iPhone 5s and 5c
While I tend to be a Microsoft guy lately, I do, in general, like Apple products. My 1st gen iPad I bought just before the iPad 2 was released (bad timing) and never felt like it was a mistake. Apple had the best product at the time, and no one else was even close. When the first Windows 8 tablets came out, I jumped ship because I'm developer and I can't do my development on an iPad or an Android tablet. If I were perhaps not a developer, I might find it still fits my needs better today than the competitions tablets.
Was the iPad innovative? Sort of. Nothing on its own was anything new. But given hardware limitations at the time, they delivered the perfect combination and that is why they succeeded. Since then, it has been a downhill struggle for Apple. Every subsequent release across every product line has been increasingly lame, culminating (or at least I hope this is the culmination) in the iPhone 5c. And the hardware limitations are evaporating. You can now get a reasonable, if low powered, laptop chip in a tablet and still get 5-10 hours battery life. The market has changed and Apple products haven't.
In the iPhone 5c you get an iPhone 4s made out of cheaper components but sold at roughly the same price. I'm sorry, that IS what the iPhone 5c IS. Anyone arguing otherwise has a few screws loose. If colored shells are your thing, it may not be as big a waste of time for you, but for the vast majority of Apple customers this is a kick in the face. iPhone are marketed as and their costs are in the PREMIUM phone end of the market. What they have done is sacrificed quality in the name of profits on what is supposed to be a premium device and which still carries with it a premium price tag.
I'm not saying plastic shells have terrible build quality. And done right they can even come with a premium look and feel (see the Lumia lineup which these are a clear rip-off of for an example). But, even in the advertising, they look cheap. They look like the kind of plastic used on Lego's.
The iPhone 5s is a slightly different story. At least there they improved on the processor. But, this phone costs even more than iPhone 5c. And to stress the premium value, they come in mocking colors like gold and silver.
If this was to be the extent of their innovation this year, Apple should have instead opted to put the new process inside the crappy plastic cases and released just one new iPhone 5s at the price of the 5c or somewhere in between. At least then it wouldn't have been as insulting.
I know Apple (or at least Apple under Steve Jobs) didn't believe tablets and computers could be the same form factor. But, frankly, I think they are disastrously wrong. The limitations which made this statement true I feel are eroding away. And, I hate to say it, but Microsoft is moving in the right direction. According to their most recent financials meeting, they are already in the process of moving all of their operating systems to shared platform.
If Apple beats them there, it could be a great resurgence for them and another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. But, Apple has never been able to move fast in the OS development department, so even if they have realized this already, I'm fairly confident they'll still make it to the game last.
Apple's premium price point has always been their strength and their weakness. They don't need to sell a lot of products (comparatively speaking) to out earn their competitors. But they also need to be seen premium, innovative and ahead of the curve to keep enough people paying their premium prices.
And it is from that perspective that the iPhone 5c and 5s are disastrous. And don't think any brand is too big to fail. At the turn of the millennium Google was still just a search engine and Apple wasn't really on the radar and an estimated 97% of all computers were running Windows. Not even Google is THAT dominant in EITHER the search or the cellphone industry. Today, Microsoft is struggling to reinvent itself and change its image, and Microsoft going out of business some time in the long term is a very real possibility.
Was the iPad innovative? Sort of. Nothing on its own was anything new. But given hardware limitations at the time, they delivered the perfect combination and that is why they succeeded. Since then, it has been a downhill struggle for Apple. Every subsequent release across every product line has been increasingly lame, culminating (or at least I hope this is the culmination) in the iPhone 5c. And the hardware limitations are evaporating. You can now get a reasonable, if low powered, laptop chip in a tablet and still get 5-10 hours battery life. The market has changed and Apple products haven't.
In the iPhone 5c you get an iPhone 4s made out of cheaper components but sold at roughly the same price. I'm sorry, that IS what the iPhone 5c IS. Anyone arguing otherwise has a few screws loose. If colored shells are your thing, it may not be as big a waste of time for you, but for the vast majority of Apple customers this is a kick in the face. iPhone are marketed as and their costs are in the PREMIUM phone end of the market. What they have done is sacrificed quality in the name of profits on what is supposed to be a premium device and which still carries with it a premium price tag.
I'm not saying plastic shells have terrible build quality. And done right they can even come with a premium look and feel (see the Lumia lineup which these are a clear rip-off of for an example). But, even in the advertising, they look cheap. They look like the kind of plastic used on Lego's.
The iPhone 5s is a slightly different story. At least there they improved on the processor. But, this phone costs even more than iPhone 5c. And to stress the premium value, they come in mocking colors like gold and silver.
If this was to be the extent of their innovation this year, Apple should have instead opted to put the new process inside the crappy plastic cases and released just one new iPhone 5s at the price of the 5c or somewhere in between. At least then it wouldn't have been as insulting.
I know Apple (or at least Apple under Steve Jobs) didn't believe tablets and computers could be the same form factor. But, frankly, I think they are disastrously wrong. The limitations which made this statement true I feel are eroding away. And, I hate to say it, but Microsoft is moving in the right direction. According to their most recent financials meeting, they are already in the process of moving all of their operating systems to shared platform.
If Apple beats them there, it could be a great resurgence for them and another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. But, Apple has never been able to move fast in the OS development department, so even if they have realized this already, I'm fairly confident they'll still make it to the game last.
Apple's premium price point has always been their strength and their weakness. They don't need to sell a lot of products (comparatively speaking) to out earn their competitors. But they also need to be seen premium, innovative and ahead of the curve to keep enough people paying their premium prices.
And it is from that perspective that the iPhone 5c and 5s are disastrous. And don't think any brand is too big to fail. At the turn of the millennium Google was still just a search engine and Apple wasn't really on the radar and an estimated 97% of all computers were running Windows. Not even Google is THAT dominant in EITHER the search or the cellphone industry. Today, Microsoft is struggling to reinvent itself and change its image, and Microsoft going out of business some time in the long term is a very real possibility.
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