How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
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Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#2These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock.
I'm curious what they change but web searches just return the same three sound bites.
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#3These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock. I'm curious what they chan…
I'm curious what they change but web searches just return the same three sound bites.
On a different note, would this cause buyers to be less happy, knowing that there will be a better product in a week? Along the same lines as The Paradox of Choice[1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#4Maybe consumption patterns are extremely different in that market, but it seems that continuously changing hardware of a phone is not really that consumer friendly.
My current Android phone (Galaxy Nexus) is almost two years old and my current iPhone is a 4S (running iOS 7). I will soon be upgrading both, but I can't really see myself changing devices more of then than that. It's a convenience and cost issue. Even if you make the data transition seamless and remove the cost barrier, you are still left with limit of how often people will want to change their routine.
Needless to say, the comparisons like this are meaningless, because Apple is much more than a fancy set of hardware. iOS 7 update made my iPhone 4S camera feel like a brand new piece of hardware, when all I did was update the software...
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#5100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1].
And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version".
These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are just tossed due to a small error?
And man, would it suck to order a phone and then have it be obsolete within a couple of days of having it be delivered.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57540705-37/apples-fiscal-...
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#6These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock. I'm curious what they chan…
Forbes has been hit and miss lately. For every good article they do about tech, they do some short, sensationalist 'China is taking over' piece like this.
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#7These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock. I'm curious what they chan…
I'm curious what they change but web searches just return the same three sound bites. Agreed. The article didn't exactly go into how they go about this. On a different note, would this cause buyers to be less happy, knowing that there will be a better product in a week? Along the same lines as The Paradox of Choice[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...
I think so, Apple has been successful with slow release cylces and making their stuff desirable. For lower cost consumer stuff it probably doesn't matter but these Chinese phones supposedly cost $300+ so I could see holding off a purchase to wait for improvements. Then again, I've had a Tracfone with a buggy LCD for years so I'm always waiting anyway.
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#8100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1]. And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version". These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are j…
I'm also wondering how you get regulatory approval. It doesn't take a lot of change to trigger a recertification with the FCC.
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#9If only Google did the same with all Android devices, or at least a big "Google-approved" subset of them. They need to bring over the ChromeOS update system to Android, especially now that Chrome and Android have the same guy running them.
Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices
#10Here's an experiment. Take all the forum members on macrumors and crowd source a new phone by taking all of their ideas. See what kind of mutant non-functioning phone results from a democratic process. One of the reason why Apple and Google's phones and OSs are successful is because there are visionaries (Ives, Jobs, Rubin) at the top coming up with new ideas, instead of taking a poll and purely going with consumer feedback.