IPhone users are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
The firm has the idea that users are too stupid to know what they like. And since the iPhone is the only option (really?!) then users are obviously delusional. The poster has written a poor headline and should rescind it. No one is being held hostage. Because other makers are still in business then there must be a viable business for them to stay in it. And the goalpost is always moving forward. If I've learned one thing about Apple, execution is their business. If a feature: won't work, is buggy, or too complex they won't implement it. They'll eventually do it, but not at 80%, not even 95% complete.
And finally, I didn't pay for my phone the company did. So this is as close to an objective opinion your going to get. There is no buyers remorse here. I have a cabinet of phones I could use if this one didn't work out. Some of my colleagues have turned in their iPhones and gone back to BBs, WMs, and Nokias.
I'm sure I'm not the only one... So why DID I put up with it? Part of it might be a love-affair with Apple due to their exceptional marketing and the near mythical status of Steve Jobs.
Consumers aren't stupid-- but I can't imagine how you could think that all of your decisions are rational... Or even most of them. Ever done any A/B testing? Why would an orange button perform 20% better than a blue one?
What about priming studies?
(more thoughts in an old blog post: http://www.tonywright.com/2007/the-fuss-about-macs-priming-a... )
Here's the interesting bit:
Bargh and several colleagues chose a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave them two scrambled-sentence tests. The first test was sprinkled with rude words like “disturb,” “bother,” and “intrude.” The second test was sprinkled with polite words like “respect,” “considerate,” and “yield.”
In both cases, the tests were indiscreet. None of the subjects picked up on the word trend consciously. But it primed them subconsciously.
After taking the five-minute test, students were asked to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. An actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the experimenter when the students would arrive. And the goal was to see how long it would take students to interrupt.
"Bargh wanted to know if the subjects who were primed with polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with rude words. They thought the subconscious priming would have a slight affect. But the affect was pretty profound in quantitative terms.
The people primed with rude words interrupted, on average, after only five minutes. But 82% of the people primed with polite words never interrupted at all. Who knows how long they would have patiently and politely waited if the researchers hadn’t give the test a ten-minute time limit. [Note by Tony: Those damn ethics committees... Milgram would never be able to get away with his experiment today!]"
Maybe it was because the data and apps were great?
Do you have any supporting data which shows that Apple's marketing is that much better than e.g. Nokia's? In all the markets they both sell in?!
Please note that your hand waving, trying to sell a model by sounding convincing, is also known as marketing. :-)
Do try to make a case, it would be interesting.
Start with answering: Why hasn't everyone hired away the Apple advertisement geniuses a long time ago if they are so much better with fewer features?
Edit: A little clearer and removed 2nd half (it was beating a dead horse).
No, I didn't say that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man ). The closest thing I did say to that was "Part of it might be a love-affair with Apple due to their exceptional marketing and the near mythical status of Steve Jobs." A big part is certainly the UI. People love the Apple/iPhone brand for a lot of reasons-- many of these reasons are perfectly rational.
My point was that consumers tend to over-estimate how rational their decisions and their brand loyalty are.
So you were not talking about the iPhone but about people's explanations for why they bought iPhones?
Edit: If I wasn't clear, I still need a good motivation for why Apple would be such a special case, if you are going to make a case.
This explanation, however, doesn't provide a good headline, so obviously isn't plausible.
Listen, I've recommended friends and family of mine get iPhones, and I'm typing this on a Mac. But the best thing you can do for companies you like is call them on their crap. And a lack of basic chat functionality on the iPhone is a sad state of affairs, and no one really seems to talk about it. Apple does some stuff wrong, but they tend to cover it up through marketing. My wife, who used to use an iPhone, just pointed out to me as I was typing this that iPhones are a status symbol, and many people buy them more because they are iPhones than out of any real analysis of the features. Once bought, people want to validate their own decisions, so they'll defend the inferior product. Such is the power of marketing.
-No copy & paste -No MMS -No stereo Bluetooth -No third party apps -No video recording -No Flash
Except they did. They bought it and liked it -- many of them bought another one (3G/GS). So it appears to me it's not really a feature-driven industry. It's a usability driven industry. Making a complex device easier to use is more important than offering every possible feature.
From my perspective, the feature-driven nature of the industry is exactly what left the door wide open for someone to invade with fewer features and greater usability. The dogged pursuit of feature bullet points and checkmarks may help you sell to a particular demographic, but most people were never able to exploit those features.
The most dramatic illustration of this is how Mobile Safari appeared in HTTP daemon logs out of proportion with the market share that the platform had relative to existing smartphones that already had mobile browsing.
Edit: Actually, that's the 2nd most dramatic. The most dramatic illustration, to me, is how the device was so simple to use that the TV advertisements could demonstrate it by showing a pair of hands. Sure, the ads stretched the truth on the performance, but nevertheless they were essentially tutorial in nature. Meanwhile, other smartphones showed people dancing and smiling: anything but how their phones were used.
A feature-driven industry is an industry ripe for invasion by someone who has internalized what Antoine de Saint-Exupery meant when he said "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
The iPhone appears to be driven by a vision of making certain things easy and safe, at the expense of everything else. Since these things are desirable, whether technical or marketing driven, users are willing to live with the decisions made by Apple.
This is not defending any of the "crap", this is recognising that the choices made are very successful.
For those of you curious, I listen to this radio station streaming, and consider it a great example of a way to embrace Safari for the iPhone: http://c895worldwide.com/web/streaming/iphone/iphone.html It lets me add a bookmark to my home screen with an icon it gets from the page itself, and when I start streaming music, it keeps going even when I leave Safari and do something else.
The arguably best UI around is a killer feature. That is something which generates love. Great usability makes the UI just "disappear", you don't think about it.
Just look at which phone users really manage to use them for data traffic (and the carriers' trouble with that).
This isn't unique to Apple. I buy pens (Pilot G-tec C4) which break really easily. That is not really smart, but their thin writing is a killer feature for me. I buy them a dozen at a time without even cursing.
Disclaimer: I don't really care if I use Ubuntu or Mac.
Edit: bensummers made it clearer and better.
Sure, plenty of limitations, but overall, the iPhone completely redefined how well a phone could work, and has massively expanded what people expect from their phones.
To the benefit of users of the iPhone and competing devices alike.
But then, I guess most people really like the touch screen interface, and apple (maybe? I wouldn't know. I can't stand touch screens) was the first to get the touch screen right.
(as an aside, I think the newton is interesting because if it's handwriting recognition was good enough, we'd be seeing handwriting recognition as a dominant input method for PDAs today. The thing is, it wasn't, and by now, even if someone comes up with absolutely perfect handwriting recognition software, too many of us have grown up not knowing how to write. the time when handwriting recognition could have worked is over.)
However, the 9500 was released in '04, and I think it can reasonably be argued that it is as 'advanced' as the first generation iphone. It doesn't have 3g, but neither did the first iphone. it does have wifi, edge, and a /keyboard/ making it a much more useful device, imho, than the iphone. I understand that the keyboard vs. touchscreen debate is subjective, and probably has more to do with what you are used to than anything else, but aside from the touchscreen, I'm not sure how else the iphone is more 'advanced' than the communicator 9500.
Now, if you want to compare modern devices, check out the n900. it's pretty slick. it's got a touchscreen and a keyboard, and the screen is absolutely beautiful, even in full sunlight. Under the covers, it's linux, and it's sold unlocked, so you can play with it. The maemo linux stuff is pretty close to regular linux, so you have a chance of understanding it too. Again, the apple software is better /if it does what you want/ while the nokia hardware is clearly superior, and the nokia software allows you to do exactly what you want /if you know how/.
I'm not saying the iphone is bad- If you have the same needs that apple had in mind when they designed it, it's a really great phone. But I think what they took out was probably more important to that than what they put in. As far as I can tell, apple didn't do anything particularly innovative in terms of features or technology, but they certainly made a lot of users happy. My belief is that part of their success was that they made the interface /just right/ for a certain class of users, by removing the sort of features those users don't want. (unfortunately, I don't belong to that class of users.)
Now, previous nokia communicators were status symbols in other parts of the world, but here, they never were. The iphone was the first smartphone to impact your image positively in the US. I'm the last person you should ask as to why that is, but I will give you my opinion anyhow: the Iphone was the first smart phone that cool people could effectively use.
[1] the thing is big and blocky. It looks as tough as it is. You can drop it, throw it, stick it in your pocket with your keys, and assuming your pockets are large enough to handle it, there's not a problem. I like clamshell designs for this reason.
The iPhone, as it is, appeals to a variety of different user profiles. There are people who buy it for the cool factor, others that buy it because it's from Apple, others that want games, those who get it for the web browsing and still others that buy it as a phone with an integrated iPod. And, of course, those who buy it as a smartphone. The fact it fills all these roles adequately with a nice GUI makes it a top seller.
It may not even be the best seller in any market segment I described, but even being an average seller in a dozen segments can make any marketing exec smile.
This is really a joke of a "research report", it's more like a bad high school paper.
Again, these are just my personal reasons for choosing Apple at this time, I am more than willing to give other companies a chance if they can manage to make great hardware to go with their great software. So I really don't feel myself held hostage by anyone but AT&T and I am definitely not in love with them, so no, there is no Stockholm Syndrome here.
My needs have changed a bit and so I'm using an Android phone now. But I was pretty happy with the iPhone for quite a while, despite its limitations.
And that's the more perverse thing in this article - it short-circuits any iPhone users' defense because they are all delusional.
I got an iPhone because it looks nice and I figured the apps would be cool. Well it looks nice but the apps, for the most part, don't do much but divert me. There are some I use - but not as frequently as I use the phone, email and calendar features.
I toyed with ditching the phone but now I cant: im totally sold on the phone functionality.. it's the best set up I've ever had.
And there I think is the hook: the iPhone really does just work as a phone. Lots of smart phones never manage that :)
(there are plenty of "wtf" moments... but they havent yet completely frustrated me - which is rarw)