Not that it really matters, but it wasn’t Apple denying you turn by turn, it was Google who wouldn’t do it unless Apple gave up more of your privacy. That was a big reason Apple ended up building their own map solution.
I agree that battery life is likely to be a big question mark here - if it doesn’t last for more than a day, I definitely wouldn’t buy it. I actually think the UI looks fantastic. Hard to say until you actually use it, but I still give Apple the benefit of the doubt here.
I expect most phones to be a little bit underwhelming these days. It’s become a pretty mature market segment, and the huge variety of Android phones out there mean any given feature has likely been done somewhere else, so you’re never very likely to get a big jump in features anymore. That said, I expect performance will be fantastic as compared to other phones, the cameral will likely be way better than most any other, and the combination of features will be mostly what I’m looking for. Put another way, good design is about tradeoffs, and to me Apple does the best job at making the tradeoffs I like.
It’s Apple’s map solution I took exception to, not Google’s. Maps on IOS 6 supported turn by turn on the 4S, but not the 4. The phone was definitely capable - Waze worked quite happily on the 4. Which means either Apple’s programmers sucked (actually an argument I’d almost buy, given what a clusterfuck Maps was) or they deliberately withheld it to encourage upgrades.
Actually most of the world are using Android. You can argue about fragmentation all day, but Android uptake is steady and dominates developing markets in particular. I suspect you really mean “most of the world in the USA”.
Apple needs to demonstrate that they are still visionaries, and there is nothing to show that here. Without Jobs they are following again.
The division between ‘techies’ and everyone else is giving away to a division between everyone else and ‘your Grandma’.
“Apple needs to demonstrate that they are still visionaries, and there is nothing to show that here. Without Jobs they are following again.”
Question. Apple has billions in the bank. Who do they “need” to demonstrate visionariship to?
Jobs did fine by the company. Sure, he helped save it. He cut cruft and expanded on what worked. (And then he killed what worked for things which worked better.) Granted.
But maybe we could recognize that he didn’t do any of those things alone, and that those who helped him do those things are now running the company. Maybe those people are doing just fine making things folk like to buy.
(Or maybe it’s just me that’s ready to stop thinking of Jobs as some sort of magic business elf without whom no innovation is possible.)
So there’s the Android that you always hear bragging about when Apple comes out with something new (the high end), and then there’s the Android that’s on billions of devices (the low end). The giant market share difference comes at the low end, and at the high end where Apple plays, they’re quite competitive in terms of units (with Apple making the lion’s share of the profits). This pattern plays out in most parts of the world, with the big difference being the ratio of low end to high end devices being sold. So yes, Android dominates Apple in the parts of the market where Apple does not compete.
I don’t personally believe Apple has anything to prove about being visionaries, nor do I believe nearly enough time has passed since Jobs has been gone for anybody to make that case. It’s not like Apple defined a new market every single year he was around - there were always a plenty of years of largely incremental improvements. Time will tell if their watch becomes their next big growth driver (I do believe most Android watches will follow it’s template quite soon), or if they’ll have to do something else to keep up their growth.
Contrary to the belief of most techies, they won’t need to come up with mind-blowing features every year to succeed. They just need to keep up their market-leading customer satisfaction, design, and build quality, and their customers will keep coming back. The simple fact is that the smartphone market is largely mature at this point, and NOBODY is coming out with crazy innovative must have features. It’s incremental improvement all around, and most of their customers are going to stick with their existing ecosystem and what they know in the absence of a vastly better alternative. I’d go so far as to argue that price and the fact that they didn’t offer a large-screen alternative were by far the biggest drivers of people choosing Android over Apple. (What innovation!)
The one thing I always want to hear from people who claim Apple is screwed because they can no longer innovate is a) who is now doing all that market leading innovation, and b) what exactly their big innovation was that is (or will) steal all of Apple’s customers away.
The simple fact is that Apple’s success has never been about coming up with new features faster than everybody else. People have been complaining for YEARS that everything that Apple does was done somewhere else first, and that all their competitors have more features. Their secret has always been focusing on fewer features but doing them really really well, and counting on continuous incremental improvement to improve their feature set over time. Other companies tend to focus on having a wider feature set (which by necessity requires less time spent polishing), so new features often show up half baked and hard to use or understand.
(But I do see it said a lot that Apple must do X. Or else. But few say why, or if they do, the reasons offered seem spurious. This annoys me about punditry in general.)
I think the Watch looks neat enough. If my pattern for early-adoption holds, I expect to buy the third generation or so. I can actually see it supplanting my pocket computer smartphone.
That alone would make me grateful. For all the pixels and ink spilled about smartphones, I could probably live without one. (Could use a larger iPad, though.)
Sorry guys, I can just see myself getting sucked into being the Android guy in an argument, and although I do use Android its not a debate I have really strong feelings about, and I’ll probably end up taking a beating.
All your posts have been perfectly reasonable. I’m just a facetious bastard.
Count me in with those of y’all who don’t need or expect “revolutionary” out of every product announcement. Of course there were smart phones before the iPhone and here in Japan there were nearly smart feature phones but it seems like the iPhone made the market for smart phones. Just as there have been smart or feature heavy electronic watches for ages now (1)(2) it looks like what Apple is trying to do here is to make a market for the smart watch category.
Apple as a consumer electronics and entertainment company has to differentiate themselves from Sony, Samsung and the micro brands. They seem to be good at this with their branding and marketing strategies. They arent the scrappy computer company of the two Steves any more, that era is long gone. Perhaps someone in Apple noticed how in Japan some brands like Burburry and Louis Viton sell to the masses yet still retain a top shelf brand image and decided to adopt some of that strategy. As long as Tim Cook & Co.'s mature Apple can keep it up, I’m a happy little shareholder.
Some may remember this Seiko watch with a TV dating to 1984 which was pretty dang futuristic back then.
Unfortunately a vital detail is missing: the necessary TV receiver is inside a box (model no. TR02-01) approximately the size of a Walkman which is connected to the watch via the cable shown on the photograph. The idea is to put the cable through the sleeve of your jacket and hide the receiver in the pocket. Then, just put on the earphone (the cable also serves as an antenna) and you can watch TV inconspicuously almost anywhere. Only if you were able to recognize anything on the far too slow and terribly low-contrast liquid crystal display …
Just think of the TR02-01 as an iphone ahead of its time…
Battery life is no where near the biggest question mark. “The point” still is. These things are sort of neat, and that’s about it. And that’s me trying my best to extrapolate all of the super-awesome-scifi-coolness I can manage.
If I had $350 to burn, an original drawing or another bike (used) would be among the myriad things way higher on my list. Not to mention a couple of actual watches with some actual class.
If watches are a fashion statement (and they most definitely are), the statements smart watches make right now are, “I have no class,” and, “I have more money than sense.”
If I see one of these on a wrist, I will honestly need some convincing before I can take the person seriously. Their only saving grace, socially, over Glass and e-cigarettes is that they never become part of your face.
I’d argue Apple is one of the least offending parties in the planned obsolescence game.
Yes, the enthusiast tower-full-of-air computer is made out of generic upgradeable parts and that’s a sort of longevity in itself — as long as new parts are still being made that are compatible with your current ones and it’s not more cost effective to just get a new one. In practice this works less well than people think.
But talking about integrated-display desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and mp3 players: with a few exceptions (cracking macbook case plastic) I’ve had models made three, five, eight years ago that still work perfectly fine. In the meanwhile I’ve seen Sony Vaios, Motorola Xooms and countless cheap windows laptops and discount android phones of similar vintage grinding to a halt and failing prematurely. Relatively speaking, the Apple versions seem built to last.
I do think the price premium does mean longer-lasting materials and more refined build quality, if nothing else.
And speaking of phones and tablets I do think Apple’s mess is the smaller one regarding ‘sorry, your 2009 model is not compatible with the latest and greatest software/connectors/accessories’. Good luck with that.
Regarding ‘Apple needs to innovate’, I think the last awesome ‘haven’t seen it before at all’ Eureka moment I remember was the clickwheel. Even the all-screen-all-the-time multitouch was seen before in table version. What they do is refine previous innovations into something just better enough to be a bigger market success than ever before. That’s all they have been doing for years, and it has been a wildly successful strategy. The ‘they stopped innovation, they’re doomed’ narrative doesn’t make sense to me at all.
And about Android being the World’s Darling, my local experience (Brazil) is that some people do buy expensive Samsungs for the large screen (let’s ser how many keep doing that after ‘6 plus’) but most Android phones are chosen for price alone, with the ease of pirating apps instead of paying for them being a nice bonus. I’m guessing this is similar to China, India, Russia and many other markets.
All that said, I’m not convinced at all by that Apple Watch. What is it for, exactly?
