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Comment by schraeds | Hacker News Reader

Apple seems to be able to innovate iOS while providing robust and timely updates for older devices.

I would not call iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G "robust": it was more of a disaster than anything. There are obviously strengths to all sides here, and I don't mean to champion that Google's is best or the only way. But I think it's clear what they're doing, and I'd bet they've weighed all possible options and found this to be the most economically sensible one.

I honestly thought Apple's behaviour with the 3G was shameful. I wouldn't have minded if they hadn't released the update for the 3G, but instead what they effectively did was brick a load of people's phones and then offer poor options for downgrading. It's really not what I expect from a premium brand.

this is a bad analogy, apple does not backport features to old versions of their OS, they put their new OS on old handsets. google puts their new OS onto old devices as much as they can too, the problem is that the carriers and other handset manufacturers don't. i'm sure google would love if everything would start running ICS, but it's not their responsibility.

"as much as they can ...not their responsibility."

You make it sound like Google's suddenly found themselves in these unfortunate circumstances through no fault of their own.

On the contrary, this is the reality of Android. You don't get to own the pluses of being "open" and not own the minuses.

> You don't get to own the pluses of being "open" and not own the minuses.

Actually you can, you wouldn't blame Linus because your linux based router comes with a broken or old version of linux.

I'm sure Linus himself would tell you that he would own that as a minus of linux and that it's far outweighed by the positives.

Let's not guess what he would say. But blaming Linus for that is like the Iranian government blaming a dev because someone used his upload app to upload porn pictures or people blaming gun makers instead of killers. You can do it but it isn't the smartest thing to do to say the least IMO.

Oh yeah? Let me know when I can get Siri on an iPhone 4 without resorting to some sketchy hacks.

This false equivalence is tiresome.

The inability to run a handful of hardware dependent features on iOS is not even in the same ballpark as the complete lack of timely updates for over 95% of Android users.

Hardware dependant? Siri was shown running on pre-4s devices (3g if I recall correctly) before apple bought them.

Not to Apple's standards apparently.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57371624-264/why-apples-a5...

Siri has since been ported to older devices via jailbreaking. As I understand it, there are no performance issues.

However, I do agree that Google needs to sort the 'update problem'.

"As I understand it, there are no performance issues."

It's one thing to "work" in the hacking sense, and another to "work properly" in the Apple sense.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2656999&cid=38...

There's a difference between running and running as well as on the 4S. The demo of noise reduction is impressive. http://www.audience.com/demos/transmit-noise-en.php [audience.com] It's easy to see why with that noise reduction, Siri would be much more accurate than without it, in real scenarios.

Apple obviously wants Siri to be judged on it's best performance. They have a reputation for quality to maintain.

That's certainly true for some definition of "robust" and "timely". I'm assuming yours doesn't include security and bug fixes.

The way Android is fragmented changes all of that. If iOS were fragmented the same way Android was, Apple would be doing the same thing.

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