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Tasting the Ice Cream SandwichTasting the Ice Cream SandwichPosted May 16, 2012 10:29 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)In reply to: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich by anselm Parent article: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich
anselm: The big difference here is that people don't buy Android, they buy a phone that has Android installed. They don't make an operating system choice, they make a phone choice that is influenced by a lot of factors other than what operating system the phone runs. Ah, but they do buy Android. I see it in the brochures that come through my letterbox every week—page after page of phones with the little green robot on them or peeking out of them. When users see that, they know they are buying into a compatible ecosystem that will work across all those devices. And it’s not just the electronics places and phone carrier shops; even the stationery shops are carrying Android phones now. I even saw one advertised in my local supermarket. The bottom end that Android spans keeps dropping lower and lower.
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Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 11:29 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Yes, but people still don't buy Android installation media for their iPhones – they're buying phones that they like that happen to come with Android preinstalled. The ecosystem is a factor that goes into picking a phone but if all Android phones were Android-robot green with yellow and pink stars all over them and Mickey Mouse ears attached then the ecosystem could be the best thing in the world but people still wouldn't want to be seen with a dorky phone. It's really not the consumers who drive Android uptake. Consumers will buy all sorts of strange stuff, and for most people a phone is still a phone first and a mobile computer second (even though we all know that modern smartphones are really computers with the ancillary ability of being able to place and receive phone calls). A phone, unlike a computer, is a lifestyle object, so many people want to be seen with a reasonably recent and cool-looking one. Android phones do become cheaper and cheaper, but people who are in the market for a cheap phone don't see an Android phone, they see a cheap phone, and if it is running that Android thing they've heard about then so much the better as long as it looks like a goodish phone. If it was really running CP/M it would still be a goodish-looking cheap phone. (The first iPhone was a pretty lame phone from a technical POV when it came out but boy did it look slick, especially to someone who already had an iPod and whose mind equated »Apple stuff« with »cool stuff«, which means a large swathe of the populace.) Android is out there mainly because the phone manufacturers like it – it saves them the trouble of maintaining their own operating system (and ecosystem) to compete with Apple. Also, with Google in the background, which is big, not a phone manufacturer (Motorola notwithstanding), and not going to go away, Android looks good to a phone manufacturer in a way that a dinky little outfit like Canonical (with Ubuntu) never could, which is why we are unlikely to see Ubuntu phones anytime soon regardless of their technical merit. Furthermore, phone manufacturers want to sell lots and lots of goodish-looking cheap phones (especially in places where people don't have money to burn on the latest top-of-the-line iPhone), so a reasonably cool operating system that doesn't cost them license fees, like Android, is a good thing. Why do you think Microsoft tries to extort patent licensing fees from Android-using phone manufacturers? Right, because they want to disrupt the Android value proposition for phone manufacturers by making it more expensive to put Android on a phone than Windows Phone. The reasoning seems to be that once using Windows Phone is more convenient for the phone manufacturers than using Android, they will go for it and the customers will follow along because they're not buying operating systems, they're buying phones – and a Windows Phone phone is still a reasonable phone for calling people even if its app ecosystem isn't quite like that of Android. Especially if the phone itself is cheaper.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 12:36 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I just want to say that the above comment, as an antidote to all the "No, you are wrong!" sniping, is a great summary of why things are as they are. One can always argue that Canonical, GNOME, KDE and others haven't stepped up to deliver the front-to-back, top-to-bottom coherent user experience, but there's not a huge incentive to do so when they will all be denied an audience by the cartel-like activities of the industry.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 13:12 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>The first iPhone was a pretty lame phone from a technical POV when it came out
No it didn't. It was the FIRST phone where web browsing was not an exercise in pulling hair.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 17:22 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The iPhone was using GSM when many other smartphones were already using UMTS. (When the iPhone came out I had a very clunky not-that-smart Nokia phone and even that was using UMTS.) The iPhone may have had a reasonable web browser compared to other phones at the time, but its Internet connectivity sucked, which did make the better browser somewhat pointless. It did eventually get UMTS but only quite some time later, which from Apple's POV was just fine because by that time many iPhone users were more than happy to ditch their phones for the newer model that actually promised reasonable speed. It would have been perfectly possible to launch the thing with UMTS from the get-go but that would have meant that many fewer sales, a strategy that was successfully repeated with the iPad. – As far as the phone features (rather than the web browsing features) are concerned, I seem to remember that at the time the reviews were less than enthusiastic. Most of the stuff people associate with the iPhone nowadays (like third-party native apps) only came along after it had been out for a while. Contrary to popular legend, the iPhone took off not because it was the greatest phone technology ever but because it was a cool gadget from Apple that had some nifty but marginally useful features that other phones didn't have at the time (even though it missed various other useful features that other phones did have), in some very slick packaging guaranteed to wow your friends, colleagues, and business associates – a lifestyle product, not a technology product. Which is not a problem at all (Apple makes most of its money selling lifestyle products), but means that the lessons learned from the iPhone and its competitors do not automatically transfer to technology products like PC operating systems.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 17:57 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
There were no good 3G solutions by the time the first iPhone arrived. Existing 3G networks in the US at that time were not capable of supporting enough subscribers.
And I do remember browsing on iPhone compared to other phones. It really was a groundbreaking experience. 3-rd party app infrastructure also appeared quite quickly (in a year) after the phone's launch.
PS: I'm actually still using EDGE on my phone because there's no UMTS/HSPA in my country (there's 4G, but not 3G due to quarrels over radio spectrum licensing). It's fairly OK.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 20:37 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] There were no good 3G solutions by the time the first iPhone arrived. Existing 3G networks in the US at that time were not capable of supporting enough subscribers. That's because as far as mobile communications are concerned, the US are a backwater. Here in Germany (and various other European countries), UMTS was already so widespread at the time that the iPhone being launched without UMTS capability did raise lots of eyebrows. After all, even the el-cheapo phones you would get »for free« with a contract (like mine) had UMTS already, so why not a €500+ iPhone? It's not that Apple couldn't have done it if they'd wanted to; it does make sense from a marketing point of view given Apple's strategy of introducing mediocre devices first to skim off the people who must have every new Apple product right away, and then later launching a device that is like the one they should have, and could have, brought out in the first place.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 22:28 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>That's because as far as mobile communications are concerned, the US are a backwater.
Sure. But the US was (and still is) the primary iPhone market. So it made no sense for them to develop 3G phones (which is NOT trivial - just ask OpenMoko people).
And iPhones are certainly NOT mediocre - they have top-notch hardware with new features (like 'retina displays' or gyroscopes) appearing well in advance of other competitors.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 23:25 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] So it made no sense for them to develop 3G phones (which is NOT trivial - just ask OpenMoko people). Nokia was doing it even in their cheap phones at the time, so it can't have been that hard either. And iPhones are certainly NOT mediocre - they have top-notch hardware with new features (like 'retina displays' or gyroscopes) appearing well in advance of other competitors. We were talking about the first iPhone, which was a very slick package but definitely not a great phone compared to others in the market at the time. Of course Apple has been beefing the iPhone up since then – after all they need to give their customers a reason to get the latest phones, and the competition isn't slacking off, either. (Arguably some of the iPhone competitors do have nicer hardware from a practical-use POV – the »retina display« is cool but a somewhat bigger screen is often more valuable in real life.) But the same effect was visible with the iPad, where the general consensus was that the iPad 2 was the device they ought to have, and could have, come up with instead of the original iPad – which was missing all sorts of obvious features that were introduced with the second version, just so all those people who thought the first one was cool already had to go out and get the next one, too, just to stay on top of things.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 19, 2012 15:26 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
"If you're not deeply embarrased when you ship, then you shipped too late."
If Apple really did ship crap rev1 devices to force upgrades, somebody else would be eating their lunch right now. Apple does do many questionable things (lock-in!) but I don't buy that "forced upgrade treadmill" theory at all.
Even Apple can't wait until something is perfect before shipping.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 21, 2012 13:32 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Nobody is talking about »forced upgrades«. The original iPad didn't have a camera, so when the iPad 2 came out, many owners of the first iPad thought that would be a cool feature to have and got the new version (after all, being able to video-chat with other people using FaceTime must count for something). How difficult would it have been for Apple to put a camera into the first iPad? Virtually all the mobile phones at the time – including the iPhone – had at least one already, so it's not as if the requisite pieces weren't out there and mass-producible already. The reason this works is that smartphones and tablets are considered lifestyle products rather than computers. You carry them around in public and people – even complete strangers – see you using them. Having (and being seen as having) the latest Apple stuff to play with is an important part of many people's lives, so it makes sense for Apple to introduce piecemeal upgrades to skim off that part of their customer base who must have everything just because it is new. If the original iPad had had the two cameras already, then fewer people would have felt the need to get a new one a year after the original one came out. (Do note that the new iPad is called exactly that - »the new iPad«. This strongly suggests that to be »with it«, you want that version and not the »old« one.) Even people who would hang on to their computers for a comparatively long time do not seem to mind replacing their phones every two years or so, and even quicker if the new phone seems better to them.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 1, 2012 16:45 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
If people are foolish enough to spend $600 merely to be »with it« then more power to Apple. They should be encouraged to take advantage of that revenue stream.
But, in real life, I don't think there are as many fashion victims as you say. Used Mac hardware is still outrageously expensive, even previous-gen iPhones and iPads without cameras. That seems to directly contradict your theory.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 2, 2012 12:18 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] But, in real life, I don't think there are as many fashion victims as you say. Used Mac hardware is still outrageously expensive, even previous-gen iPhones and iPads without cameras. That seems to directly contradict your theory. No, it doesn't. Used Apple stuff is still Apple stuff, i.e., cool and fashionable. If you want Apple stuff in preference to other stuff but can't really afford to buy it new then you buy it used. Many people seem to want even the used Apple stuff so there is a lot of demand. Demand keeps the prices for used Apple stuff up. The new Apple stuff is quite expensive in order to cream off those people who must have the new up-to-date Apple stuff and are ready to pay for it. Do note that, e.g., the iPad 2 is still available new but priced somewhat lower than it used to be when it was the top-of-the-line model. This makes it more accessible to people who want new (as in, unused) Apple stuff but not the very new Apple stuff at the premium price. It takes a trained eye to distinguish the iPad 2 from the »new iPad« but it still has an Apple logo, so the »lifestyle incentive« of being seen with cool Apple stuff is the same. (Also, it's supposedly not a bad tablet at all.)
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
This matches my recollection. I was in awe when I saw a functional web browser on the phone. Ever since that moment I wanted such a phone, but could not justify the expense to myself. In the end, I got an android device years later.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Which only goes to prove that consumers generally aren't that passionate about what operating system their phone runs as long as it does roughly what they want. (That is if they're not the sort of person who isn't that passionate about what operating system their phone runs as long as the phone has a big Apple logo on the back.) ☺
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 17, 2012 9:10 UTC (Thu) by rwst (guest, #84121) [Link]
Which itself proves that if Linux would come preinstalled on one half of desktops (the less expensive half), and Windows/OSX on the other half, most of the people would chose Linux desktops and stay with them.
I thought around 2000 this was clear, too. Later, Dell and RH made some real money with the idea. Nowadays, noone seems to bother, not even the E.U. cartel office.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 17, 2012 16:47 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Sorry, but I do not agree with your statement that people would choose Linux desktops.
Perhaps if Wine was more polished and complete.
Out of the four people I know who bought netbooks with Linux preinstalled, three of them replaced Linux with a Windows XP install and were much happier.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 17, 2012 17:46 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] And I'll bet the fourth flattened theirs and replaced the delivered Linux distro with a decent one. I don't know about the other netbook lines, but I do know that the Linux distro that Asus used on the Eee range was awful.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 31, 2012 12:52 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Which itself proves that if Linux would come preinstalled on one half of desktops (the less expensive half), and Windows/OSX on the other half, most of the people would chose Linux desktops and stay with them
I thought that too at one time, but it simply can't be true.
As you use your computer day-by-day, month-by-month, try to think about all the things you do without thinking. I mean things like subconsciously learning that if you do certain things, something crashes or the computer grinds to a halt.
Or things like upgrading your distribution and needing a simple one-line fix to get something working again. Or getting new hardware and needing to spend even just a few minutes Googling for how to get it to work.
For most of us here these obstacles are insignificant. We don't really even notice that we need to spend five minutes now-and-then fixing things, because it's so easy.
But consider the perspective of someone who actually *can't* do those things. That's not a five-minute interruption in exchange for new cool versions of software; it's a complete inability to do something you used to be able to, in exchange for...nothing.
When was the last time Ubuntu made a new release that didn't require you to a) learn a new way of interacting with your computer, b) fix something that broke, or c) both of the above? I've tried every Ubuntu release, at least very briefly. All of them. And one of those things has happened *every* *single* *time*. It's not only on release upgrades even. My partner uses Ubuntu and has learned not to accept new release upgrades so long as the current release is still supported, because of the inevitable breakage, but periodically a high-priority update comes along and her printer will stop working; fortunately she's usually able to solve it with some Googling, because countless other people had exactly the same problem and managed to figure out the magical incantation to fix it.
Back to those things you learn to subconsciously ignore: try actively looking for minor bugs - the kind of things they're calling 'paper cuts'. When you start paying attention, you start to realise that you encounter *dozens* every day. Around the KDE 4.2 time (IIRC) I actually wrote down a list of all the minor bugs I experienced within the first 5 minutes. It wasn't a small list. I filed bugs for some of them; others had already been reported. In some cases there was some flaming about worrying over small things, but *small things add up*.
Here's an example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4957647/calendar.png
By the way, the red 'fail' icon in that shot is because so far I've only spent about 45 minutes trying to work out how to get wireless networking to work. It only took me a couple of minutes to get wired networking working because I have enough Debian experience to know that I needed to add 'auto eth0 inet dhcp' to /etc/network/interfaces. Good luck figuring that out if you're a new user. Why doesn't wired networking work out-of-the-box on a default install of the last two Ubuntu releases? No idea, but that's exactly the kind of thing I've come to expect (to be fair, in many cases the network connection does work; it just refuses to perform any name resolution - to a non-technnical user that's the same thing).
A solution that's permanently 90% finished is not 90% as good; that last 10% is utterly crucial for a good user experience.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 31, 2012 18:55 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
every windows upgrade (including service packs) break things on windows systems as well. somehow people manage
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 6, 2012 14:48 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
I'm sorry, but I can't assume good faith when you make such an obviously ludicrous statement.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 6, 2012 15:15 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
I'll elaborate a little:
The problem is that you are obviously aware that your statement is an attempt to compare entirely unrelated things in entirely unrelated contexts, simply as a means of avoiding making any real point. It is deliberately dismissive and inflammatory, and very blatantly intended as nothing but snide trolling.
The regressions in Windows in successive releases are so trivial in comparison with the regressions in Linux distributions that trying to claim any equivalence displays, at best, a breathtaking level of ignorance. Furthermore, every Windows version is supported for longer than the best support level available in any Linux distribution, while simultaneously making it trivial for any user to use the latest version of any application software they desire.
Nobody would seriously try to claim that 'the latest 64-bit version of Windows no longer runs my 16-bit Windows applications from 1992' is in any way equivalent to 'my networking stops working every six months'.
Pretty much the only legitimately comparable example is that there are a number of printers for which the existing drivers haven't worked in new OS releases - and Ubuntu has that problem periodically in minor (non-release) updates, so doesn't exactly come out ahead.
There are probably some other examples of extremely cheap hardware with drivers that work in one Windows release but not the next, however in the vast majority of cases that hardware either doesn't work in Linux *at all*, or works well enough to satisfy a tick-list but not well enough to actually use (eg a webcam that manages 30fps in Windows, but 2 fps in Linux). I'm aware that in such a case it's the manufacturer of that crappy hardware that's at fault, but then to make a fair comparison you need to acknowledge that in the case of Windows as well.
Statements like yours are a textbook example of why Linux - and Free Software in general - is not taken seriously by normal computer users, since the only thing you are interested in is nursing your damaged pride at all costs. The very idea that a competitor might be better in some way must not be entertained under any circumstances, with the inevitable result that real deficiencies cannot be fixed because they cannot even be acknowledged.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 6, 2012 19:23 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> Nobody would seriously try to claim that 'the latest 64-bit version of Windows no longer runs my 16-bit Windows applications from 1992' is in any way equivalent to 'my networking stops working every six months'.
Ok, slow down. If you have a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety network configuration, it will not stop working every six months (mine worked without modification for the last ten years or so). AND if you have some complicated, exotic configuration with strange and mysterious drivers, then every Windows update or hotpatch is an adventure.
I know that for some video configurations, things were far rougher on Linux than on Windows.
> There are probably some other examples of extremely cheap hardware with drivers that work in one Windows release but not the next, however in the vast majority of cases that hardware either doesn't work in Linux *at all*, or works well enough to satisfy a tick-list but not well enough to actually use (eg a webcam that manages 30fps in Windows, but 2 fps in Linux). I'm aware that in such a case it's the manufacturer of that crappy hardware that's at fault, but then to make a fair comparison you need to acknowledge that in the case of Windows as well.
Actually, I had problems on Linux on the "extremely expensive and especialized hardware" range more often than on the "dollar-store hardware" range.
> Statements like yours are a textbook example of why Linux - and Free Software in general - is not taken seriously by normal computer users, since the only thing you are interested in is nursing your damaged pride at all costs. The very idea that a competitor might be better in some way must not be entertained under any circumstances, with the inevitable result that real deficiencies cannot be fixed because they cannot even be acknowledged.
People acknowledge and fix those problems much more often in the Linux world than in the Windows/OSX worlds. Oh, there are lots of hardware best supported on Windows and OSX. The model where the hardware maker is usually also the driver maker works faster, even if it does not work so well.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jun 7, 2012 16:34 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
> If you have a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety network configuration, it will not stop working every six months
The idea of what is 'run-of-the-mill' changes too frequently for my liking - for example, the last three Ubuntu releases have not supported wired networking out of the box (with differing varieties of breakage depending on the release and the machine in question).
I suspect the reason that the default configuration doesn't just attempt to make a DHCP connection has something to do with NetworkManager being expected to bring up the interface, but I've managed to get NM to bring up a wired connection on precisely one occasion - and that broke on the next release upgrade; certainly I've never seen it work automatically.
Unfortunately the only machine I have access to that has a wireless connection has some kind of Broadcom chip that I think needs special firmware that I've not bothered to track down, so I can't speak for how well wireless works on supported hardware. (I do apparently have a 'Broadcom STA propretary wireless driver' installed, but it seems that's not enough.)
Actually, now that I think about it there was an Ubuntu release a while back (it was around the release of KDE4.2, so presumably it was 9.04) which did get the wireless device in this machine to work without any special configuration that I can recall; alas the next release came along and hosed it so thoroughly that I couldn't figure out how to get any networking back *at all*, and eventually resorted to reinstalling from scratch.
In contrast, I have a rather more complex setup on my Debian systems which has worked reliably for many years, but they required a reasonable amount of technical knowledge to configure in the first place. But Debian has its own problems of course; there's no single option that won't periodically come with pain.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted Jul 1, 2012 3:38 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Interesting; my personal experience has been exactly the opposite. I have upgraded my kubuntu system (which uses network manager exclusively, all configured via GUI, and with some quirks in my workplace network) regularly at every release, and for the last three years or so I have not touch said configuration.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 16, 2012 23:28 UTC (Wed) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link] anselm: Consumers will buy all sorts of strange stuff... No, they won’t. If they did. Windows Phone would not be languishing in fifth or sixth place, well behind Samsung Bada. Android succeeded because it was the one platform that encouraged open-slather competition. Having a ready-made, adaptable OS lowered the cost of trying out risky new ideas. And handset makers were truly free to try out whatever ideas they wanted, regardless of what Google might have wished (Android 2.x tablets, anybody?). Most of them failed and were forgotten. But there were enough successes to make people realize that here was a platform to be taken seriously. And so success built on success, and we have reached the situation today where Samsung has knocked Nokia off its perch as the world’s number-one mobile-phone maker.
Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich Posted May 18, 2012 5:55 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
You know what, if they called it anything other than "Windows Phone" (or any other name with Windows in it), the current Windows phones would probably have a chance. After all, the iPhone isn't "MacPhone" and Androids aren't "Linux Phone."
Call it something else and strongly de-emphasize the fact it comes from Redmond, and it'd probably sell.
(I still mourn the loss of Maemo, personally.)
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