[its_so_on]

they very much do care. If the only button anyone clicked on the home screen was "Firefox" and then did everything from there forever, pretty soon people would realize they don't really need an iPhone and would buy a far-less premium device.

This is exactly what will happen in Apple allows Chrome. They should remove it from the app store. It's against their policies and just like flash in mobile safari (firefox on ios is exactly like flash in mobile safari): All the arguments about not being "as native" are just as true, and Apple no longer has a Safari community across its devices to corral around and for developers to target.

Tim Cook is running Apple into the ground by removing Apple's user experience differentiation. He is creating beige boxes. Samsung can do that. Asus can do that. He needs to take a look at what the fuck Apple even is.

[benihana]

>Tim Cook is running Apple into the ground by removing Apple's user experience differentiation. He is creating beige boxes. Samsung can do that. Asus can do that. He needs to take a look at what the fuck Apple even is.

Are we thinking of the same Apple? Because the iPad 3 and the retina Macbook Pro don't really conjure up images of beige boxes for me.

[betterth]

Anti-apple fanboys are rabid in this thread, today. But as anyone who deals with the anti-fanboys on a regular basis can tell you: haters gonna' hate.

[its_so_on]

No, I'm a fanboi. I want Apple to keep giving me something to be a fanboi to - I am looking ahead 2-3 years and their strategy is not doing it.

[betterth]

What a shame! To each their own -- I'm really excited by Apple's 2-3 year plan.

[its_so_on]

Let's dig into this and see what we find. What are your impressions of Apple's 2-3 year plans and prospects?

I'll respond with my thoughts.

[betterth]

EDIT: Sorry about the long post, but I enjoyed being able to put some of my thoughts down onto paper. I won't be offended if you tl;dr it!

Apple is rounding a corner on it's iOS platform, growing from it's chaotic youth phase into a more conservative phase. We can reliably guess that we'll get a new iPad every April and a new iPhone every August. We'll get a new iPhone design every other year, and a hardware update every year. We'll get iOS beta in April and iOS release with in August.

I love that they've slowed down the rate of new feature implementation: watching the explosion of quickly unsupported Android devices all with one defining gimmick makes me very glad not to have picked a phone with a feature that didn't go mainstream.

To me, Apple is already looking 4+ years down the road with iOS. You can bet that major feature additions, while Google will often beat them to implementation, are already on Apple's multi-year plans. Sure, Apple may be a year late on a feature, or a year ahead, but in the grand scheme of my mobile life, one year is nothing (views like this, I believe, will be more common in the post-youth phase).

As we exit the phase, I'm glad to learn that Apple's support of it's devices these past five years has been consistent: devices getting day-one updates for over 3 years! An incredibly impressive free-replacement program turned decent warranty program. And of course, two years per physical design and only one model at a time means that there is both time and incentive for a huge third-party accessory market. (The incredible third-party support of Apple devices can only come from a conservative process -- predictable patterns that minimize potential risk and maximize market size for accessories like cases, docks and speakers).

When I look at the chaos of Android, I'm doubly impressed by not only how effective the iOS infrastructure is, but that Apple implemented a model infrastructure in the face of competition that absolutely and utterly dropped the ball (introducing version 4.1 while version 4.0 is at 7% marketshare is embarrassing... almost as if Google is abandoning anyone pre-4.0 and saying 'not our problem').

My impression? Apple now believes that mobile is no longer an arms race or a race at all -- it's a core business that will be around for decades in some form or another. In an industry where all of it's competitors are struggling and failing to even bridge the software-hardware gap, Apple has rounded that corner and set its eyes on bigger targets.

So when I say I'm excited by Apple, I mean that I'm excited that I no longer have to play the new-tech-game. I'm excited that my iPhone lasted over 3 years and got day-one updates the entire time. I'm excited to own a new iPhone in the fall, trusting that I'll get day-one updates for years, enjoy a mature support process at a brick and mortar store and a solid feature-set that works across hundreds of millions of devices. I don't have to play the custom-firmware-my-carrier-is-shit game. I don't have to wonder if I'll get the update that Google put out today, or last year(!!!). This is exciting to me: they've made a mobile infrastructure all the way from them as coders to me as a consumer (and every step in between) that actually works.

As far as outside of mobile? Apple will be unifying their product lines around cloud services and introducing their attempt to invade the living room. (Their chief competition there, I think, will be Microsoft, and I believe that both Apple and Microsoft will have offerings that REPLACE a cable box / DVR entirely, not complement it).

[its_so_on]

Please think a little more abstractly. The iPhone is less and less a well-differentiated premium offering versus its competition.

[danilocampos]

That's a pretty good chicken little, there.

I'll tell you a story about my first time with an Android device.

I went to the store to download an app. And it failed.

Over. And over. And over again. The device emitted a cryptic error message which, thankfully, was easily Googled. The troubleshooting steps required diving into the settings application and manipulating some controls to reset a data store in a low-level component in Android's OS.

Contrast that with an iPhone, which just works.

Apple's value, is, and shall remain, their airtight integration and reliable user experience. Putting Chrome on there touches none of that. None of my non-technical friends or family will ever touch it.

It's healthy for Apple to let third parties write whatever apps they want, so long as those apps don't impact system stability or security. Apple's industrial design makes hardware that's very difficult to successfully imitate, their content ecosystem is complete and richly integrated into their products. Their software and hardware are built in tandem.

No one is positioned to handle the whole enchilada as they are. When that changes, that will be the moment to worry. Meanwhile, they're in good shape.

[lomegor]

I'll tell you my experience with iOS. I bought an iPod Touch, and there was no way to put music on it. Because I run GNU/Linux the only way I could do that was with a Windows virtual machine.

I click on a link on an e-mail an it opens Safari, when I want to use Opera. I have to kill all the applications living on the down thingy (multi-tasking), although I do know that they may not be using any memory, but they do feel like slowing things down. And of course, I almost lost all my apps, had problems with my iTunes and lot's of other issues when I moved country.

That's not exactly 'just works'.

Of course, YMMV. And that's why we don't use personal examples to say that something is better than the other.

EDIT: OK, not exactly better, but to say something 'just works' or is 'airtight' and things like that. Android works pretty well too.

[danilocampos]

> I'll tell you my experience with iOS. I bought an iPod Touch, and there was no way to put music on it. Because I run GNU/Linux the only way I could do that was with a Windows virtual machine.

Apple does not care about your use case. Neither do I, for any example that describes a mass-market consumer electronics product.

The iPod touch wasn't designed to work with Linux. On the other hand, the Android device in question was emphatically designed to download apps, and failed at it with cryptic, non-user friendly results.

> And that's why we don't use personal examples to say that something is better than the other.

As delightful as I have found your condescension, the comparison wasn't made in a vacuum. The story was an object lesson in the challenges Google still faces in making an airtight UX for non-technical users, especially as compared to Apple. Defensibility of such advantage, among others, was the OP's chief concern.

As a careful reading would have revealed to you, I mentioned the error was easily Googled. This meant that it was, in no way, a unique experience. A third party blog had taken the time to walk through the fix, so common was this issue for a common use case of the product.

[its_so_on]

I'm telling you what happens if Apple allows Firefox to dominate the iOS ecosystem. It's easier to target, it's easier to get right as a single app on an android device, and it crushes Apple's ecosystem and differnetiation. They've fucked up letting chrome in and they need to remove it to set things right. It's that simple.

[mhurron]

That's a whole lot of stupid you're spitting out there, but honestly the part that is bugging me the worst is you keep confusing Chrome with Firefox.

[its_so_on]

Maybe I need to spell it out for you, but if Apple allows Chrome it has to allow Firefox. Any and every argument that would apply to one applies to the other.

[danilocampos]

You get that iOS Chrome is running the exact same WebKit as Mobile Safari, right? There's no fragmentation risk there.

[telcodud]

Why would you consider it fragmentation even if (and that's a big if...not going to happen) Apple allowed Chrome for iOS to use its own version of WebKit (and V8!) instead of UIWebView? That doesn't make any sense.

[danilocampos]

...Where once there was one rendering engine, now there would be two. That introduces fragmentation for any developers targeting web users on iOS devices, as there would surely be a handful of nuances differentiating the two. Even if those were just around performance.

I don't even think that matters very much, though – I'm just addressing the concern of the crazy fucker above.