Predicted by a 3 year old comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/COenroJWEAAjLoi.jpg:large
Outside of Microsoft (disclosure: MS employee), I don't see much competition for Apple in the innovative premium tablet space. They still execute well in the phone space, watch seems to be shaping up fine, they are still the only PC maker that is known for producing PCs that can last. The costs don't seem too off from the competition, unless we are talking about Xiaomi or Lenovo, but then the tradeoffs are obvious (no longer in the premium space).
I do see Apple slowing down a bit in innovation. I mean, if iPad Pro was released last year (stylus, yeh!), I might have bought it, but the Surface 3 came out instead, which is quite decent (I won't go SP3 because of the fan). But Apple is still executing well, they aren't making many mistakes. They have built up a loyal fanbase and haven't done anything to betray them yet.
People who depend on tech are usually about the shiny more than normal consumers, who just want to get what they need done. The rabid irrational Apple fanboy isn't grandma, no, it is the young kid working in tech.
This may perhaps reflect the different professional subcultures we're around, but IME "people who depend on tech" are _less_ prone to this (not necessarily the rabid fanboying but the equivalent effect). I think you're underestimating the effect that an unwillingness to do (relatively) in-depth research has on the purchasing decisions of "normal consumers". I.e., "wanting what they need to get done" is a wonderful wish, but it's somewhat meaningless when decoupled from knowing the differences/capabilities of each device. I don't think it's controversial to say that normal consumers put much much more faith in the wisdom of the crowds, and (if they can afford it), Apple products are the beginning and end of their search. The fact that "Android" or even "high-end Android" isn't a cohesive brand to the casual observer means that iPhones seem like a plurality of their cursory data set, even when it's not the majority (which, at least in the US, is pretty often).
Even in 2015, I have people asking me in slightly shocked tones why I don't use an iPhone, and their certainty is always based entirely on social proof (they generally have no knowledge about whatever is I happen to be using).
I cannot count the amount of times I have experienced this phenomena. A couple of years ago, when I first got an android phone, I remember someone say "Ha, you don't have an iPhone, your poor!"... the content of the comment didn't really disturb me, what did was the reasoning which lead the person to generate such a perspective.
Care to break down Apple vs. Microsoft's revenues in tablets? I can't imagine it's within two orders of magnitude, at which point I'd hardly say that Microsoft counts as competition. But maybe I'm wrong about the numbers.
(Granted, you said "pro tablets". I doubt we can get numbers on that, but I think the relevant distinction is "tablets used for work" rather than "tablets with XYZ specs", and in that space too I suspect without data that Apple is far and beyond the leader in terms of revenue.)
> iPad is far from worthless and Apple is far from
> Trivial in the space
> The point is that Apple is no longer the leader/innovator in
> the space
> People who depend on tech to make their living (often) require
> more than intangible benefits, and the competition has now
> caught/surpassed them as far as tech goes
[0] https://chitika.com/insights/2014/q4-tablet-update [1] https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/tablet-ownership-highest...
I'm not the parent commenter, but from the top...
> Far from trivial doesn't really capture a device that combines being the most expensive with a 75% market share in the US[0] and where US tablet ownership among internet users is 54%[1].
As hinted at by the first part of the sentence you're responding to, this thread is talking about the quality of iOS devices for professional work, not their popularity.
> Oooh, is there (yet another) new iPhone killer out again this month?
The snark here handily hides the lack of substance: once again, the reason there's no iPhone-killer (and I don't anticipate there being one for some time) is a different question from whether there's an alternative better-suited to professional work.
But Apple never created new product categories successfully in the past. People bought Macs in lieu of PC's; iPods in lieu of Discmans/minidisc/other MP3 players; iPhones in lieu of flip phones, candy bars, or blackberries.
They tried to create a new product category with the iPad and get people who don't own a computer to buy one (or buy one in addition to their normal computer purchases). It's been mildly successful so far, but sales have been falling. Apple should probably stick with replacing existing product categories with a well-designed, premium alternative.
Now that iIOS has multitasking it changes in an important way. I wonder if it can be a productivity device now. But its still not great when it comes to balancing more than 2 apps.
http://www.macworld.com/article/1163019/ios_5_new_gestures.h...
If you swipe with four fingers to the left or right, you can move between your two most recent apps. Hopefully iOS9 will make "multi-tasking" even easier.
I think I heard at WWDC that iOS 9 adds support for command-tab, which goes great with a hardware keyboard.
Before that he got a bulky Vista laptop that was on sale. He said that he felt silly walking around the airport with it when everyone else had some light tablet.
I would still be using my iPad for development, except for the fact that I found the 9.5" screen to be just too limiting. The other reason was that all the bluetooth keyboards require a separate cable for charging, which I hate.
The larger screen and the fact that they keyboard cover is powered by the tablet itself makes this super compelling.
Not for my "every day development" machine, but for use on road trips or so I can go spend some time in the middle of the woods without a full-sized laptop in tow.
Also, the updated screen tech for the pencil hopefully means I don't need to buy a separate Wacom tablet.
Coda[2] for iOS is also very compelling for a number of tasks, most importantly web development with a live preview. Editorial[3] is worth mentioning as well for it's deep customizability and scriptability.
So, the workflow is still pretty reliant on a desktop or VPS somewhere but the tools are becoming much cleaner and more integrated along the newer app communication features of iOS.
[1]: http://workingcopyapp.com [2]: https://panic.com/coda-ios/ [3]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/editorial/id673907758?mt=8
I basically used the tablet as a terminal to an EC2 instance. vim, tmux, git ...
When I was away from Wifi, it was a good excuse not to think about work.
So WinRT and SurfaceRT struggled. My sister bought one and liked it though.
In a lot of ways the Surface is a laptop with a detachable keyboard and the OS and eco system is still based on that. Apple wants their eco system to develop from a clean touch OS base into productivity areas. Having said that, they are really lagging in this area and the momentum has shifted well away from iPads in the business world.
The Surface might beat the iPad pro, but I do wonder if the either will be the future of productivity compared with a laptop and a tablet.
I picked one up on a curious whim, and often use this language to describe the Surface 3. It really does act like a laptop, all the way down to going to sleep while I'm playing music, and hibernating during periods of inactivity.
My brother-in-law will probably love this iPad Pro as he is a financial advisor and spends a lot of time getting quotes from websites, so he loves his iPad. He hates his MacBook Pro as he says "it keeps too many things open and doesn't shut them down properly" which is indicative of not understanding how apps close on OSX (or bothering to learn), and an interesting side-effect of the 'freeze-dried' app states on iOS for multitasking. I would have thought that OSX > iOS (I find using the iPad frustrating as it is like using a child's toy with no filesystem access) but for "real world" users it is obviously different. Enlightening to me anyway!
Editorial is perfect for writing and blogging.
Procreate is awesome for painting(of course it's not PS+Wacom, but it is surprisingly good).
I can use Recorder to record audio for my videos.
And Pinnacle Studio is a surprisingly awesome for editing videos.
Maybe they don't exactly compete with pro tools available for mac and pc, but they are amazing. And Pinnacle/Procreate totally crush everything available on Linux(for my purposes).
From notes, to scripts for clients servers, it just took over.
Being able to quickly sketch, or take a photo of something and add notes too it quickly is super handy.
People who are mobile (as in floating around an office or travel) whose job tasks are easily attributable to specific applications are very happy with iPads. Ideally, the number of applications they use every day on a traditional PC is less than 5. Examples: Sales, Executives, auditors, policemen, medical professionals, case workers.
We had one group of auditors who literally sent my team a $200 fruit basket in appreciation for their iPads. The card said something like "You changed our lives. Thank you!" Executives spend 95% of their day in mail or approving things... again, perfect use case as long as that workflow doesn't require IE6 :)
If you're a consultant, whose specific tasks may change day to day, a full-stack devops guy using any of 15 tools, or a professional writer churning out copy, than an iPad doesn't work. That's ok... a $500 nailgun doesn't make sense for hanging a picture. We have the luxury of choosing tools these days... in 1999, mobile == 12 lb laptop with cable!
I haven't seen anyone, including Microsoft badged people, using a Surface Pro as anything but a nice laptop.
Were they using a custom made app for their specific task or something like that?
- Pre-boot authentication. - Windows sign-in - VPN two-factor sign-in - Web Portal access - Find your thing.
Best case, that process took 7-9 minutes, at a customer site using guest wifi or air-card in an office building, with a potentially angry customer. Not fun. The typical user does that 5-10 times a day, and in many cases the workers were actually preparing paper reports on their own time to function.
Enter iPad. Access was a snap, and it performed better with marginal cellular connections. Accessing the web portal did still require a two-factor challenge, but that two factor was effective for ALL of their internal access. We used a web browser that gave them a native iPad browsing experience (vs. an SSL-VPN'd IE) and access to several different systems via app.
A better alternative in a laptop form factor would be a zero client laptop, but they are very niche devices.
I didn't really go into detail about the full use case, they get other benefits from the overall snappy iPad experience in terms of switching apps, etc.
If you run under any regulation (PCI-DSS, HIPAA etc.) your PC will have to be hardened, have anti-virus, full disk encryption, 2 factor auth for remote connection and tick every other possible "security" box to be compliant.
Mobile well it's easy just have an MDM and do what ever the fuck you want, so if you want to use your laptop from the train in a regulated industry you'll have to stand on one foot, hold the laptop over your head while giving a blood sample to authenticate you and on the other hand you can just hope on your tablet/mobile phone connect to your office using VPN on-demand or even a regular web app (as long as it's SSL because dur-dur security!) and you're golden.
HIPAA endpoints that are used to access, view or input patient data are in scope.
I am a QSA.
Obviously there is nothing preventing companies from creating new tablet version of apps for surface as well, but there might be a problem with the corporate "if it works, you won't get a budget to fix it" thinking.
Apples move with the pencil is more targeted at businesses, hospitals and such. Win the users at home first, convert them easily at work later, at a higher price with a better margin.
What really is happening is the usual trolling that happens after every Apple event.
Apple has different priorities. They'll make tablets more functional as CPU and battery improve. There will be a conversion with the desktop, or at least low-end laptops, at some point. When they put a fan in the iPad then you can question if they've lost their way.
(And Wang beat that by several years with a 3" thick monstrosity that, IIRC, went nowhere.)
Yes, the trolling reoccurs. Key is how excited the marketplace is for which product, naysayers aside. As others note: the iPod wasn't new, but it was subjectively better than anything else out there.
What was this and where can I read more about it?
I've tried to find a picture of it several times since, but nothing yet.
The keyboard cover thing? Sure I could agree with you on that. I actually think Surface did a better job with it especially with the adjustable kickstand but we'll see when I can actually touch and play with the iPad Pro one.
Every mac illustrator worth his salt is going to throw money at the screen to get this and I'm sure many many apps for the pen aren't far behind. Smart move by Apple
The enterprise market is more tricky... I can see some fancy plastic surgery office having iPad Pro's but when it comes to "less sexy" enterprise uses I still think Surface and Windows might be ahead
I'm an illustrator and this is definitely on my list. I am not a big fan of drawing where I'm looking any more, but Astropad + an ipad Pro will let me work in Illustrator in a cramped environment.
And maybe in a couple of years we'll finally get an Air/iPad Pro hybrid. Like the Surface, except running OSX.
haha that makes me laugh. Either a big wad of cash notes, or bags of metal change, or flicking a credit card at it like ninja stars. Even funnier would be the attempt to pay contactless by waving their NFC phone repeatedly over the screen like we used to do with magnets on CRTs before we realised the damage it did...
I have a MacBook and every time I use a Windows laptop I find the touchpad to be a complete joke and clicky clicky clicky. Even booting to Windows on my MacBook is painful as the touchpad suddenly becomes very dumb.
Maybe this is it, maybe not. What I want to do: read things, highlight, scribble notes, diagrams, outlines, sync, search, etc. Basically I want something that completely replaces paper coming out of a printer. It seems like the younger people maybe are more adapted to digital documents, but I have very strong spatial memory for paper and can find things I've written or read in paper very quickly.
Surface Pro has this, but is overkill frankly. iPad, kindle, other tablets have not been sufficiently usable to actually replace a printed or blank sheet of paper. This device may fit that use case, but it inhabits a priced point that's worse than Surface Pro. For some reason I'm waiting for something in the $200-300 price range to show up--things that are more expensive I feel like I have to protect and coddle. So, yes something like iOS definitely could work there. There are even some interesting eink devices that go after the paper replacement route. But they are also too expensive compared to Surface Pro.
Maybe this will be a big enough kick in the butt for Google to start supporting pen input in ChromeOS or Android (there are Android tablets that have pen input, but IIRC that support is plastered on top by manufacturers increasing support and integration costs significantly, so software updates don't happen).
This is what I'm hoping for as well. I'd love to use a phone with pen support, but as long as it's not built into the core OS, pen support is going to come at the cost of timely OS updates. And that's a trade-off I'm not willing to make since I generally buy unlocked and tend to skip quite a few generations before upgrading.
It's more than a year old now.
And you're deliberately misinterpreting that keynote. Unlike the devices that basically were on the market, you don't need a stylus to navigate the OS or use the device at all.
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/01/21/pencil-available-apple-s...
I guess I hadn't asked in a store since then. :)
Check out the sales figures [0]. Consumers didn't begin to adopt the iPod in detectable numbers until the third generation (when it got USB syncing), and it didn't really take off until the fourth (full USB connectivity, various other improvements.)
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/ipod-sales_n_468000...
Not only are they playing catch up, but they failed to adequately catch up.
The iPod was nowhere near the first mp3 player, it was just the best one. The iPad wasn't close to the first tablet. Will it be the best tablet? I don't know, but whether or not the Surface had a keyboard first won't be the deciding factor.
Every company is incorporating an absurd number of innovations pioneered by other people. When it comes to hardware, I just want to love using the device.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/14/us-apple-samsung-l...
> Koh frequently remarked on the similarity between each company's tablets. At one point during the hearing, she held one black glass tablet in each hand above her head, and asked Sullivan if she could identify which company produced which.
> "Not at this distance your honor," said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.
I get what you're saying, but they were asked to tell the difference over an unspecified distance.
I don't see this argument holding water and it seems to me that my interlocutor is comfortable with Apple stealing/copying other people's work but when they do to Apple it's all hell breaks loose, double standards maybe?
Their execution/quality control is still top notch though, but other companies are catching up.
Putting everything together is several order of magnitude harder than adding a part number to a BOM years before the ecosystem is ready to use it appropriately. They had to get there feature by feature, one at a time. Touch ID was a stepping stone for instance, and that's a whole engineering and design task by itself. It's a multi-year evolution to get to the point of adding a service that incidentally happens to use NFC as one of the many involved technologies. So, no, they did not "add NFC" without Apple Pay.
What specific changes have made it possible for NFC to work in this way? All those things you listed seem possible in 2012.
NFC was a complete basket case, and still remains that way except for Apple.
The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful.
June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.
Apple Pay didn't come out of the blue. The impending POS infrastructure change created the opportunity to launch a better payments user experience in the 2014-2015 timeframe. Apple knew this, and developed/acquired/refined a better security method (touchID + tokenization) and corresponding user experience to negotiate on favorable terms with banks and merchants, which sealed the deal for many and created momentum toward getting stragglers onboard and reaching broad market penetration.
Just adding an NFC chip and calling it a day changes nothing. Few markets are penetrated by hardware - or even hardware and software - alone.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...
When it comes to market adoption of hardware, typically the market leader gets picked up for adoption. By forcing their own version of mobile payments (passbook) and not allowing NFC, the market was split and NFC adoption stymied.
Apple Pay does not require Apple-specific contactless payment terminals and will work with Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, and American Express's ExpressPay terminals.
So merchants are not "locked in" to passbook.
The reason for Apple Pay success is that they worked with the companies in question so that the infrastructure was already in place when the phone was launched. I was in the UK the week of the Apple Pay launch there and the same terminals that 3 months prior were accepting my contactless card were now accepting my iPhone.
In other words it just worked.
The only reason Apple has support for those now in 2015 is because merchants weren't falling for the walled-garden ploy. Apple has finally caught up with other forms of payment, which is why Apple was a major staller for NFC technology adoption.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5944863/apple-reveals-full-line-up-of-pas...
From related link [1]:
> There's no NFC in the new iPhone, but you'll be able to use your screen as a scannable gift card/plane ticket/voucher/etc. with Passbook, which creates a virtual bundle of all those annoying cards you cram into your wallet. Here's an ideal little scenario for you: a free cup of coffee at Starbucks, because you've got a $25 credit built right into your phone. Hand it to the cashier, beep, coffee, slurp, bye.
If you think this somehow stymied NFC... thats an incredible stretch. Before Apple was it the gift card mafia stopping NFC? Were merchants going to just throw away their perfectly usable POS machines... because technology?
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5944514/all-the-best-new-features-of-ios-...
The entire context of this discussion was how Apple killed NFC adoption in 2012 by not supporting NFC and splitting the market with their own walled-garden solution. Even your quote shows the surprise on Gizmodo's part that they released some gift card substitute...
Lets say Apple had stuck NFC in an iPhone 4S. What then? Mobile payments is not a faucet you just turn on. They'd have to convince the entire market - retailers, banks, and credit card companies alike - that they needed to incur tens of million dollars of infrastructure changes and possibly more with fraud in order to... well, what exactly do they get? They'd move from something that people were used to (credit/debit cards) that had clear risk profiles to something unknown with little evidence of consumers willingness to adopt and no added benefit to retailers or banks.
You might respond - its a better user experience! Banks don't give a shit about user experience, thats why they close at 4pm. Retailers don't either, thats why they'd buy POS machines with crap UIs and never replace them even when the digitizer could barely create a signature.
Banks and credit card companies care about risk, and retailers care about keeping costs down and seeing clear benefit in the form of evidence of consumer interest before adopting. Banks and credit card companies are also powerful, quite conservative, and are middle-men that do not necessarily have users interests at heart. Nobody in this industry turns on a dime (heh). Knowing this, Apple chose to wait for the steady trickle of POS machine replacements in the coming POS transition that would follow from Visa's EMV migration announced in 2011 [1], focus on risk-reduction and gaining leverage with credit card companies and banks through TouchID, and launch Passbook as a proof of concept both to train users and show retailers that people want to use their phones. Passbook wasn't an mobile payments competitor, it was a progenitor. It sidestepped major gaps in infrastructure, and it was placed in the second or third tier of iOS features due to its limited usefulness.
Passbook seems to be what you're hung up on. Here's a question - if Apple is so amazeballs that it could have moved the market in 2012, why then are there still retailers and banks that are slow on the Apple Pay uptake? Is it because Google and the coalition of second tier nobodys is missing? No, its because banks and retailers generally don't give a shit about user experience, manage their infrastructure at their own pace, and have all sorts of issues and internal politics that affect their decision making about _anything_.
You keep saying the same thing and haven't provided nearly enough evidence to support the leaps you're making that Apple somehow killed the beautiful 'open' fairyland that would have been NFC in 2012. There was no NFC market in 2012 to split, just bumbling attempts that misread how to make headway in the market, and a handful of Android phones with the hardware just so they could say 'first!' I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
[1] http://www.emv-connection.com/emv-migration-driven-by-paymen...
I had said that Apple stalled NFC development by not releasing it in 2014. Are you saying that NFC market adoption would have been the same, if Apple had released NFC in 2012?
Well, they did Apple Pay. NFC is just an implementation detail, and NFC payments is far from dead
I'm assuming you haven't used a Surface Pro but you can mark my words now, Apple will release a direct copy of the Surface within 3 years. The iPad Pro is a glorified iPad and will be utterly unusable for doing anything professional, so it's not a copy at this stage.
Pretty much everything serious.
https://www.apple.com/business/mobile-enterprise-apps/health...
Oh yes there is. The car.
Very high margin. Plenty of opportunity to do something radically different.
As an aside, I find the obsession with touchscreen interfaces in cars to be irritating because obviously the testers test these things whilst sat perfectly still in a stationary vehicle or in a car with hydrogas suspension (just kidding), and not on a typical road that has bumps. They're impossible to use whilst in motion as your arm bounces around.
Disagree. This is a really commonly held viewpoint that I think is the product of our fast news cycles, and I don't think it approaches truth for another several years.
You are totally right that iPod and iPhone were not the first. While these were cool products when they came out, I think what's often lost is that it was only in the years of incremental improvements that defined how important these products were.
Tons of use cases are being unlocked in health, education, home automation, transportation, payments, enterprise, etc that these markets have been waiting for and wanting and are truly transformative. They're just not talked about as much, or hit that level of 'omg' for people who aren't dealing with those use cases, but they're real. The less sexy incremental stuff is amazing, and in fact, way more interesting because so few companies get the details right.
Just like you're saying about not being first, most blow-your-mind ideas that will come out in the next 10 years are probably already thought of, prototyped, or launched in some highly crippled form to an extremely limited audience. Two amazing things we can assume are in the pipeline are:
1. Driverless car, which will fundamentally change our transportation infrastructure.
2. Eye tracking and face tracking, which unlock new interaction paradigms that are even more natural and seamless. See the recent Faceshift acquisition [1] for evidence.
These are going to be awesome! But they'll take time to perfect.
I'm not sure what qualifies as innovations for you. I'll admit I'm not blown away by today's stuff, it is S-cycle after all, but I am impressed by the way they've implemented 3D touch. Its the first force touch implementation (vs watch and macbook) that I really like because it looks incredibly intuitive and everyday useful - like something that I'll wonder how I lived without.
Well anyway, I think we'd probably agree about a lot things, but I'd be curious as to what big innovation you've got in mind that's missing. Cheers.
[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/04/faceshift-motion-capture...
Just because they've been a computer company thus far doesn't mean it'll always be that way. They're the largest company on earth with over $100B in the bank and incredible consumer goodwill looking for any space with large profit margin potential where they can differentiate with good user experience.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/14/apple-self...
iPod had iTunes, true flat rate pricing for all music. Giant articles (if not books) have been written describing the huge challenge that was.
The iPhone was a completely new relationship between the phone manufacturer and the cellular carrier that allowed Apple to rake in unheard of profits. Their other main innovation with the iPhone was making a touch screen UI that was good. To be fair, that took a lot of engineering and UX work (early gen cap touch was terrible).
Apple was then able to pivot and make an app store built on existing infrastructure, another innovation that none of the other phone manufactures made. Yes "app stores" existed before the App Store, but they where not the one stop shop with guaranteed assurances that Apple offered. Executing on the App Store idea perfectly involved innovation for sure.
It's an admittedly nuanced statement, but not an outright falsehood.
I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro. Just like they were inspired by the original iPad, which was inspired by... which was inspired by... etc...
>I don't think anyone in that room took it for anything else - they've all seen the Samsung and Microsoft tablets that inspired the Pro.
Perhaps that's true for a room of tech experts and media. As for the thousands of common consumers watching at home, they may not draw the same conclusions.
In my opinion, this should be made illegal. We have seen in Germany during the years 1935 to 1945, and more recently with ISIS, what manipulative talk could lead people to do.
Virtually any device you put out that's not exactly, spec-by-spec the same, you can say 'never been a product like this before'. It's true and empty.
They do a lot of those, they're true, hyperbolic, and totally devoid of any significance.
For example they'll say 'the iPhone 6 was the most popular iPhone ... EVER'. As if it's significant. But that's completely unexpected and it's not news, either. I'll happily take a 10 trillion dollar bet that the iPhone 7 will sell even better. And that the new Galaxy S 6 sells better than the 5, and the 7 will sell better than the 6, too.
Or they'll say the iPhone 6S is the most advanced iPhone ... EVER. As if, again, that's news. As if we think they built a 6S that's worse than the 6.
It's a truthful, hyperbolic, totally insignificant statement. It's different from a falsehood.
Calling a 3 second video, a photo, in the sense that it's a bunch of photo frames, that's more of a direct falsehood to me. We use the word photo to denote a still image, and video for multiple frames of photos. But that's a marketing gimmick that's more ridiculous than it is disingenuous.
As for innovation, I mostly agree. The ability to execute extremely well and polish your work isn't innovation. It can be driven by innovations of course but it's not the kind of innovation we talk about when we refer to Apple's history. Since the iPhone 4 I've mostly felt a ton of polish but no real breakthroughs on the phone department for example, tablet wise... mostly just solid iterations like everyone else, nothing fundamentally innovative about the iPad 4 or Air or mini, really. Pro feels like more of the same, split screen we've seen before, styluses we've seen before. Again, executed well and polished.
I mean of course there's innovation, but it's not what sets them apart. Look at Force Touch for example, now 3D touch. People probably missed the fact Huawei demo'd force touch last week on their android phone. And that's a feature we'd think of as their innovation. Others, like a large tablet, split screen, type covers, wireless charging, a stylus, 3-second videos (called live photos) etc are all seen before.
You understand that sales growth can't last forever right?
iPad for example has had that happening to it (later revision sold less well).
What's the best Microsoft desktop OS? Which is the best Dell screen? Which is the best keyboard? Motorola phone? The current year's Apple lineup has always been better than the last year's, and that's what the "best ever" statements mean to me, and I believe that's what they mean to the target audience: "This is new, and it works at least as well as the old stuff."
Which other company, which other product line of comparable complexity, introduces features without compromising usability?
I don't think it's remarkable at all. It would be remarkable if they weren't getting better year after year.
I like Apple products as much as the next guy, but cmon, this is some serious kool-aid drinking here.
Apple doesn't produce software that is any less issue prone than any other vendor. In fact the chorus complaining about software regressions has been getting louder and louder, even from Apple fans.
Yosemite was a particularly low point with regard to Apple software.
http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/the-worst-bugs-in-os-x-yosemit...
http://www.tekrevue.com/yosemite-bugs-time-for-another-snow-...
Software is hard. Apple aren't special, their software has just as many issues as any other vendor's, which is actually kind of disappointing given they have full control of the hardware, MS actually does a lot better with regard to software quality given the varied HW landscape Windows is deployed to.
Edit: Software quality isn't just a Yosemite issue with Apple, it's a long running joke that you should never install a X.0 OSX release due to bugs.
It's also depends on the level we're talking. If we just take "product like the iPad pro" to mean "a large tablet" then yes it's a "complete falsehood".
But it obviously means "a large tablet with this attention to detail, with the supporting OS and app ecosystem finely tuned to work along with it". Which is true -- as all Surface tablets I've seen are if not subpar, different in several ways.
Yes. It's marketing - the magic context in which we suspend our disbelief and let people lie to our faces, and we then applaud and pay them.
Marketing is the process of figuring out who a product is for and how to get them to want to buy it (through channels like engineering, design, and yes, advertising). Apple being an excellent marketing company isn't a slur — it's an incredible complement. They absolutely excel at understanding who their target audience is, building devices that appeal to that audience, and advertising to ensure that audience is aware of how those devices address needs they may not have even known they had.
They make okay products (in absolute terms, not implying that anything is better) and would not have their completely rabid following did they not manipulate people into buying into their status, lifestyle, and that they're more valuable than their worth.
If anything gets us is not us believing the ad, but just getting pumped with the nice visuals and subtle suggestions (so more subsconscius manipulation than convincing us).
Oh yes, it will. Getting teen-agers to start applying basic precepts of personal hygiene is like trying to drill an oil well with a toothbrush. Those commercials get it exactly right: (1) you stink (2) only men who don't stink get laid (3) use a bloody deodorant, you testosterone-laden pig!
I was just thinking how a terminal web browser gets you laid :)
Watching theses events is like this famous passage of the Odyssey. Once you are tightly attached, and don't risk to go overboard (and start buying stuff you don't really need), then enjoy the show. I've been told their exciting song is the most detailed and beautiful thing you've ever heard :)
Of course they're selling the hell out of it, that's what companies that take in billions of dollars do: make a decent product and then promote it. At least the stuff Apple makes usually works and the features they add into their products are actually useful - yeah, I'm looking at you, Samsung, and your list of Samsung XXX functions that were obviously designed and implemented over a weekend.
Surface 3 Pro:
12.0 inches (30 cm) 2160x1440 (216 ppi) = 3 M pixels and the noisy fan
iPad Pro:
12.9-inch 2732-by-2048 resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi) = 5.5 M pixels (!) and no fan
On the other hand, as long as we don't know how good the Apple pencil is for writing (e.g. palm recognition), it's quite unclear how well suited the iPad Pro really is. A year from now the Pro tablet market will look very competitive I think, but for now it's still too much of a toy for my taste.
Just saying, I think Apple is still a pretty innovative company.
Androids huge sales are mostly low end of the market -- people who don't care about smartphones or computers, and just get whats cheaper with a 2 year contract.
Apple does reap the lion's share of profit from smartphone sales, but they don't dominate smartphone use.
Of course it is -- there are way more of those Android units.
But I wanted to point which users are more active, not mere volume. Even in the US Android could have more volume, but iOS users still generate far more traffic (not as total: as traffic per head).
If the 10% or 5% iOS users in a country generate the 20% or 30% of web traffic, then they are much more heavier tech/web users than the others.
Any proof?
Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
I realize that sites vary by demographics, so I'm curious if you're just making this statement up, using your own site's stats, or found something that actually backs this up on the wider web.
http://fortune.com/2015/09/04/apple-tv-everywhere-share/ http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-outshines-android-in-us-mobil...
Or:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/08/03/ios-users-...
Or even this, which spins the issue:
http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-beating-ios-in-web...
The latter is about Android "beating" iOs in web usage for the first time -- but in fact usage/users ratio is much higher in iOS, so you get more web usage from far fewer users.
>Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
Depends if it attracts the demographic who would opt for cheaper Android phones.
My numbers are from several generic articles (by ad companies, sites etc) on the respective platforms web use.
Yes,92% of industry profits is domination in my book. Without sustainable profits, marketshare is meaningless. Only profitable players are Samsung and Apple.
For example, if you're developing a business website, iOS dominates the market, because optimizing for Android is nigh impossible, and iOS users have more money, and spend more money (on average, your market segment may differ, mine does).
Or, if you're considering making an app, iOS dominates the market, because Android users don't like using apps, much less paying for them.
Apple makes more profit than any phone company in the world, by a very large margin.
That == Dominating mobile.
what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/revenue-gap-between-ios-and...
The "free with contract" or sub $400 market is a cut throat race to the bottom between Samsung and Xiaomi. Apple chooses not to enter that race (despite several journalists claiming they NEED a cheap phone to survive).
If the market leader has 90% market share and they grow to 95%, they have grown a lot less than you relatively (so the minor player can claim they have grown the most) but they now own a bigger piece of the pie than they used to.
This is why you should always be skeptical of anyone who uses relative numbers (growth) instead of absolute ones: the reality is probably that they have lost market share.
Which is what we have seen Apple do compared to Android these past three years.
You will notice that the early keynotes right after the iPhone and iPad came out were showing absolute numbers in shipments and dollars, and now, they just stick to percents and vague claims ("We're growing the fastest").
For example, below appears to be the report Cook used for his "+14% vs -0.4%" slide, which at best, is very misleading.
"In the worldwide mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), vendors shipped 464.6 million units, down -0.4% from the 466.3 million units shipped 2Q14.[1]"
Truth is, the smartphone market actually GREW by 11.6% (Q2 2014:302.1m => Q2 2015:337.2m).
1980: Apple has 10% of a 100,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 90,000,000.
1981: Apple has 15% of a 200,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 170,000,000. What happened was that while Apple's market share grew, it grew much slower than the market itself.
I guess you might want to look at the world that way; for example, if you wanted to know how difficult it would be to convince the entire market to switch to your product. But I tend to agree that market share would seem to be more useful for most purposes.
Apple never did the VERY first products of a category. There was Xerox before Lisa, PDAs before Newton, mp3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad, smartwatches before the Apple Watch, etc.
The only did the first products of a category that were where at least half-thought out (instead of rushed crap), and people actually wanted to buy in droves.
Newton is a more clear cut failure -- but was too ahead of its time as most things one would want just werent there (internet would be a biggie).
Apple PowerCD? (odd vertical CD player)
Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh? (oddly, the Cisco E20 appears to be identical in appearance)
But I didn't said they don't make flops.
Just that their "signature thing" is not coming up first with something, but coming with something that's somewhat thought out and people actually want to by. People remember them for these things: the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, iMac, etc (and IIRC Apple Watch too, did better than all competitor smartwatches combined).
Their story against Microsoft over the last decade has been nothing short but astonishing. No one could have predicted the dominance they have now in year 2000 or even 2005.
Plus, Apple has been playing catch up for a while now. I can't remember precisely which iOS release it was (I believe iOS 7) but the release was pretty much catching up with essential features already present in Android.
I have the 2014 one (brand new!) and it is disappointing. Less battery life than my old iPad 3. Worse performance too.
The iPad Pro is a big iPad. No x86, no fan, touch-based software stack, etc. It's not a computer, it doesn't have USB ports, it can't run desktop software. You can't plug it into a dock hook use it as a desktop machine.[1] On purpose. It's a very different point in the design space.
[1] Some people may consider the iPad Pro to be a Surface 3 with less features. And maybe it is depending on what you want from it. My take is that I've got a quad-core laptop with 16GB of RAM as my workhorse. I don't want a compromise device that's part tablet and part ULV laptop. I want a companion device with a big screen that I can mark up PDFs on. I want a bigger iPad, not a laptop with a detachable keyboard.
OSX has this to some extent with icons in the menu bar and changes in menu options when you press Alt, but on the iPad they were VERY wise to keep it in one place and to market the device as NOT a PC or workstation.
I think that's possibly because that's what a lot of people seemed to be wanting / hoping for, from this announcement. And it's not what Apple was looking to deliver - which is fine.
Nobody wants to use the equivalent of a thick toothpick to point at things on the screen, like we did with old Windows Mobile and Palm devices. (Just dialing a phone number required pulling the stylus out of its sleeve.) Being able to just poke at things with your fingertip, drag, gesture, etc. are all far superior methods of interaction. However, for precise operations, such as drawing or handwriting, it's a very different tool.
Doesn't compute.
But the selection of programs that are comfortable to use with the touchscreen is very small. In my case, pretty much web browsing, email, Netflix, and OneNote.
For typical programs, you'll either be fat-fingering buttons that are too small or you'll be pulling out the stylus frequently. The tablet experience does not compare well to an iPad.
I wouldn't like to think how MFC handles pinch to zoom, for example.
Its funny, at the presentation they mentioned the cover and how the magnets transfer input from the keyboard to the computer as if it was a revolutionary idea. Then again, it is Apple. They can come out with a bottle water product and swoon the masses.