Posts by John Molloy86 posts • joined Wednesday 4th April 2007 19:44 GMT
The issue here is that smug, technically-obsessed posters don't understand why this thing is selling. It is always on, it is intuitive, and you do not have to pass some kind of geek IQ test to make it do things. At last there is a product that lets real people do stuff without having to resort to tech savvy relatives or worse, pay people, to get things done.
The barbarians are at the gates. The cabal is falling.
I fear you misread his post. He hates that he hasn't got it yet, not that he hates the device.
Thank you for that.
My mother died of a brain tumor last year, and my sister is a breast cancer survivor.
You may have a thicker skin than I, but I found it offensive.
Agreed. One can only hope that Anna has no relatives that have suffered from or are dying of cancer because this tasteless headline takes the f***ing biscuit.
In fact the whole thing is a trolly bitch about Apple.
"Indeed The Register predicted this move after the arrival of the first iPad. Sadly, we didn't patent the idea."
I think you have to actually do something to get a patent. Don't think you could look at a leading device and say "like that but in yellow, or like that but smaller." I can see that you are trying to hint at Apple patenting everything but that was a dumb comment.
One other point. Digitimes track record on Apple has been pretty abysmal. They are the News of the World of tech reporting, a place that with this article, you are only a couple of places above.
Shame it has no actual basis in fact.
"Tech titan faces tablet knockout in dozens of China's cities"
This thing is garnering a lot of publicity as the press would love to talk this up. But up until now it has managed to pull 45 iPads from the shelves. 45. So lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This is all hype and bluster and the press are lapping it up.
I could be completely wrong here, but I think chip and pin is a european initiative - I don't think it is used in the US or Asia, which is where the phones are developed and manufactured.
Every iAd sold, and every Siri query answered first time (it eventually falls back to google) is one less ad served by Google. iOS is still the largest source of mobile advertising income for Google. These small steps are eating away at that.
"Apple were also insanely profitable with their Macs some 20 years ago, but they chose high profit margins to market share"
Actually it was a different Apple, one full of bean counters and sugar water salesmen, basically bit players who didn't understand the market.
For all your sarcasm about Jobs, you have forgotten his best creation: the new Apple, the largest tech company in the world, ain't going to roll over this time. It's not that Jobs came back, it is what his management team have done over the last 15 years, but ignore that and just rely on usual British sarcasm, that'll fix it.
Samsung is a large company. The components division is completely separate from the mobile company. I think last year Apple spent something like 6-8 billion dollars with them and were Samsung's single largest customer.
I am pretty certain that the guy who ran the mobile division and put these "designs" into production was canned about 4 months ago.
But this argument appears to have tipped into "saving face" at Samsung and they are going at it with all they have, even if they are completely misusing the FRAND agreements already in place.
"I wonder how long it will be before Apple simply moves to alternative suppliers."
They already have shifted large quantities away.
"It is funny though, Samsung that has patents on actual inventions can't use those patents as they're standards,"
Let me spell it out for you. The reason they cannot use those patents to sue Apple is that they agreed to have them rolled into the standards. When that happens they must license them on FRAND terms, which means that they cannot use them as a lever to try and get better agreements with a customer just because they want. Also Samsung were seeking a 2.4% payment on the chip that Apple uses for connection to the wireless network on each and every infringement, which would be an outrageous figure and totally against the FRAND terms to which they signed up.
The iPhone 4S uses Qualcomm chips to do this connection and Qualcomm are already paying Samsung for the rights to use their patents. Samsung are trying to double dip here and charge the end customer for patents they have already licensed to the chip manufacturer.
"However the galaxy does look a fair old bit like an iPad"
I assume you have seen the charger? It's the same as the iPad charger, save for the color. And Samsung were the only manufacturer that went out of their way to skin Android to resemble the way the iPad looks and feels.
Samsung are on very shaky ground here, despite what the Apple haters seem to think.
In Japan, with the "Airplane Mode" argument, Samsung may have more luck, but I haven't had time to work out if there was prior art yet.
"It seems to me that Samsung have taken the only path that was open to them, and in using a selection of proper, defensible patents based on technological innovation "
All fine and dandy, save for the fact that the the patents Samsung are using to "protect themselves" are part of the 3G standard, so they are committed to licensing them on FRAND terms. That basically means if someone comes along with a better way of doing a mobile phone you cannot then use those patents to try and pull off a special deal to use their designs, their techniques. It certainly doesn't give Samsung the opportunity to lift Apple's designs for both hardware and software (skinning Android to look like iOS? Nobody else bothers to do the) even down to the design of the USB charger.
Where did you get your numbers from? Does it actually have anything in there for marketing? Did the design just come up at no cost? The cost of components are not the cost of manufacture, and Apple's leading device, the iPhone is probably responsible for the largest parts of Apple's profit margins as they get full retail from the carriers for every one sold.
More to the point. Amazon isn't allowed to sell iPads, only the scammers and third parties put iPads on Amazon as the actual company has no agreement with Apple to sell the iPad. This is why the sales charts on Amazon are not the place to go when trying to work out how well the iPad is selling because they don't there.
Yeah, right. People will not being buying playbooks in any quantity.
Not even people from the government.
The Dell appears to be a monitor.
The Apple product contains an HD camera, high-quality audio, three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a Thunderbolt port for daisy-chaining additional high-performance devices.
So you get what you pay for I suppose.
The word that is missing from the title is "preliminary", but don't let the UK focused anti-fanboys stop celebrating,,,
Firstly you make up a product called Logic X to instill, fear, uncertainty, doubt into the conversation.
"there are already alerts that it breaks a lot of commonly used plug-ins"
Link, please, because my Logic using friends have told me that they haven't had any major issues. Perhaps the plug-ins they use don't fall into the "broken" category.
Perhaps we should wait and actually see what it does, and what the next version of Logic is and does before panicking...
Thing is no one is forcing you to upgrade...
Just because Apple are releasing Lion - you don't HAVE to upgrade.
But I thought Apple had actually done this a few months back...
That is the message you get if you are low on drive space...
His "Perhaps the answer lies with the Financial Times, which spurred Apple to ease its app purchasing restrictions by introducing an HTML5 web app that bypasses the App Store entirely." argument kinda fails as that is how Apple launched the iPhone in the first place - and all the developers went up in arms to ask for full app writing privileges.
Basically Matt's moan this week is to try and get Apple to hand over the keys to their kingdom. Application lock in was an important idea from the start - once you are on iOS you stick with it - that people poo-pooed, but it is real and it is an important part of the iOS strategy.
Eagerly awaiting the article next week using same argument on getting all my Windows apps for free on Linux... Not clones, but the same applications.
"Go on Adobe, I bought Photoshop for Windows, give it to me for free on Linux. And no, I won't give you anything for development, I've already paid you for your time once."
Sounds a bit stupid when you put it like that.
Save that "his icon" consists of Apple's icon for wi-fi inside Apple's logo for sync.
So yes he probably has a strong case for insertion of two of Apple's icons being ripped off...
When Google fixes their OS... and delivers it to all their customers.
Latest prediction: 5 months
Number of Users delivered to: 4%
Looks like you'll need to buy a new phone.
You spend the time waiting for the downloads by posting your rant here.
That Android figure is made up of a lot of companies... Some giving their phones away... Takes the count way up but remember, it is not the best Android phones which are leading the count. If it were then you'd be seeing 18.7 million figures for whatever the Droid of the month is. You don't.
Apple basically have 2 phones. The iphone 4 and the iPhone 3gs. One company shipping 18.7 million phones and the greater part of the profit in the smartphone market is NOT to be sniffed at.
"The UI bits that Apple is claiming infringement of could have been thought up by a creative group of 6th formers with the right leadership. "
Yes the same can be said about Rothko's or Jackson Pollack's artwork.
The point is that it wasn't thought up by 6th formers and the look and feel of touchwiz is as close to the iPhone layout and design as you can get.
The only thing about that phone that is original is that the home button is an oblong instead of a circle and that isn't saying much now is it?
"Apple needs to justify its market cap and nothing short of spectacular growth will do that."
Well Apple have had pretty spectacular growth for a while now and it doesn't appear to move the needle much. Pretty low P/E ratios and if you back the cash out, ridiculously low P/E ratios. Meanwhile we get Amazon and other trading well above their earnings - 73.5 or so as of this morning.
Apple doesn't have to justify it's market cap at all. That is what the market does. The market cap of the company is what the market thinks it is worth... and Apple are very underrated.
When all the other companies produced new and interesting interfaces on top of Android...
Why did Samsung slavishly rip off the iPhone?
You don't have to try too hard to use your imagination to find out uses for it.
Your argument Stacy is "I don't want one, therefore there aren't any uses I can see".
Here's the thing - I am getting old - and having a large screen which I can prop up against a pillow in bed to watch an episode or two of a TV series or a movie before going to sleep is a perfect use. No dumb keyboard banging against your chin or fans kicking in to make it impossible to hear what is being said... And that is just one use...
Giant GPS device when in the car.
Giant phone with Skype for emergencies if you don't have a mobile - there are some of us you know.
Classic Games machine - have you seen the Atari collection? - pretty awesome for those of us of a certain age.
Use iSwifter to watch streaming Flash sites such as Hulu, there really is no end of possibilities.
But it's far easier to say that there are "no advantages" when you have invested in another product though.
"Apple is fantastic at fostering growth in new markets. It is terrible at maintaining market share."
Apple still holds the mobile music player market share - and this is not a unique occurrence.
The mobile phone market is very different from the tablet market. Cut throat competitiveness and high subsidies from the carriers are not going to be able to attract new customers with tablets if those customers are up to their necks attempting to recoup their phone subsidies.
Yes, there will be lots of entrants to the tablet market - but how many will stick?
At the moment Honeycomb isn't ready. Yes it is shipping on some devices but that doesn't make it actually ready. When it is ready then will it be "good enough"? Well we shall see but until Google implement some form of DRM then Netflix won't be on the boxes for example and that is a pretty large use of the tablet form thrown out the window.
I think you are making some huge assumptions here to get page hits, Matt. And I think that you are wrong when it comes to the future of tablets.
If you own a Google product then all your data belong Google.
If you buy from Apple then you get what you pay for with your agreed limitations.
If you buy from Google - you are the product which is sold.
For example, Android is "Open" except with Honeycomb where Google aren't releasing that yet.
The Apple ecosystem has a huge number of paying customers. It is where the money is.
With Android people who get cheap phones just want free software.
So you get the same level of noise without the payoff.
@hammarbtyp
Which manufacturer recently released a product that was missing 3 of its advertised features on day one?
No Flash. An SD card slot but nothing can actually access it as of yet. Promised 4G but you have to ship it back to the factory to get it upgraded when they make it available. Yes, Motorola, shipping vaporware promises where it counts.
And you are claiming that the iPad was a Bete? I think you should get your facts sorted sonny.
Rik, when you have a product that comes from nowhere and ships 15 million units in nine months then maybe you'd have a point. Until then keep your smarm to yourself.
This is going to sell shedloads and the rest of the pack very little indeed.
It's not about specs it's about function. At the moment the highly spec'd Xoom has no actual functions. There is very little you can do with it. Meanwhile... there are tons of things you can do with the iPad.
"I still however wonder about all the poeple who are buying and bought tablets. What are they really using this for?"
Best cinema for the bed. Netflix is great. You can try and do it with a netbook but the keyboard smashes your chin.
"Hope you like paying 42% more for media subscriptions."
Er, Apple wants to charge a company 30% if Apple generates the subscription. Apple won't take anything for the subscription if it is applied outside of the Apple's ecosystem. Apple would like the price of the subscription within Apple's ecosystem to match any offers outside the ecosystem.
Would you care to explain why this is 42% more?
More rampant anti-Apple trolling from someone who can't be bothered to actually look into it and do the math.
None of those companies listed are Mac shops... So your point?
I love all these AC's posting their opinions anonymously.
At the moment the only place you can make money selling apps is through Apple's App Store. Developers go to where the paying customers are and that is iOS. Apple have 100's of millions of customers who are prepared to pay money to buy applications. The competition not so much.
"Because this is bound to cause a massive stampede of developers and publishers pulling off the iOS platform, dooming the iThingys into oblivion."
Not going to happen.
"Jobs has already been burned when he was ripping UK citizens off at higher prices than the rest of the EU."
The UK record industry set both the terms and the prices. There were things called markets back in the day when the recording industry only sold vinyl and CDs, the record companies forced Apple to stick to the same markets when they released iTunes.
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your rant.
It's not like Apple is the only company that manufactures in Chine... Where are the reports from the other companies that do this? Easy for the haters to come down hard on Apple for actually reporting on this stuff... And easy for the press, especially the cynical, British, press to use the Apple name to garner hits but the truth is it has to be better for Apple to highlight this stuff instead of sweeping it under the carpet like the rest are doing.
OSX renders pdfs natively. You can read and create pdfs without the need for Acrobat on a Mac.
"They lost the desktop war"
Please stop with the tired argument that Apple lost the desktop war. Yes, IBM came in and ripped off the Apple II (slotted, expandable computer with a keyboard and monitor attached) and won the war. At no time did the Mac hold any significant share.
"they lost the browser war"
The battle for the web browser has been won with WebKit, which owes a significant chunk of its existence to Apple and the work it gave back to the community while developing Safari.
"they're losing the smartphone war."
The battle for the smartphone is far from over. I would like you to illustrate having 4% of global handset sales and 51% of the profit is "losing" from any way you look at it.
Either way this has nothing to do with Flash. Just sounds like a "Apple iz Evil" rant to me, with extra added cynicism from the guy who's probably happy to use Android, despite the fact that before the iPhone it was going to be Rimm-off.
'Do a search on "Flash Games" and I think you'll see that yes, many people would miss Flash - it isn't just about video you know."
I think most games that run in Flash have been converted to native iOS apps by now.
"I can do all those things on my £200 Acer Netbook running Linux without the need for any "apps" or itunes."
Yup, but just tell me how is your 200 quid Acer for curling up in bed and watching a movie? Does the keyboard stick out and catch your chin? Does it seem strange having to press the cursor buttons to move between pages on that book applications you have?
"Does your pad thingy have any USB ports or a webcam built in?"
Nope but that's not what it was bought for.
You think it is clever that you are slagging off people for having bought something that you can do for 200 quid... except you can't. The iPad is very good as a personal device for watching movies, reading and playing games. Prop it against a pillow in your bed and you have a very small cinema,. You just can't do that with a netbook.
"This is a new market"
Hang on - I though Microsoft "owned" this market for like 14 years or so...
"Large numbers of tablets with features virtually analogous to the iPad will be appearing this year and I expect they'll start turning up in the $200-300 range, nearly half what an iPad costs."
Interesting but wrong. The reason why there were no iPad competitors last year is that all the companies were under the impression that the iPad would cost $999. They were so shocked at the $499 price that NONE of the devices shown at CES last year were shipped within 6 months of the demo and those that were met the market with a resounding plop.
"Given that, I wonder how Apple will justify the price of it's product."
The price will be $499. That is reasonable for a device that ships with iOS on a large screen. The question really is how can the competition hit a lower price given the cost of production. Samsung with their Galaxy Tab required carrier subsidies to hit the price - and they make a lot of the components for the iPad.
"Having started in IT in the mid-1980's I can categorically state that, especially in the early days, "App" was in very regular usage. "
I think they were called programmes back then. Yes, with, that BBC spelling too. That's why they were called programmers and not Applicators or Application Consultants.
When this project actually exists then maybe Apple might need to catch up. So far we've had a courier-like cgi demo and some promises of a delivery date sometime next year.
If and when this thing ships then Apple might catch up.
Here's the thing I bet the iPad 2 ships before this thing.
Save for the fact that up until the release of the iPhone all iterations of Android resembled a RIM knock off. It was only after the announcement of the iPhone in Jan 2007 that Android underwent a touch screen, iPhone clone transformation. So Larry is desperate to say we didn't copy but perhaps that would be better coming from a company that didn't have a board member sitting on Apple's board during the development of both platforms. Pot, kettle, black.
Do you really think that the FTC would favor a Taiwanese company over the largest US technology company? This is just HTC responding to the 13 patent infringements that Apple took to the FTC earlier in the year. Now HTC have some Microsoft patents to fight back with they are trying.
Interestingly enough the patent deal that HTC did with Microsoft now gives a precedent to the "Microsoft owns the Linux part of Android" as that was in the contract that was signed. HTC is paying Microsoft a royalty for every Android phone they ship!
Which of these iPhone killers allows users to run the apps that they have already spent money on? The iPhone has a bit of a lock in there.
Also it's very easy to build a phone with the same list of features as the iPhone or even exceed them but it is far, far harder to exceed it's ease of use. And that can't be put in a bullet list of features.
Oh, and remind me, just when is Nokia going do well in America? They have never had any pentitration in the US in any significant amount. And with the current competition it is very unlike they ever will.
Yes Android will probably rule the world. There will be a load of so so phones that will sell for rock bottom prices and no one will be making any money. Apart from Apple. Who will be making shed loads.
