[frahse]

Originally Posted by Sregener

I'm not an Apple Fanboy. But my first Android phone experience was a horrible one. I had Android 2.3 on the phone, and I could never get the phone to unlock when a call would come in. It sometimes took me 20 times pulling down the lock bar to unlock the phone, and it was very unresponsive when the phone was ringing. After a few weeks of missed calls, I bought an iPhone. It unlocks instantly, every time.

That sounds like my first experience with girls. Those "fumbling" times.

In 2006, I grew tired of reloading my Windows computer every 7-12 months to fix things that shouldn't have gone wrong in the first place. I used to work in IT, held a few certifications, and the day came where I just wanted a computer to work instead of having to work to make it do what it was supposed to. Bought my first iMac. Loved everything about it, and I haven't gone back to a Windows environment.

Ah, you gave up the transient tramps, infested in smart and accomplished women, love, and got married. Me too.

I write this now using an antique Powerbook G4, which oddly still works just fine running an outdated OS. It would have set me back $3300 new, but was only $150 on eBay. How many Windows laptops from 2005 are still even minimally functional?

I have to laugh at that. Check eBay for used Latitudes at that same price.

On the other hand, I have an original iPad that is very long in the tooth. Apple broke the OS in IOS 5.2 and then dumped support for the original iPad with IOS 6.0. There's a memory leak in 5.2 that hasn't been fixed, and it causes any memory-intensive application to crash frequently (this includes Safari.) Frustrating, to say the least. That's why my second tablet was a Nexus 7, which I love most of the time.

Apple would have been served better to take one of those 150 Billions that are laying around and fix those problems and you would have stuck with them. I think one Billion would be enough. Don't you?

What Apple excels at is making a high-quality product that functions the way it should. Where they fail is in locking users into proprietary formats or standards (for instance, the long-term lack of a 4G phone, the long-term lock into AT&T or the fact that you can't read a book from the iBookstore on a Mac.) I think most people who hate Apple do so because of their proprietary nature and their high cost. I think most people who love Apple do so because of their user-friendliness and quality offerings. In my case, I believe you get what you pay for, and now that there are Android products that are the equal of Apple's for similar prices, you can get a quality experience from either environment, but this was not always the case.

I absolutely agree with you here.
In fact I will double up on that.

Going forward, I think Apple needs to do more to improve their hardware. The iPhone 5 doesn't make me want to replace my iPhone 4, but the Galaxy S4 does. The OSs are now close enough that I don't really care one way or the other.

Apple and (Steve Jobs) had great strength in seeing openings in the technical world and leveraging well developed products with their great marketing. They didn't invent the products but they certainly developed them to a better level than they had been and finally they had a certain "magical" touch with the selling of them.

On the other hand maybe the market finally caught up to the technology and Apple benefited.

The question now is whether there is a technological product line out there that Apple can tweak and "develop" into the "next new shiny thing?"