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by dasil003
5181 days ago
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> I have a feeling that Apple might just start to run into the kinds of realities MS and others have been living with for years. Why would they run into these realities now? Apple's been around just as long as Microsoft, and they have been pissing off their customer base with poor backwards compatibility the whole time. The scale is much larger now, I'll give you that, but the relentless forward-thinking is what has allowed Apple to get into the dominant position they are in now. Microsoft by contrast, got bogged down with the enterprise where large IT departments put them between a rock and a hard place by refusing to upgrade if they didn't support whatever byzantine legacy application infrastructure they were running. Even to this day where Microsoft realizes they need innovation, they are still forced to hedge their bets with this hybrid Windows 8 Metro crap. Mark my words, this problem of app size is a tempest in a teapot. Given current trends, most iPads will be 3rd gen within a year, and in a couple years, the first iPad will fall off the iOS upgrade cycle. For every customer that Apple loses because they demand backward compatibility, they'll gain ten with the latest new shiny. The reason Apple will not do anything this problem is not out of planned obsolescence or greed. All else being equal they would be happy for you to have unlimited space on your iPad. But to solve it is non-trivial and does not push their product forward. To the contrary, it adds complexity that will inevitably slow their product development, which runs directly contrary to their modus operandi. |
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What I am saying is that these issues will become more and more pressing now that they are operating at a much larger scale than in prior years. In the past they could piss-off their cult followers and move on. I am not sure this is the case today. I think it might be reasonable to assume that normal folks --the bulk of the people buying iDevices--, not tech guys or cult members, will not take kindly to their 16 GB iPhone becoming obsolete simply because Apple released an iPad with more resolution. They would feel that this is absurd, and rightly so. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with older devices. Techies are different. I buy crap I don't really need just 'cause it's cool and sometimes because I want to actively support the company doing the cool stuff. Normal folk are far more practical than that.
If a normal person has a lesser-storage iPhone and, overnight, half their apps go away because they wont fit, they will not run out and buy a new phone. They'll be pissed. This will be particularly true if some mainstream media outlet grabs ahold of the reasons that led to this and outs the story to the general public.
There's another angle to this as well: Trash. Now Apple is in a position to generate, quite literally, mountains of trash based on decisions to not support older devices. I am not an environmental extremist by any measure, but I certainly don't like the idea of millions of perfectly good devices ending-up in the trash bin due to a bad tech decision.