iPhone! Introducing your new mobile phone - mobile everything

[ScottM]

Ooopps

Cisco executives at the John Chambers keynote at CES 2007 claim that they own the name iPhone.

"This was registered by Cisco nearly 7 years ago and was recently rolled out by Cisco subsidary Linksys for their WiFi phone which is labeled iphone"

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Communication/Industry?Article=/Communication/Industry/K7T5L4J5

 

[mikea]

Ooopps

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Communication/Industry?Article=/Communication/Industry/K7T5L4J5

They need to to get on the same page:

Cisco head of development Charlie Giancarlo, speaking to England's The Times during this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said of the iPhone name: "The iPhone mark has been ours since 1996. Apple did ask if they could buy it. We didn't want to part from it." A company representative confirmed the situation and issued this statement on Tuesday: "It is our belief that with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final documents and public statement that were distributed to them last night, and that addressed a few remaining items."

...Asked for comment, Apple's senior vice-president for worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, would not address the Cisco issue and simply said: "There are a number of companies that have used iPhone, but this is the first use in a cellular phone. We feel fine using it as a cell phone name."

http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/29886

Maybe Apple didn't sign the agreement. If Cisco sues they're gonna lose the the iPhone trademark, at least the scope of it they think they have.

It'll be "The Apple iPhone (tm)."

 

[wbarnhill]

So it's gonna be 599 WITH a two year agreement? Yeesh. Though with the costs of a lot of the high end smartphones, people might be willing to shell out the cash. I don't know though, seems more of a "cool" phone (like the RAZR, which I see in the hands of every teenager in town) than one that will be used by business types (who would be more interested in the WiFi/data access side). I will say that it looks great, but deciding to go with Cingular's EDGE (aka Mobile 56K) almost guaranteed having to include WiFi (Which kills battery life on every cellular device I've seen with the feature). I hope they keep at it and find a solution for everyone. Til then, I'll keep my Treo 700p. Besides, I can use the Treo as a broadband modem (mmm, EVDO) while charging it through the USB

But hey, here's the PC Counterpart to the iPhone (Also on Cingular):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...TF8&coliid=I1P7EB7VYZCVVG&colid=3AQQOWWYYF9D3

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Re: Introducing your new mobile phone - mobile everything

I'm very afraid for the new partner, Cingular. If Apple is supposed to support the phone...Steve is going to go ballistic when customers complain about Cingular's usual SNAFUs. Cingular's CEO can count on getting some not gentle feedback from Mr. Jobs. They are not going to meet Job's standards.

They'd better, and quick, lest they be "Steved."

One thing about Jobs, you do NOT **** him off and get away with it. Just ask IBM - They put a bit too much effort into the new gaming consoles and not enough into a laptop-suitable G5 chip, and they got Steved. Not too many companies will go to the trouble of making an entire architecture change because of a slow supplier, but again - You do not mess with Steve and get away with it.

That dude is scary. Make him President and Osama would turn himself in tomorrow.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

In comparison to everything else on the market, the introduction and subsequent marketing of the iPod was stellar.

Well, since the rest of the industry pretty much had no marketing, it's not hard for Apple to win this comparison.

When people think MP3 player, they think of iPod. That's successful marketing.

I think an awful lot of that credit can go to the engineers and designers who came up with such a desireable product, and word of mouth from satisfied customers.

Apple certainly has improved their marketing drastically in the last 5 years, but it shouldn't be so hard to sell good products. I give them a rating of "no longer completely inept."

 

[flyingcheesehead]

If you think about it, they thought this phone was so revolutionary they could hang the company's future on it. They sure didn't want it to have a name like "iPod Communicator" or "Mac Mobile." The name had to have two syllables.

Rumor was that the plan B name was going to be "iChat Mobile." I'd go after the iPhone name too!

 

[Henning]

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

I know I'll buy one after the first gen bugs are gone.

http://www.macrumorslive.com/

It's a pocket computer/iPod/phone. This will let us get DUATS anywhere.

The UI is incredible.

Watch the stock prices rise like a bullet.

BTW, the iTV is going to be $299. I'll get that too, even though I had my doubts. The price is reasonable.

Design wise it's a bit further on, but feature wise, I don't see it being any more useful or feature laden than the Pocket PC Phone Editions that I've been using for years.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

1. 4 or 8GB? And no SD slot? That must be a joke. This is 2007.

1. 
   
   And in 2007, the most popular smartphone, the Treo 700, comes with 128MB. I'll take 8GB.
   
   

   [*]Cingular.

   
   Who I happen to be quite satisfied with. Verizon has better support, but if Verizon got a hold of the iPhone they'd cripple the heck out of it like they do with all the others.
   
   Nobody else has the network to be able to compete with Cingular and Verizon.
   
   Oh, and the reason these keep coming out on Cingular - Well, the entire rest of the world uses GSM, while the only companies in the US that use GSM are T*Mobile and, you guessed it, Cingular. It does not pay for Apple to develop a CDMA or TDMA version because it would be useless in the rest of the world.
   
   

   [*]I don't trust Apple to write any more software than lives on the IPod. If they themselves don't trust their developers to the point that they had them NOT write more than half of OS X, there's no reason I should trust them to put out a quality piece of software either.

   
   Riiiiiiight. Darwin, the open source portion of OS X, is/was an experiment, and a gimmick. It's hardly OS X - It's just another Linux/Unix clone. OS X, while based on Darwin, is all Apple. They trust their people just fine, and they put out lots of quality software that's trusted by some big-time organizations. (Just ask the movie studios...)
   
   

   [*]The screen and UI just doesn't impress me that much. Cool? Yeah.

   
   Nobody else even comes close, and you're not impressed. Sheesh. What DOES it take to impress you?
   
   

   [*]Where's wireless sync/edit with my iTunes library? Again... It's 2007, Mr. Jobs, and if all I'm gonna get is 4 or 8GB it's ridiculous that for $600 that's not possible.

   
   Not really. Can you say sssssssslllllllllloooooooooowwwwww? USB 2 is over 10 times faster than current WiFi standards, so until we see a solid 802.11n standard and a practical way of putting it into a device of this size, you won't see wireless sync.
   
   Remember, Apple doesn't just do things to say they can do them - They wait until they can do them the way they should be done.
   
   

   [*]The screen just screams, "I'm going to get scratched to the point of unreadability."

   
   An early review indicates that the screen seems to be pretty tough and scratch-proof. Let's hope they've learned their lesson.
   
   

   I know I'll be relentlessly flamed by the Mac fanboys

   
   Ooo, can I be a fanboy too?
   
   Is it wrong to like well-designed products? Or should we all just live with the el cheapo, el crappo Wal-Mart junk that most companies foist on us?
   
   

   But what it comes down to for me is the fact that I look at a 30+ year-old company that despite its leadership position at the time wound up asleep at the switch during the biggest phase of (arguably) the most significant revolution in human-kind,

   
   Huh? I assume you're talking about the personal computer revolution. Remember who started it.
   
   Yes, they have crappy marketing and they always have. They foolishly assumed a better product would sell itself, but when there's a competitor like Microsoft in the business... Well, it's foolish!
   
   

   has since had one real commercially successful product,

   
   One? What the hell is your definition of commercially successful? Mine is "makes a significant profit." By that definition, Apple has had dozens if not hundreds of commercially successful products.
   
   

   and even after 30 years, still can't write software.

   
   This is where you completely lose me. They write the most robust personal computer OS on the market, leading digital audio/video editing software (as well as prosumer and consumer versions thereof), some excellent productivity tools (Keynote and Pages), and countless other smaller things. All of the above are stable, full-featured, and have the best user interfaces around. What makes you say they can't write software? Call me a "fanboy" but you seem to be an anti-fanboy when you say things like this... Or maybe you're just ignorant of the scope of what Apple really does?

 

[wbarnhill]

And in 2007, the most popular smartphone, the Treo 700, comes with 128MB. I'll take 8GB.

I will say the Treo's memory isn't meant to store music and video like the iPhone's is. And you can pop in an SD card if you really want to do that. I've got a gig card in mine, but I don't use it for more than just a phone. If I want an iPod, I get an iPod (which I have). Like I said before, I see this as trying to mesh too many areas and they're not going to have a solid customer base. It'd be better for them to make two models. One based on the teenager scene, with the iPod capabilities, and one based on the business end, with focusing on maximizing battery life while enabling above average use of the WiFi and EDGE capability.

 

[ScottM]

Nobody else even comes close, and you're not impressed. Sheesh. What DOES it take to impress you?

You don't work where I do and see what I get to see. The Director of the human factor research lab is 40 feet away from my office. There is a lot of cool stuff being demo'ed, especially for Homeland Security systems, think Minority Report.

 

[Brian Austin]

Well, since the rest of the industry pretty much had no marketing, it's not hard for Apple to win this comparison.

Which is what I said in the first place...

 

[tdager]

BTW...it looks like Cisco sued Apple, and contrary to what someone else said, by all accounts in a court fight it would be Apple that would lose, not Cisco.

I see Apple shelling out BIG BUCKS to Cisco for the name.

 

[Brian Austin]

Maybe Apple didn't sign the agreement. If Cisco sues they're gonna lose the the iPhone trademark, at least the scope of it they think they have.

According to http://news.com.com/Cisco+sues+Appl...mark/2100-1047_3-6149285.html?tag=st.txt.caro

"Cisco said in the complaint that Apple had attempted to get rights to the iPhone name several times, but after Cisco refused, the company created a front company to try to acquire the rights another way, according to the lawsuit."

"Cisco holds a clear advantage in the legal dispute as the trademark holder of record and having already released products using the iPhone name, said Bruce Sunstein, co-founder of the Boston law firm Bromberg & Sunstein. "The one who has a registration is in a better position than the one who does not.""

What I find ironic here is that if the same bullheaded tactics had been used by Microsoft, everyone would be screaming that M$ is up to their usual tricks. Here, however, it's simply a "mistake" and all will be forgiven. Sheesh.

 

[ScottM]

According to http://news.com.com/Cisco+sues+Appl...mark/2100-1047_3-6149285.html?tag=st.txt.caro

"Cisco said in the complaint that Apple had attempted to get rights to the iPhone name several times, but after Cisco refused, the company created a front company to try to acquire the rights another way, according to the lawsuit."

"Cisco holds a clear advantage in the legal dispute as the trademark holder of record and having already released products using the iPhone name, said Bruce Sunstein, co-founder of the Boston law firm Bromberg & Sunstein. "The one who has a registration is in a better position than the one who does not.""

What I find ironic here is that if the same bullheaded tactics had been used by Microsoft, everyone would be screaming that M$ is up to their usual tricks. Here, however, it's simply a "mistake" and all will be forgiven. Sheesh.

Do not expect this to be the last legal issue in regards to this phone. To put the 'phone' into iPhone Apple had to acquire essential IPR form other companies that had done development on cellular phones. It appears that they have not done that yet. So before they go to market they will need to secure licensing terms. Normally the companies that work together in standrds will exchange IPR under Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND) terms.

RAND terms must be guaranteed, by legal agreement, with companies that participated in the development of the standard they built to. If Apple is not a member of that organization then RAND does not apply and they have to negotiate whatever terms they can get. You can probably bet that Motorola , Nokia, Ericsson, Seimens, etc. will not be too happy to give them a discount.

 

[Brian Austin]

More and more interesting. From the Cisco story, it sounds like Mr. Jobs jumped the gun. The licensing terms you mention, Scott, just add fuel to the fire.

We may not be seeing this phone for a while...

 

[ScottM]

More and more interesting. From the Cisco story, it sounds like Mr. Jobs jumped the gun. The licensing terms you mention, Scott, just add fuel to the fire.

We may not be seeing this phone for a while...

I think it will get more interesting ASAP. I fully expect to be gaged by my work later today about this whole topic.

 

[Brian Austin]

Interesting rundown on the more technical aspects of the iPhone and some drawbacks...

http://news.com.com/A+heavy+load+for+the+iPhone+to+bear/2100-1041_3-6149195.html

Summed up: this thing isn't using the latest technology available to cellular nor did Apple learn from early smartphone design problems, like two handed requirements.

 

[mikea]

What I find ironic here is that if the same bullheaded tactics had been used by Microsoft, everyone would be screaming that M$ is up to their usual tricks. Here, however, it's simply a "mistake" and all will be forgiven. Sheesh.

Nah. It's the joke with the punchline "We know what you are. The question is how much." It's only a matter of who gets how much of the $Millions they're gonna take in.

 

[Brian Austin]

Nah. It's the joke with the punchline "We know what you are. The question is how much." It's only a matter of who gets how much of the $Millions they're gonna take in.

And, of course, they didn't set themselves up for it by releasing the product a little earlier than they should have.

 

[ReverendSlappy]

And in 2007, the most popular smartphone, the Treo 700, comes with 128MB. I'll take 8GB.

The Treo at least has an SD slot. And 8GB is not an amount I'd expect in a "leapfrog" or "revolutionary" or <insert RDF-Jobsisms here> type of product. It's a Nano.

Who I happen to be quite satisfied with. Verizon has better support, but if Verizon got a hold of the iPhone they'd cripple the heck out of it like they do with all the others.

Nobody else has the network to be able to compete with Cingular and Verizon.

Oh, and the reason these keep coming out on Cingular - Well, the entire rest of the world uses GSM, while the only companies in the US that use GSM are T*Mobile and, you guessed it, Cingular. It does not pay for Apple to develop a CDMA or TDMA version because it would be useless in the rest of the world.

Those are fair points about GSM and network size, and I'm glad for you that you've been satisfied with Cingular. But I've simply had the precisely opposite experience.

Riiiiiiight. Darwin, the open source portion of OS X, is/was an experiment, and a gimmick. It's hardly OS X - It's just another Linux/Unix clone. OS X, while based on Darwin, is all Apple. They trust their people just fine, and they put out lots of quality software that's trusted by some big-time organizations. (Just ask the movie studios...)

Simply put, the kernel is XNU, which, sure, NeXT did develop. But XNU is BSD and... er, whatever the name of that CMU variant is. You don't write your own kernel? You're not a real OS developer. Sorry, that's just how I feel. I mean come on, there are plenty of Linux kids out there developing hybrid kernels for fun.

The Quartz graphics layer they wrote, Finder, Aqua, Expose and all that suff are great. Fine. But the fact is simply that Apple did not write the entirety of the OS. Period. If the iPhone's OS is built using the same kind of approach as OSX, I'll be less skeptical. If it's ALL written by Apple, it'll be impossible for me to ignore the cold-sweats and nausea induced by flashbacks of my time supporting PowerPCs back in the (Apple-written) MacOS 7.5-8.1 days.

Nobody else even comes close, and you're not impressed. Sheesh. What DOES it take to impress you?

It's just not $600 cool -- maybe $250-300. I pay for features, not UI.

Edit: And the "Visual Voicemail" feature is worth at least $100. To me, anyway.

Not really. Can you say sssssssslllllllllloooooooooowwwwww? USB 2 is over 10 times faster than current WiFi standards, so until we see a solid 802.11n standard and a practical way of putting it into a device of this size, you won't see wireless sync.

Remember, Apple doesn't just do things to say they can do them - They wait until they can do them the way they should be done.

If all I'm getting is 8GB, which isn't big enough to store my entire library -- especially when you consider how Stevo's pushing the noton of watching video on the iPhone -- it is once again not worth the price tag. It's a Nano, and ain't no way I'm paying $600 for that.

It's not about the speed; it's about having any ability to make remote changes to what I have on my iPhone at any one time. And it's not possible -- the right way, the wrong way, or any way -- with this product. And again, I pay for features; this is one more lack thereof that makes the price absurd.

An early review indicates that the screen seems to be pretty tough and scratch-proof. Let's hope they've learned their lesson.

I'd suspect that's probably the case; my 2nd-gen Nano and other newer iPods my friends have have held up well. I guess we'll see.

Ooo, can I be a fanboy too?

Is it wrong to like well-designed products? Or should we all just live with the el cheapo, el crappo Wal-Mart junk that most companies foist on us?

It's not wrong to like good products. It is wrong, however, to assume sight-unseen that a company that has made one successful hand-held device (in several flavors) has done so again. Everybody gets so caught up in the Apple hype that they forget that this is a giant step up in terms of complexity for Apple, and just assume that "Well, the iPod is great so this must be too." It's a lot more complex a device, it's a lot more software to squeeze on a little device, and it could very well suck. But you'll never hear that from any fanboys.

Huh? I assume you're talking about the personal computer revolution. Remember who started it.

And who -- despite starting it -- failed to profit from or contribute to it in any meaningful way after about 1992. And during the biggest parts of the boom (call it 95-2001), Apple spent most of the time hemorrhaging cash and watching its stock sink to a level at which you could buy it with the change on the floor in your car, and not bringing one new, innovative thing to market. Hardly revolutionary.

Yes, they have crappy marketing and they always have. They foolishly assumed a better product would sell itself, but when there's a competitor like Microsoft in the business... Well, it's foolish!

Sure, blame the marketing. Not the fact that between, say, 1992 and 1998 (when the iMac came out) they couldn't -- or wouldn't -- make a product that anyone wanted to buy and did absolutely nothing new. I doubt the biggest marketing genius on the planet could have foisted the giant hunk of steaming crap that was MacOS on anybody -- at any price, let alone the laughably outrageous prices they tried to. (To be fair, OSX is a world better. I even ran it for a while and quite liked it. But again, it really is just a more robust, better-looking, better-working GNOME or KDE. Hardly something to beat one's breast about with words like "revolutionary".)

Or, sure, blame Microsoft. Nevermind the fact that it's seriously possible that without the $150 million Microsoft invested in Apple that it wouldn't even be around today (and we'd be stuck with those sh*tty Zunes). And nevermind the fact Microsoft partnered with Apple to offer Internet Explorer on MacOS. And the fact that it sold plenty of copies of MS Office for Mac. So I assume when you say "a competitor like Microsoft", you mean "a much more seriously savvy competitor at the time" and nothing else.

One? What the hell is your definition of commercially successful? Mine is "makes a significant profit." By that definition, Apple has had dozens if not hundreds of commercially successful products.

I should have been more specific: One commercially successful personal device. The iPod is, like I said, probably the best product of the last 10 years. But the iPhone is a lot more than -- and a lot different from -- the iPod in terms of functionality, and given my experience with Apple-written OSes, I'm not blindly giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that everything they do is the new gold-standard for technological innovation. Plenty of people did exactly that during the early 90's, and look what happened after that: By your own definition, Apple wasn't successful between 1993 and 1998 -- when it didn't make any profit, let alone a "significant" one (again, during quite possibly some of the most profitable time in history for technology companies).

This is where you completely lose me. They write the most robust personal computer OS on the market, leading digital audio/video editing software (as well as prosumer and consumer versions thereof), some excellent productivity tools (Keynote and Pages), and countless other smaller things. All of the above are stable, full-featured, and have the best user interfaces around. What makes you say they can't write software? Call me a "fanboy" but you seem to be an anti-fanboy when you say things like this... Or maybe you're just ignorant of the scope of what Apple really does?

To be fair, as far as the non-OS software Apple has sold, remember that much of it was acquired from other firms. For example, Final Cut came from Macromedia. iDVD and DVD Studio Pro came from Astarte. Those are just a few instances, and I'm sure there are more. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that or that it takes much away from what Apple has done with those products since, but it's not fair to claim that that Apple originated them. But plenty of companies (Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, Google, Yahoo, and on and on) do the same thing so I don't necessarily count it as a strike against them.

As to my experience with Apple, I supported MacOS PowerPCs and -- I didn't build the infrastructure -- PowerPCs running MacOS serving all of an ISP's core services from 1996 to 1999. I won't get into much detail, because I may wind up lying on the floor naked in the fetal position, but suffice it to say that I swore at the time that I would never, ever, ever buy an Apple product again (I since have... a few times). Having "grown-up" with Windows, I was the "junior" admin, and the "senior" guys were all (self-proclaimed, anyway) Mac experts, so perhaps my experience was slightly skewed by overestimating their skill. But I doubt it. So if I'm an "anti-fanboy", it's through experience -- both the experience of using/supporting Apple's crappy OSes in the late 90's, and the experience of having such high hopes for a company that was in the driver's seat in 1990 and watching them completely fall off the map for more than 5 years. I most certainly am not about to make the latter mistake again, and given my experience I've been -- with some exceptions -- generally disinclined to put myself in a position to repeat the former.

 

[mikea]

And, of course, they didn't set themselves up for it by releasing the product a little earlier than they should have.

They didn't release it. They're going to release it in June. I wouldn't bet that date doesn't slip, with the accompaning screams.

The iPhone is a huge leap in hardware and software tech and challenge to pull off. Steve said they've been working on it for 2 1/2 years. It's got a screen that didn't exist when they started. The UI is brand new. The voicemail thing is another project.

I expect that the reason they won't let anybody have their hands on it, and they won't answer questions like which CPU is has, is becuase a lotta things don't work well enough yet and they haven't yet decided things like what CPU it will have. Since it runs OS X/Unix it can run on any CPU on the planet. They can see which performs best and has the longest battery life.

I'm sure that just getting to where that demo worked was a major undertaking.

As he said, he announced it because they had to file the FCC approval request and he didn't want people to see it first at the FCC.

I wouldn't be there to buy the first ones in June (October).

Next year or so it will have 3G, more storage, more apps and rev 6 hardware and firmware which will fix all of the problems the early adopters were so kind as to test.

During that year or more the hackers will have written widgets to get it to do SSL and remote desktop and you name it and you haven't thought of it, too. As I just heard today on MacBreak Weekly, even if Apple tries to close out third party developers, the thing runs the Safari browser so you can just write a web app, flash, Java and all.

When iPhone gen 2 or 3 comes out is when I'll be getting mine. My iPod is a gen 5.

I'm going to look for a deal on the new HTC Windows Mobile 5 phone to use the meantime. Maybe I'll get one on eBay from one of those who got the iPhone.

 

[Brian Austin]

They didn't release it. They're going to release it in June. I wouldn't bet that date doesn't slip, with the accompaning screams.

You're right. I should have said "announced".

I'm not questioning the uniqueness of many of its features. If it's anything like my own 5G iPod (which I love and take everywhere), I'm sure it will be quite a hit.

My issue is with the bandwagon. Here's Jobs, announcing a new product from Apple. The guy could be announcing a new toilet that has Mac OS X installed and Mac-addicts everywhere would line up to buy one...and be singing its praises before even seeing one in their bathrooms. I'll let you guess the name.

No one has seen the product. Apple won't release any development details (yet) so no one can add on (yet). Everyone in the "yeah Apple" crowd is simply regurgitating speculative articles and the initial stuff from Apple. How critical can you really be with that?

Remove the Apple name and place the product in Motorola's hands...or any other phone vendor. Would you get celebrating the grand achievement then? Even if it LICENSED Mac OS X but was branded with the Motorola name (I know that's hardly likely to happen with Apple's very locked down licensing system)?

I've read some fairly critical articles on the iPhones capabilities, specifically with regards to their lack of high-speed support. Instead of jumping on to Cingular's speedier 3G HSDPA network, they are going with the slower EDGE system. And what about the two-hand requirement for using some of the touchscreen's features? Try that when you're driving sometime.

The features aren't even the real hard part for Apple. They've got licenses to negotiate for several patents that others own. They've got the Cisco trademark issue, which could have been avoided if they had played it straight (from what I've read). Apple is going to shell out a crapload of money to release a product in a new market that is rather niche to say the least. As someone mentioned here, it's a niche product in a niche market. As a shareholder, I wouldn't be too thrilled with the ROI prospects on that one.

Nothing else on it is really THAT revolutionary to warrant this kind of response...unless it's Apple. That's what bugs me more than anything.

 

[ReverendSlappy]

You're right. I should have said "announced".

I'm not questioning the uniqueness of many of its features. If it's anything like my own 5G iPod (which I love and take everywhere), I'm sure it will be quite a hit.

My issue is with the bandwagon. Here's Jobs, announcing a new product from Apple. The guy could be announcing a new toilet that has Mac OS X installed and Mac-addicts everywhere would line up to buy one...and be singing its praises before even seeing one in their bathrooms. I'll let you guess the name.

No one has seen the product. Apple won't release any development details (yet) so no one can add on (yet). Everyone in the "yeah Apple" crowd is simply regurgitating speculative articles and the initial stuff from Apple. How critical can you really be with that?

Remove the Apple name and place the product in Motorola's hands...or any other phone vendor. Would you get celebrating the grand achievement then? Even if it LICENSED Mac OS X but was branded with the Motorola name (I know that's hardly likely to happen with Apple's very locked down licensing system)?

I've read some fairly critical articles on the iPhones capabilities, specifically with regards to their lack of high-speed support. Instead of jumping on to Cingular's speedier 3G HSDPA network, they are going with the slower EDGE system. And what about the two-hand requirement for using some of the touchscreen's features? Try that when you're driving sometime.

The features aren't even the real hard part for Apple. They've got licenses to negotiate for several patents that others own. They've got the Cisco trademark issue, which could have been avoided if they had played it straight (from what I've read). Apple is going to shell out a crapload of money to release a product in a new market that is rather niche to say the least. As someone mentioned here, it's a niche product in a niche market. As a shareholder, I wouldn't be too thrilled with the ROI prospects on that one.

Nothing else on it is really THAT revolutionary to warrant this kind of response...unless it's Apple. That's what bugs me more than anything.

Amen. If Microsoft or somebody else were to release the exact same product, with the exact same specs and features, it'd be "ho-hum". But it's Apple, so it must be the coolest, awesomest, most revolutionary thing to hit the market ever. Right. And people say Apple's bad at marketing...

As far as things go from an Apple shareholder's perspective, I'm wondering if the earliness of the announcement has anything to do with their earnings which are to be reported later this month...

 

[AirBaker]

I think Cingular is the 'real' winner here. Although who knows what negotiating went into that contract.

At least here in the Bay Area, this OLD GSM network sucks. I think the phone is pretty cool personally, but you couldn't get me to take a free one if it meant using Cingular.

And what about the two-hand requirement for using some of the touchscreen's features? Try that when you're driving sometime.

I thought that was what voice commands were for. At least I hope that's what they're for.... Someone will be changing the song, dialing their friend Doris, and driving? YIKES.

 

[AirBaker]

Right. And people say Apple's bad at marketing...

Actually, all my 'GEEKS' that work for me are now OS X junkies. Apple has now made its product geek-cool. I find that impressive.

 

[mikea]

Actually, all my 'GEEKS' that work for me are now OS X junkies. Apple has now made its product geek-cool. I find that impressive.

15-20 years ago when I had to make the Macs work with everything and everybody else on the network I hated them. We had certified Mac support guys who, when I would ask them for help, the answer always was "Reinstall System 7."

Now I love my Macs because it's 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The Macs just work. Macs, with Samba built in, do Windows networking better than Windows.

I'm too old to get a lot of enjoyment out of tinkering. I gave enough years of my life doing that.

What tipped it for me is knowing that a had a Unix comamnd prompt available. When I bought my first I figured if I hated it I could use it as a server and run real stuff, even though I no longer wanted to mess with what that takes.

It turned out I didn't hate it and I do use one as a server and THAT is very easy to do.

 

[AirBaker]

...I hated them.

Yep... Know the feeling. (Thread Hijack). Did you ever have to support the MacTCP protocol? Some joker thought it would be funny to have the error message say "That pesky MacTCP is acting up again." ERRRR

 

[flyingcheesehead]

My issue is with the bandwagon. Here's Jobs, announcing a new product from Apple. The guy could be announcing a new toilet that has Mac OS X installed and Mac-addicts everywhere would line up to buy one...and be singing its praises before even seeing one in their bathrooms. I'll let you guess the name.

Hmmm...

IP?
iHead
iLoo
iGottaGo

Uh oh. Don't give him any ideas. I don't want to see the man in jeans and a black turtleneck demoing the iCrap!

Remove the Apple name and place the product in Motorola's hands...or any other phone vendor. Would you get celebrating the grand achievement then?

No, because Moto doesn't make products like Apple does. There's a reason Apple has all the fanboys.

Instead of jumping on to Cingular's speedier 3G HSDPA network, they are going with the slower EDGE system.

WHAT network? Is that rolled out yet? Do any other devices support it?

I'm a Cingular (ahem, AT&T Wireless now I guess...) customer, and when I purchased my phone several months ago, EDGE was all you could get. They haven't been telling me about any new speedier solution, so I'm guessing that if it exists at all, it's in "select markets."

Really, EDGE isn't that bad. I keep an eye on my throughput constantly, and it often gets up into the almost-30KB/sec range. So, it's equivalent to the el-cheapo-slow DSL lines. Beats the crap out of a regular modem anyway...

Also, everyone's comparing it with EVDO. A Sprint-using friend of mine always gets excited when he's around Chicago or another big city because he can get EVDO, whereas otherwise he can't. I get EDGE almost everywhere I go, even out in the boonies. It's very rare to drop into GPRS mode.

The features aren't even the real hard part for Apple. They've got licenses to negotiate for several patents that others own. They've got the Cisco trademark issue, which could have been avoided if they had played it straight (from what I've read). Apple is going to shell out a crapload of money to release a product

You've got that right. I think they'll still sell a ton of 'em.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

They didn't release it. They're going to release it in June. I wouldn't bet that date doesn't slip, with the accompaning screams.

Steve must be pretty sure of it though, because otherwise he'd have said something like "mid to late 2007." People hate missed release dates, so they've been very conservative with announcing them the last several years. For instance, the Intel transition was originally "within a year and a half" (they did it in a year). Mac OS X 10.5 will be released "In the first half of 2007." etc.

If he is gonna miss a deadline though, this is it. It seems they have a lot of licensing hurdles to jump through still, both for the name and some of the technology.

As he said, he announced it because they had to file the FCC approval request and he didn't want people to see it first at the FCC.

Bingo. That's one of the tricks the rumor sites use, and we know how Apple feels about rumors. I wonder if this is the "touchscreen iPod" that they accidentally leaked a few months ago.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

And, of course, they didn't set themselves up for it by releasing the product a little earlier than they should have.

Like Mike said, they did it so the rumor sites didn't find out first from the FCC. However, I agree... They did release it a bit early. I wonder if smartphone sales will sag in the meantime...

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Those are fair points about GSM and network size, and I'm glad for you that you've been satisfied with Cingular. But I've simply had the precisely opposite experience.

No network pleases everyone. I used to love Verizon and I've already mentioned that I think they have excellent support, but I know plenty of folks who feel just the opposite. They need to go with a true nationwide network, which means Verizon or Cingular, but Verizon cripples the heck out of phones and Apple isn't going to play that game. There is only one choice, unfortunately, and it's the little orange guy.

You don't write your own kernel? You're not a real OS developer.

Whatever. That reminds me of all the truckers that say "You have an AUTOMATIC?? You're not a REAL truck driver!"

If it's ALL written by Apple, it'll be impossible for me to ignore the cold-sweats and nausea induced by flashbacks of my time supporting PowerPCs back in the (Apple-written) MacOS 7.5-8.1 days.

I've been supporting Macs longer than that, back into the days of 6.0.x. Compare Mac OS to Windows back then, and Mac OS was still a far superior product. Compare either to today, and... Yeah.

C'mon, it wasn't that hard to support Macs back then. Sheesh.

Edit: And the "Visual Voicemail" feature is worth at least $100. To me, anyway.

That's an interesting one. I think the cell companies purposely make their VM suck so that you have to burn minutes trying to get to the message you want. This will certainly be a big improvement.

If all I'm getting is 8GB, which isn't big enough to store my entire library -- especially when you consider how Stevo's pushing the noton of watching video on the iPhone -- it is once again not worth the price tag. It's a Nano, and ain't no way I'm paying $600 for that.

How big should it be? If you make it 80GB, it's going to have to have a hard drive and be bigger, heavier, less susceptible to dropping, and compete with the iPod. Oh, not to mention way more expen$ive than it already is.

My personal library is somewhere around 23 gigs, and that's without any video. But, that's what the iPod is for (I have a 60GB).

It's not about the speed; it's about having any ability to make remote changes to what I have on my iPhone at any one time. And it's not possible -- the right way, the wrong way, or any way -- with this product.

You *can* sync wirelessly, for things like your address book and such. You simply can't sync the music/videos (ie BIG STUFF that would be slow) wirelessly.

However, I'd bet that by the time this thing actually ships, 802.11n will be finalized and wireless sync will be included. You know, Steve does have to have something for his "Oh, and one more thing..." spiel.

I'd suspect that's probably the case; my 2nd-gen Nano and other newer iPods my friends have have held up well. I guess we'll see.

Hm... Good to hear.

And who -- despite starting it -- failed to profit from or contribute to it in any meaningful way after about 1992. And during the biggest parts of the boom (call it 95-2001), Apple spent most of the time hemorrhaging cash and watching its stock sink to a level at which you could buy it with the change on the floor in your car, and not bringing one new, innovative thing to market. Hardly revolutionary.

*cough* iMac. 1998. That's right in the middle.

Yeah, Apple was a tad, um, "slow" in the short-bus kind of way before Jobs came back. His bullheaded insistence that Apple produce revolutionary, "insanely great" products is why you see great things coming out of Apple that simply wouldn't have happened before his return.

Sure, blame the marketing. Not the fact that between, say, 1992 and 1998 (when the iMac came out) they couldn't -- or wouldn't -- make a product that anyone wanted to buy and did absolutely nothing new.

PowerBook, 1992. First standard-equipment CD-ROM drive, Macintosh Centris 650, 1993. The original "AV machines" with a DSP, voice recognition, and video input and output standard, Quadra 840AV, 1993. The world's first PDA, the Newton MessagePad, 1993. Power Macs and the original architecture change, 1994. etc. etc. etc.

Apple in the non-Steve days did a lot of revolutionary things, very quietly. Of the ones I've listed above, I think the CD-ROM inclusion was the one that's most affected computers of today. Before that, nobody really made anything on CD-ROM because nobody had the drive. Once the drives started coming out like crazy, developers had an installed base to sell to, and they developed all kinds of neat stuff. That was the beginning of the "multimedia revolution."

The problem is, they didn't have Steve and his Reality Distortion Field to squawk about how great these things were. They were still leading, and the rest of the market still copying, but without Apple (and Steve) doing any marketing whatsoever, everyone thought that the PC market was coming up with this stuff.

I doubt the biggest marketing genius on the planet could have foisted the giant hunk of steaming crap that was MacOS on anybody -- at any price, let alone the laughably outrageous prices they tried to.

Laughably outrageous, like "Free?" Apple didn't charge for MacOS until pretty late in the game, after they had the cute blue-face logo. I think it was 8.5 that they first charged for. Yes, you could buy a boxed copy as early as 7.0, but back in those days it was actually legal and encouraged for Mac user groups and the like to duplicate the installation floppies and pass them out.

And really, what consumer personal computer OS back in those days wasn't a "giant hunk of steaming crap" by today's standards?

Or, sure, blame Microsoft. Nevermind the fact that it's seriously possible that without the $150 million Microsoft invested in Apple that it wouldn't even be around today (and we'd be stuck with those sh*tty Zunes).

The $150 million wasn't what saved Apple. The continued development of Microsoft Office, was a much much much larger factor, IMHO. The $150 mil was a brilliant move by Apple after they caught M$ with their pants down (QuickTime source code was found in early versions of Windows Media). Rather than a lengthy lawsuit, Apple offered the payoff. That avoided a ton of legal expenses and, well, the $150 mil was nice too.

I still think Apple would have survived even without Office (WordPerfect was actually a better product that Word on the Mac in those days), but it would have been much tougher.

And nevermind the fact Microsoft partnered with Apple to offer Internet Explorer on MacOS.

Whoopee. There were browsers before IE, and there were browsers after IE. IE is no longer offered for Mac OS X, and who cares? Nobody. I mean, really, speaking of giant hunks of steaming crap...

And the fact that it sold plenty of copies of MS Office for Mac.

You say that like it was a favor Microsoft did for Apple. Microsoft likes selling Mac products, it makes 'em a lot of money.

So I assume when you say "a competitor like Microsoft", you mean "a much more seriously savvy competitor at the time" and nothing else.

I mean a competitor in the "OS Wars" sense. Microsoft is so damn big they're both a competitor and an ally all at once. Kinda scary.

By your own definition, Apple wasn't successful between 1993 and 1998 -- when it didn't make any profit, let alone a "significant" one

I can't find historical profit data at the moment, but they did make profits in some of those years, not all. Interestingly enough, the revenues they made in 1995 were not exceeded until 2005. It was 1996 when "the big drop" occurred, so I am pretty sure that from 1993-1995 they were consistently making a profit.

The funny thing is how the losses started. They had a bad quarter and lost $69 million, which is a drop in the bucket for a company that has over $2 BILLION cash on hand. The press, however, jumped all over it and people were very reluctant to buy Macs for fear that Apple wasn't going to be around to support them (I know, I was trying to sell Macs at the time!). This comic sums it up pretty well:

After everyone though Apple was going to die, it did start to hurt with two quarters of $700 mil+ losses. Power of the press...

As to my experience with Apple, I supported MacOS PowerPCs and -- I didn't build the infrastructure -- PowerPCs running MacOS serving all of an ISP's core services from 1996 to 1999. I won't get into much detail, because I may wind up lying on the floor naked in the fetal position, but suffice it to say that I swore at the time that I would never, ever, ever buy an Apple product again (I since have... a few times)

.

Oh come on. I was doing the same thing in the same time period. I think the worst part was the name. Remember "Apple Internet Server Solution for the World Wide Web?" Ugh.

I'm sure you know WebStar, AIMS/EIMS, NetPresenz, MacDNS and/or QuickDNS, etc. quite well. You probably also know what a PowerKey Pro is.

While it wasn't the most elegant thing in the world, only two of the above were Apple products at all (and those were both free - ya get what ya pay for and all that). Had Apple actually designed the entire solution, it would have been much better.

FWIW, I finally took down my last Mac OS 9 server in early 2003.

I still, at any given point in time, would rather have supported Mac users and servers than others. I did for some time run some non-Mac stuff (OK, it was an Apple Network Server 700 running LinuxPPC) but I always liked how I never had to worry about security on the Mac servers (which is also why the US Army ran www.army.mil on Mac OS 9 boxen for a while). OS 9 was even more secure than OS X, being that it's kinda difficult to hack anything with no command line interface whatsoever.

OK, I'm posted out for now.

 

[Brian Austin]

WHAT network? Is that rolled out yet? Do any other devices support it?

I'm a Cingular (ahem, AT&T Wireless now I guess...) customer, and when I purchased my phone several months ago, EDGE was all you could get. They haven't been telling me about any new speedier solution, so I'm guessing that if it exists at all, it's in "select markets."

Really, EDGE isn't that bad. I keep an eye on my throughput constantly, and it often gets up into the almost-30KB/sec range. So, it's equivalent to the el-cheapo-slow DSL lines. Beats the crap out of a regular modem anyway...

Also, everyone's comparing it with EVDO. A Sprint-using friend of mine always gets excited when he's around Chicago or another big city because he can get EVDO, whereas otherwise he can't. I get EDGE almost everywhere I go, even out in the boonies. It's very rare to drop into GPRS mode.

Cingular shows three PDA/smartphones on their site supporting 3G data. They also show a number of flipphones doing the same. HSDPA is currently supported in quite a few metro areas, according to some press releases.

Personally, I have no issues with EVDO on Sprint. One of my technicians drove to ALQ from Phoenix with his parents over Christmas. He played online games the whole way with his Sprint PPC6700 connected. Said he dropped only when they went into the Salt River Canyon. Other than that, he got dialup speeds or higher, typically in the 64K - 128K range. Since EDGE peaks at 135K according to their website, I'm not sure why that is necessarily any better than what I've seen off EVDO.

I think they'll still sell a ton of 'em.

Again, I'm not disagreeing, although "ton" is a relative term here. It's a really small niche market in comparison to the cellular market. I'll go on record as predicting that this won't be a profit center for Apple for at least two years.

My point is that, feature for feature, no one would be paying any attention to this if it didn't have the name "Apple" on the back. Rose colored glasses, etc., don't make for critical review. In the grand scheme of what IS possible vs what is actually on the iPhone, it's kinda old stuff.

 

[ScottM]

American Standard Toilets and plumbing to sue Kent Shook
"Toto said in the complaint that Kent had attempted to get rights to the iGottaGo name several times, but American Standard refused."

"American Standard holds a clear advantage in the legal dispute as the trademark holder of record and having already released products using the iGottaGo name, said Bruce Sumpstein, co-founder of the Boston law firm Bromberg & Sumpstein. "The one who has a registration is in a better position than the one who does not, Kent is in a world of crap.""

 

[flyingcheesehead]

American Standard Toilets and plumbing to sue Kent Shook
"Toto said in the complaint that Kent had attempted to get rights to the iGottaGo name several times, but American Standard refused."

"American Standard holds a clear advantage in the legal dispute as the trademark holder of record and having already released products using the iGottaGo name, said Bruce Sumpstein, co-founder of the Boston law firm Bromberg & Sumpstein. "The one who has a registration is in a better position than the one who does not, Kent is in a world of crap.""

Nice, Scott!

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Cingular shows three PDA/smartphones on their site supporting 3G data. They also show a number of flipphones doing the same. HSDPA is currently supported in quite a few metro areas, according to some press releases.

I looked at their site for coverage. None in my entire STATE. I'd have to go to the Empire of Chicago. Blech.

He played online games the whole way with his Sprint PPC6700 connected. Said he dropped only when they went into the Salt River Canyon. Other than that, he got dialup speeds or higher, typically in the 64K - 128K range.

Right - It drops back to the lower standards outside the metro areas. I get EDGE darn near everywhere.

Again, I'm not disagreeing, although "ton" is a relative term here. It's a really small niche market in comparison to the cellular market. I'll go on record as predicting that this won't be a profit center for Apple for at least two years.

Already forgot where I saw the quote, but Jobs said that they would be REALLY happy if they could get 1 percent of the market by the end of 2008. So, they don't seem to have iPod-level expectations at least.

My point is that, feature for feature, no one would be paying any attention to this if it didn't have the name "Apple" on the back. Rose colored glasses, etc., don't make for critical review. In the grand scheme of what IS possible vs what is actually on the iPhone, it's kinda old stuff.

Right - It's not features that excite us Apple geeks, though we do like features. It's USABILITY. My current phone has a zillion features (which is why I bought it), but as it turns out, I don't use a lot of them, even ones that I considered essential when I was looking for the phone in the first place. Features are useless if you don't use them. (How profound.) That's the draw for Apple - They have features that will be accessible, so more folks will use them.

 

[ReverendSlappy]

No network pleases everyone. I used to love Verizon and I've already mentioned that I think they have excellent support, but I know plenty of folks who feel just the opposite. They need to go with a true nationwide network, which means Verizon or Cingular, but Verizon cripples the heck out of phones and Apple isn't going to play that game. There is only one choice, unfortunately, and it's the little orange guy.

I totally get that. I mean when the choices are "bad, small, worse, and worst" it's inevitable that a lot of people are going to wind up dissatisfied. I didn't ever mean to imply that Cingular's (IMHO) suckiness is somehow Apple's fault -- or that they really could have chosen a provider that would have pleased more people -- just that my experience with Cingular is enough to make me not buy the iPhone.

Whatever. That reminds me of all the truckers that say "You have an AUTOMATIC?? You're not a REAL truck driver!"

It wasn't really my intention to call them "wimps" or some such. Just that the fact that they didn't write the entire OS goes to my mistrust of their software development ability -- an ability that is going to be more tested with the iPhone than it has been with the iPod.

I've been supporting Macs longer than that, back into the days of 6.0.x. Compare Mac OS to Windows back then, and Mac OS was still a far superior product. Compare either to today, and... Yeah.

C'mon, it wasn't that hard to support Macs back then. Sheesh.

Yeah, I mean I think that anybody taking an honest look back at MacOS wouldn't call it a world-class operating system, by today's standards. And I'd argue that Windows95 (despite all its flaws) did more to advance desktop OSes than any release of MacOS did during the same period. Those were during the non-Jobs days, but again, I was just talking about how after having such a string of successes in the 80's, Apple completely dropped the ball in the 90s.

And no, it wasn't "hard". It just wasn't as easy as it should have been, and for all its "we do things the right way" attitude, Apple sure didn't do that -- at all -- with MacOS.

That's an interesting one. I think the cell companies purposely make their VM suck so that you have to burn minutes trying to get to the message you want. This will certainly be a big improvement.

The more I think about "visual voicemail", the cooler it sounds to me. I would assume that a lot of providers will be jumping at the chance to compete with that feature -- which should be relatively easy to implement given the capabilities of most cell phones and PDAs out there.

And I'm 100% on board with your little conspiracy theory there. And it irks me just as much.

How big should it be? If you make it 80GB, it's going to have to have a hard drive and be bigger, heavier, less susceptible to dropping, and compete with the iPod. Oh, not to mention way more expen$ive than it already is.

My personal library is somewhere around 23 gigs, and that's without any video. But, that's what the iPod is for (I have a 60GB).



You *can* sync wirelessly, for things like your address book and such. You simply can't sync the music/videos (ie BIG STUFF that would be slow) wirelessly.

However, I'd bet that by the time this thing actually ships, 802.11n will be finalized and wireless sync will be included. You know, Steve does have to have something for his "Oh, and one more thing..." spiel.

My point is that IMHO, if you're going to charge $500-$600, you've gotta do one or the other: Either find a better balance of size/weight and storage or give me the ability to change what I've got on the device on the fly. Or, at the very least, provide the ability to add/swap storage. It'd be pricey (and something of a pain) to do, but I'd settle for carrying around a bunch of SD cards that I could swap around.

I guess where that beef comes from is my experience traveling a lot for work last year (gone for several weeks at a time). During that period, I had only a company-issued laptop (a MacBook Pro, which I enjoyed enough) and my 8GB Nano. With my library weighing in at around 46GB, minus video, (I know, I'm a little crazy... I could probably easily delete around 20GB of that and never miss it. But many of those MP3's go all the way back to like '96, man! I don't wanna lose 'em!), and being not at all interested in lugging two laptops around (the company was... strict about what software one could install), I was pretty much stuck with the 8GB I had for -- in some cases -- up to 3 weeks at a time. I guess 8 freaking gigs (I know... the reality is that it's a lot) is probably plenty for most people, but I think my listening habits may be different or something. It was mildly frustrating to hear or think of a song, realize I have it in my library at home, and not be able to get it on my iPod (without -- the horror -- buying it or some other silly idea). But I'd only spent the, what, $250 or whatever on the Nano, so it didn't really get to me. But if I were to spend $600 on a device, I'd want it to be able to store -- somehow -- enough music for that amount of time OR let me grab what I want from my library whenever I want. Sure, there aren't many (any?) devices that allow for that, but they don't cost $600.

*cough* iMac. 1998. That's right in the middle.

Yeah, Apple was a tad, um, "slow" in the short-bus kind of way before Jobs came back. His bullheaded insistence that Apple produce revolutionary, "insanely great" products is why you see great things coming out of Apple that simply wouldn't have happened before his return.

Like I think I said somewhere in my last post, the iMac did represent the turning point for Apple. But the 90's was a pretty dark period of time for Apple -- especially commercially. I think a lot of that could definitely be contributed to Stevo's absence, but I don't buy the idea that with the talent, momentum, and respect that Apple had before his departure that that era should have been THAT bad.

PowerBook, 1992. First standard-equipment CD-ROM drive, Macintosh Centris 650, 1993. The original "AV machines" with a DSP, voice recognition, and video input and output standard, Quadra 840AV, 1993. The world's first PDA, the Newton MessagePad, 1993. Power Macs and the original architecture change, 1994. etc. etc. etc.

Apple in the non-Steve days did a lot of revolutionary things, very quietly. Of the ones I've listed above, I think the CD-ROM inclusion was the one that's most affected computers of today. Before that, nobody really made anything on CD-ROM because nobody had the drive. Once the drives started coming out like crazy, developers had an installed base to sell to, and they developed all kinds of neat stuff. That was the beginning of the "multimedia revolution."

The problem is, they didn't have Steve and his Reality Distortion Field to squawk about how great these things were. They were still leading, and the rest of the market still copying, but without Apple (and Steve) doing any marketing whatsoever, everyone thought that the PC market was coming up with this stuff.

I'm not so sure I'm ready to attribute the "multimedia revolution" entirely to Apple, but sure, Apple did do some great stuff during that period of time. It was just a few years ago (maybe 2002-2003) that I dealt with somebody at work who still carried around a Newton. I'm not sure why -- and I didn't ask him how in the hell he was still able to keep it working -- but it's true they were still -- quietly -- doing some cool things. But that time was fiscally AWFUL for Apple. They simply couldn't sell what they made. And every time Apple does something new and I watch the investors I have the fortune or misfortune of working near go into an uncontrollable AAPL-buying frenzy, I think of those years and really seriously wonder if that particular ship has been righted. Mr. Jobs certainly helps, but watching them crash and burn so cataclysmically in the 90's after being considered the biggest technology wunderkind makes me wonder if the next Apple Ice Age isn't right around the corner.

Laughably outrageous, like "Free?" Apple didn't charge for MacOS until pretty late in the game, after they had the cute blue-face logo. I think it was 8.5 that they first charged for. Yes, you could buy a boxed copy as early as 7.0, but back in those days it was actually legal and encouraged for Mac user groups and the like to duplicate the installation floppies and pass them out.

The OS may have been free. But the hardware to run it on most definitely wasn't.

And really, what consumer personal computer OS back in those days wasn't a "giant hunk of steaming crap" by today's standards?

<insert name of Unix variant here>

The $150 million wasn't what saved Apple. The continued development of Microsoft Office, was a much much much larger factor, IMHO. The $150 mil was a brilliant move by Apple after they caught M$ with their pants down (QuickTime source code was found in early versions of Windows Media). Rather than a lengthy lawsuit, Apple offered the payoff. That avoided a ton of legal expenses and, well, the $150 mil was nice too.

I still think Apple would have survived even without Office (WordPerfect was actually a better product that Word on the Mac in those days), but it would have been much tougher.

Whoopee. There were browsers before IE, and there were browsers after IE. IE is no longer offered for Mac OS X, and who cares? Nobody. I mean, really, speaking of giant hunks of steaming crap...

You say that like it was a favor Microsoft did for Apple. Microsoft likes selling Mac products, it makes 'em a lot of money.

I mean a competitor in the "OS Wars" sense. Microsoft is so damn big they're both a competitor and an ally all at once. Kinda scary.

I was just assuming you were going down the whole "Microsoft is evil, and that's why Apple isn't #1" road, and trying to head you off at the pass.

I can't find historical profit data at the moment, but they did make profits in some of those years, not all. Interestingly enough, the revenues they made in 1995 were not exceeded until 2005. It was 1996 when "the big drop" occurred, so I am pretty sure that from 1993-1995 they were consistently making a profit.

The funny thing is how the losses started. They had a bad quarter and lost $69 million, which is a drop in the bucket for a company that has over $2 BILLION cash on hand. The press, however, jumped all over it and people were very reluctant to buy Macs for fear that Apple wasn't going to be around to support them (I know, I was trying to sell Macs at the time!). This comic sums it up pretty well:

After everyone though Apple was going to die, it did start to hurt with two quarters of $700 mil+ losses. Power of the press...

The reasons are debatable, but Apple experienced horrid financial performance for a lot of the 90s. The only data I was able to find was on Wikipedia:

Thanks in part to the iMac, fiscal 1998 was Apple's first profitable year since 1993.

They were just a really, really poor performing company during those years, and I'm just always so surprised that people either forget or ignore that these days. Score one for Mr. Jobs, I guess.

Oh come on. I was doing the same thing in the same time period. I think the worst part was the name. Remember "Apple Internet Server Solution for the World Wide Web?" Ugh.

Oh my God... that brings back some memories (read: gut-wrenching flashbacks). <shiver>

That name -- along with some others I can't remember -- were just... atrocious. To the point that they were almost funny.

I'm sure you know WebStar, AIMS/EIMS, NetPresenz, MacDNS and/or QuickDNS, etc. quite well. You probably also know what a PowerKey Pro is.

While it wasn't the most elegant thing in the world, only two of the above were Apple products at all (and those were both free - ya get what ya pay for and all that). Had Apple actually designed the entire solution, it would have been much better.

FWIW, I finally took down my last Mac OS 9 server in early 2003.

I still, at any given point in time, would rather have supported Mac users and servers than others. I did for some time run some non-Mac stuff (OK, it was an Apple Network Server 700 running LinuxPPC) but I always liked how I never had to worry about security on the Mac servers (which is also why the US Army ran www.army.mil on Mac OS 9 boxen for a while). OS 9 was even more secure than OS X, being that it's kinda difficult to hack anything with no command line interface whatsoever.

OK, I'm posted out for now.

True, most of those apps weren't written by Apple. But still... I think "not the most elegant thing in the world" is understating it pretty healthily. But again, prior to that job, I grew up in sort of a hybrid "DOS/Windows/Solaris/Unix-ish with a dash of OS/2" world, so maybe I just didn't get it... I'm not ashamed to admit it. Regardless, what I did see (especially compared to, say, BSD or AIX) I simply didn't like. But I guess that's not really an apples to apples (a-har-har... I slay me) comparison.

Anyway, what it comes down to for me is not that I dislike Apple itself or its products themselves. I'm just really, REALLY tired of the hype. Like I said, if any other company came out with the exact same product -- same features, same quality, etc. -- as Apple did with the iPhone, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now (and that other company's stock wouldn't have closed over 94 freekin' bucks today). I don't know what exactly to attribute that phenomenon to, but it simply can't be the fact that Apple has had a 100% consistent reputation of leading the industry. They led -- hell, started -- it, then faded drastically, then experienced a resurgence, in an almost entirely different form. That's a really impressive success-->failure-->redemption story, but it's not enough to make me believe they walk on water. And I think the iPhone's shortcomings are proof of that.

 

[mikea]

I
It wasn't really my intention to call them "wimps" or some such. Just that the fact that they didn't write the entire OS goes to my mistrust of their software development ability -- an ability that is going to be more tested with the iPhone than it has been with the iPod.
...

Yeah, I mean I think that anybody taking an honest look back at MacOS wouldn't call it a world-class operating system, by today's standards. And I'd argue that Windows95 (despite all its flaws) did more to advance desktop OSes than any release of MacOS did during the same period. Those were during the non-Jobs days, but again, I was just talking about how after having such a string of successes in the 80's, Apple completely dropped the ball in the 90s.

How long have you been around?

MICROSOFT WROTE NONE OF MS-DOS (until versions above 2.0) which Windows 95 was built on. Even the company they bought MS-DOS from didn't write it. The guy cross compiled CP/M-80 to make Seattle DOS which Microsoft bought for a one time payment of $50,000.

AT&T wrote most of Unix, but it couldn't do TCP/IP until a bunch of hippies at Berkeley wrote that. A lot of modern, robust, systems besides OS X like the ones at banks and the ones in government datacenters that hold secrets and bust secrets and launch missles are built on UNIX.

No company that sells it "wrote most of it."

IBM and other companies are "selling" Linux now which is just as robust as Unix. No one person wrote any significant part of that.

THAT Berkeley code, BTW, became the TCP stack in Windows up to Windows 2000. Microsoft didn't write that either. Windows 95 didn't ship with TCP/IP.

And the company that was ripped off in the first place, Digital Research, had a really fine GUI OS called GEM long before Windows 95 came out and introduced the world to the blue screen.

 

[Brian Austin]

Right - It's not features that excite us Apple geeks, though we do like features. It's USABILITY. My current phone has a zillion features (which is why I bought it), but as it turns out, I don't use a lot of them, even ones that I considered essential when I was looking for the phone in the first place. Features are useless if you don't use them. (How profound.) That's the draw for Apple - They have features that will be accessible, so more folks will use them.

Define "accessible". What features are on your phone that you don't find accessible or usable? My PPC6700 can do just about everything that the iPhone can do (and I can dial contacts with one hand while driving) plus I can synch everything (including files) across BT, WiFi, or my Exchange server. Everything is accessible. I can add on programs, including GPS, office utils, games, more music, etc., as desired (basically anything built for a Pocket PC).

Aside from the size (this sucker is admittedly bigger than I'd prefer), the only two differences from the iPhone is the OS and the big 'ole touchscreen (mine is touch but smaller and not built for big 'ole fingers). PLUS the PPC6700 has a pretty good battery life.

I don't find any of the features "inaccessible".

I seriously think that having "Apple" in front of any product automatically bypasses any critical review of the actual product. It's like some sort of drug or something.

For instance, Apple's iTV. Slick? Kinda. Neat design. But wait...it ONLY syncs with iTunes?? No cable connection. No movie library for anything outside of iTunes. No TV shows that aren't carried on iTunes. No DVR capability. Basically, this thing is a visual medium for iTunes...which is already POSSIBLE on a PC or Mac. Tell me again why I'd pay for this??

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Define "accessible". What features are on your phone that you don't find accessible or usable?

I thought I'd be doing a lot more MP3 ring tones customized for different people. For instance, I have a long-standing tradition of spending new year's with a particular friend (since high school!) and so on my old phone, when he called, it played Auld Lang Syne. I'd thought "well gee, I'll just pop a real version of ALS in there and use it as the ring tone." But, it's a pain in the butt. I mean not REALLY... But it's not cakewalk-easy. I have to connect to the phone via Bluetooth, dig to the folder on the phone where ringtones are stored, drop the file in, get back on the phone, find the person, dig through some menus to find the custom ringtone option, browse through all the ringtones, and set it.

The Apple Way of doing this (not saying this will be how the iPhone would work, but just an example of how Apple does things) would be to, for instance, highlight the song in iTunes, and drag it over his name in the Address Book. Then, next time the phone is synced, the file is sent and the prefs automatically updated to use that as his ringtone.

The reason I haven't done it yet isn't that I can't, it's that it's WORK. For something as stupid as a custom ringtone, I'm not going to waste 5 minutes for each person in my address book who I want to have a custom tone for. So, despite the fact that I really wanted this feature when I was phone-shopping, I don't use it. "Inaccessible?" Not exactly. But, it's not nearly as easy as it SHOULD be.

For instance, Apple's iTV. Slick? Kinda. Neat design. But wait...it ONLY syncs with iTunes?? No cable connection. No movie library for anything outside of iTunes. No TV shows that aren't carried on iTunes. No DVR capability. Basically, this thing is a visual medium for iTunes...which is already POSSIBLE on a PC or Mac. Tell me again why I'd pay for this??

Yeah, I'm not all that impressed with it either. Of course, I hardly watch any TV anyway.

I've been thinking for a while that the perfect media computer would be a Mac Mini, IF it were capable of driving Apple's 30" Cinema Display. My brother has an excellent setup, but his 30" Cinema Display is connected to his main computer (dual Power Mac G5). He's got surround sound, the big screen, and he uses a piece of hardware which is ironically called the EyeTV to bring in HDTV as well as standard-def off both cable and antenna. He can watch TV, it's got DVR functionality, DVD's, blah blah blah. Very nice setup. That's something Apple will need for this to be really successful.

Apple products aren't always a commercial success, but they are pretty much always at the top of the cool-factor scale. That's why they get the hype.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Just that the fact that they didn't write the entire OS goes to my mistrust of their software development ability -- an ability that is going to be more tested with the iPhone than it has been with the iPod.

Mike pointed out one side of this. I'll point out that Apple didn't do the iPod OS either.

Yeah, I mean I think that anybody taking an honest look back at MacOS wouldn't call it a world-class operating system, by today's standards.

Nothing back then was world-class by today's standards.

And I'd argue that Windows95 (despite all its flaws) did more to advance desktop OSes than any release of MacOS did during the same period.

How so? What, in Windows95, hadn't already been done?

It was mildly frustrating to hear or think of a song, realize I have it in my library at home, and not be able to get it on my iPod (without -- the horror -- buying it or some other silly idea).

I can certainly understand that. Trust me, it'd be playing in my head until I could actually get home and listen to it!

I don't buy the idea that with the talent, momentum, and respect that Apple had before his departure that that era should have been THAT bad.

Agreed.

It was just a few years ago (maybe 2002-2003) that I dealt with somebody at work who still carried around a Newton.

According to Wikipedia, there are still folks using them, and there have been drivers written for WiFi cards and the like. I had no idea.

Supposedly, the Newton 2000 and 2100 were really super-slick gizmos, but I never really got to play with one. (I owned a 130 at one point.) They weren't out for long before Jobs came back, and the Newton was the first thing to get "Steved." The Newton had been the idea of John Sculley, the Apple CEO who Jobs originally hired, who then turned around and fired Jobs a couple of years later. The demise of the Newton, unfortunately, was nothing more than Jobs' grudge against Sculley.

<insert name of Unix variant here>

I knew you were gonna say that. Which is why I inserted the words personal and consumer. Unix is not a good end-user type of OS.

Oh my God... that brings back some memories (read: gut-wrenching flashbacks). <shiver>

That name -- along with some others I can't remember -- were just... atrocious. To the point that they were almost funny.

Ah yes. You probably know how it is... Apple people used to sing Apple's praises to the world, and then turn around and ***** and moan about them when no non-Apple people were around.

if any other company came out with the exact same product -- same features, same quality, etc. -- as Apple did with the iPhone, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now

That's just the point, though... Other companies generally do not have products with the same features, quality, and usability as Apple does. Sure, someone gets something right now and then, but Apple is a lot more consistent. That's why we love 'em...

They led -- hell, started -- it, then faded drastically, then experienced a resurgence, in an almost entirely different form. That's a really impressive success-->failure-->redemption story, but it's not enough to make me believe they walk on water.

Sounds like they belong on an episode of VH1's Behind The Music, doesn't it?