t just say “well my Android device is smooth” and refuse to compare it to what we’re even talking about. You then play this little bullshit semantic game instead of replying to the actual comment.
Does it, or does it not perform as smoothly as an iPhone? It has everything to do with its performance, because like I said, there isn’t much room below iPhone (or Windows Phone) levels of smoothness.
Then you’re being willfully dense, one or two Gingerbread devices does not disprove the general notion that Android devices are not smooth. You might make excuses for Android, but others in this thread don’t, and have even admitted that it is the case (while pointing out some mitigating factors like OEM skins).
I think its time you start being honest and stop living in this fantasy world where the only phone that exists is your own, so that must speak for all of Android.
In fact, in Jelly Bean they even mention that they’ve specifically optimized around UI smoothness with Project Butter. According to you, this shouldn’t be necessary, because Gingerbread is smooth. Except it isn’t.
I’m convinced it does, for reasons I mention above.
Edited 2013-01-19 06:52 UTC
I’m not making excuses, I’m saying it’s not has bad as you want to make it out to be.
You seem to continuously confuse smoothness with performance. Smoothness is a part of performance, it is not the same as performance.
Also, what general notion?
It’s a new phone, it’s performs well. My wife has a similar phone but different model, it performs well. Hmmm…you know what? That proves to me that Gingerbread does not universally have bad performance.
Maybe it didn’t perform when it came out, I dunno, but now it does.
So? UI smoothness != performance.
Says the guy who bases his opinion that Gingerbread is universally slow on the experience on a handful of phones (God knows how long ago) and some vague general notion.
Maybe you should not let your intense dislike for Google and Android color your impressions.
I’m not making it out to be anything. I’m stating the truth. I’m not saying that current Android devices are bad. Older Android devices were borderline unusable. Even the flagships at the time.
I’m speaking about UI performance specifically. All of that theoretical power is useless if the main interaction point is a frustrating experience.
I thought this would’ve been obvious, especially when I brought up Jelly Bean early on, before you even commented. You may find general performance to be adequate, which is fine, but if your UI isn’t smooth, the whole thing breaks, and a user’s perception of overall performance is much worse.
UI performance is an especially multifaceted beast which depends on a host of factors, and there are actual CPU bound calculations that can bog it down (especially on Android). I ultimately don’t fault the performance of the SoC per say, but I do think its an architectural deficiency which they seem to have made great strides towards remedying.
I forgot we’re talking about Android, where it is indeed possible to buy a device running an considerably older OS and keep a serious face.
I’d imagine that some hardware advances may make up some lost ground, but I still wouldn’t place it in the same league as the iPhone, mainly because I’m unconvinced Gingerbread is capable of such a technical feat. If you look at some of the fixes that Project Butter brought to JB, its a wonder how these things took that long to land in Android.
I’ve never been talking about overall device performance, as I’ve stated in every comment since you first replied, and in every comment reply to others on this same topic.
I don’t understand why you have such an issue addressing what I’m actually talking about.
I think my experiences are in general indicative of Android as a whole when it comes to UI performance on Gingerbread. Its just never been a particularly good experience. Sure, I’ll give you that newer phones have made the situation better, but they’re just masking the symptoms with better hardware, not solving the fundamental problem.
Just because I don’t sing Android praises as often as you’d like doesn’t mean I dislike it. I think in the next revision of Android they will have likely completely caught up when it comes to a modern UI stack which performs well on a varying range of devices.
I just don’t think Android is a pleasant consumer experience and believe their success is completely accidental. An anomaly aided by excellent timing and a vacuum in the industry. I am not convinced that they will dominate the tablet market, and still wouldn’t bet on Google, yet.
If a year from now things change (which they very well may) then I will be more than glad to give Android its deserved praise, but as it stands it is not there. I understand some people are taken aback that I have the audacity to speak candidly on my experience with Android, but I frankly don’t care.
Edited 2013-01-19 07:37 UTC
You suffer from the delusion that smooth scrolling is the benchmark of all things. It’s not. Smooth scrolling existed on the C64, a very slow computer with a very shitty OS by today’s standards.
To be honest, even in those days I found Microsoft Basic to be sub par compared to some of the BASIC interpreters being released in Europe.
I think Commodore was just being cheap. The Commodore 64 basically (haha) used the same BASIC as its predecessor the VIC-20. It’s strange to imagine them releasing a computer with some nifty chips (video & sound) and no BASIC commands to make use of them, but they did.
I used to have a BASIC translation poster. It listed (haha) a number of commands and how they were implemented on a number of home computers. The Commodore 64 often had to do with PRINTing some character string or POKEing a memory location.
Not everybody was happy with Simons’ BASIC (I liked it), but it would have been a huge improvement over BASIC 2.0 and it made it easy to do graphics, sounds, sprites and redefined character sets. It also still left a lot of memory free for the program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons‘_BASIC
My personal experience with JB is that it actually slowed down my phone’s interface compared to its performance with ICS, and this is on a Nexus S, a “pure Google experience” phone. I could probably go back to ICS but it’s too much trouble for the short time I’ll still be using this device.
The only phone I’ve used to date that is as fast and fluid as an iPhone is a Windows Phone (HTC Arrive). And I only stopped using it because for the time being, I’m dependent on tethering and TeamViewer while on the go to support a few clients.
I’m working to simplify things in that regard, and I hope that by the time I’m up for renewal this summer I’ll be free to choose between a new WP8 phone, a BB10 phone, an iPhone (though I’m doubtful about that one), or an Android phone (also doubtful, though if I choose that it would have to be the Galaxy Note 2, replacing both my phone and aging Nook Color).
Nexus S had an actual degradation of performance under JB. That is why there will be no upgrade to 4.2 for Nexus S.
I don’t want to be too nit-picky but if you’re going to make features to price comparisons you ought to use real numbers. A new iPhone 5 16GB costs $199 USD with an AT&T contract. A comparable Android phone (also form AT&T) doesn’t get cheaper than $299 USD. I don’t study math but I’m fairly certain 199 is not 10% of 299.
I’m not an Apple “FanBoy” as they are called, I use Apple’s products because they offer quality, durability, and a pleasant use experience. I don’t defend them, I defend rationality. If you make an argument against Apple (or anyone or anything) that makes sense and is properly founded I will believe you, not in any other case.
Sources:
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone5
https://www.att.com/shop/wireless/devices/androidphones.html
Faulty logic. That’s only because the iPhone is subsidized more — have you checked that e.g. the monthly fee the user pays is the same, that AT&T themselves pay the same amount of money for both phones, and so on? You should compare unsubsidized prices or check all of your facts first.
iPhone 5 16GB Unlocked: $649 USD
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD293LL/A?cppart=UNLOCKED%2…
Samsung Phones on Amazon (same feature set as the iPhone above): $685-769 USD
http://ow.ly/gYw4X
This just confirms what I said.
Really? Your link only lists the most expensive sellers, whereas e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-GT-I9300-Factory-Unlocked/dp/B… sells Samsung Galaxy S III for $576, unlocked, brand new.
EDIT: Thought to add that in general a Galaxy S III and an iPhone 5 sell for similar prices and your linking to this or that specific item to try to somehow “prove” that iPhone 5 is cheaper is just silly. There’s always going to be price differences and fluctuations between the various resellers and whatnot, but the average price is more-or-less the same. I could go and search for the one reseller that sells a Galaxy S III for some ridiculously cheap price and then “prove” that iPhones are OMGZOMFG expensive, but then I’d just lower myself at your level.
Edited 2013-01-20 23:53 UTC
Uh, no it doesn’t. My Gingerbread phone still cost ~$80. Maybe it’s not as “powerful” as the iPhone but that’s not the point.
It’s a new, cheap Gingerbread and it performs commendably well, especially considering it’s price. I guess some people just have a problem accepting that expensive does not always equal better (or at least not so much better that paying 10 times as much is acceptable). Heck, it even has a feature no iPhone has: dual SIM’s.
I’m curious, what is the model?
Who’s making an argument against Apple? I am making an argument for Android by saying that my new Gingerbread phone is performing well.
A) I am not in the U.S.
B) An unlocked iPhone costs $800+ here, my Gingerbread cost me ~$80. Do the math.
Nelson, stop diverting again. Soulbender didn’t say that Gingerbread phones run as smoothly as iPhones do, yet you insist on making this a dick-measuring contest. Soulbender is right, there are plenty of Gingerbread phones out there that are very usable (my GF’s Galaxy Note is one example – never seen a single stutter at all), and when you are shown to be incorrect in your assertions, like a kid you try to change the subject. Stop talking childish nonsense and accept when you are proven wrong.
My HTC Desire S ran very smoothly.
So much so that I was actually contemplating keeping it when it was upgrade time (despite the upgrade offered being 4x more powerful)
I think you have a good point, but the image… That isn’t exactly a huge evolution, really, is it?
The phones (and interfaces) got blacker, and then slightly bigger…
Even that though ignores what we are seeing in the mobile market which is an exact (on fast forward) repeat of what we saw in X86.
You have the chip used in all these systems (ARM) hitting a thermal wall and going from MHz wars to core wars, with Nvidia up to 5 and Samsung up to 6, and just like with X86 we are seeing that when they can no longer compete on speed (because the average user won’t “feel” the difference between a dual and a quad because writing programs that scale with cores is VERY difficult) so they are competing the only way they can…on price.
This severely hurts Apple as while there will always be Apple fans that will pay any cost for the Apple logo most folks? Just want a device that works. Apple has already basically admitted this by keeping their older models being built as well as introducing the iPad Mini but even that isn’t gonna help when you have offerings like Kindle Fire for $200 and from the looks of it we’ll have dual core tablets running the latest Android for $100 or less by this summer.
The reason Apple HAS to have “the next big thing” is that is how Jobs kept the Apple premium so high, they were the first in the market and were cutting edge. The longer they are in a market the more the market will sour for them as they are no longer unique and therefor can’t command the premium prices anymore. Just look at how few X86 laptops they sell compared to the larger market, how Android smartphones are exploding thanks to having price points for everybody (they even have a $75 USD Android 4 phone at Walmart on their pre-paid and it actually works quite nicely) and now in tablets we are seeing more and more units with nicer hardware at lower prices, because they don’t have to please Wall Street with higher profit margins.
So its not so much “what have you done for me lately?” its instead “If we don’t have a new market we are gonna end up in commodity land” because as any retailer will tell you “good enough” with cheap prices will always end up winning in the end. Apple will always have a niche but without new markets it will continually become a smaller niche until it becomes a repeat of X86.
+1 insightful
I think that is a common but completely wrong interpretation of what is happening in the mobile device markets. What is interesting is how different the mobile device markets are and how differently the dynamics of platform performance in the mobile device markets are compared to the PC markets.
In the PC era a Mac was pretty much an equivalent of a Wintel PC when it came to platform utilisation. On both Macs and Wintel PCs people did pretty much the same things, they all ran programs to do similar things and with similar patterns of usage. It was probably true that there was a slightly higher amount of graphic design being done on Macs compared to Wintel PCs but that difference wasn’t hugely significant and the difference faded over time. People generally used their Macs as much as people used their Wintel PCs and people generally pretty much did the same sort of stuff on both platforms.
This was very important.
Because is meant that one Mac and one Wintel PC had an equivalent impact and value when it came to platform utilisation. Broadly speaking if twice as many Wintel PCs were sold as Macs then there would be twice as many people buying Wintel PC software, twice as many Wintel PC compatible documents would be produced, twice as many web pages would be surfed using Wintel PC browsers, etc etc. Broadly a Mac was only as valuable as a Wintel PC in the larger PC ecosystem and value chain.
And this this meant that if the ratio of Wintel PCs sold to Macs was ten to one then Wintel PCs would utterly dominate the PC ecosystem and value chain. Macs were marginalised because the money followed the consumers and the Mac ecosystem became less attractive and this in turn drove even more marginalistion.
This is what people think is happening with iOS versus Android. But it isn’t.
Mobile device platform utilisation can be measured by these sort of common sense metrics (I have probably missed some)
Web browsing
Web commerce
Developer revenues
Peripheral makers revenues
Hardware makers profits
Advertising income and spend
Availability of digital content
The most striking thing when one looks at the statistics for these sorts of platform utilisation metrics is how consistently they show iOS significantly out performing Android. It seems that in terms of platform utilisation, and therefore in terms of added value in the ecosystem, one average iOS user is worth several times one average Android user.
This is has very big implications. It means that in order for the Android ecosystem to just reach parity with the iOS ecosystem there needs to be something between four and ten times as many Android devices as iOS devices in the installed base. In order for Android to have a richer and healthier ecosystem than iOS might require Android to achieve an installed base twenty or more times that of iOS.
The mobile device market is not the PC market. The dynamic is completely different and trying to analyse it using concepts and patterns from the PC era will lead to a misunderstanding of what is happening.
Too simplistic. Such a comparison completely ignores facts like e.g. there are no sub-$100 iPhones — poor people generally buy cheaper phones and end up spending less money on all sorts of extras, so that immediately drags the average down.
If you wanted a more honest comparison you’d have to compare phone models of similar price and then see how the numbers add up. Then again, this is such an obvious thing that I have a strong feeling of bias on your part.
I am not sure how your argument counters what I am saying. I was responding to people who say that because Android is outselling iOS it is turning into a repeat of Mac Vs Windows and Android is winning the platform wars just like Windows did by selling more units. I am saying that not all units are equal. It seems that iOS units count more as platforms than Android units.
If it is true that the disparity in platform utilisation between iOS and Android is because a lot of sub-$100 Android phones are being sold then that merely explains the disparity it does change the consequences.
The fact of the matter is that Android is outselling iOS significantly and the Android installed base is now significantly bigger than the iOS installed. Yet the iOS ecosystem is much more healthy, dynamic, and lucrative than the Android ecosystem. Apple makes almost all the profits in the phones business and almost all Android OEMs except for Samsung are barely scrapping by. iOS developers are making more money than Android developers, the same with contents sellers, advertisers, peripheral makers. The iOS ecosystem is healthy, the Android ecosystem is surprisingly anaemic. The ‘market share trumps everything‘ strand of thinking says it should be the other way round.That is the result of the difference in platform utilisation between the two.
Cheap Android phones may explain that phenomena (I personally think that ‘s only part of the answer BTW) but it does not change it.
If you frequent Apple fanboi related sites, which I suspect you do, you have fallen to this issue of misrepresenting facts and clinging to numbers that are barely have any meaning outside of a small number of users.
Android install base is not significantly larger than an iOS install base. Both should be about 500mil by now, with a margin of error of no more than 15%. Total app revenues are barely known, as only Apple’s revenues can be counted up. And there are stories on both sides of massive piracy and massive profits, that don’t support any death threats to any platform.
And then there’s this BS that comes from nowhere:
Both ecosystems are healthy and active.
Every metric I have ever seen from multiple sources (none of which are your bizarre imaged ‘fanboi’ sites) says the same thing: Android users actually use their Android phones as a platform to do things much, much less than iOS users. Given the weight of evidence I would have thought this is not a very controversial thing to say. I could trawl the web for data links but do I really need to,?
I would love to see these “metrics” of yours.
I’m surprised you don’t know these. Without looking for them these metrics regularly appear in the news. In the latest Apple keynote there was even a reference to it.
Each time it turns out Android users don’t use their phones/tablets all that much.
Ho hum. I am always surprised by people who profess to be interested in the tech trends and yet seem so oblivious to clear trends that are well documented. I decided to spend precisely five minutes responding to your tedious request, the results are below.
If you really want more data I suggest a few relevant Google searches, you will find a lot of interesting material about the differences between iOS and Android platform utilisation. Personally I find this difference between the platform utilisation rates, which has enormous implications, to be one of the most interesting phenomena in the modern tech world. It is clearly a well documented fact yet explaining why it is happening is very complex because I suspect it involves many different factors some of which are hard to measure. I would love to see some serious research on this question.
Here are some links for you, a ‘thank you’ would be nice
General overview of the different levels of iOS and Android engagement and the engagement trend
http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/26/the-android-engagement-paradox/com…
Advertising income
http://www.opera.com/sma/2012/q2/
Digital Content
http://www.macstories.net/stories/mapping-the-entertainment-ecosyst…
Developer revenues
http://techpinions.com/android-v-ios-part-4-developers/9535
Web traffic
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57464763-37/apples-ios-grabs-65-o…
Web commerce
http://www.fortune3.com/blog/2012/11/cyber-monday-2012-ecommerce-st…
A case study with one product on both platforms
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/30/no-more-tnw-magazine-for-a…
Being interested in technological advancements in no way or form implies interest in marketing trends. Also, I have no need to try to justify my choices or to try to prove some sort of superiority based on the popularity of my choices.
I don’t find it such an interesting phenomenon. As I said, part of it comes from the simple fact that iPhones are always premium models and the people who buy those are more likely to have money to spend, whereas there are plenty of cheap lower-end Android – phones for the people who are likely to have less money to spend. Also, something that immediately sticks to the eye from those charts is the fact that Google doesn’t offer e-books, music, movies etc. via its Google Play Market to even nearly as many countries as Apple does through iTunes — this is obviously going to show up in the charts, what with less money spent on these things and such, but also indirectly because people who want to be able to consume these things will have to gravitate towards iOS, then or be knowledgeable of other means of obtaining their content.
Nevertheless, none of those charts paint such a dire image as you keep yammering about. Yes, there is plenty that can be done to improve the situation and a lot of it lies on Google’s shoulders, but one has to also keep in mind that you’re comparing out-dated models and sub-$90 models to $600+ model devices. Unless there comes out a similar chart based on similarly-priced models I won’t be eating what you’re offering.
I had to get some shut-eye so my comment became shorter than I’d liked to, but well, I also have the following to say about this:
iTunes.
What? Why? Well, you’re more-or-less required to install iTunes sooner or later, to apply updates or manage music or whatnot. Once you’ve installed iTunes so that you can manage your music on your various devices Apple has a great foot-hold in to your life as there’s e-books, apps, movies, TV-shows and all the other cool stuff just a click away, in the same central application, and again, you’re more-or-less bound to eventually explore those sections of the application, too. It’s a neat, easily-accessible package for all sorts of content-consumption needs, and it doesn’t just let you buy stuff but also allows you to manage, play and stream it.
Now, contrast this to Google: a bunch of often-times incoherent websites very loosely connected to eachother, no central way of managing your content, streaming it or playing it. Even the Google Music desktop application only allows you to upload local music to their servers or download music from your account — no managing, no buying, no thing. Google’s Play Market is a rambling mess of stuff and it’s not even available in half as many places as iTunes’s stores are! Here in Finland, for example, Google offers only apps. Not books, not movies, not music, no TV-shows, no nothing.
iTunes being such a central piece of the Apple-experience is a great idea from marketing-perspective, what with the discoverability of new and old content and making it all appealing, and Google has really dropped the ball here. Of course it will then show up in all kinds of revenue-streams! This still does not say anything about Android as an OS or its userbase, it merely comes down to Google’s inability to execute a coherent marketing plan.
General overview of the different levels of iOS and Android engagement and the engagement trend
http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/26/the-android-engagement-paradox/com…
Advertising income
http://www.opera.com/sma/2012/q2/
Digital Content
http://www.macstories.net/stories/mapping-the-entertainment-ecosyst…
Developer revenues
http://techpinions.com/android-v-ios-part-4-developers/9535
Web traffic
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57464763-37/apples-ios-grabs-65-o…
Web commerce
http://www.fortune3.com/blog/2012/11/cyber-monday-2012-ecommerce-st…
A case study with one product on both platforms
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/30/no-more-tnw-magazine-for-a…
Not to mention Werecat that most importantly Google makes their money from datamining so how many apps sell in a particular month? Doesn’t affect their bottom line in the slightest. Heck they could afford to just outright buy the developers of the next Angry Birds style hit game and give it away with every Android phone and STILL make insane piles of money because they have the kind of information advertisers LOVE, they have users going from Chrome on their desktops to Android smartphones so they can target those ads like a fricking laser at the consumer.
So for Google you simply can’t use the kinds of metric that Apple uses because Google isn’t really a software OR a hardware company, they are an AD company so all that really matters to them is not how much Bill and Suzy pay for their smartphones, just that those smartphones are Android.
And I don’t know how it is in your area but ever since Walmart (don’t know how big Wally World is there but its fricking HUGE here, like McDonald’s when it comes to sheer volume) started carrying Android smartphones at ALL price points with their prepaid plans they have just exploded, I mean everybody is using the things now, you just can’t get away from ’em. After trying a friend’s Samsung that only cost $75 (the unlimited everything plan is only $50 which is dirt cheap here) I can see why and most likely will switch when my plan expires, we’re talking unlimited everything including web, a 1GHz with Skype and Wifi for $75?
so as I said there is a REASON why Apple is always having to find new markets because if they don’t they find themselves in a race to the bottom which they don’t want any part of. If the rumors are true and the next “big thing” Cook is gonna unveil is gonna be a watch? Yeah i don’t think that one will fly off the shelves. But as a retailer I can tell you that when products get “good enough” it quickly becomes price above all and I’d say we are there when it comes to phones and tablets.
In case you wonder, Walmart really doesn’t exist in any meaningful way outside the U.S.
The prepaid plan that you’re talking about isn’t really fully-unlimited as once you go past 2GB used data it gets throttled a lot.
http://www.tuaw.com/2013/01/17/why-walmarts-straight-talk-unlimited…
So what. The only point of product competition between Apple and Google are the Nexus line of products and the sales of the Nexus 4 has been very poor. Android is a cost center for Google. The only company actually making profits with Android is Samsung.
I guess this must be why the iPhone has increased market share in the US
It could explain the high marks the iPhone always gets for user satisfactions and the much lower scores for Android.
Use an iPhone, buy a newer model, synch back your settings/apps and you instantly know how to use it and everything is there. There is no learning curve when upgrading to a new model. Besides the fun/usefulness is in the 3rd party apps. iOS gets nicely out of the way. The Android fans here make it sound like people are using the OS itself all day or keep staring at the home screen. Normal users launch their favorite apps.
Android keeps changing, manufacturers keep adding their own UIs. Switching either OS, model or brand and it’s a new and confusing experience.
Apple adds features to each iOS release, but the basics remain the same. You are not forced to first master these changes to be able to use your device. They do the same with OS X.
Looking at usage statistics iPhone users are much more active, while Android users aren’t and kind of seem so lost that they don’t even bother figuring out how it all works.
I think much of the techie community, certainly those sections not that keen or positively hostile to Apple, are still reeling from the explosion of Apple in the last decade or so. Apple’s mode of operation (vertically integrated, software-hardware combined, etc) was ideally suited to the next phase of tech evolution which was the spread of powerful touch operated computers in tiny and cheap consumer objects but Apple could have easily fluffed it.
They didn’t.
Instead they had a brilliant decade of execution and innovation that built a huge empire and actually drove the new mobile device markets. Even with all it’s units shipped Android still cannot come close to iOS in terms of the metrics of actual platform utilisation.
I cannot see how Apple can fail to grow, prosper and be one of the two platforms that will dominate the mobile device markets for the next decade even if everything they do is just iteration from now on in. They are almost the only player that holds all the cards, they just have to play them reasonably competently.
The inability to appreciate what Apple is capable of and to write them off is exemplified by this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/13/comment.business
Guess what the article is about before you read it.
Here are a couple of quotes from it:
Apple is losing its hip and unpredictable edge as it risks being left behind by the very technology it helped to proliferate…
Make no mistake, these are going to be difficult times for Apple. Jobs’s resuscitation of the company after it nearly collapsed, is one of the great corporate turnarounds of US business history. But gratitude also belongs to history. From now on, Apple faces stiff competition on all fronts.
Are you a pastebot for Gruber, Dalrymple, and their associates?
I swear you just repost their stuff as comments here.
I notice you didn’t refute any of his points.
Thanks for dragging the conversation down, Thom. >:(
Like you I learn about the world by reading what others say, like you little of what I say is stunningly original but is made up of stuff I pick up and adapt from others, like you I pass on interesting thoughts and perspectives I come across, unlike you I don’t get my knickers in a twist when other people do it.
Hahahahahaha!!! Really? How about they iterate and everyone else is innovating? What if Windows Phone actually gets it’s big break? Even the fact that they released iPad Mini shows that they don’t share the blind love/faith you do.
And how many hundred million of those classic-design iPhones have they sold in all that time? Is it more or less than those Androids?
“I think my response can be summed up in just one image:
http://techmog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/android-evolution.jpg…
I completely agree. Apple designed an interface before release and has since been able to reap the rewards of a stable platform for developers and users alike.
Android, as shown in your excelent picture, was released as pre-beta with no thought to usability. It has taken many iterations and redesigns and is only now becoming a usable system after many years. Unfortunately users and developers alike cannot rely on even this version being carried forward and becoming a stable environment to learn.
Just because the UI remains how it was originally designed, doesn’t mean it’s optimal – Apple for the first year didn’t even allow 3rd party apps, IT WASN’T A PLATFORM AT ALL for developers.
Are we really that surprised? Their whole marketing campaign was “buy our stuff, its super innovative and you will be the cool kid while everyone else will be these lame PC people.” If you manufacture douchebag food, ya gotta keep feeding your douchebag customers. If they can’t buy something that makes them feel more elite then everyone else, of course they are going to throw hissy fits. Fact of the matter is they are walking into Verizon and seeing better phones with the competitor. That doesn’t settle well for people who think their purchases makes them special, important or creative.
Long before the iPad, or the iPod touch, there were the Nokia tablets. Yes, tablets, though they were phone-pocket sized. The N770, N800, and the sunlight-readable N810. SD card slots, touchscreen, (OTG) USB port. Ran flash. I did in 2008 what I do on my similar Android media player in 2013. Microsoft had tablets. Others were available. Remember the Palm and Handspring before they were cellphones?
Steve Jobs defines the platform – allowing economies of scale, there are millions of Apple fanbois who will buy the product, so it is a hit.
Even if there was a better Android tablet for a year before the iPad, it would be ignored or complained about. Because it wouldn’t have been Apple. You weren’t locked into iTunes and their App store. It would have GPS on non-cell devices and a removable battery, maybe a real HDMI, USB, and SD card port (Toshiba Thrive!). But unless Steve Jobs comes out and says “you need *this*”, it doesn’t matter.
Apple does innovate, but less than imagined. They are high-priced, high margin. Anyone would love a Ferrari or Lamborghini. The trick is to make one affordable.
If only fanboys buy iPhones/iPads what did they buy before?
Macs? Then the OS X marketshare would be way bigger.
Most iPod/iPhone/iPad users own a Windows machine and aren’t fanboys at all.
Android is getting so good, even the most rabid of Apple fanboys are switching over:
http://betanews.com/2013/01/18/i-cant-believe-i-switched-from-iphon…
This is going to be a huge problem for Apple if they don’t do something dramatic with iOS.
I find it amusing how people argue over which mobile OS is “best”, when the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Android users are clueless n00b5 who don’t even know how to use their damned phones…
http://www.phonearena.com/news/The-Street-says-Android-users-know-n…
FTFY.
This is something of a trend and one i particularly relate too as i did the same.
I went from an iPhone to Galaxy Note 2 and i couldn’t be happier. The multitasking is simply incredible.
http://imgur.com/ZSofWXG
The image shows a HD (720p) video playing whilst i am surfing the net on chrome below, no slow downs, screen size makes watching/doing both without a problem.
I love the fact i have access to the file system and have uploaded loads of PDF’s and various files, a process which can be done in any situation as long as i have a web browser and wifi. (airdroid, great app).
The Note is a very capable and robust device, when loaded with services such as Evernote it simply puts the phone into the stratsophere, especially when using the pen.
I won’t dismiss the iPhone though as i strongly believe that without it we wouldn’t have phones and tablets of the calliber we have now. I had a Nokia E61, a Sony P910i, these were supposed to be powerful smart phones but they are positively prehistoric when compared to the iPhone released in 2007. They were unstable and for me the UI was a mess, touch was a joke. The iPhone has pushed the industry forward much like the Mac did with GUI, it wasn’t the first but it brought it to the masses and started a GUI revolution.
We now come to the problem with the iPhone and in particular the 5. One of the best stories ive read of steve jobs is that he said no alot. If something wasn’t up to standard then it wouldn’t be released, if something was poor then generally Steve would admit it (i remember the emails i got over MobileMe, Cloud is something Apple can’t and still get right).
This reflects the different nature of Tim Cook and Steve Jobs, Tim Cook is a competent CEO but he is a bean counter, if something will make more money but reduce the overall impact Tim will go for this, we only have to go back a few months into Tim’s CEO stewartship to see the fiasco in the stores where the ex-Dixon’s bean counter decided to reduce staff to improve profits, in the SJ biography a mentor to SJ discussing the store said that you need extra staff to ensure a good level of service, it may not look good on the financial break downs but will promote a positive experience and image.
The iPad mini is an abomination, again in SJ biography he states that he would never do a mini as it would only compete against the iPad, a similar situation experienced by Dell and something that has been reported recently is happening to Apple, the mini is cannibalising the iPad sales. where as people are still buying kindles and nexuses.
I have covered the above as i think this leads us back to the iPhone and apples thinking. I really believe that at some point they had say 10 new features, perhaps NFC or some other bits, upper management look at the 10 and think hang on lets release 3 and spread the other 7 across the other releases (i.e. 5S, 6 etc..). When the iPhone 4 was released it was a major upgrade over the 3GS, better screen, camera, faster, new design, facetime the list seemed endless and made the phone appear leapfrog over the competition, it was an era in which it felt that other manufacturers were trying to keep up.
We have now arrived at a point, where the iPhone is left to tick along, hanging onto the brand, recognition and familiarity to generate a large number of sales.
What can apple do, well luckily i think a number of Apple’s problems are software and thus pretty easy to fix over the coming year, in a way the phrase death by a 1000 papercuts comes to mind. These are some of the minor features ive noticed since using my Galaxy Note2 JB 4.1.1 when compared to the iPhone and iOS6.
Notification centre/area allows me to toggle wifi, data, screen rotation, powersaving mode etc.. Apps take advantage of the notification centre well (music players show play controls)
Phone has the ability to block spam numbers and spam texts, even an option to add phrases such as “you could win £1000” as a spam phrase.
Widgets, useful summery information at a glance (such as train times, weather etc..)
Better camera controls, burst shot, best shot
Google Now (Siri clone is much more useful and more aware of my surroundings, i.e. when i walk in a train station in london it will show me the status of the underground)
I could go on but these could be easily added, along with more ideas to help people get the most out of their phone. The hardware is pretty much reaching a point like computers where it just doesn’t matter apart from reducing battery drain, apple seriously needs to work on the software.
For the sake of reality in using my iPhone 4s…when I am viewing an hour long hi def concert video, say from the archives of the Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall (one of the most tech savvy video/audio offerings available), I am watching in full screen with no interest in multi-tasking while the video is playing. So, it is probably a good idea to avoid hyping that ‘feature’ when it really has little relevance to use patterns for everyone.
Edited 2013-01-20 15:24 UTC
i suppose it depends on what youre doing at that particular moment.
I will agree when im watching full films i will watch them full screen, for some tv shows (especially the ones ive seen before) i will put it in a window, i will also watch info type videos and it’s really handy to have it multitasking.
So for example watching a video on development, whilst taking notes about the video im watching,
Watching a tv programme and instead of having to keep switching in and out to SMS to friends i can multitask, these are all real world and all very useful.
But not relevant for many others with different use preferences…therefore not missed…I’m more concerned with the quality of the video/app/document I’m focusing on and the consistency of staying current with system updates and app updates..both are brain dead simple on IOS.
On some occasions he pointed this out himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3LEXae1j6E…
There is a bit of reality distortion going on in that article. I wouldn’t point it out but it kind of makes my point. The iPod didn’t turn the music industry on its head. iTunes did. The Creative Zen was out long before iPod, but you couldn’t buy music. The reason why the labels trusted Jobs was because he was one of them, owning Pixar. Had Amazon been selling music at the time like now, the Zen would be the device the iPod was. (In fact, Apple had to pay $4 million to Creative for stealing the Zen interface for the iPod)
As for the other devices, other companies were doing similar things at the same time. In fact, Apple just lost its design patents in a EU court last week because there is no proof that the design concepts were created by Apple.
What Apple does do well is hype and polish. They are the Ford of the IT world. Ford didn’t invent the automobile. Ford invented a better way of making the automobile and pushed it across the country. So today we all recognize the Ford Model A. Same with Apple. We all recognize their products. They are all distinctive in the industry. But don’t think for a second that they are alone in the industry. Its not that there is a double standard. Its that too much praise is heaped on Apple for things that everyone else is doing. Where is the praise for Google’s world changing Android? How about praise for Samsung’s industry changing technologies? See, for everyone else, its just another day at the office. But Apple wants you to think they walk on water. Thats how they get people to buy their stuff.
I disagree….word of mouth and observation drive people to buy Apple’s products. Every time I pick up a Galaxy S3, I go back to the iPhone and it’s obvious to me why the latter is a superior, more cohesive user experience. This has nothing to do with thinking that Apple is infallible; it’s about individual informed choice…period.
word of mouth? You got that right. But it’s more than that.
Apple is selling a lifestyle, not pieces of hardware. You HAVE to buy their new stuff or people look at you like you’re a moron.
As an example, I’m in the coffee shop with my laptop. I dual boot Linux and Windows. A girl sitting next to me strikes up a conversation and begins talking down to me like I don’t know about social networks or computers.
I work in IT and even do some programming. Yet there she was acting like I had no idea what a computer was, what as social network was, or how anything actually worked. All because I didn’t have a Mac.
That’s how it is now…it’s more than pieces of hardware…you have to get that hardware before people think you’re with it. Otherwise, they think you’re washed up and ignorant.
It’s herd mentality at its best.
Well, it seems if you did have a MacBook girls wouldn’t talk to you so I guess it’s best sticking with your dual boot laptop.
Girls already talked to me dude…I’ve been married for 11 years
I’m done past that point where I care if they do.
I find that rather hard to imagine. :-p
There’s something really, really wrong with you, man. Really, really wrong.
You mean at its worst ;-p
Why is it that all of these so called ‘stories’ take place in a coffee shop? Please, describe how this lady ‘talked down’ to you. Maybe you’re just insecure around women and felt intimidated by whatever she was saying? Did she explicitly tell you that she felt you were stupid because you had no Mac?
I think it is far more likely that you are just projecting your dislike of Apple or applying whatever rediculous stereotype you have of Apple users onto this lady. You just generalized a group of millions of Apple users as having some ‘herd’ mentality that look down on you — making such sweeping generalizations is equally as stupid as trying to judge one’s knowledge of computers based on the brand of products they own. In fact, you’re guilty of the very same thing you are accusing this lady of — judging people based on what hardware they own!
Or is it only okay to judge when it’s against Apple or their users? Android is now becoming the marketshare king — are these users part of the ‘herd’ and only buying Androids to be like the rest? Or is that accusation only reserved for Apple? Or, perhaps, Android is gaining sales based on merit just like Apple before them?
I don’ t even own any Apple products except for an iPod, so I take no offense either way — but I know hypocrisy and double-standards when I see them. Your post just proved the author of this article’s point.
Let’s take a look what you just did with your comment shall we?
You don’t know anything about me…you don’t know whether I work in a Mac store. You don’t know whether I work for Apple. You don’t know whether I work for a school system in IT and work on Macs all day long. You know NOTHING about me…but you’ve got me pegged as some stereotyping fool based on a single sentence in my comment…
All without even addressing the topic of the comment…that Apple is not selling products any longer…but lifestyles.
Thanks for missing the point entirely. Thanks further for trying to push me into a corner and label me.
I don’t dislike Apple products. I have 2 generations of ipad and an new imac. As for my laptops…I don’t like the fact that I can’t repair Macs so I don’t use them there.
This isn’t a sweeping generalization…it’s an observation based on an interaction I had AND the fact that I service thousands of Apple devices in my job…I have to deal with tons of Apple ‘fans’ daily.
In my opinion, people who use Apple products (specifically, laptops) look down on others who don’t. Since it is not readily apparent to my users at work that I am an Apple product guy (android phone, windows/linux laptop…I don’t bring my iPad to work since my job provided me with one there) I get flipped a lot of crap by others. The minute they think I’m not a Mac guy…I become less than knowledgeable. This is my observation over the past 5 years dealing with Mac users in an enterprise environment and also a girl in the coffee shop.
If this observation/opinion hurts your feelings…you need to re-examine how you approach topics on the internet.
And yet, in that huge wall of text, you still did not describe what was said to you — you only stated that the end result of the interaction is that you were left feeling… inadequate. It’s funny how you have an issue with being judged over the Internet without me directly knowing you when you continue judge Mac owners as needing to buy a lifestyle and follow the herd vs buying it based on merits.
You working at Apple or not, being an Apple product guy or not, etc. has nothing to do my post (actually, it’s very telling that you actually think that would matter). What I’m pointing out to you is the ridiculousness of generalizing personalities for a multi-million product userbase. Is it still not clear to you how you are doing the exact thing to these users that you are criticizing them of?
I’ve taken no offense and am just amusingly pointing out the hypocrisy of your argument. Clearly, you appear have taken offense to that with your defense that I do not know you — but hey, you just might need to re-examine how you approach this Internet topic just as much you need to recognize your own hypocrisy.
I am a Mac owner you idiot…you’re still ignoring the fact that now Apple products are more about lifestyle now instead of products. If you want to be cool, you have to own a Mac…otherwise you’re not as cool. That’s a fact…otherwise Apple wouldn’t have been so successful.
I’m amused at your blatant disregard for addressing the actual topic of my comment instead of plucking one sentence out of the entire thought.
You have the thinnest skin of anyone I’ve ever met on the internet. You should crawl back into a cave where nothing bad can get you. You’re picking out a single sentence and ignoring the entire thought of the paragraph. But hey, what you lack in the ability to understand the English language, you make up for in ass hattery.
<Insert your obligatory “LOL, you mad, bro?” image here> Wow, let’s count your contradictions and hypocrisies. Let’s see:
1. You are upset that I passed judgement on you based on the content of your post, yet you do the same to a larger group consisting of tens of millions of different people (that you refer to as a ‘herd’, but on a much weaker criteria, such as the brand of their purchases).
2. You make sweeping generalizations regarding those tens of millions of people, yet you say that you yourself are a Mac owner — thereby proving that your own generalization is wrong (Unless, of course, you are intending to say that you are one of the lucky enlightened ones).
3. You suggest that I am plucking a single sentence out of your post while ignoring the greater argument, yet the scenario I am actually criticizing actually took up the greater part of your post (Go ahead, quote it. Much of it had to do with your silly coffee shop scenario)
4. You accuse me of having the thinnest skin of anyone you’ve met on the Internet, yet you are the one that is getting all angry and resorting to “idiot” name calling and childish suggestions of “crawling back into a cave”. All because I disagreed with you. (If you talked this way to the lady in the coffee shop, maybe she had reason to feel the way she did — and it’s not because you didn’t have a Mac with you. Maybe that goes for all these other “mean” people as well.)
5. You suggest that I lack understanding of the English language, yet you are the one who dug yourself into these contradictions and hypocrisies and got entangled within them. Go ahead, re-read the posts. You wrote them.
Overall, your proposition that Apple only sells a lifestyle instead of products is weakly supported by simple generalizations. Sorry, but “All Apple owners I’ve met are mean to me and make me feel stupid” doesn’t rank too high on the credibility scale. While it is true that marketing and a “lifestyle” element are contributing factors, you will find that to be true for most successfully mass produced products. In any case, the above contradictions speak for themselves.
lol…look at you go. You should write a novel with all your great ideas!
Reading comprehension. You needs it. You’ve derailed the entire conversation from being about what I think Apple is…to whether or not I’m bashing people.
When you go back to school to get it…remember to figure out how to address the central theme or central idea of a topic and how to not pick things out of context.
Learn how to do these things…specifically picking one sentence out of an entire paragraph and missing the entire theme of the comment…and you’ll be fine.
Considering that he actually did stereotype a multi million userbase, you’re still the guy that is clinging to a single sentence, even though through the rant it’s blatantly obvious what he’s talking about.
Have you seen there marketing machine? Just look at the PC vs Mac line of ads. All of their ads make you think you have to have the latest Apple product just to be normal. Look at the way they introduce new products. For each product launch they have a giant event like they just found the cure to cancer or something. Its not informed choice. Most of their customers are not in IT. They don’t have a damn clue about the technology in their device. What they do know is that Apple says they need to buy one because its revolutionary and better.
Samsung spends 10x more on marketing than Apple. I see their advertising a lot in The Netherlands and no Apple ones.
Not just in the Netherlands. While visiting my family on the other side of the states over the holidays, I saw a crapload of ads for the Galaxy S3. I don’t own a tv myself so had no idea how extensive Samsung’s advertising had become. I didn’t see one signle Apple ad, though I did see a few awful ads for Microsoft’s Surface RT lumped in with the Samsung ads.
We had this talent show (one of many) where the contestants were forced to pretend to be using Galaxy Tabs backstage as Samsung was one of the big sponsors.
Funny enough on a few occasions they were referred to as “iPads” by the show’s presenters.
That’s because tablet isn’t in common use. A lot of people called most touchscreen smartphones an iPhone, if you remember.
iPad might get the treatment of Thermos, Aspirin, Kleenex, Hoover and Xerox…
In The Netherlands were use to refer to mobile phones as “mobile” or “gsm” (which is a bit weird). But since the iPhone arrived most people call them iPhones, other phones are still generic.
The term “tablet” is very uncommon, most tablets are called by their name, be it an iPad or a (Galaxy) Tab.
It not so much what they spend as how they spend it. They often are putting down competitors in their commercials. Most companies never mention their competitors in their commercials, at least from what I see.
They don’t in The Netherlands, I believe it’s against the law here.
Apple is successful in the smartphone/tablet space because their hardware/software/apps ecosystem resonates with many of my IT colleagues who are expert with multiple operating systems, but are not up to wasting their ‘sands of time’ tinkering with their device…they just use it and move on…and then, iPhones and iPads are also successful in attracting the tech clueless (and many in between)…I don’t know about others…but it’s a waste to base tech prefs on what the clueless deem to be the flavor fav of the moment. So, it does all come down to informed choice, imho.
Edited 2013-01-19 10:45 UTC
Most of Windows customers are not it IT either. That is a weird argument to make.
So Apple tries to get the best coverage for each of their product launches. What is wrong with that. That is called being smart! Why would a company spend millions developing a product, only to bury its introduction by not adequately letting people see it.
Not obvious enough, apparently. You’re used to the iPhone way of doing things.
It’s more than obvious that for me and others, the cohesive iPhone way of doing things is proven, solid and more than up to any task I need done. When any of my Android buds come around, the first question for them is…’which version of Android are you on, and when will you be current?’
That’s a significant FUBAR for them, IMHO.
Geeks will be geeks.
Also, why would you be asking that question? Do you even care? Basically your mocking does not prove your point.(Assuming, you are the one asking the version question)
You haven’t given a single reason beyond a vague “It’s obvious”. For me iPhone, even though updated regularly, has these little annoying little quirks that just don’t feel right anymore. In 2009 Android vs iPhone OS was mostly an easy decision, but now it’s mostly personal preference.
What annoying little quirks are you talking about? For me, the obvious is a far more useful and integrated ecosystem with more great apps than I can fit on my 64 gig device. One click keeps me on the latest OS updates, which is very important to me. And, when I ask those Droid lovers what version of the system they are on, it is seldom up to date…’tis a pity.
I would disagree with this. People could rip their CDs easily. The click-wheel interface combined with a larger display made finding a track easy. You could scroll through a large music library easily and find the song or artist you wanted. The same was not true of competing devices at the time. Apple also built in FireWire, which shipped with most Macs at the time. Users could load up 5GB of music quickly compared to USB 1.1.
It’s true that iTunes made it easy to manage music and create playlists and such, but the device itself was much more user friendly. Despite the higher cost, comparatively small amount of storage, and the fact it only worked with the Mac at first, it took off.
iPod didn’t really took off for the first few years, in its original form which you mostly describe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg – until 2005, it was a minuscule player (pun intended); and afterwards, it made an impact mostly just in a few atypical, affluent, and visible markets.
By 2005, most of the world was already starting to leapfrog dedicated portable audio players, going for mobile phones (in 2007 or so I read a report about how ~20% of European mobile subscribers uses their phones for music consumption – that alone already means more people than all iPods ever made)
Saw an ad this week for the iPhone 5 where Apple was implying that they originated the concept of noise canceling via external microphone.
Pretty sure that concept dates back to around 2008. No wonder Samsung has been pounding the “it’s already here” drum.
Only if you add the “on a mobile-phone” to it. Noise-cancellation via one or more extraneous microphones has been around for decades otherwise.
Then why were mobile phones not doing a good job at it if the tech was available?
Apple includes some specialized hardware for sound field processing in the iPhone 4S for Siri and suddenly every Samsung device starts including it too. Never saw it before the iPhone 4S.
But no, it wasn’t actually new. It was just a darn good idea that no one apparently bothered to use.
“Our speaker phone mode sounds like crap. Why not fix it?”
“Oh no one cares about that and it would cost money.”
Well Apple does it and suddenly people care?
Nexus One wants to talk to you, sans the background noise due to Audience Inc’s noise cancellation chip.
And Apple started to care only 6 months after Nexus One.
Edited 2013-01-21 06:59 UTC
iPhone noise cancellation was available on the iPhone 4, i.e. one year before the iPhone 4S, therefore 6 months before the Nexus One.
QED.
Really?
Nexus One – Release data Jan 5, 2010 (T minus 5 months 19 days 00:00:00)
iPhone4 – Release date Jun 24, 2010
Thanks for playing. You may proceed to eating your hat.
Edited 2013-01-22 07:31 UTC
I will indeed. :$
From the article:
Im not necessarily saying it is fair, but from average pundits point of view the success of Apple is tied to being innovative and producing disruptive products – and it is, to a point… Therefore, that becomes the yardstick, i.e. when Apple tries to capitalize on the innovative and disruptive product they introduced by actually riding the wave they created, they are viewed as stagnating.
Is this _really_ stagnation? I think the real question that should be asked is how long they can ride a particular wave? I think this is where many industry analysts (including me in the past) get it wrong – Apple has figured out ways to extend such waves by selectively improving their products in unique ways – ways their competitors end up scrambling to match, thus extending the wave for quite a long time… Their ability to do this repeatedly is really uncanny.
Did anyone think, when they bought their original iPhone (which was an ok looking little soap shaped piece of plastic with a shitty screen) that the future success of the entire sector would hinge so strongly on build quality and materials? Apple did that… Is that innovation? Hell no, but it sure worked. Or high density displays? Or voice recognition? None of these kinds of things register as huge innovations, but they are enough to keep the entire industry busy trying to keep up.
I honestly thought the iPhone “wave” would have died like 2 or 3 years ago… But I honestly haven’t seen any real, hard evidence of it dying even now… The iPhone 5 to my eyes seems pretty mediocre, but yet sales are still very high and still growing year over year.
My only point really is that Apple seems to (for the last 10 years or so) have a very good idea of how long they can ride such waves and when it is time to move on. And they are very good at moving on…
Look at how smoothly they went from classic iPod to the modern iterations. That used to be their bread and butter. They still make them, but they introduced new products to absorb their loses as the product wave wained. It is still a valuable product in many ways, but it is noise as far as their bottom line goes.
Anyway, rant over. I long ago gave up on critiquing Apple when it comes to product development. Love Apple or hate them, the reason the industry analysts keep getting it wrong is because they don’t think like them… Apple will eventually f*ck up, but my guess (and most analysts) guess on when that will be is just about useless. Funny part to me is that when that happens all the “I told you sos” will start flying out of the mouths of idiots who have been wrong over and over and over again for the last 10 years…
You must live in the USA. The iPhone is pretty much in terminal decline everywhere else.
It sure is
https://twitter.com/TangChris/status/292073230385172480
The people lined up are scalpers buying multiple iPhones to resell on the Chinese black market. It doesn’t indicate an insatiable demand.
In Australia we’ve had recent a massive surge in sales of baby formula. There hasn’t been a baby boom – rather it is being bought by Chinese students and shipped back to be sold on the black market.
I wouldn’t say a random picture qualifies as any sort of proof. I could just as well travel to Seinäjoki and take a picture of the local Apple Store — I’ve only ever seen 3 people there at max, two of which are employees. Would that indicate that almost no one wants Apple-stuff, then?
Historically Apple seems to be repeating the same deal. Come up with a new innovative market, do well in that market for a little bit, then start to lose that market to people better at commoditization. I’d say it’s probably high time Apple shifts gears and finds something else in the technology world to revolutionize. I’m not sure what that market is, but I’m sure its there. Gaming? Entertainment? Transportation?
Edited 2013-01-19 03:56 UTC
If you look at Apple’s history carefully you will realise that most of their products have been unsuccessful (Lisa, Newton, Appletalk, e-world, 20th Anniversary Mac etc). However every now and then they have created a successful niche product that has succeeded beyound all expectations. It is a high risk strategy that has allowed them to temporarily dominate but an almost certain way to eventually go broke.
Most companies’ products are unsuccessful. Microsoft pretty much has had 2 successful products (Windows in its various guises, and Office). Maybe XBox is another success. Many of their other attempts have not done so well (CE anyone, Zune, Kin and others).
MS has never pretended to be innovative or cool. They don’t need to be because they have a virtually unbreakable monopoly on the corporate and academic desktop.
Oh, they’ve done that PLENTY. You don’t remember how they tried to market Windows 1.0 to people back in the day? Or the extremely cheesy Microsoft Surface – commercials with dancing college students? The 80s commercials with Bill Gates prancing around and praising their products like they were literal gifts from the gods?
It would seem that you didn’t even TRY to think of anything.
That is simple. No one, not a single company, gets a pass on their past glories. Get over it.
We already have reasonable replacements for iPad, iPhone and iPod is being pushed out of the market by cheap Android phones.(Quick question… What do you buy? An iPod touch 32GB for $300 or an Android phone for $200 and a $50 64GB uSD? )
Also, iPad’s success lies only in one thing – iPad optimized apps. Otherwise, iPad is not that impressive.
Question is, what will their next move be? A bigger iPad? Or something that will actually change things?
The iPad is really nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch. Using one is an utterly underwhelming (aka atrocious) experience once the novelty factor wears off.
Sorry dude…gotta call unmitigated bravo sierra on your use evaluation. I see a fuckton of iPads on the train every day up to NYC….not a trace of ‘utterly underwhelming experience’ in evidence.
Both my sisters have iPads (Windows PCs and Samsung Android phones). I’ve used the iPad extensively. The experience is like using one of those touch screen information kiosks in shopping centres – utterly brain dead.
IMHO large tablets are just a clumsy and impractical gimmick with very little future. Most will either be replaced with phablets or ultrabooks over the next couple of years.
Edited 2013-01-20 01:01 UTC
Everyone, of course, has a right to their opinion; but I rub shoulders every day with dozens of business colleagues who are issued iPads and are happily productive with their capabilities in the business arena. Then, a young relative of mine (8yrs old) received an iPad Mini for the holidays. I watched her set it up and immediately start viewing Disney videos. I think that comparing its usability range to a kiosk is damning it with unwarranted feinted praise. I don’t own a tablet at this time because my laptops and iPhone 4s are sufficient, but I gotta say that a Mini with a retina display will be hard to resist down the road.
Edited 2013-01-20 15:32 UTC
The article is ostensibly about Apple, but I think it’s really a criticism of tech journalists, who lazily keep hoping for something new and exciting for Apple in spite of continually insisting Apple’s wellspring of innovation has run dry.
So really, the article is: “Tech journalists keep getting it wrong.”
The complainers inhabit this forum, too. Have a look for all the comments that complain that Apple’s iOS GUI is stale/outdated. Really? Bored already?
Strange enough the people who complain about the iPhone are the ones who don’t have one. The ones that do have one are quite happy, unlike Android users of which most have given up trying to figure out how it works. Even WP users are happier than Android ones.
I don’t think any company should change anything just for change. Why fix something that isn’t broken and have your users go through a new learning experience when before they could operate their device with the greatest of ease? Why waste time and energy to replace something that’s proven with something that is not?
Current sales data doesn’t support your assumptions. Apple has had to decrease manufacturing and the Nexus 7 outsold iPad in Japan.
The decreasing story has been debunked on several sites.
The iPad being outsold, if it’s really true, in a single country doesn’t say that much. A lot of Android users rather have an iOS device.
Yes… You keep telling that yourself. Maybe that will make you happier…
I’m going for Mr. Happy 2013. 🙂
Since you’re in Nederland, you can become Mr Happy 2013 with a little puff of smoke
I was even born in Amsterdam, but I’m 100% clean and intend to stay that way AND become Mr. Happy 2013! When my sprained thumb (basketball) heals I should be quite happy already.
hey, it’s just like how those complaining about Android are those who don’t own one.
I have really no idea what you base this assertion on but maybe it’s because Android users aren’t hipsters with more money than sense who spend all their time in coffee shops fiddling with their iPhone?
I guess the logical solution to this situation is if we all swap phones and spend 1-2 months with them.
PhoneSwap.
Just when you thought reality shows couldn’t get more boring!
The contestant whose phone gets obsoleted first will be removed from the show!
Apple does get an extraordinary amount of hate, and I find it baffling. I’ve been an Apple user since the early 80s. I was seven at the time. I’ve seen the company go from being a world leader to a marginal player on the brink of destruction, back to being a world leader – indeed, to the world’s most valuable company (though why a phone and computer company should be that also baffles me.)
I was ridiculed for using Apple for pretty much the entire 90s. Then something changed, it wasn’t the iMac or iPod. It was OS X. Apple went form a company with a stale OS to a posix compliant platform with a great (subjective as it is) UI. Everyone loved it. Why? because Apple was the underdog. Apple’s perhaps most underrated move was switching to Intel. It removed all barriers to adoption from the Windows world. You could buy an Apple but if you didn’t like it, You could still run windows. At native speed no less. While iPod was fast becoming the must-have consumer item, it was the change to Intel and the lightning fast adoption of OS X by the developer community that was backbone behind Apple’s growth.
Many people who talk about Apple’s walled garden and control freakery ignore the fact that a massive proportion of developers switched to OSX in the early naughties because it fulfilled a certain promise that was made by Linux and never quite delivered. A great OS, that’s *easy* to use. Idiots and seasoned hackers alike were at home with OS X.
Fast forward to the iPhone, A phone both lauded for it’s revolutionary design (in every sense) and ridiculed for basic flaws. More so in Europe where phones and phone usage behaviour were far more developed that in the US. Apple redefined an entire industry. As they had done with computers.
Sure, Apple isn’t as “inventive”as they were in the early 80s. But I truly believe anyone who thinks Android would in any way shape or form exist in the mature feature-rich state it is today without the iPhone is delusional. And no, pointing to obscure projects here and there that also used similar technologies isn’t good enough.
Apple isn’t hated now because of it’s walled garden. Almost every_single_osNews reader can bypass Apple’s garden if they want. It’s not hard. It’s hated because of it’s success. People who make comparison’s with MS back in the day are way off the mark. No one, and I mean *no* one is forcing you to use an Apple. Or to develop for it. The market made that decision. And the market will royally screw Apple when it get’s it wrong (unlike MS back in the day).
Your Samsung is in no small part awesome because of Apple. Windows no longer sucks because OS X (and Linux) beat the living crap out of it. And here’s the good news, once Apple make’s crap products (as decide by the market, not you, fellow OSNews Geek), it will fail.
Apple is not the be all and end all of tech companies. And to be sure, some of their policies and indeed products suck sometimes. People talk about the *harm* Apple is doing to the industry. I can’t help but think, “Are you new to the internet, or just technology?”.
To be sure, I’m perfectly aware by expressing any remotely pro-Apple opinion on this website means I will be rated down to Dante’s lowest circle of hell. *snorts dried Apple Cool-Aid*
</rant>
PS: Kindly excuse any typos, it’s late. … oh so late.
Edited 2013-01-19 21:47 UTC
Hmm.
Nope, hasn’t happened. I’ve even seen pro-Apple stuff rated up.*
Nice try playing the oppressed and the martyr.
Despite having, as is commonly boasted, the largest market cap and “customer satisfaction” blah blah, Apple apologists still have a persecution mentality.
Strongly resembles the other majority cult in the US.
* I suspect people like Tony Swash get rated down is because of the leading questions (that sound easily like they come out of a state propaganda machine) he disguises poorly as “analysis”.
I wasn’t taking myself that seriously, but ok.
hmmm… upon rereading, my post does come off a tad melodramatic. Oh well. Like I said, it was late.
Personally, I try to be fair and hate equally Microsoft and Apple, Samsung and Sony, Google and Facebook,…
That is not always possible. I probably hate the latter the most.
+1 !
There’s no untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.0. So that statement is not true at all.
Indeed you are right. I’ve read about tethered jailbroken iOS 6 but that’s far from a simple process. I stand corrected! As i’ve already pointed out, it wasn’t my most brilliant comment …
I don’t know if underrated, it was rather ~loud. BTW, an interesting bit of info: the “Pepsi CEO” thought that not going to Intel in the 90s was one of his biggest mistakes: http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=7045
Not really so …maybe in a few atypical (very affluent, and visible) markets. But even there: a lot of people don’t seem to realise how slow start the iPod had:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg – it really became big only in 2005. And that was a time when most of the world was already leapfrogging dedicated audio players, going the mobile phone route (in 2007 or so I read a report about how ~20% of European mobile subscribers uses their phones for music consumption – that alone already means more people than all iPods ever made)
And you know, Apple might be hated because of how it acts (now that it can afford it) …and how some of its supporters behave, now that Apple is not an underdog. I was a bit of a supporter and promoter of Apple, for a time – but I stopped doing that, mostly to not be associated with such people.
Innovation is a double-edged sword, breaking new ground without alienating users has proved to impossible for both Apple and Microsoft. Doesn’t anybody remember the debacle created when Apple ditched their old OS for the BSD-derived OS X? It didn’t help that it released as an incomplete product that was barely functional from the GUI. Only now would I consider it be a finished product after years of evolution.
Microsoft will suffer the same fate with Windows 8. Many users will despise it and give up, the rest will just figure out how to use it while it continues to evolve. I put myself in the latter category.
I’m a Linux user at heart but I acknowledge that I live in a Windows world. Change is good; it keeps us young in mind and heart.
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
I am not sure how i should feel about the topic. Should i feel sorry for Apple?
Or does the world not pay enough due to Apple as the greatest company on earth?
Apple was always a company that charged a high price on little innovation.
There OS was not that great till X. Multitasking was not really a standard till then. As an Ex-Amiga user i thought always what the hype about Apple was. Commodores Amiga system was already way ahead.
I do think that Apple is a company that can sell hardware very well and make it appear as something different. The software is easy to understand and even people that are not nerds can operate a computer.
Maybe because of Apple Smartphones are better with better interfaces that lets people work with ease and worry about other things.
For myself i would never buy an Apple product since they are too expensive for me and i am not one of the rest of us.
Right now i do own a Nexus 4 and i am glad that i bought it. Very easy to use and no problems.
But i don’t think there is a double standard. There is no throne where a company can rest on its laurels and shield itself from competition.
Also the main claim on this article seems to be the fact of copy. Companies always copy from each other. You can check any other field and you will see copies all around you.
What counts is what people like and like to use. If people love to buy Apple products, thats fine. In a sense it is a useless discussion. Or it is a discussion because of Apple.
“Poor Apple unfairly judged with double standards” Wow, news indeed. But are Apple fair in their judgements of others? I would not say fair – I might rather say “often, tortious”.
They have patented round corners in rectangles then asked for a billion dollars for infringing; they have copied from their competitors all sorts of stuff like notification interfaces, geotagging, social networking, instant messaging, instant email, videoconferencing, and mostly everything in cell telephony; they have lifted a whole OS verbatim from the public domain (Unix/Free BSD) and built their own product upon it while painting themselves like the only true creators; they have polished existing device classes (the MP3 player, the Smartphone), then claimed the market as their own invention. In short, they have added (very, very nice) coats of paint to what was already done, then demanded all credit. This might not win many friends in tech. It will in finance, though, as long as the stuff sells well.
Oh, It’s OK, Apple, you copy, they copy. Everybody copies everybody else, then adds a little bit more: it’s the only way progress moves. The most successful, like Apple, do it better, add more of their own, and package it better. You are doing great – you should keep going, and let everybody else carry on. But homesteading market and technology concepts will only lead to stagnation once you have copied everybody else’s good ideas and your lawyers have put your competitors out of business and made them unable to come up with anything else new.
Is it unfair to be disappointed that the iPhone 5 looks and feels exactly the same as the iPhone 4s which looks and feels exactly the same as the iPhone 4? Maybe people are actually tired of black and white rectangles with rounded corners. Both in their pocket, in their backpack and on their desktop.
The patent you refer to did not form part of the Samsung legal action.
So what? Who cares? They homestead tech, then fence their ranch, then shoot the other settlers because the river is THEIRS.
Once again, the broad brush you wield is stuck in a dark place….the iPhone 5 does not look and feel exactly the same as a 4S or a 4…..the subtle differences may be lost on you. Many of us are already tired of an Android weed field where just staying current is a veritable crap-shoot.
Edited 2013-01-22 10:19 UTC
They are sure lost on me, though I use an iPhone 4 on a daily basis since two or three years ago, due to corporate demands.
I see the screen is now more Android like, but not much else. Oh, it is faster, wow. Improvements must be so subtle that only a jaded Android warrior like you, worn out in the long battle of Android updates will notice. The compulsory iTunes sucks as much as ever, and everything that was wrong, still is.
What was right, still is, but that is not much in the way of improvements, is it? And how come the wonderful Apple updates never brought me turn by turn navigation, and it has had to be Google who brought it to me?
Please, go out to take pictures with. your 10″ iPad and come back when you develop some critical sense.
What???? Apple’s Maps worked perfectly for me from the get-go on my 4S. Google sucks in comparison. iTunes is a very good database for Mac users…you maybe don’t know how to use it to manage multiple devices in your network. Android is like ‘Bizarro Superman.” Kind of a cheesy one off, imho.
Maybe it worked OK because you live in America. Those 3d views work fine, too, if you live in Frisco. If you are in Madrid, it is. POS, from total failures searching for centric streets, to being sent to Venezuela (across the Atlantic ocean, in case you’re wondering). And the loss of transit instructions was very real, whether you care or not from your SUV.
Oh, and turn by turn navigation does not work AT ALL in the iPhone 4, because Apple must think that if we are too cheap to upgrade to something newer, they will be too cheap to bother. It is not a matter of horsepower, because turn navigation works fine in far less powerful Android and Nokia devices from the far past.
And what about Siri? It does not work either.
And iTunes is an unmitigated POS. You like it? Fine, choose your poison, but why cant’t I avoid it? It is astonishing that it needs so many resources to do so little.And at the same time, it does far too much. Why do I need my music player to be my app shop and ebook librarian? Only so that Apple controls all entries to the phone, to ensure I never skip the pay line.And all that crap about such device is not paired to such other – if you sync now all your data will be erased? You may think to Apple you are a valued customer, but they treat you like a cheapskate, a cash cow, an idiot, and a thief, all at the same time.
Your experience and comments are totally unreal compared with my Apple use case experiences since 1994. Yes, living in America and using iTunes on OSX carry certain advantages; but syncing works flawlessly for me in this ecosystem….not sure what your issues are…fortunately you have other choices.