With all their patent trolling and absurd tyrannical control over the app store, I have no idea why so many tech-saavy people still love Apple.
Like promoting useless patent litigations of 'rounded corners', 'slide to unlock' nature?
An iPhone developer and a founder of a company passionately argued with me once saying "what if they have found out the 'perfect radius' for their corners where their phone looks the best (say 5.6 mm), which no one else could find before? It definitely deserves to be patented".
I was facepalm. Many people just don't think it's a problem, and don't realize how it is ultimately bad for them and their children.
ever.
Before Apple came up with iPhone, I had a freaking Ericsson brick thingy. None of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung were innovating. None of those old, non original ideas were in any of those devices. Nokia had a webkit browser with a ridiculous cursor that you operated with that joystick thingy. I'm glad that Apple actually pushed them forward.
So yes, I think Apple has original products and they are innovating.
I use Apple everything. I love Apple products. But to say there wasn't any innovation happening before it in the phone sector misses some really cool things.
PS. I would pay all the money in the world for an updated P1i, same qwerty rocker keyboard, capacitive 3" touchscreen @ 720p running Android. One can dream, right?
There's a big difference between a good concept and a good execution of a concept. Apple have always been brilliant at execution, even if they don't have many original concepts (they don't do basic research). Is it not innovative to take a good idea and execute it better than anyone before? I find that a hard thing to dismiss. However, now that they are on top of the world, it would be nice to see them invest in open basic research to give back to the community where they got all their ideas and technologies from, like microsoft does with microsoft research.
RE giving back to the community; FreeBSD, CUPS, WebKit, LLVM and Clang to name a few. Notice I haven't claimed that any of these were directly invented by Apple, but all have varying levels of investment and contribution from Apple.
This is all out there on the internet. It takes a couple of seconds to look up with whatever search engine fits in with your ideology.
I agree that Apple's UX was a significant advance. (See this 2007 review talking about "paradigm-shifting interface"
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hard... )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9h...
Steve comments again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnkXa3eTV88
The Mac's 30th anniversary a few weeks gave the original Mac launch videos a lot of recent play where Gates and Microsoft basically played an eerily similar role to Google with the iPhone launch. Of course MS, like Google did want to do everything.
It's clear as day why Steve felt betrayed by Google. As he said in the internal town hall:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake teams at Google want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. "Don't be evil is a load of crap"
{I've edited in the two updates/corrections from the bottom}
I can't believe anyone contests this.
I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs. Even the settings section for the iPhone blew every single other phone in existence out of the water. Something that simple, that essential, had been revolutionised by this thoughtful new way at looking at phone interfaces.
Android, on that very day, looked like every other phone. 10 years behind, old, tired, pathetic, no vision what so ever.
In less than 6 months the android team lifted every single iPhone design element, added very little of their own and unveiled what is possibly one of the biggest design rip-offs in tech history.
I can understand why Jobs was pissed.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have competition. Competition is a basic requirement for a functional economy.
Which is why the patient system is broken.
Besides the interface, I thought it was interesting that it had a real unix based OS underneath, which would pay off in the future as phone processors became more powerful.
It's sortof funny looking back. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess.
Apple has this fame of original crazy geniouses that have invented X or Y. They have mostly taken other's ideas and perfected them. Perfected them a lot, admittedly; even may be taken them to a new level of awesomeness with a great vision of on which details it was better to improve.
I love apple products, don't take me wrong. They deserve a lot of credit for the iPod, the iPhone, iOS, the iPad...
I think it was extremely childish of Jobs to get so pissed.
I'm not sure why people always ignore the second part of why Jobs was pissed. It was the Schmidt one-two sucker punch that really pissed him off.
I've never thought of Jobs as being someone mature and reasonable anyway. He was already like that in his younger years whenever the competition heated up. He didn't change.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1FJHY...
That is the exact old skool interface that was so terrible.
That is Android pre-iPhone.
His only argument is 'well look later, there's some touch too'. But that's even more damning as the touch was so badly designed and clunky.
Watch the whole thing if you want. Notice the use of right-click menus. Notice the zoom had to use buttons. The program switcher is lifted from Vista and looks nothing like what actually happened, which was a iPhone copied home button.
What the video shows is that Android had an interface and it was nothing like the one that came out 6 months later which was wholesale lifted from the iPhone.
Windows Mobile showed you didn't have to do it anything like Apple did, so why did android look so much like the iOS?
> Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
> On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.
> “Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-...
This is not one of those Apple vs Google fights; it's straight up well-sourced journalism.
You are wrong because you are looking at the wrong category for a comparison. Look at PDAs. PDAs had everything that the iPhone could do, more or less. And this, YEARS before the iPhone came out. I know it, because I had PDAs very early on and I remember making fun of the people thinking that the iPhone was so revolutionary at work because I had been doing the same stuff with my PDA for 5 years. Of course, the iPhone had a better browser, was easier to use, was more cool looking, but nonetheless it had nothing NEW in functionality over the previous PDAs. Comparing with phones is therefore irrelevant, the iPhone was PDA-Phone, thus being called a Smart-Phone later on by the mainstream media.
I'd like to think they noticed it because it was good. KHTML at the time had quite strong CSS support compared to its competition (not necessarily the best, but it competed well), had done some important advances in l18n support compared to others (e.g. strong support for bidi text layout), and the design of its render tree which e.g. allowed for hardware-accelerated layer compositing was later adopted by competitors like Gecko. It was a pretty good codebase.
Sure, it's been a decade since those events, and the majority of the engineering effort by now lies chiefly on the WebKit side of things. Apple employees working on WebKit have done a ton of good work, as have other stakeholders. Apple was an important factor both in terms of workforce increase and popularity increase for the project. But I think it's very legitimate to continue to credit the KDE community with its inception.
Who created LLVM and WebKit is irrelevant. Those projects wouldn't be as awesome as they are now without Apple's efforts and money.
Good hardware offerings (beyond the "my custom built hot-rod has a faster CPU"), and a full blown UNIX desktop OS with a nice interface and access to all kinds of proprietary software and consumer/professional peripherals.
Plus "absurd tyrannical control over the app store"? Apple made the whole platform, API and market out of thin air, it's not like people have some inherent god-given right to have their apps featured in it. And still -- there are now over 800,000 apps on it -- if anything it's as lax as it comes for a closed market. Try developing for game consoles some day.
As for "patent trolling", I haven't see anything beyond all other companies, from Google to Oracle and MS, do.
If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to jailbreak it. If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to buy a developer's license.
But if the platform was built by someone else, he gets to set the rules.
And if the rules are lax enough, like the App Store is, and people using the platform dont mind much, then we don't have much of a case.
If the app meets reliability and design standards, why not let the market decide? Its arrogance.
Apple should by no means ever restrict the ability to place code on a device that they sell. Restrict things from the App Store? Sure. Restrict devices to only use the App Store? Absolutely not.
Developers hated it, of course, so now we have the App Store. But it's not like Apple has all of a sudden stopped people from bookmarking a website and using it like a built-in app.
And if it doesn't, then why is the app "second class" when run on an iOS device? Phones running Firefox OS do have native apps running (e.g. the browser). Is Firefox OS doing the wrong thing by preventing users from installing native apps?
If it's A-okay when Mozilla does it, the same should be true when Apple does it.
It's hilarious the number of people getting up from their Xbox or Playstation to rip on Apple for being a closed garden, and why, oh why, would anyone, anywhere be so stupid to develop for, or buy into, a walled garden.
The cognitive dissonance is intense, which explains, I think the barely contained rage seeping out of each comment.
And that's not crazy. The variety of things you do with your phone is far wider than the variety of things you do on your console. With a console you pretty much just want to play games and maybe use it as a video streaming machine so you don't have to get another device for such a simple function. Compare that to your phone, whose usefulness as a device for making calls has been marginalized, and usefulness for just about everything else has exploded.
On of the issues I remember at the time was their refusal to have Sun releasing JVM updates for Apple's platform, while simultaneously not keeping it up to date themselves. As a CS student with a curriculum using Java as a teaching platform, that's pretty annoying.
Of course it's Apple's legal right to deny what they want. That doesn't mean that I think it's right that they have that right. Apple is a quasi-monopoly, and people are dependent on them. There is no second app store for iOS devices really. A more fitting analogy would be when the postal service would decline to transport mail with porn in it. Would that be a good situation?
I'm sure if they would take away the porn magazines (even if the grocery stores just use their legal right to stock only whatever products they want), many people would scream bloody murder. But in the digital world, we are so used to clean walled gardens, that nobody cares. It's a bit like the movie Demolition Man...
Yes? Pornographic magazines are very common in magazine racks...
At least Samsung seems to be making some progress in this department, but I'm not holding my hopes up.
Unfortunately, it goes way beyond just small UI and physical design issues:
-The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store").
-Even though my phone has multiple cores, the audio output is seemingly competing for resources with events like changes in network or wifi availability (e.g. riding the subway), which leads to issues like choppy/distorted audio.
-The workflow/UX for common applications and uses was seemingly designed by someone that didn't use the phone for any extended period of time. Want to call someone? Open the 'Phone' application. Don't know the number? Oh, that's a different application -- close 'Phone' and open the 'People' application. What, you'd expect scrolling through contacts to be a common ask for someone about to make a call?
-Bloatware. Remember the days in which you'd buy a Dell and it would come pre-installed with a bunch of crappy applications that you immediately tried to remove? Yeah, it's like that, with the exception that you can't remove the bloatware and you have no control over their use on your data or battery.
-Little weird issues: type a text, hit enter, and start typing again too quickly? Sometimes the final word of your previous line will be entered as input on your current message. Interest-based ads from 3rd parties, hooray (I don't even want to start thinking about which local data sources are scanned)! Volume control is context specific -- there's 4 sliders for the simple intent of "I don't want things louder than X."
-I miss having a physical button to hook into the OS -- when an app is crashing (which is common), you don't have a "oh crap, close-it" toggle. This makes you interact with touchscreen buttons on an interface that's already decided to stop dealing with users.
1. http://www.motorola.com/us/shop-all-mobile-phones-1/Droid-Ra...
This has been occuring since my Galaxy S2 was released, so it's not even a new problem. Presumably, Android developers don't use their own phones enough to have fixed it yet... :/
> The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store").
Low barrier to entry means you get a bit of everything. There are quality apps in there, too.
- Never experienced this. This seems to be a motorola complaint, not an Android complaint.
- No idea what this is about. My phone application has a list of contacts built into it.
- My Nexus 5 (nor my Nexus 4, nor my Nexus S) has had bloatware. Again, a motorola complaint...
- Never experienced these issues. Particularly media--there has always been three volumes for me: Alarms, ringtones/notifications and media (games, music, video).
- The softbuttons on the front of the device work just as well as a physical, tactile button. Just because a button is physical does NOT mean that it gets any special treatment by the OS. In android, if you hit the "Home" softbutton, you go home immediately. The softbuttons work on a plane off of that crashing apps run on ;-)
My current POS Dell XPS laptop lasts 2 hours max, has a 17 inch 1080p screen, and weights a ton. Worst of all, the Windows drivers that Dell provides don't even work properly and cause frequent BSODs, so I can't even play games.
I would love to have a retina MPB, but unfortunately, I can't afford it.
I'm also willing to wager you paid nowhere near the retina MBP price for the Dell :) (though I guess you are more likely to have a bad experience with a high-priced Windows laptop than with a MBP, complaints about the 2011 batch aside)
For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to buy a $1300 laptop before starting college. I really regret making that decision. I probably should have spent a few hundred dollars more for a retina MBP instead.
Apple should just make everyone's lives a lot easier (including their own) if they took the innocent until proven guilty approach that Google takes, rather than the guilty until proven innocent stance they currently abide by.
Ditched iOS a good while ago.
Virtually every web programmer I know uses a MacBook Pro with OS X, but I only know a total of maybe 2 or 3 non-web programmers that do (not counting the 2 or 3 that shoved a Free/OSS unix onto one.) None of them have an OS X MBP as their sole laptop.
As a flexible computer-user, I'm frequently called upon to figure out what's wrong with coworkers' Macs. I've never owned a Mac, yet I'm their best hope. That says it all, I think.