Great parallel drawn between the iPhone and appliances — it really is the microwave of the smartphone world.
What people always miss when making the "open" argument with regard to the iPhone is this: What functionality is "missing"?
There are a billion things that the iPhone can't do, and much of this "missing" functionality would be achievable if iOS was open source (and is achievable if you jailbreak). But Apple builds products for the mass market, and all of this amazing functionality the iPhone is "missing" is functionality the mass market can live with or without.
As new apps bring cool new functionality, great. As new features come along in future versions of iOS, even better. If some cool stuff is left out though, so be it. 90% of iPhone owners probably won't know or care.
Personally, I do know and I do care, so I use an Android phone.
Not to be a contrarian or anything, but having been using both an Android and an iPhone for the past 3 years, I don't see a single feature on Android that would classify it as such a superior/better "computer" than the iPhone. They're both very complete and versatile little computers, just suited for different tastes. If the iPhone is a microwave, so is Android...
You're totally right. Developers should have no interest in the television that will bring apps to the forefront of the living room, succeeding where Google and others have failed. Why would hackers want to develop for another massively successful category of iOS products?
Ah, well that's different. A detailed post with specifics of the technologies involved, information on any differences between platforms, new UI concepts that will be introduced, things that will be exclusive to the TV, etc - that would be useful. However this post is just for consumers, talking about rumours, price, etc, with a few quotes from industry execs scattered around.
An article on launch day, fine, but this article does not have any information that will likely benefit people on HackerNews and is likely detrimental, causing information clutter. At this point, we all know that Apple are likely to launch a TV, let's hear more about it when they actually launch it.
Whether or not you or I agree, you've completely missed the point the author makes.
"For tech savvy smartphone users, committing to a two-year contract is brutal. Mobile technology moves so fast that smartphones can seem outdated just months after they launch. While this trend is bound to continue, the degree to which new generations of Android phones outdo their predecessors will always ebb and flow. Handsets have been improving at a somewhat modest pace for the past year or so, but the next crop of smartphones to hit store shelves will represent a huge leap forward rather than a few short steps."
His position is that while next-gen will always surpass current-gen, the upcoming handsets he covers will be a more substantial leap than generations past, and subsequent devices over the next 6-9 months will be playing catch-up rather than continuing to leapfrog.
I think your response is a bit short-sighted. Look at market share as an indicator, not a means to an end. Apple might not care that its market share is 10% or 70%, but it does care that it just launched a new smartphone and sales are slowing while its rivals are picking up steam.
If you want to believe that it's a coincidence that Apple is hitting its competitors the hardest in two countries where it seems to be losing the most ground, that's fine. Others might not share your opinion though. Germany and France are key markets — remember, the 4S launched in each of those countries at the same time as in the US.
Don't focus on market share, focus on what it might tell us.
> "but it does care that it just launched a new smartphone and sales are slowing while its rivals are picking up steam."
Again, Apple's sales may not be slowing in those regions. They could be enjoying fairly large year-over-year sales increases and still be losing share if the overall smartphone market is growing faster than they are and others (Android) are capturing most of that growth. We simply do not know. What we also do not know is: what kind of profit those other phones are generating and who they're selling to. If they're glorified feature-phones with razor-thin margins (as is often the case in other regions with explosive android growth) every indication is that Apple simply would not care about that market any more than they care about the lower-margin segments of the markets for laptops, desktops, media players, tablets, etc.
So, yes, market share could be part of an interesting larger story. But we have absolutely nothing to give context or larger meaning to the market share number. So the number itself is simply useless. Particularly as justification for some assertion that based on that number alone Apple is going to change its long-standing and very-profitable approach.
Why would Apple care about profits or margins its rivals are achieving? What matters is what Reuters is suggesting: For whatever reason (they suggest pricing/economy) people are buying not-iPhones instead of iPhones in what appears to be an increasing number of cases. Market share is an indication of that. Apple may not care about market share as a metric per say, but the company absolutely cares about people buying not-iPhones instead of iPhones. This, of course, is why they're suing every single one of their biggest competitors to begin with.
> "Why would Apple care about profits or margins its rivals are achieving?"
Because not all smartphones are in the same market segment.
If competitors are selling expensive phones, it's relevant to Apple's interests. It means they're legitimately getting beaten in the segment they're actively targeting. (The subsidized/$400+ segment)
But if competitors are selling cheap phones, then those sales don't represent any sort of loss to Apple as those customers were probably not going to spend 400+ on a phone and Apple has no (apparent) designs on the low-margin market. They would seemingly rather cede the $200 phone segment entirely than compete in it.
And whether those $200 phones are running Symbian or Android or whatever else is largely irrelevant to Apple.
And again, this is not unlike the way they've ceded the low-margin segment in every other market they compete in.
"The more interesting stat, perhaps, is that more than a quarter of respondents in ChangeWave’s survey who confirmed an imminent Kindle Fire purchase said they would buy the Amazon tablet in place of an iPad."
The correlation between the intentions of respondents in this survey and the general tablet-buying public is not clear, as is the case with any survey, but in this context the Kindle Fire is clearly a threat to the iPad. 26% - that's a huge threat.
What people always miss when making the "open" argument with regard to the iPhone is this: What functionality is "missing"?
There are a billion things that the iPhone can't do, and much of this "missing" functionality would be achievable if iOS was open source (and is achievable if you jailbreak). But Apple builds products for the mass market, and all of this amazing functionality the iPhone is "missing" is functionality the mass market can live with or without.
As new apps bring cool new functionality, great. As new features come along in future versions of iOS, even better. If some cool stuff is left out though, so be it. 90% of iPhone owners probably won't know or care.
Personally, I do know and I do care, so I use an Android phone.