He’s really not the brains behind any of Apple’s innovations anyway. Never has been. But to hear hear him talk, he came up with them all personally. So it’s his arrogance that most disgusts people. He basically uses “Used Car” sales tactics. Gets some of the information down right, but then proceeds to inflate and distort the truth. I would say he’s the father of Blowhard “InFomercials” and has advanced them to new heights of debuchery.

Case in point; in 2003 Steve out did himself in claiming and making it believable like a Magian or Gypsy, that OS-X was based on PDF’s (as the graphical core of OS-X). You know…. Adobe the company he now loves to hate that makes Photo Shop. One of two 3rd party programs (the other being MS Office) that succeeded in keeping Apple alive as a competitor. That brings up his disloyality to some other companies that helped keep them in the game….. Xerox, Motorola and IBM. Whom they stole ideas and inventions from. Then proceeded to walk on them. Also at that 2003 WWDC, he started the Gigahertz Wars by claiming that Apple’s PowerPC chips with “AltiVec” by Motorola was Apple’s invention (referred to as their “Velocity Engine”). Only to turn around and give/sell/license it to Intel. If you remember Steve conducted some very Magical (scoff) demon-strations claiming that their PowerPC chips with THEIR Velocity Engine out performed the x86 Intel competition with twice the speed in all performance categories. (transcript of that meeting as proof)
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/3q02/wwdc-622.html

If you still believe that Apple is such an innovative company and is to be taken at their word, then I truly feel sorry for you suckers that continue to be charmed out of your wits by a true scoundrel. Who after abandoning IBM for Intel (the company he was trouncing on) is now preparing to jump ship again and cut to ribbons while doing it to AMD/ATI! ….and you respect this Gypsy InFormercialistic Thief (like Sensationlist, but in selling)? I don’t see him slowing down either. He’s a control freak, very comparable to Hitler in killing his Generals sound tactics. Whom without he’d have been beaten long before he was!

Now he claims A4 as his own. When in fact Samsung designed the process and contracted with Intrinsity to design the Domino Logic and chip layout before Apple even got involved while developing their Hummingbird A8 SoC. Again Steve claims it as theirs and then backstabs Samsung by claiming Retina IPS Screens as better than Super AMOLED. To me…. that’s no one I’d like to claim as a partner or as respectable competition when they supply half of all their screens, all their processors, all their memory, etc…. et al

Apparently, that is exactly the situation with iPhone 4:
http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-4-external-antenna-causing-dropped-calls-2491402/

Let’s wait and see if the inability to make phone calls (or even stay connected to the network at all) will affect sales ;)

Perhaps their customers don’t know an alternative. Sure, they are satisfied with Apple, but there is no way to know if those same customers wouldn’t be as happy or happier with another companies’ product.

I agree Apple is a great marketing company but great marketing doesn’t get a device the highest customer satisfaction rating in it’s category.

The fact is Apple makes and markets great products. Great hardware and software a claim only a few companies can claim.

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.” — Confucius

The point I was making was that Apple have NOT produced the most advanced mobile device on the market. It is just a perception generated by a very successful marketing machine. You cannot argue that Apple leave out basic and advanced features for the sake of simplicity and then claim it is the most advanced mobile device on the market. It is a contradiction.

My personal experience with iPhone users, and I know quite a lot, is that most of them would buy the next iPhone even if it couldn’t make a phone call.

iPhone is a cool techno fashion accessory as a result of Apple’s incredible ability to hype and market to the masses, but that doesn’t make it the most advanced mobile device on the planet

I agree Cut & Paste should have been there all along that wasn’t that difficult but things like Multi-tasking have long been the source of device instability and battery drain so Apple wanted to do it right so that the consumer experience doesn’t suffer. It’s because of decisions like this that Apple ranks the highest in consumer satisfaction among smartphones. It is very hard to ignore their success and the need to evaluate what they have done right.

A couple points of clarification thought, the first iPhone absolutely had bluetooth, it did not have A2DP however. Also the new iPhone is not called the iPhone 4g it simply called the iPhone 4. There is no insinuation by the naming that it has the benefits of 4G. All though since they are a worldwide company and have been extremely successful in parts of the world where 4G exists. Those lucky customers will obviously benefit from the new iPhone and 4G.

Lastly I hear this argument about Apple catching up on things often. And I do agree there is still a lot they can add that other people have but they will. However if Apple was truly catching up and have been for some time then why are they the market leader in smart phones? There appear to be a massive amount of people and investors who think they have the best product on the market. Not only that but they could sell more iPhone 4′s in this year then Android has sold to date.

Just something to think about. Perception is reality…

Steve Jobs has a history of selling “new” features to the faithful as though they were the ‘Second Coming’ even though other platforms have had those features up to years before. In my humble opinion, most of Apple’s ‘innovations’ count for little if their basic platform lacks features standard in it’s competitors phones.

I also have to wonder about the wisdom of releasing a 4G phone when no 4G network will be available for some time for the Apple faithful. Kris Rinne of ATT stated he HOPES to roll out 4G in 2011. That tells me it will be at least 2012 before iPhone users will be able to use their 4G functionality. How does it make sense to sell a phone that cannot use it’s most important technology, probably for the period of a full 2 year contract

iPhone and Apple, with their dogged defense of their proprietary architecture and limited options certainly do not represent the pinnacle of mobile technology. While they may offer a few unique features, until they can offer a single product that can outperform all it’s competitors in every way, they will just be another player in the game supported in large part by hordes of followers who would probab ly buy an iPhone even if it was incapable of making a simple phone call.

After reading the wall of text, i like the debates going on here, this is actually the first time I have posted on these articles, so here are my few cents.

Android is a great opponent, like any player in any sport or game, one must have an opponent, with apple its now HTC and that all that remains. I love how HTC designed the EVO and its functionality, its new, its sleek, its rather simple(dont know how others find it hard), but the iPhone has just a bigger fan base that creates anything and everything into an app that any other phone has, I am sure we have all seen the jailbreaking of the iphone if not on your own phone, the unlocked iphone has WAY more potential that apple hides everytime they release iphone.

To me I do not believe that there is a phone with such a perfect touch screen system, or with the new battery life. Its because of the fan base that the iPhone has made its mark, and I do believe it will be there for a long time, because me you and others as the consumers deep down know that that is what we want, that is why Apple will strive to provide to us, what we demand.

Silk~

To be honest these columns are difficult for me because I can’t give away all my analysis points and have to leave things hanging due to my primary job as a consumer technology analyst and our client base.

That being said this approach is great for discussion and I enjoy engaging in the comments on my articles.

To your point when you sell out to an ecosystem you are loyal to that ecosystem because the hardware, software and services all work better together for the company making them. I have one ecosystem in my house that is all Apple and one that is All Microsoft. To your point about Google they actually can become hardware agnostic to a degree because of the cloud. So when I get Google TV I will have an equally compelling Google ecosystem, which is agnostic. I agree this is very disruptive yet there must still be differentiation in a cloud services model.

Perhaps for Apple Mobile me becomes the cloud glue that ties all their hardware together etc.

I also agree and have noticed that when I use android devices I use Chrome more, regardless of whether I am on a mac or PC. When I use my iPhone I use Safari. I love Chrome to phone BTW.

I have many clients in the industry who are committed to Android and we strategize down this path and think about how to make their products different so that there is differentiation in the market. WE don’t want to have happen to Android what happened with Windows PC’s for so long where they all looked the same and consumers simply shopped on price.

I want to see manufactures really differentiate their hardware, software and services. HTC I think is brilliant at this primarily with better core applications then any other Android handset maker. Their email app is better for instance, friendstream is fantastic, how facebook integrates across the device from calendar to contacts etc is brilliant.

All that to say I am glad there is choice, I am glad the industry is striving for better consumer experiences. Apple, Google, MSFT and others are good for each other and good for us consumers. They are even better for the value they create others like software developers for example.

Our economy needs these companies to keep creating value for themselves and for others because everyone benefits when they do. At the same time they need to differentiate from each other. This will be one of the primary challenges for the next decade. The trend to vertical-ization within OEM’s is demonstrating this.

That being said there are innovative things about the iPhone 4. Industry leading battery life for one, look at the specs between the iPhone and the EVO and you will see some big differences. Also the screen is the brightest and highest resolution in a mobile device, using IPS. That is new, and significant.

The antennae system in the outer frame is new and innovative and will increase signal performance in GPS, Bluetooth, GSM and more.

iMovie is innovative.

And when it comes to video conferencing the EVO requires setup with with Qik, where facetime is integrated into the core phone experience, so it works right out of the box.

Again in this case the iPhone certainly didn’t invent video conferencing now was it the first however this approach has the best shot of commercializing it in my opinion.

http://twitter.com/SoldierKnowBest: “Want an iPhone with no contract? It will cost you $599 (16GB) and $699 (32GB). Damn. I bought the EVO for only $450.
about 7 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone”

Did you notice how SoldierKnowBest Tweeted from an iPhone?

I agree that iPhone is easier to use than Android and will probably always be the case, but you also seem to think that Android is too complicated for the general public to use. Have you checked Twitter lately with the hash tag of #htcevo or #htcevo4g?

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23htcevo
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23htcevo4g

Some quotes:

SoPremiere: “God sent me an email. He said the #HTCEVO4G is “Dope.” He cancelled his AT&T service cuz he aint want dat “Wack *** #iPhone4″. #GodLovesEVO. about 8 hours ago via web”

CarmenVentura: “I cannot put this @Sprint EVO down! By far and away the sickest device I have seen in my 10 years in wireless #HTCEVO. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®”

Looks to me like the “general public” is using Android just fine. Do you realize that Blackberry has a user interface more screwed up than either Android and iPhone and they hold a market share larger than iPhone.

I think you are trying to apply Diffusion of Innovations adopter categories as if the smartphone “social system” was one giant system throughout the world. It seems to me more like it has all kinds of technical, physical, temporal, and psychological barriers that make it more like multiple social systems. For example, in the U.S. it is more like four social systems because none of the phones can truly work on another national carrier. You add SIM locking and 3.5G/4G technology to that and the picture gets worse. Most people do not want to leave their carriers, if they don’t have to. So to say that Android does not test well against Early and Late Majority does not really matter across the four major carriers. You have to test users with phones that are available within each carrier. If an iPhone is not available on Sprint then that is not a product most Sprint customers are looking at for their next upgrade because they don’t truly know what an iPhone does. Instead they will pick up an EVO 4G and think it is the “sickest” phone they have ever used…and they would be right–not necessarily because it is or is not better than an iPhone, but because it IS the “sickest” phone they have ever used and it will keep them happy for 2 years. If they are a Premier customer then it only needs to keep them happy for one year before their next upgrade. Sprint IS the only social system for them.

There is another aspect to this adoption that is not the same as a normal market. There is a stickiness factor to not only the carrier, but to what web services someone is using, also. If you are already using GMail, you probably are annoyed at how other phones don’t give you the full GMail experience and instead would welcome GMail on Android and feel like you are home. This is true for Picassa, Google Maps, Calendar, etc. If you are a Mac and Apple property user, you would not understand. But you would instead gravitate to iPhone because Android and the Google way will feel foreign to you. So if you have not moved your life to the Google platform of services and instead just dabble in Android then you will be like my friend who was complaining that if could not get his desktop Outlook to sync with an Android phone out of the box then he would never buy one. He bought a WinMo 6.5 phone instead. He just did not get it when I explained how the Android model does away with the computer and the cloud becomes the center of your world and the phone is just a constant interface to the cloud. I have another fried who mostly uses Yahoo’s properties and has now bought an EVO 4G, the “sickest” phone he has ever owned. I expect he will be moving to using more of Google’s properties due to how well it integrates with Android.

If you believe a connection to your computer is essential for a “smartphone” then you are in the Apple and Microsoft crowd and are not yet truly mobile. A cloud based mobile device will be a game changer to your business model and you will fight that tooth and nail. I don’t see iPhone 4 moving Apple to this model.

Microsoft seems to have recognized this new model and have completely refocused the entire mobile platform around XBox Live. Of course Apple has recognized this too, they just don’t want to concede that they are behind the curve in developing their web properties. Because as the world marches to 3.5G and 4G the cloud centric model all of a sudden is all you want to do as an application developer.

Don’t your remember? We went through this in the late 1990s? We went from client-server to the web model? We did that because client-server became a nightmare to do configuration management and to scale. Today we call it cloud computing. The only difference is that today we have even more compute power in the cloud than we did in the 1990s. Just speak commands into an Android phone. That compute power is not coming from only Android. It is coming from the cloud. That is something that iPhone is very much in danger of not having. I don’t care how pretty and useful the UI is or how powerful the CPU is. This is true for a lot of Google services…

I’m going to stop here now, but I completely agree with you that Android and iPhone are built for different people. They are also built with a different end-game in mind. I don’t think Apple realizes that they are not playing the same game that Google is playing. The funny thing is that Apple has put themselves in a position where they have to support HTML5 and the more they do that the more they help Google. Additionally, the more Apple closes off their systems, the more the rest of the world (HTC, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, LG, Sony, Dell, Lenovo, etc.) will help Google in moving to a web-centric model.

Once a web-centric model is achieved, the content providers will defect from Team Apple and the brilliant Mr. Jobs for the freedom of the web and Steve will feel betrayed…again.

There is however a stark difference between the iPhone and Android and to be honest both devices are going after very different consumers.

I have an article coming out soon on Slash Gear praising Android and pointing out those things i like and that I still think need improvement.

However there is no app like iMovie in the Android market place. That doesn’t mean there won’t be i’m just saying there isn’t. The Face Time application is quite a bit more intuitive then the Evo’s video conferencing. The evo’s works well but Face Time is better at this point in time.

My main point here is the Evo is not a mass market consumer phone. Those in the Early and Late majority have not tested well with it. This is where I think the iPhone innovations stand out, in their ability to simply work out the box the way consumers expect.

I fully expect Android to live up to its potential. I hate the core apps on many Android devices and I hate having to go search for more useful ones. Consumers in the early and late majority will not tolerate this.

I have many close friends who are executives at HTC and they buy analysis from me, I think they are leading the pack with innovation in hardware for Android and I am excited for their future. But right now I believe the iPhone 4 is the bar by which other devices will be judge. Like it or not market perception is reality.

I do however feel that innovating upon a core experience or making things more useful and valuable to consumers is still innovation. It may not be technical but it is still innovation.

That being said I still think there is lots of innovation to still happen but I will draw a line in the sand and still say that regardless of what we consider or will consider innovation in the future, Apple is one of the best companies at commercializing products we have ever seen in the tech industry. Particular commercializing the mass market of consumers, which is the biggest segment of the market.

Apple stands out because of their ability to take things and bring them to the mass market where many other companies fail.

I don’t think these companies that do this like Apple, Microsoft and Google to name a few do it to tell the world they invented it, instead they are trying to show how useful it is for the mainstream consumer.

Keep in mind laws of consumer adoption demonstrate how the mass consumer market is much different then many of us techies in the industry. They perceive value very differently then we do and Apple understands that.

Video conference? That went live on Friday June 4 on Sprint 4G network with HTC EVO 4G. Oh and you are not limited to WIFI. I have done it between my friend’s EVO and my Nexus One using Fring or Qik. These phones stream video in real-time today. Oh wait, but one phone is on Verizon, the other on Sprint, another on T-Mobile, but how are the phones working together without Apple leading the way with their “open” video standard? Yeah, I hate to break it to you, but you’ll have to wait for “Apple to start leading the way on June 24 when the iPhone 4 comes out.” Or how did you put it exactly, “…Apple is leading the way in laying the groundwork for this technology in the US.”

I’m sorry, but its Verizon leading the way on LTE, Sprint leading the way in Wimax, T-Mobile leading the way for HSPA+, and Qualcomm Snapdragon leading the way for CPU/radio. I will give it to Apple on software though, iMovie is very nice…if Steve approves it. I have nothing against Apple. I have a problem with journalists who do not know what else is happening in the industry and then give the public the wrong impression.

Please try to read other industry news, not just Apple press releases. It is obvious in your video that you are giddy with excitement and this is just your first reaction, but you should try to strive for balance. I guess this is part of the problem with instantaneous reporting. No time for reflection.

Apple had it easy when the market place was barren of competitors and innovation was a low hanging fruit but now competition enters the market and Apple is beset by many independent manufacturers and developers.

But regarding this article it can already be seen that the Apple supporters are circling the wagons and defending the iPhone 4 from the attacks that it will receive regarding innovation by preemptively attacking “naysayers”. But what is true is that the writer already realized it before any naysayer attacked it. That there really was no innovation.

Battery life? They made the battery bigger. That is great and a step up but innovative?

Capture? This was software innovation for iMovie, nothing to do with the iPhone itself. It’s a 5MP camera. That seems to be the defacto standard in the market with 8MP and speculation of 12PMs coming next year.

Facetime? The innovation is in the branding of voice calls. Apple was beat to the punch on this already and even then its limited to WiFi with hopes that one day it will run on 3G, and the hope that AT&T won’t charge another $10-20 for the service. Any what standard did Apple provide that is locked to their hardware and their API? As the hardware becomes more diverse outside the iPhone/iPod/iPad market, Apple will lose control of that standard like they did Webkit. Others will adapt it to their needs because Apple will only write in what they need and that is only if their API is so much more streamline and with such a level of performance that other developers do take it and expand on it.

The first iPod was the great leap in innovation, the iPhone was another great leap my marrying media to the cellphone. They really did shake up the cellphone market. Palm and RIMM the leaders have suffered because they did not change with the times. Those that say the writing on the wall like HTC who were nimble enough to adapt become successful in the power vacuum. The problem is with any power vacuum is that the one who creates it cannot fill it fast enough and now competitors appear quickly. But those days are over and any next generation iPhone/iPod/iPad will be an incremental improvement not an innovation.

What I (and a lot of other folks) have a problem with is not that Apple is adding these features to their devices. It is more of an issue with the way it is presented. A lot of people, including Apple themselves, seem to like to pretend they innovated or pioneered this technology, when they most certainly did not. Want to add a front facing camera? Fine. Do it and STFU about it. We just get tired of the hype that canvases all of our favorite websites, technology and non-technology based alike. If it were a brand new feature that no one had ever thought of before, then it would be news. Copying what another company or inventor has already done should not warrant this kind of buzz.