Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fully agree. I recall in particular reading John Carmack a few years back talking about how he was glad Apple wasn't as dominant as Microsoft, because they were far harder to work with. I wish I could remember the quote well enough to search accurately for it.
This may be it: http://kotaku.com/5397908/carmack-working-with-apple-is-a-ro...
Apple's Mistake
171–180 of 285 posts
Re: Apple's Mistake
#172Laptops displaced desktops?! You are deluded. We develop on 8GB i7s with dual 24" screens. We have one at home and one at work, Remote Desktop-ing from each other. Gigabit ethernet and optical fiber internet. No molasses wifi here. We work FAST, we work HARD. But we use Windows 7 too, so we're not limited to Apple's crappy hardware either...
Although I don't think your comment is true, I do have a question for PG: Did you buy the 27" iMac just to use as a monitor, or for the computer part as well?
Re: Apple's Mistake
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may not have started out as central to the experience, but I think that it's starting to quickly become just that and Apple knows this or at least they want it to be. So far all the recent iPhone commercials I've seen only focus on the thousands of apps you can get for the iphone - not the iphone's "awesome" feature set. I was looking at a friend's iphone the other day and I saw page after page of 3rd party applic…
What's funny is that in the beginning, Apple didn't even want to provide an API for native applications. They wanted all developers to use the Web API. When developers balked at that idea Apple reluctantly laid out plans for native applications. I wouldn't believe that for a minute. The App Store would have been part of the iPhone product plan from day 1. It's too big, too complex, too strategic, and (yes) too well-e…
“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.”
"We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”
The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
Re: Apple's Mistake
#174I wish Amazon gets into the handheld device business. They clearly understand consumers, software, infrastructure & user-experience. They missed the boat with the ipod, here's a fantastic opportunity to do something about it.
Since the "1984 incident" I trust Amazon even less than I trust Apple. At least Apple doesn't yank music/apps/whatever off their customers' devices.
Amazon apologized; it's unlikely they'll delete books again. I trust them more.
Re: Apple's Mistake
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Faustian bargain? Assholes? Evil? .. really, if this is the most serious accusation of "evil" one can level at Apple then it isn't really going to affect my buying decisions. It's not like they're dealing in small arms or manufacturing cluster bombs. If you step back and think about it all Apple is doing is stuffing up their own app store, which can be classified as monumentally stupid and short sighted but not reall…
Sorry but I believe in a religious way that an hardware vendor should not have the power to enforce what software can run into a device. Like a bike vendor can't force you to only use your bike in a limited number of streets.
A company should have the right to control the user experience offered for a device that it designed and manufactured. That will mean denying a third party's right to bypass those controls.
The user has the right to do anything with the device once they've bought it.
Re: Apple's Mistake
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conversely, having a horrible train-wreck of an approval process like Apple does clearly doesn't mean you can't have unparalleled success either. So I guess we're back to square one.
Umm yes. But nobody seems to be arguing that. The original commenter implied that without vetting the applications, the carriers networks would be in danger. But that reality already exists on plenty of other platforms (even one by Microsoft) without any troubles. The success or failure of the platform is not in question.
It's possible that if Windows Mobile had been as popular as the iPhone, then the carriers _would_ have started to see a big problem with malware ruining their networks.
Re: Apple's Mistake
#177Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for…
Re: Apple's Mistake
#178Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for…
Re: Apple's Mistake
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's funny is that in the beginning, Apple didn't even want to provide an API for native applications. They wanted all developers to use the Web API. When developers balked at that idea Apple reluctantly laid out plans for native applications. I wouldn't believe that for a minute. The App Store would have been part of the iPhone product plan from day 1. It's too big, too complex, too strategic, and (yes) too well-e…
I'm not so sure about that. From an interview with Steve Jobs in the NY Times 1 Nov 2007: “I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.” "We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore.…
But the App Store was announced to the public only seven months after that, in June of 2008.
If they did all that work in seven months, my resume will be on someone's desk at Apple by Monday. Seriously. I don't want to compete with any large companies that can move that fast. They win.
No, the only reasonable conclusion is that you can't take Jobs at his word when he appears to rule something out.
Re: Apple's Mistake
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that the indentation complaints are valid, but the fix should definitely go through QA while the users continue to suffer. While I'm sure it works on the developer machine, it is much better to have a program that takes a long time and works right than for it to give incorrect results to users, or make a different part of the application stop working. If the feature was really critical and important, QA should fi…
I've seen lots of software that's gone through QA but didn't work. Ever use Microsoft Windows? QA is important, but determining how many spaces a line of code is indented is not QA. That is a code review, which is important, but not critical. There should be automated acceptance tests, so that new releases can be shipped immediately. (It's also worth noting that stuff like indenting, naming conventions, etc. can be a…