[unalone]

> It's not a huge sacrifice to voluntarily use the best product in a category. The number of Apple employees who want to use a non-iphone device is probably less than two percent.

You know, I am a huge Apple fan, but I don't like this argument. It suggests there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS, when in fact both Android's and Windows's designs offer a number of features that iOS lacks. While I don't think either come within spitting distance of iOS's build quality, there are plenty of reasons to want to use them anyway.

Particularly since Apple is a company which hires plenty of programmers, I imagine there'd be plenty of users who want to use an open-source phone OS. Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones, which would be pretty amusing actually.

[seiji]

Unless they're all jailbreaking their iPhones

A lot of Apple employees (cupertino engineering department people, not retail flees or nongineers) walk around with engineering builds on their phones with less handcuffed lockdown. There are clever builds running around in China factories for device bring-up and testing too, but I haven't seen any of those leaked.

there are no valid reasons to prefer Android or even Windows to iOS

I agree. (yay selective quoting!)

But honestly, Windows Mobile (is that what they call it now? Does it have another eight brand identifiers tacked on?) doesn't have enough install base. Everybody in the Sane World™ has an iOS-first and sometimes iOS-only mobile app approach.

As for Android (which is kinda meaningless. It's like saying "Linux" when you're talking about a Linksys router or the entirety of AWS), the rampant security failures, hacks, crapmalware, and the feeling of "it requires as much attention as maintaining a laptop" by people I know puts it right of the running. Maybe it's perfect for somebody who needs a hobby (a lot of people enjoy riding and maintaining motorcycles on the weekend too), but I need my things to work, work well, keep working, and unobtrusively get out of my way after being used.

All that being said, Apple is dead. Apple has no defense against the awesome creepiness of Google Spyware (Now) and that'll drive the future. They can't fight forever. Apple and Google will have to make up eventually. The only saving grace we have is Google is such crap at marketing things, they called their personal assistant "Now" instead of giving it a name and personality people can relate to. People enjoy thinking "Siri" is an actual person. Google doesn't get that. (Hey Google, I'm available to fix all your shit and complete your instrumentality plans. Give me a call.)

[hack_edu]

Explain how Google Now is any more spyware than what goes on with browser tracking throughout the industry. That's no excuse for spyware, but there's little warrant in singling out Google here. In fact, Google Now seems to really just be the use of the data that's been tracked (by all parties discussed in this subcomment thread) for years into a package that's user facing and easier to digest.

And let's not fool ourselves that Apple isn't tracking in such a "spyware" fashion just the same.

[seiji]

Explain how Google Now is any more spyware than what goes on with browser tracking throughout the industry.

To me, Google Now is that thing reading all your email behind the scenes, parsing mostly unstructured text to form a coherent narrative of your life, then prompting you based on what it discovered. It's disturbingly useful and beyond creepy.

The only way Apple can compete with Google Now is if they start to copy all your mail from iOS/OS X Mail.app back to Apple for analysis. They'll probably have an API for "Send this chunk of unstructured data to the users's Apple Action Item processor" for external applications too.

I'd completely forgotten about the insane browser search tracking google now thing. That's another quintillion times creepy.

(Note: it's only creepy because Cloud Cloud Cloud. You're giving up control of your life to Cloud all Praise Cloud. No, you can't have the data. No, you can't run it on your own. No, you can't be private. Cloud Cloud Cloud.)

[wonderyak]

Obviously as someone that has never used Google Now, you wouldn't know this... but it acts on search data, not gmail data.

Its a normal app with normal settings (enter stocks you want to follow, enter sports teams, etc..) that takes some cues from what you search for once you've set up Google now.

Why the hell would Google want to display all the OLD data it has on you in an application called 'Now'?

[maxerickson]

I'm sure it uses email data. A friend emailed me flight information and it showed up on my tablet. They didn't use any of my computers to search on that flight (never mind that I have search history disabled).