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Apple is a traditional business

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Re: Apple is a traditional business

#161

Post by smitherfield »

MBCook wrote: post #108
wilsonnb wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How long do you think it would have taken? Seriously? It took Google a few years to catch up having their massive resources and Apple as a guidepost. RIM had no incentive, they were trying to lock you into the BB server product and tried to get consumers on it to. The phone was a means to an end. MS wanted to push Windows. They’d been trying since CE first appeared and it still didn’t take off. As long as Balmer was…

>How long did it take the rest of the industry to catch up to the Mac from ‘84?

The Amiga was '85. It did take a while for PC-compatibles, of course.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#162

Post by cptskippy »

dingaling wrote: post #118
cptskippy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

The cult like follow Apple has enjoyed has never really bothered me. From a business sense it makes sense that they would cultivate it if the culture was beneficial to them. You see the same sort of fanaticism with cars, guns, televisions, cameras, watches, sunglasses, and a myriad of other products.

I think that understanding of marketing and brand, in addition to the value of engineering, is what made Jobs such a great leader. He understood enough of both sides of the business to make them work together cohesively where other companies tend to favor one or the other.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#163

Post by zeveb »

scarface74 wrote: post #146
hungerstrike wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Locked and closed compared to what? Did you miss the part where Linux was mentioned as the preferred tinkerers OS? This isn't about Android vs iPhone, it's about freedom vs no freedom.

So what can't you "tinker" with that you would like on OS X - a certified Unix operating system?

> So what can't you "tinker" with that you would like on OS X

- The kernel (yes, there's Darwin — I don't believe it's possible to replace a working macOS kernel with my own build)

- The window manager

- The Finder

- Cocoa

- Safari

- XCode (although I believe some components are open source)

- iMessage

- Facetime

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#164

Post by jjrh »

zer00eyz wrote: post #54
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.

Not worth it. Jobs was, for all intents and purposes a phenomenal business person in spite of the fact that many people early in his career didn't see it. Name a product apple invented that was HUGE? Go ahead and think about that. GUI & Mac was Xerox, the iPhone was Xerox and palm and... Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things. Lets look at the design side. MacBooks for a…

> OSX is just *nix with a nice GUI (something open source could learn from).

I think open source developers know this but it's not their expertise. What we need is a way to make it easier for people with that expertise to contribute to projects.

Doing a bit of work with GTK I realised just how hard it is to abstract the look/design stuff out, it's very intertwined with the code meaning folks with artistic ability have a steep learning make seemingly minor GUI changes.

This explains why the web looks really good and stuff like electron is attractive.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#165

Post by mikestew »

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…

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?

There are accessibility settings on iOS that mitigate every one of those items (and more), and iOS has consistently been one of the most, if not the most, accessible phones out there . What specifically are you looking for?

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#166

Post by bni »

hungerstrike wrote: post #119
jaegerpicker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple - Its not your device, but the data is yours.

Google - Its your device, but the data is ours.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#167

Post by greymeister »

0xcafecafe wrote: post #153
greymeister wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current experience with just about any cashierless option at a grocery or department store is far from a minor convenience, it's almost entirely an inconvenience. I now get to do what I did over 20 years ago and bag groceries, except then I was paid for it. However, it allows the store to place one minimum wage employee over multiple lanes versus having to have one per lane (or even two if it was like the grocery…

To each his own, I exclusively use the self checkout line whenever I can (especially at costco) and it saves me a ton of time. Besides the point here was about innovation and working towards a better future, which the amazon cashierless stores might be. Just because the current solution for self-checkouts is bad doesn't mean we should stop innovating.

Working towards a better future sounds like an admirable goal, but that's ad-speak on top of actual goals of the innovation, which is more profitable retail.

I don't personally think a robot grocery store is something I'm interested in, but that's entirely subjective.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#168

Post by hefeweizen »

gambiting wrote: post #125
UncleMeat wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is Alexa different than Siri on iPhones? Why is one a surveillance speaker but the other isnt? I'm near my phone far more often than I am in my living room.

You need to press a button to activate Siri. Alexa/Google home are listening at all times.

False, "Hey Siri" activates Siri on the iphone (just tried this out). So, it's not different.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#169

Post by mikestew »

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…

How long would it have taken to get the App Store?

You mean like HandNGo (spelling?) that existed several years before the iPhone came out, let alone the iOS App Store? Quite popular with Windows Mobile folks, that was. There were others that I've long since forgotten about, but they existed.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#170

Post by eridius »

hungerstrike wrote: post #119
jaegerpicker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Provisioning profile expiration doesn't stop apps from running, it just prevents you from building more apps until you refresh the profile.
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