Milking the iPhone
aboveavalon.com
aboveavalon.com
I don't think so. For that to happen there would have to be a quantum leap in user interfaces and right now I don't see any technology on the horizon that could provide that leap. Watch screens are too small for anything but displaying simplistic stuff, let alone letting the user meaningfully and fluidly control the device.
Voice interfaces have been tried for decades. They mostly failed. People are comfortable with them in very private environments (e.g. cars) but not when others are around (for good reason).
I think the author is right to conclude that Apple thinks we're still firmly in the smartphone era.
What about above-device "floating" gestures, e.g. Project Soli [1]. Gesturing above instead of on the device means much more space in which to do things.
If I could have floating gestures in front of my desktop I'd be very happy. Scrolling a page by waving my hand while leaning back in my seat. I think someone made something like this with Kinect.
It has been a while since I've used one and got to that opinion, and apparently software quality has gotten better. so if you are interested in this kind of thing it's maybe something to look into.
Currently I lean back, cross my arms and hold a wireless mouse when I read long articles.
We're basically out of technology for the next innovation period. The truly "magical" next step is a direct neural interface, and we're an unknown number of years away from that.
Nothing else can improve on the hand-sized touch screen. The alternatives all come with serious compromises. Voice is too loud and public, portable floating holographic displays haven't been invented yet and may suffer from privacy issues, and there's not much else available.
In-eye projection is probably the most promising approach, but the product would have to be no heavier than existing glasses, and I can't imagine that being viable for five years at a minimum. A decade would be more realistic.
We might have LCDs with holographic resolution by then, so all kinds of interesting things might be possible. But for now, hand-sized touch screens are as good as it gets - and will be for quite a while.
Of course there's still a lot you can do with a small touch panel. There's huge scope to make software much, much better and smarter than it is today.
Great opportunity for a jam session!
You're going to carry your phone with you anyway.
Even if the phone did have a cell antenna and did have a battery good enough for it, and even if it had human-level natural language processing, you'll want a phone-sized screen for, you know, all the stuff that you use your phone for today, for examples including but certainly not limited to: reading anything longer than an SMS. Looking at a web page. Looking at a map. Playing games. Taking a photo. Showing pictures/video to other people.
The idea that we'll give up on having screens big enough to actually look at things is just crazy. We love our phone screens. The one thing that people demonstrably want their phone screens to be is bigger.
If you're going to be carrying a phone-sized screen with you 95%+ of the time anyway, why on earth would you make the expensive, difficult decision to jam a cell antenna into your watch. Much less all the valid points that people make about voice interfaces and battery and so forth.
The idea that a personal computer is a good idea is just insane, for this reason:
You're going to be connected to a mainframe anyway.
Even if your personal computer did have enough storage and power you're still going to want connect to the mainframe to access reports and data.
So if you're going to have a connection to a mainframe anyway, why bother with all that local computing power?
---
I'm not saying it's a good idea in the current ecosystem but there are advantages to the watch having it's own network connectivity, and in fact I believe the current watch does connect directly to your wifi access point using credentials shared by the phone when possible.
The main issue with watch cellular access at the moment, is cost of paying for a phone contract for a watch, when at least at the moment, you will probably want a phone too.
Tim Cook also pooh-poohed headsup displays as a barrier between people, instead of connecting them. But, since earplugs and people checking their phones already disconnect people, this seems like diversionary bs to me. Apple is surely working on this, as they work on many things.
Small displays are the problem, bigger phones are popular despite their awkwardness. Headsup displays solve both: large display, out of the way.
Not sure about input; gesturing to yourself is going to look even crazier than talking to yourself.
That sounds painful.
(The word you are looking for is pooh-poohed.)
In the early seventies I used to carry my Philips portable cassette player and headphones everywhere, people thought I was crazy until Akio Morita had the same idea and got Sony to create the Walkman. Now people wear headphones in the street and hardly anyone thinks about it at all.
My point is that what you think is crazy now might well be normal in ten years time, or perhaps even tomorrow.
Wonder if it's technically possible...
It's handwavy Sci-Fi right now, but...
Just like how yes, if you have your laptop on you, you'd almost always prefer to use that over your phone, but your phone can be with you in many more scenarios.
A product that sacrifices general utility in pursuit of a 5%-10% use case is a niche product. Nothing wrong with that, but Apple isn't looking to add a new niche product.
Now, obviously, if you could throw cell connectivity onto a watch for very little cost and very few compromises to the rest of the watch, then sure, you would. But in the real world, cellular connectivity for a watch would be an enormous additional cost both monetarily and to anything else you wanted the watch to do. It doesn't make sense for a product that's trying for mass appeal.
The ability to not carry my phone is the only reason I'd be tempted to try a wearable device again (I had a gen 1 Apple Watch and sold it within a month). I'm not really interested in using it as an "always on" watch, but if I go for a run or take the kids to the park I'd love to be able to leave my phone at home and rely solely on my watch to stay connected. I wouldn't be using it for browsing or meaningful work, but to be able to receive calls, text messages and scan emails without carrying my phone would be great (cracked screens make the playground an expensive activity!).
Cook's comments followed a report on Monday from technology research firm IDC estimating that the tech giant sold 1.1 million units of the Apple Watch during the third quarter of 2016, down 71 percent from the year-ago quarter.
In movies and books they all have dental audiotransmitters, both in/out. Whisper to siri, no one will notice.
Edit: if she will read messages and rss-like things to me only, I'll probably look at the screen much less often.
no one including siri
But battery and power draw constraints put this two to five years out, depending on aggregate data needs.
I know it sounds a bit gimmicky (like using an iPad as a camera), but my father in law has a Galaxy Tab which is what he uses as a phone/tablet/computer. He just carries it wherever he goes.
Forcing people to learn foreign languages to talk to their devices is not a good idea.
I wonder if you've seen the rotating bezel of Samsung gear s3 in action, it might change your mind. But the watch UI is not the bottleneck, the constant wearing of a watch is.
If you have paid attention, Apple has reduced the ambitions of the watch. It's targeted at health/fitness and notifications now.
And Apple exited displays and WiFi routers because they are shrinking commodity markets. Neither Apple nor their customers would benefit from Apple continuing to chase that.
Apple pioneered the laser printer in the U.S. market and made a lot of money selling them. Nevertheless, they got out of the printer business when it became clear that printers were a commodity. No one today complains that Apple doesn't make printers. In fact if Apple started to, everyone would say they lost their minds.
Thus it will soon be with displays and WiFi routers.
So I'm having trouble buying the premise of the article.
I really would like to enter the Apple ecosystem but 1- they're not making the computer I want and 2- prices are just ridiculous.
The series of questionable statements include:
A phone in a watch is a game changer? Really?!
Apple is the only one focusing on smartphones? "Android" is mentioned only twice and only in the context of Android users moving to an iWatch Phone.
The claim that Apple Watch and TV are moats, but then arguing that WiFi routers don't really matter. Eh?
Even considering that Apple is looking seriously at wearable is debatable. You need to include the airpod as a wearable so that you have something else than the rarely updated Apple Watch.
- the press painting them in a good light.
- customers evangelizing its products.
- hiring, and retaining, the very best talent in the valley.
Some of the changes have also boosted sales. If you're sacrificing your ability to compete in the future, short-term profit is just "operation was a success, but the patient is dead"
Sure, Apple needs to increase sales but how it increases sales and how it positions itself strategically to keep growing shareholder value is the key thing.
Apple has been thinking about something like this for a long time.
It all depends on the workflow, if one mostly uses 1-2 apps fullscreen it can fly.
Given that, I think a giant screen running iOS is less than 4 years away. Related: I don't think macOS is long for this world.
They might do that, but it's not that high on user's priorities by any long shot.
Phone/tablet use has surpassed desktop use, and most of it happens on the go, on the sofa, on the bus, on the restaurant, and in other such places where no displays and keyboards make much sense.
For a niche, yes, they would be great (writers working on the coffee shop typing on their iPhone etc) but not for any majority of people, and not for Apple to "reassert their dominance".
This is extremely cool. The problem is, nobody really needs that.
So, business as usual? As I've been hearing the exact same things, only with more fanfare ("iPod Killer", "iPhone killer", "Macbook Air killer" etc.) for 15 years now...
Everything else is somewhere distant down their priority list, or not on any list at all, and unfortunately it shows.
In the past, Apple's strength has been their cohesive ecosystem. They seem like they're continually dropping parts of it while letting other parts wither.
For many of us, Apple computers represent the best tool for our jobs. Sure, we can use Linux or even Windows if forced to, but it will mean a less efficient and enjoyable working experience.
5K displays years before anyone else, even developing custom controller chips.
Wide colour gamut displays on laptops and desktops
Continuity to tie in the Mac and iOS systems.
Integrating a complete hardware subsystem with it's own OS and display in the form of the Touch Bar.
Going just a little further back they introduced the Fusion Drive, a custom flash/disk storage system adapting enterprise style tiered storage in a consumer package.
To support this thesis you'd need to show that other companies have been successfully advancing their platforms with better implemented, better thought out technologies and were thus leaving Apple behind. But where are these advanced features in other desktop and laptop systems that are leaving Apple in the dust? The only thing the PC market has that MacOS doesn't is touch screens which barely anybody actually uses.
Which solution seems to have the most thought and effort put into it, slapping a commodity touch sensor on a PC screen and calling it job done, or the Touch Bar?It's too early to tell how well adopted the touch bar will become, but nobody can accuse Apple of leaving touch interfaces for laptops unaddressed.
If Apple's new AI push succeeds, this will happen, but the company has a long path ahead.
Lackluster compared to what? Because in its field, watches in general, it's the #2 best selling watch. And in its niche, smartwatches, it's outselling the competition (Samsung, etc) by an order of magnitude or so.
It also became a multi-billion dollar business just as it came out -- and it's only in it's 2nd release (it took more time for the iPod to sell the same amount of units). And of course, compared to the profits coming in, there's probably not even a comparison, as Apple is unique in having high profit margins whereas many else are selling commodity hardware on thinner margins.
The main issue is people having unrealistic expectatations of what the sales of the Apple Watch should be. Obviously everybody has a smartphone (whether Apple or not), but very few will have a watch (whether Apple Watch or anything else). Heck, most people don't even wear an ordinary watch anymore.
So, given that, and given that Apple never said "the Apple Watch will surpass iPhone / iPad etc in sales", they just released it as another product they do, it's incredibly successful. In fact it just sold more units this quarter than it did last year, so it keeps improving too.
Apple themselves posted them. It's based on sales though, not units.
Here in Moscow (at Apple Premium Reseller site) it has eight models, down to iPhone 5s (which I resently purchased as a gift for a paltry price of about $344). http://www.re-store.ru/apple-iphone/
If someone don't know what an Apple Premium Reseller is, here is some info: http://www.apple.com/in/buy/apr/
http://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/Apple-denies-it-is-disco...
Apple premium reseller is an empty designation. It has been given to all kinds of ho-hum retailers judging from my country (where we only have those and no official Apple Store) and a couple of other countries I've worked on.
It just means the reseller passed a few basic Apple criteria, for support, space, etc.
It says nothing about the product line, and being only allowed to sell the latest line up etc.
Every article predicting hard times for Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook has the same flaw: not considering how many decades of runway these companies have if their business hits a rough patch.
The thing I am most excited about is integration of all a user's devices, and Apple has a good start on that.
Apple could end up adding iCar and iHome to their product line.
Citation needed, especially when it comes to mobile use.
The tactility might be good, but touch keyboards are much more flexible and let you free up tons of real estate for more screen in apps that don't need a keyboard.
Shouldn't that tradeoff be considered before one declares what's best?
Defense, in an industry like this, is vertical integration, so more like tools such as Xcode.
The Apple watch is a luxury item and fashion statement. An advertisement and status symbol. It does not insulate or protect the appeal or practicality of other products.
As an accessory, the watch promotes deeper investment, but it's adoption is niche.
The walled garden and business partnerships of the app store to provide desirable mobile media and content that motivates actually using an iPhone for anything at all is the true moat and fortification surrounding the iPhone.
As for attacking itself as an evolutionary leap forward, Apple would need to obviate its current product line with something better that reduces dependency on said products. Phone service and phone numbers may eventually become anachronistic. At which point, phones cease to be phones, really, but the name and the digital broadband connection will still be there.
Maybe personal orbital satellites and sub-orbital high altitude personal drones will obviate today's concept of a handset? Does that sound silly, because I can't tell anymore.
I laughed when I read these two sentences. Speaking of the Mac, there are hardly any Apple products that fit best for many consumers. Apple and the people who write about Apple may chant that "Apple is very vocal about continuing to invest in the Mac", but what's seen in retail and online stores says a lot about the "investment" not being helpful or useful for customers who have been with Apple for long.
> …
> However, Apple's handling of the Mac line has been increasingly questionable.
Seriously, was "questionable" the best adjective that the author could come up with in this context? In my opinion, the right wording, based on facts as observed by consumers, should be, "However, Apple's abandoning of the Mac line and its usual tightlippedness has been mind numbingly incomprehensible and exasperatingly frustrating."
According to whom? The results for this quarter (after Samsung took back the Galaxy) will be published early next year...
But I don't think Apple's industry focus will ever shift.
Rather their/our definition of what 'personal computing' means will continue to evolve as the technology does.
An iPhone is a personal computer. An Apple Watch wants to be a personal computer. Apple won't ever stop being a personal computer company.
It's just that some day, a personal computer will be precisely that: a computer inside a person, integrated as software and hardware. A human iOS.
Surely that is the ultimate endgoal, and not an aluminum car (with a charge point under its chasis) that can talk.
For every piece of the puzzle that they drop they become potentially easier to replace.
Is the author suggesting autonomous smart caravans?
Huge vacuum there, something's bound to happen.
Watch has been a huge and very expensive misstep. IMO Apple should have tried to own the home automation market, with secure, high-margin, high-quality products linked into the Apple ecosystem and built with some measure of AI and smart collective decision making - the kind of thing Nest tried to do, but never quite got right, and which the other players in that market (Belkin, etc) don't have the smarts to try.
Watch is a mistake because it's not useful in the way that classic Apple products are. It can do some mildly interesting things, but the whole point of an Apple product is that you're supposed to dream about owning it because you can do more with it than without it.
Watch doesn't do that. It's a fashion accessory, not a powerful tool that happens to be beautifully designed. So even if it's refined physically - thinner, etc - it's never going to be a huge success unless someone in Cupertino works out how to change that.
The next iPhone needs to be a Mac computer in your pocket and have the full functionality of a Mac.
One thing that is painfully missing from iOS is multiuser support.
It is unbelievable that, so many years later, I can't hand my iPhone or iPad to a friend, co-worker, my kids or someone at a meeting and have them be in "guest" mode or some mode where I can exercise complete access control to information and apps. Today, if you hand your unlocked iOS device to someone they have full access to anything that isn't locked out specifically by an app. And, even at that, your entire device is exposed.
The other improvement would be more granularity in selecting what lives outside and inside the lock screen. I work in an ITAR environment, which means my phone needs to have a password in order to prevent access to my ITAR email and calendar. NOTHING ELSE ON MY PHONE requires that lockout. I can't even hang-up the damn thing while on a call without entering a password because the damn lock screen locks out everything. This is ridiculous.
If I had the aforementioned multi-user mode I could setup a "work" user to deal with my ITAR stuff and a "me" user to expose what I want and how I want it.
There is no good reason I can come up with to have my friggin calculator live behind a password. I should be able to define what I want on each side of that wall.
Finally, and this would be the killer app, the new your-iphone-is-a-mac device should have the technology necessary to bring up the MacOS interface on any computer any time. In other words, when I go to work, I should be able to connect to my Mac-in-my-pocket device and bring-up MacOS on a window on my Windows 10 machine.
It should be painless and seamless. If it requires a little USB device, that's fine. The phone should have a slot for this device to be stored so it can go with you anywhere. Pop it out, plug it in and you are in business. This should also work on traditional Macs.
Now your phone is your real personal computer, everywhere.
It could even use the touchscreen as the trackpad if necessary.
The other huge evolutionary step if they took this path would be to allow full file system access. Maybe there's a distinction between MacOS and iOS apps. The iOS stuff can remain sandboxed while the MacOS apps enjoy full file system access.
Finally, the phone's physical UI needs to evolve. This business of overloading a precious few buttons is nonsense. Double click, triple click, the volume button is this and that...etc. Insane. Most people have no clue because most people don't operate that way. What the iPhone desperately needs is something like an edge mounted wheel or, even better, a two dimensional sensor (like the mice that image an amplified version of the table to determine how far you moved, only this one would image your thumb).
Something like scrolling through your address book or apps could be a single handed, single finger operation. Many years ago I had a Motorola flip phone with a piggy back accessory (forgot the name) that included a rotary wheel with a push-to-select function. It was incredibly useful and fast.
The iPhone also needs a few buttons the user can define. I want a real edge-mounted button to, for example, launch my RPN calculator. Maybe another button to launch the weather app, stocks or whatever. Physical buttons are good.
Now, I understand the minimalist design thing. Fine. Provide an unencumbered interface and protocol entrepreneurs can use to interface with the phone and build such add-on products. By unencumbered I mean something like a simple high speed serial port with power, no licensing, no walled garden, no buying proprietary chips. The range of innovation this would spur would be massive.
There's a lot they can do with the device and form factor. They need to get off this thinner, thinner, thinner bullshit. I don't want it thinner. I'd gladly have a device twice as thick as the current crop of iphones if it did a good portion of what I described above. People don't buy these things because they are thin. I am still on an iPhone 4S because there's nothing whatsoever in the new phones that is compelling or useful enough to spend the money on an upgrade.
If Apple doesn't wake up they are going to find themselves up against new contenders that will eat them for lunch. I still have hopes for a fully desktop integrated Windows phone. Microsoft won't do it but that doesn't mean companies like HP won't pull it off and knock it out of the park. If someone shows-up with powerful fully integrated Windows PC in my pocket that can connect to the desktop (and more) I am launching this 4S into orbit and switching. I want Solidworks in my pocket and usable anywhere I go. I want computing that isn't tied to and locked to my desk. I want to own my data and not have it exposed on someone's cloud.
I want the next evolutionary step in computing. It's about time. Who's going to do it?
More functionality like Reminders can be accessed via Siri.
Anyhow, the point I think remains: The user ought to be able to choose what's on each side of that wall.
I've been looking forward to a multi-user iOS ever since the first iPad came out. I consider iPhones as more personal, where each person (or young adult/adult) in a house/family would likely have one of their own. But iPad is a different story altogether, and is more likely to be shared among people in a house/family. It's frustrating that it's still not possible to create user accounts and quickly switch between them on iOS devices.
A few months ago I watched one of the WWDC videos about a feature called "Shared iPad" [1] that allows schools to provide shared iPads to students and what developers would have to do to support it (and what comes out of the box and avoids work for developers too). Each student has their preferences and work saved on device and on iCloud and the switching process would download the appropriate bits for the next student who logs in (if/when necessary). My understanding of this, and the reason why user switching is still not around, is that this needs more flash memory in the device (to cache things and avoid going to iCloud as much as possible), a good amount of RAM on the device to support reasonably good performance for user switching (so all apps don't necessarily have to be killed or off loaded from RAM when possible), and certain other considerations that others may know better about.
But I'm still waiting for this feature to be open to everyone so we can have "Shared iPad" at home or at work.
For example, 2-3 years ago I thought OS X (now macOS) was really going down hill, far less stability, performance stagnation and no clear direction. Turn to 2016 and I think Sierra is the most stable and reliable macOS yet, also we now have much 'better' standboxing, protected core system storage, better battery life and an interesting file system on its way. Now, look at the iPhone 7+ - it's a great phone, it's in my opinion the best phone they've ever made, it's not perfect, the camera is good but it's still a phone camera and thus requires a lot of light and a nice clean lens to take a decent shot, its battery life is excellent compared to most other phones - you can quite happily go two days between charges unless you have something setup poorly (like a polling email account etc), iOS is more responsive and stable than ever, we have public and developer betas and finally Apple actually respond to bug reports from the feedback tool (not every time, but when it's something worth investigating).
The retina MacBook is a lovely replacement for the MacBook Air, yes it doesn't have enough RAM and could do with a bit faster CPU, but it is a truly portable, usable machine.
Since the introduction of the 5k iMac, there's been no turning back for me, I have an early 2015 model at work and late 2015 at home and they are simply a joy to work on, not just the wonderful screen but the CPUs are rarely maxed out, the upgraded GPU in my home machine easily plays any game I want to play.
The bad is that the MacBook Pro is undeniably over priced if you want to spec it out, the Mac Pro is long overdue an update and they in my opinion should have retired the Air and offered a higher spec MacBook.
On the software side of things, we have a larger than ever open source software community contributing software usable on OS X and the range and diversity of games available of macOS has grown at an amazing rate over the past few years, look at the titles on steam, gogs and the App Store - it was only 2-3 years ago you really had to use wine and friends to play such games. iTunes still kind of sucks, it's UI/UX is a lot better than when Apple Music first launched but the app is still very slow and heavy when you have a large library, but Apple Music itself has very quickly gone from being a wtf is this product to replacing Spotify for me thanks to its integration across devices, better streaming quality (or so it seems) and it's better range of full albums.
Tldr; some things work, some things don't, I think things are better than ever regardless of failed experiments or some product lines that are outdated.
Yes, some day that will be feasible. At current power ratios, not soon, and believing otherwise betrays utter cluelessness.
The Gear S3 Frontier manages mobile connectivity and superior UX with a supposed 4. Day battery life
The real crux is I'm simply not going to pay my carrier another $5-20 subscription for another client device.
Same thing will likely apply here too.
The 4 day battery life (closer to 3 in practice) just about sums its benefits over the Apple Watch. Less features and not as well made, less applications available, and stuck with Tizen. Not so great connectivity options either.
As for the condescending "they don't know about other brands", well, I've followed Tizen development since forever, with Rasterman involved in it et all.
What you choose to label as ignorance others might call "making the choice that suits my needs". I mean, I don't even have cable/satellite TV and I've seen a Samsung ad. I can't imagine your average consumer has no idea of other offerings.
:)
I'm curious, do you know of a credible projection on when this becomes viable?
To be fair, this event being far off underscores the author's argument. It's not yet time to abandon the iPhone sandcastle.
If the Internet was made up of proper semantic tagging, and actual useful, machine parsable information, then yeah, sure, make a 'watch' that can answer your spoken queries with meaningful information. Unfortunately, the Internet is so far gone as far as easy information retrieval is concerned, that even the most simplest of queries needs significant backend development of APIs and data re-formatting.
Even if it were doable on a large-data scale your conversations with your watch would go like this:
User: Watch, When is the Guns'N'Roses concert on in London?
Watch: Hi, I'm about to tell you 'when is the Guns'N'Roses concert on in London',
but first here is an advert!
Watch: *LOUDLY* <jingle jingle jingle> (singing) When you get caught short,
don't be fraught, with BoneDryos.... Adult Diapers.....! <jingle jingle jingle>
Watch: The Guns'N'Roses concert in London is on...
<beep beep> Need Faster Broadband? say YES now! <beep beep>
... 16th of June 2017.
User: Watch, Great! I'll have two tickets please!
Watch: Hi, I'm about to buy you 'two tickets' for Gun'N'Roses Not In This Lifetime
Tour in London, at the London Stadium on the 16th June 2017 at 3pm but first,
here's a short promotion... <jingle jingle jing..
User: Oh, FFS...
Why is this? Is it because of increased power requirements of 3g, 4g etc? Or all the extra useless processing devices do? (Ignoring the screen...)
My first phone was a siemens c30. Apparently the battery capacity was ~600mAh and gave >10 days standby where the Apple watch has ~200mAh and gives ~18h. So the c30 lasted over 3 times longer on the same charge?
Is it really unfeasible to expect us getting back to that same efficiency by cutting back in some areas?
It's an iOS-only messaging system (meaning that the majority of the people out there can't use it), and it limited to only certain carriers (it works on only 3 our of 6 in my country, AFAIK), narrowing the audience even more.
Yet, even though it's double-niche, Apple seems to be putting effort, and features into an app, that, apparently, very few people out there can use (I don't personally know anybody how has both and iPhone and a carrier that supports iMessages, me having only the former).
That's my point. If you're a global company targeting major US cities, you're missing out about 80% (might be more, might be less) of the world.
Of course there are people for whom this is useful, but that doesn't mean it's useful for most (or even a large percentage!) of the people out there.
You don't even need a phone to use iMessage - it works just as well with an iCloud account name or on a Mac. I don't know what the carriers in your country are doing to the phone to break it (blocking it to preserve SMS revenues?). I've also traveled extensively and never had problems with iMessage so I'd wager your country is an outlier. iMessage is not even blocked in China.
You need an iPhone and specific carriers for iMessage activation.
> I don't know what the carriers in your country are doing to the phone to break it [..]
They're not doing anything.
iMessages activation requires carrier intervention. It's clearly documented in Apple's website. Apple simply has no deal with them.
There are also known issues with reactivation when you change your phone AND your carrier, but not your number.
There's also a list of "supported carriers" (where my country, Argentina, isn't even in the list, even though some carrier do work).
> blocking it to preserve SMS revenues?
Seriously? Do you think a carrier would charge me for an SMS, and then discard it silently?
I actually do get the SMSs. The problem is that there's no carrier support for the activation.
I stopped reading at this point since this will be another "Pile on the Bad News for Apple" type of hyperbole.
For Apple to remain relevant in the future, the company will need to attack itself. Management will need to risk its own ecosystem.
...also agree and it seems like Apple has been doing this because, as stated in the article, of the lack of attention other products (and services) have recently received.
Milk the iPhone today, and then figure out what comes next.
I agree with this and fully expect Apple to do so, but where are the novel insights (that haven't been re-hashed from other recent sources (such as Bloomberg, Six Colors, etc).
Good analysis overall, but it's typically with some variation of "this is greatest" with some hint at a greater big idea just around the corner.
"apologist: a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial."
But now I know, thanks!