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Apple is a traditional business

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Re: Apple is a traditional business

#131

Post by askafriend »

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…

I was there. It was an absolutely massive leap. It captured people's imagination and proved that imagination could be reality in a way nothing else has since.

It's quite easy to trivialize things in retrospect. But at that time, in that context, that device was pure magic.

It changed so many people's relationship with general computing period.

And like many people pointed out here, it's not about any individual piece, but it's more about how all the individual pieces fit together into one product, and one story that was so different from the prevailing story at the time. It was absolutely the execution that set them apart and moved our industry forward.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#132

Post by wmeredith »

sahaskatta wrote: post #98
michaelt wrote: post #13

I've been an Android user for years; I recently decided to change to iPhone, and this article really captures the reason why: Apple seems to be the only company for whom a cloud backup of my phone book is a liability, not an asset to be monetised.

What company is monetizing your address book?

Googling for 2 seconds shows that numerous companies over the years have gotten in trouble for scraping contacts. A couple fast examples.

June 16th, 2015: Linkedin settled a lawsuit for over $13 million in a class action grounded on their alleged use of users’ email contacts it obtained from the “Add Connections” feature in its service.[0]

Apr 30, 2013: Path, the photo-centric social network that just hit 10 million users yesterday, has been getting some heat for what some users say are spammy tactics to recruit new users. Digital marketer Stephen Kenwright downloaded the app earlier this week, tried it out, uninstalled it, and went to bed. When he woke up, he found that Path had gone on a rogue mission early in the morning, texting and robocalling an unknown number of his contacts, including his grandparents. [1]

[0] https://www.hastingslawandpost.com/hlandp/2015/6/16/look-out...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4286090/path-is-spamming-...

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#133

Post by wmeredith »

_bxg1 wrote: post #29

Apple's main endeavor is to develop an actual product. They design and engineer something in the hopes that people buy it. The honesty - and arguably, quaintness - of that consumer relationship separates Apple from the rest of the valley.

Eh, I think this argument is a bit glib.

Google's main endeavor is to develop an actual product. They design and engineer something in the hopes that people use it. (Then they sell ads, like the publishing industry has done for 200 years.)

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#134

Post by sweden »

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…

I remember back then, in the early days of the smartphone era, the lack of good Android phones that could be comparable to an iPhone. Even the supposed high-end Android devices were severely lacking in terms of performance and smooth UI when compared to the latest iPhone.

I think that the first Android phone that could actually compete with an iPhone must have been the Samsung Galaxy S3, in 2012, 6 years after the release of the original iPhone in 2007.

Apple was way ahead of the competitors back then, they basically set the golden standard for what a smartphone should look like and it took many years for the competition to catch up.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#135

Post by neuromantik8086 »

imron wrote: post #116
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…

> 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...

Agreed:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Ap...

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#136

Post by hungerstrike »

scarface74 wrote: post #120
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.

> 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.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#137

Post by dzonga »

antris wrote: post #103
monocasa wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A worker at Foxconn has about the same discretionary income as blue collar workers in the states; their food and housing is covered by Foxconn, but isn't normally listed as part of their salary. Now, albeit, they're slightly on the higher end of Chinese workers, but it's not just the shitty aristocrat's kids spending money on iPhones. The people making the things make enough money to buy one, just the same as my hair…

In that case Foxconn isn't an example of an average company paying average wage. The disposable income per capita in China was 36396 chinese yuan in 2017, which makes a little over 400 USD per month. Median disposable income is even lower. You're not even close to buying iPhones with that kind of wages.

my friend lives in Beijing and teaches English and gets paid $3k$ / month. So I can bet a lot of folks are paid decently in China too

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#138

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

We wouldn't have, because Apple was the only company that was user-focused, not technology-focused.

Windows, RIM, Nokia, and others had all tried to produce similar devices. They invariably ended up with a clunking mess of buttons and features that appealed to geeks and/or business people, and no one else.

The genius wasn't in putting the parts together - although that was a significant achievement. It was in making a device that was uniquely beautiful, elegantly understated, and so easy to use it could (literally) be picked up by almost anyone.

No other company has ever taken the obsessive interest in design and aesthetics that Apple had under Jobs.

Not even the current Apple, which understands visual presentation, but seems to have prioritised ease-of-manufacture and profit margins over user delight.

Jobs was hardly infallible, but when he had a hit he hit it out of the park.

As for what we don't have - VR, smart home, and health, are all bumping along when they could be soaring.

The other big miss was handing content creation over to YouTube. Apple could easily have set up a content store to match/beat YouTube, as a follow-up to podcasts and the app store.

I have no idea if Jobs even considered any of the above. But Cook doesn't really get content, so Apple are unlikely to win big in these markets now - more likely to offer a not-quite-right product like Watch, which was mildly interesting, but not the game changer it might have been.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#139

Post by dreamcompiler »

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 wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the first phone of any kind that wasn't bundled with crapware from the cellular companies and locked into their ecosystems. That was a huge win for consumers, and it was solely due to the persuasive power of Steve Jobs.

Re: Apple is a traditional business

#140

Post by kalleboo »

__david__ wrote: post #76
pseudometa wrote: post #34

Having been a fan of Apple for over a decade now, over the last year I've come to the opposite point of view. Their iPhone and airpods are great products and of course they can ride a long time on those, but in every other area from Macs and accessories I feel they are falling flat on delivering great user experiences. From FaceTime to Siri, to crappy Apple TV remotes, Home Kit... there are just a LOT of mediocre pro…

Interesting you say that about the Apple TV remotes. I thought they were all horrible but I really like the new one. The speed at which I can move around and the precision of selecting things is really great.

We had a lot of trouble with the new Apple TV remote. Stuff like it getting knocked slightly and the Apple TV going wild, etc. Luckily the AppleTV generations that use it also support HDMI-CEC so we just use our TV remote instead.
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