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Comment by ackfoo | Hacker News Reader

Pure damage control.

Steve Jobs had a brain and a backbone to go with it. Not sure the current crop do. I hope they find someone with vision and an expiry date to inoculate Apple against the stupidity of business people.

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I always find it so hilarious watching people go down this "if Steve Jobs was alive he would never do this" path. Because as was documented in his biography Apple's current strategy was at minimum signed off by Steve. And more than likely he was fully involved in crafting it.

But hey I am sure you're much smarter than the same management and design teams that has been in places during the invention of the iPod, iPad and iPhone.

Sounds like the management has installed Gruber and MG as their sources for getting talking points! Hopefully just talking points and not strategy.

Case in point - “For us, it matters that people use our products. We really want to enrich people’s lives, and you can’t enrich somebody’s life if the product is in the drawer.” That's bull. Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices. They benefit from selling hardware. Let aside the validity of such "surveys" ( do they count Chinese and Indian web traffic and how? Because thats where growth is.) - even if they were valid it isn't anything for Apple to bank on.

> Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices.

Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one.

>> Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one.

Yes.

Most of what I did on my iPad 1 was surf. Upgrading to iOS 5 killed my iPad (Safari crashes constantly) and it basically went into the drawer. iOS4 killed my iPhone 3G in an even more dramatic fashion.

While those OS upgrades happened in the age of Forstall, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that I would upgrade to an iPhone or iPad.

It used to be an easy decision, but now that there is more parity among platforms (compared to say, 2010), it's that much more important for Apple to ensure that people can continue using their device.

Hopefully with OS upgrades in the age of Federighi, we won't see as many performance crippling major releases as we have in the past.

So you switched to Android which is known for getting timely releases of software updates?

The Nexus devices are known to get timely updates.

I've only had my Nexus 7 since spring this year. There have been two updates, and both of them made my device faster, which was a refreshing change after having three iOS devices where OS upgrades made the devices slower, and in two of the cases, unusable.

While I'm more curious about WP8 to replace my iPhone 4, I have no issue with upgrading to an Android Nexus phone, given my experience with a Nexus tablet.

Well, if people don't actively use the Apple products they've bought then by definition they won't be having a good experience with them. If they're not having a good experience with Apple products then not only have the engineers and designers at Apple failed, but there will be no excitement or "buzz" that will inspire the owners of Apple products to buy new Apple products (for themselves or others) or recommend existing Apple products to others.

So, I don't think that the talking point is "bull". I think it was a grossly oversimplification of their business/design strategy.

It is "bull". The tablets are being bought and used mostly outside the US, primarily in Asia. If you compare global sales with US web usage you've got a mystery to explain because the figures don't match, which leads to theories like all Android tablets get bought and put in drawers.

If you look at web usage segmented by region it's clear that they're getting used roughly in line with installed base, which is higher for iOS tablets in the US than elsewhere:

http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-...

Actually, it's Jeff Bezos's talking point from the Kindle launch. He was basically saying, Amazon only benefits when people use their devices, so Amazon doesn't care about margins on hardware. This was a dig at Apple, for whom, once the device is sold, the majority of revenue is made (App Store doesn't really contribute hugely)

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