Two brilliant moves that helped create the Apple iOS powerhouse

A lot of my friends have a iPhone 3 GS and they are happy with it and see no need to change. It's not the same with Android low-end models.

Please don't get me wrong I don't want to bash Android here but I want to make how smart this decision was / is. People are buying the old hardware ( which was awesome) and getting it with new the software for a good price.

Maybe I should also point out that people have also seen the same product last year and friends using it. Think about it. Would you buy a new phone which just came out as low-end model or would you buy the product from last year for a better price? Apple shows that the second choice wins.

I'd say that overall the 3GS looks like a better deal.

Sure, pricing is confusing but that cuts both ways.

Here's the Jobs quote from the biography:

"'Screw it,' he said at one meeting where they showed him the analysis. 'I'm sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.'"

I don't think Jobs should get any credit for the iTunes/Windows port. It's for the people that finally managed to wear Steve down and get the decision made.

I think you have a valid point about segmenting only the upper end of the market though. Apple has always catered more to the upper end than anything else, but it works for them. Segmenting this end of the market is still a very lucrative proposition for them. Also, the fact that the top selling smartphone in the US is the iPhone meaning they're currently able to cater to the whole of the smartphone market very effectively, not just the upper end.

I agree this isn't a good strategy when the 3rd world countries start going strong on smartphones, but that doesn't mean it's not a good strategy now. Perhaps when that happens they will fundamentally have to shift their focus from catering only to the upper end of the market to a broader one, but I don't think that will happen soon enough for them to change their strategy now.

But of course, in "corporate" they are going to require a "user friendly solution"

It (was) usually a VB program done by people with no UX talent, on a budget an a short timeframe and with no testing as well. Also they make file copies take magically 3x as much time than copying using Windows explorer.

Not to mention iTunes is a better solution, because it's your music library integrated with syncing. It's different for example than having one program to sync and another to listen. (Similar solutions like Amarok + iPod plugin work great as well)

A version of iTunes arrived on Windows 2000 and Windows XP in October of 2003; two years. (October 2003 also saw the announcement of Panther, 10.3.)

Prior to the availability of iTunes on Windows, MusicMatch Jukebox was commonly used with Windows, and that package was included with various iPod devices.

The general market acceptance of OS X didn't really get rolling until the Intel port, and that was announced during the 2005 WWDC. (I don't have that plot handy; that's from memory.)

Here's a plot of iPod sales, and note the sales trend and the years: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/charting_apples_growt...

For more plots on sales of iPod and Mac devices (as well as iPad and iPhone), see the Asymco site. Here's one of the many available plots: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/26/apple-has-moved-on/

And in a business, recognize too that Apple would have been foolish to constrain the potential sales of their then-new iPod product (and now iPhone and iPad) from the volume computing market, and that market was and remains Windows. And first with MusicMatch Jukebox and later with iTunes, they didn't. And they still don't. Their statements and their history of intentional self-cannibalization among their products points to this, too.

And in general, always question what your professors tell you. Always. That's part of what college is supposed to teach students, even if your individual professors don't or won't.

There was a market for Windows users to use the iPod, you knew that because there was software out there for it. You could go down to CompUSA or Microcenter and buy a boxed piece of software for $60 or so that would do all the syncing. All you had to do was provide an iPod and FireWire. There were a lot of people (at least gadget nerds) who were really interested in the device despite the difficulty of using it unsupported. I doubt more than a handful of people purchased a Mac just for an iPod, since ~$150 in software and hardware would let you use the 1st gen with Windows.

The iPod that was released with Windows compatibility was the first one to support USB, which was a necessity in the Windows world. If they had tried to sell to Windows users with only FireWire, I think the reaction would have been pretty bad.

Well, it's a valid comparison, since it's apples to apples. Even the numbers themselves can be considered valid, given that a large portion of American mobile customers get their phones with their contracts.

* Anything that mentions regex needs to have an automatic disclaimer of "yes, you know the formal mathematical definition of regular expression and how it differs from what most programming languages now offer, good for you".

* Anything that mentions SQL needs to have an automatic disclaimer of "yes, you know that Database X isn't really relational according to a strict interpretation, good for you".

etc., etc.

Any article which discusses mobile phone pricing similarly needs to have a "yes, you noticed that it talked about contract-subsidized prices, good for you".

Because, to be perfectly honest, such comments add not one good goddamned bit of insight or information to the discussion (as here, where subsidized iOS phone prices were compared to subsidized Android phone prices, which is roughly as fair a comparison as one can get of how up-front cheaply such phones can be acquired), and typically are just restating something most readers already know.