The iPhone Software Revolution

Apple completely sucks at influencing anything on worldwide scale.

What? Are you actually serious?

The iPhone is not a phone, well it can be used for makin calls as well, but its a personal computing platform.

This platform has captured the essence of having an electronic swiss army knife -you can do with it almost all of the functions you might need.

The real break through it creating a real usable user interface suitable for smalls screens.

@Rarst why do they need to influence the world? They’re doing quite well right where they are.

No, not everyone signs multi-year contracts for their cell phone. I never have and never will. Most definitely not when it means inflating my cell phone bill tenfold. No matter how cool the device it’s bundled with is.

Apple completely sucks at influencing anything on worldwide scale.

What? Are you actually serious?

Living in a country where Apple mostly perceived as money wasting toy, country officially discarded by Apple as any kind of market, country where iPhone (even first one) wasn’t ever officially released…

I absolutely am.

Apple likes to present itself like a planet-sized phenomena. In reality it focuses on markets that are convenient and couldn’t care (or matter) less for rest of the world. :slight_smile:

On Windows and Nokia handsets you can install any app you like.

And this is why I won’t be moving to an iPhone. Lovely as they are I object to being constrained to running the software they deem is acceptable to them.

Have you actually used OS/X on a Mac? It’s not locked down at all.

…they attempt to control every nuance of the entire experience from end to end. For the best Apple™ experience, you run custom Appletm applications on artfully designed Apple™ hardware dongles.

OS/X is Unix and Cocoa is Objective-C. You can crack open Application bundles, manipulate plist files, inject code into applications, and do all the things you normally can on Unix. The configuration files are text files, you have access to DTrace, you can add kernel extensions, etc. Now, theming support is non-existent and the replacement of the Finder with a third party app has a lot of rough edges.

Windows (with the exception of theming) is far more locked down then OS/X is.

Where this comes from is that they control the hardware. They control the experience not by locking down the software (you don’t even enter serial numbers when installing OS/X), but by limiting the amount of hardware they need to support. Theoretically this means that their drivers should be polished and perfect. In reality it just means that they’re very good. The lack of true lock-in can be proved simply by looking at the number and variations of Hackintoshes.

Why do they need to influence the world? They’re doing quite well right where they are.

That was to post’s:

I predict they will dominate the market for years to come

I am assuming mobile phone market as whole is implied.

And yes, Apple is doing most excellently where they are. :slight_smile: However that place is considerably smaller than it seems, especially in worldwide mobile phone industry dominated by Nokia.

I don’t have much comment on the iPhone, but I have a little doubt on this “But a cell phone? It’s a closed ecosystem, by definition, running on a proprietary network.”.

The mobile network is not as “proprietary” as you think. In theory, you can make your own mobile to do whatever you want as long as it can communicate with others on the network. The specifications are online and free. For UMTS the specification can be found under http://www.3gpp.org/specification-numbering , for EV-DO, check 3GPP2 website.

If mobile network is proprietary, then the internet is also running on a proprietary network as well.

How much did Apple pay you to write this? Oh well, one RSS feed less to read. Thanks!

its Internet Explorer browsing software was lackluster until the third version

You could argue that it still is lacklustre!

I work at Microsoft. Over the years I have been proud of some things MS accomplished, but not all. A month ago I purchased an iPhone and was amazed, not just by what it can do, but by how intuitive the UI is–my 3-year-old can use it! She comes and asks to use the iPhone, turns it on, navigates to a game, and manipulates it pretty well. What a testament to great UI design!! I know that MS has made gains with WinMo, and at one time I would have wanted one, but it really doesn’t fill my needs as a consumer like the iPhone.

As a side note, MS library offers employees access to Safari books online (tech books). They just started listing, at login, the most popular books by other Microsoft employees. The top two? Developing iPhone apps and objective-C.

  1. That iPhone image is such a photoshop disaster ( http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/ ). The reflection misses the bottom button.

  2. Does the new iPhone support Flash? Because I don’t get how someone can get excited about a device that doesn’t support YouTube or anything flashy.

It’s a closed ecosystem, by definition, running on a proprietary network.

Id you mean the carriers network, it may me true in the US where it seems every handset ever sold is tied to a subscription. In the rest of the world however this is far from the norm, as Rarst maybe pointed out. I don’t really see anything proprietary about the Symbian platform for example. There is no app-store to be approved for, no lock in to a particular developer stack, or to a handset manufacturer or carrier.

The closed ecosystem seems, to me at least, a very US market-driven way of working.

You forgot to add the following things that the iPhone can replace:

  • PDA (kinda of obvious, no?)
  • Tape/voice recorder (very important for journalists)

oh yeah, and it also has a calculator :wink:

Perhaps you don’t keep up with phone and smart phone trends but there is actually very little about the iPhone that is new. Smart phones have been very incremental for the past 10 years or so, with great ideas along the way that were embraced by all players.

What has Apple truly done that was novel?

  1. Marketing - they’ve marketed their device to the world, not just executives or geeks or kids but to everyone.

  2. App Store Development - they’ve convinced hundreds of developers to author apps for their platform, but that’s it - everything else about their App Store had already been done before, why hadn’t you heard about it? See #1

  3. Made it sexy - sure they’ve brought together a nice set of pre-existing technology in a nice package, but what makes it truly sexy? See #1

So perhaps in 10-20 years we’ll look back as business people and use the iPhone as an example of what really really good marketing can do, but as a technical revolution? Product revolution? I’m not buying either.

A more important product than the Macintosh for Apple, maybe. For the rest of the world, it will very likely just go the way of the Wii once the shiny wears off. Perhaps I am just old and jaded, but I don’t really believe the world lives on their goddamn cellphone like the iPhone enthusiasts do.

The invention that changes the world will not be a phone, it will be the device that shows up the phone for the irritating failure that it is.

Because I don’t get how someone can get excited about a device that doesn’t support YouTube or anything flashy.

The iPhone has YouTube support built in. It does not support flash yet, but to be honest I have yet to find a Flash website that I actually want to visit.

Too bad the iPhone works only with AT&T. AT&T is evil. They must die.

How much did Apple pay you to write this? Oh well, one RSS feed less to read. Thanks!

And one less developer to compete with. Thanks!!!