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Apple is a traditional business

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Re: Apple is a traditional business

#111

Post by scarface74 »

et-al wrote: post #82
fhood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally loose sleep, wondering what products were lost due to Jobs' early death. Edit: Ok, fine. I loose sleep wondering what ideas were out there that languished because Jobs wasn't around to see their potential and capitalize on them. The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point.

Has this talk with a friend, but it was actually centered around accessibility of technology for older people (or less technologically-inclined people, if you must). If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? Would Siri be more functional? I know Jitterbug exists, but it seems almost insulting. (If anyone has used one and fe…

Apple already goes out of its way to make the iPhone accessible.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#113

Post by wmeredith »

pier25 wrote: post #84
oflannabhra wrote: post #11

> ...this is a time when Amazon is pushing innovations that don’t solve any real-world problems but may create some: like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience, or complex and expensive cashierless stores that won’t deliver much of an improvement to our shopping experience but may cost underprivileged people their jobs. This is a time whe…

> but it really points to how rarely an innovation like the iPhone really occurs Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first.

The innovation of the iPhone was in the execution. The ideas were around, along with a ton of failed attempts at it. A computer in your pocket had been an idea for decades. Apple made one that a critical mass of people could/would actually use.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#114

Post by seem_2211 »

xmodem wrote: post #7

(Disclosure: I hold AAPL) Great article but a couple of points: On Tuesday’s call, there was just one question about innovative offerings, and it concerned health applications, an important driver of Apple Watch sales but not a potential world-beating sensation. Apple appears to be happy to think small and focus on its shareholders, not on pie-in-the-sky ideas, like other tech companies, including industry leaders. T…

At what point do you hit massive diminishing returns? $3.4b a quarter is $285m in R&D every single week. That's a lot of money, no matter how you slice it.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#115

Post by srslack »

MBCook wrote: post #74
beamatronic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has a…

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch co…

I'll give you accessibility and decent touch controls in a pretty package. But I can't let this slide:

>How long would it have taken to get the App Store? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software)

Package management was not an Apple innovation, and before iOS 2.0 there were no officially supported native third party applications at all, and the only way power users accomplished this was by installing a package management system based on APT (installer.app/cydia). Jobs believed that web applications with native controls would be all anyone needed with the original iPhone.

So what do they do in iOS 2.0? Give you a crippled, prettier package management solution that requires Apple hardware, and fees, to develop and publish on, and gave the finger to power users.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#116

Post by imron »

wilsonnb wrote: post #92
MBCook wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch co…

It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember co…

> It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed.

I'm not so sure.

A picture says a thousand words:

https://www.cultofmac.com/145083/what-phones-looked-like-bef...

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#117

Post by IncRnd »

blhack wrote: post #106
IncRnd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, but don't forget that the pieces to be able to create the iPhone had to be there first. Like the LG Prada?

Like Palm's existing smartphone with existing smartphone apps, or blackberry.

Thank you. Yes - that is my exact point!

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#118

Post by dingaling »

cptskippy wrote: post #94
fhood wrote: post #14

It is kind of amazing how much the landscape has changed. I have always used Apple computers and phones, and I used to view Apple as a vaguely sinister company, but one that produced the best products. It is very weird to me that they are now a model for non-evil practices among large tech companies.

> I used to view Apple as a vaguely sinister company What about Apple gave you the impression they were sinister and what has changed? I've actually been going the opposite direction with my opinion of them. All of their talk of "you are not the product" and "we respect your privacy" is great but feels opportunistic given the current climate. The foundation of Apple's products that they are touting as privacy focused…

I'm not the OP but since the early 1990s I've had an uneasy feeling about Apple, primarily due to their ability to sustain a cultish following.

It went beyond encouraging loyalty bymaking good products ( though that was the era of the dire Performa ) and into mocking and belittling non-believers, and rewriting history in a sort of Soviet-airbrushing style.

I don't know whether the company itself nutured that but it was unsettling. Microsoft was explicitly dominating like a tyrant, but Apple was a cult leader with a thin smile and an army of vehement adherents.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#119

Post by hungerstrike »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #109
mathieuh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still stop running after seven days.

This is completely false, I have several apps that I've built on my own personal account, which is expired because I haven't released a personal app in a year or so, all of them are still running just fine after a year.

Incorrect. Provisioning profiles created by free Apple developer accounts only last for 7 days. After that you have to fire up Xcode and rebuild your app and reinstall it.

This is a very well known fact that you can find documentation for on many sites outside of apple.com, such as right here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/ios/get-started/ins...

The sad fact is that it's not your phone, it's Apples.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#120

Post by scarface74 »

zeveb wrote: post #23

I'm very fond of Apple's business stance; my concern is not with it, but with their technological stance. Apple products are built on lock-in; they are proprietary and closed, not open. Frankly, at this point they're not even really all that good (in fact, sometimes embarrassingly bad — something not limited to Apple!). I want the freedom to tinker, the freedom to review, the freedom to extend. That's why I use Linux…

Locked and closed compared to what? What makes Android what it is to most people is a bunch of closed sourced Google Services and a bunch of closed sourced binary drivers. That are so closed that not even Google was able to upgrade some of their Nexus devices because they were dependent on closed source drivers.
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