The Epic Battle Between Apple & Google Is All But Over - Who Won?

[wizwor]

When the kids were small, I bought a bunch of IBM 600e class laptops. I added DVD drives, wireless network cards, and hardware decoders to these business machines. We linked them with an inexpensive hub on rainy days to let the kids play Doom, Duke Nukem, and other networked games. They were only obsoleted by flash. Truly the best laptops i have ever used.

[afv011]

Originally Posted by wizwor

but let's not pretend copying a smart phone is the same as inventing one.

Are you seriously suggesting apple invented the smartphone?

[JAcheson]

Originally Posted by wizwor

Apple is like an ice breaker launching new products in the icy oceans of unknown markets. Google is a tug boat drafting behind the SS iPhone. This article is like the SS Google declaring that they got there too. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have made very nice smart phones, but let's not pretend copying a smart phone is the same as inventing one.

I wonder what Derek Brown thought the Battlefield of Tomorrow would be in 2006...

Apart from the Apple II and Macintosh computers, Apple has tended NOT to be the first mover in a new market. MP3 players existed for years before the iPod, Tablet PCs existed for more than a decade before the iPad.

What Apple has been good at in the last decade is moving into a market where there is a clear demand for a product, but no winning design has yet emerged. Apple has been very good at putting together a compelling design where there were previously just vague ideas of what people wanted.

Their problem is that once they establish the paradigm, other companies tend to eventually beat them at their own game. Windows trumped the Mac. My Sansa Clip MP3 player is a better and cheaper MP3 player than anything Apple makes. They're currently getting beaten in the smartphone arena too, IMHO.

[Sregener]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I think you are being unkind there to Windows laptops. I am certain that if you were to run a circa 2005 Windows Laptop with the SAME O/S and applications as were current when it was shipped, you would have a good level of functionality.

2 problems with that idea.

First, you aren't going to be doing anything on the Internet using a 2005 browser and email client. At least, not unless you want to kiss your passwords goodbye.

Second problem, if I was still running my 2005 Windows laptop, I would have to have done at least 8 complete system wipes and reinstalls of the OS in that time, either to fix corrupt registry problems or to "restore" the speed of the machine back to its original. How many ads do you see for "Speed up your PC"? There isn't a market for those for OS X, simply because we still have the same speed, even after using the same machine for all those years.

Look, I did the PC support thing. Professionally for a while, too. I know what's involved. I also know that when it was on my dime, I didn't want to deal with the 6-8 hour problems that cropped up frequently (at least twice a year) with my 2003 Windows XP machine. There's a reason the number of techs needed to support Macs is so much lower than PCs. Windows is labor intensive.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by afv011

Are you seriously suggesting apple invented the smartphone?

Originally Posted by JAcheson

Apple has been very good at putting together a compelling design where there were previously just vague ideas of what people wanted.

Yeah. Apple didn't invent the smartphone any more than Amazon invented the e-reader, but they both may as well have.

They are the ones everyone else started chasing, not any that came before.

Perhaps wizwor should have used the word 'revolutionizing' rather than 'inventing.'

[BeccaPrice]

Originally Posted by Sregener

Look, I did the PC support thing. Professionally for a while, too. I know what's involved. I also know that when it was on my dime, I didn't want to deal with the 6-8 hour problems that cropped up frequently (at least twice a year) with my 2003 Windows XP machine. There's a reason the number of techs needed to support Macs is so much lower than PCs. Windows is labor intensive.

This is so odd to me. I ran Windows XP for many years with no problems. I've been running Win7 for quite awhile now - well over a year, I'm sure - and have never had to do this level of support. My biggest issue was when IE somehow decided that it was stuck in work off-line mode when I needed to get into an IE-only website, and that only took me a moment to persuade IE to go back to online mode.

[MrDoug]

After reading today that Apple is dodging Federal Taxes by hiding income elsewhere besides the U .S. I will never buy another Apple product! The news today will definitely have a HUGE backlash!
Doug.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by MrDoug

After reading today that Apple is dodging Federal Taxes by hiding income elsewhere besides the U .S. I will never buy another Apple product! The news today will definitely have a HUGE backlash!
Doug.

I can't fault any individual or company for trying to find all legal means to reduce their tax burden. I'd rather see your ire redirected at our Congress to push for tax code reform to reduce both the need and opportunity to do stuff like that.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by ApK

The nominal answer is, of course "a lot more than she paid for them" but the narrower answer is "less than at any other time in Apple's recent history."
Seems like rather the worst possible moment to have sold (allowing that "worst" in this context is still darn good.)

Actually, it was one of the best times to sell, given that the stock has plunged substantially since then and hadn't gone down hardly at all when she sold. She is far richer than she would have been had she waited. The only time that would have been better was right before Jobs' illness was announced.

If I'd been wise enough to make the same mistakes she did, I'd be able to buy a condo in certain areas without touching my other savings.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Actually, it was one of the best times to sell, given that the stock has plunged substantially since then and hadn't gone down hardly at all when she sold. She is far richer than she would have been had she waited. The only time that would have been better was right before Jobs' illness was announced.

If I'd been wise enough to make the same mistakes she did, I'd be able to buy a condo in certain areas without touching my other savings.

Not saying she didn't do well, just saying that the time immediately following his death was a low point. It had been higher just previous to his death, and it went up greatly the next year.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by MrDoug

After reading today that Apple is dodging Federal Taxes by hiding income elsewhere besides the U .S. I will never buy another Apple product! The news today will definitely have a HUGE backlash!
Doug.

It's easy to get upset at this, but focus your anger on the culprits. The tax code is written by lobbyists and lawyers. They KNEW about the loopholes the very first time they were leveraged. They never did anything to address the problems. I can't fault anyone for taking a benefit that is available.

[Sregener]

Originally Posted by MrDoug

After reading today that Apple is dodging Federal Taxes by hiding income elsewhere besides the U .S. I will never buy another Apple product! The news today will definitely have a HUGE backlash!

Do you itemize your deductions? Shame on you! Dodging taxes by reducing your taxable income using legal means!

Do you put some of your income into 401K or other tax-deferred or tax-free retirement/education accounts? Say it isn't so!

Tax avoidance is perfectly legal, and a company or individual that doesn't engage in tax avoidance isn't going to be very competitive. Tax evasion (not reporting your activities accurately or intentionally reporting them using erroneous numbers) is illegal, and deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.

This isn't a big deal. It isn't news, except that it's Apple and there are plenty of enemies of Apple in the press willing to make a mountain out of a molehill. Apple engaged in tax avoidance. Who cares, exactly?

[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?"

[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I think you are being unkind there to Windows laptops. I am certain that if you were to run a circa 2005 Windows Laptop with the SAME O/S and applications as were current when it was shipped, you would have a good level of functionality. The majority of people do NOT look at the requirements for an application or O/S upgrade on those machines, and assume that just because it runs an older version of Windows, and that Microsoft is now actively showing how fantastic the newest version is, that their laptop will be fantastic with the new release.

Windows 7 runs just fine on an AMD A64 X2 CPU or a Core 2 (2006 era) system from around that time frame provided it's got 2GB of RAM. Even runs OK on 1GB.

[MrDoug]

Originally Posted by forsooth

Explain please.

Sorry.. I got confused on the posts.. I not very smart here.. LOL.. I not very good at reeding and riting.. especally spling.. rithmatic I OK.. dollers and cents wize I think I OK.. It won't happin again..
Doug