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Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple
Darwin:
But you know what? None of the other companies have made any tablets nearly as nice as this one. Do it already! But it's going to be hard to compete with that build quality and that screen with the great multi-touch responsiveness.
-superboyac (November 30, 2010, 05:37 PM)
--- End quote ---
I suspect that this is because nobody but Apple can get away with charging the prices that Apple charges for their devices, irrespective of the quality and design (EDIT: and it follows that achieving Apple's build quality would be a money losing proposition). Sony builds premium notebook computers, but I don't see many of them in the wild - just too darned expensive. Samsung is giving it a go with the Galaxy Tab, which I briefly played with the other day, but I don't see them catching Apple. In fact, I think that they've made a blunder and should be marketing the thing at least $100 cheaper...
superboyac:
I don't know, Darwin. I want to very respectfully disagree with you there. :)
I believe that the other companies can get away with charging high prices..IF...(big if)...the end result is as nice all around. People will easily pay $700 for a tablet as nice as the ipad if there were not glaring issues. The problem is that Apple has the head start. The bigger problem is that Apple has all the hardware/software/OS being controlled in house. They can fine tune everything to be just right and smooth. Look what's happening in the PC world. Android is not yet ready for the tablet form factor. Windows is not really tablet friendly as far as resource use and just general UI. I mean, Windows is much too hardcore for a tablet. And all the hardware parts, can all these companies really work together to get the right balance of battery life, resource use, form factor...it's too much. Sony has a hard enough time getting things right within their own company, let alone cooperating with others.
So in the end, we get competing products like the Galaxy. It's essentially the same price as the ipad, but inferior in just about every way. So now we have millions of ipad users, and a handful of other inferior products. So there's a bunch of apps for ipad that work well with a large user base, and a bunch of android apps not really built for tablets, with only a few users using them on tablets. There's such an uphill battle here.
A company like Sony has the most chance to compete. They have the amazing hardware technology which is significantly superior to Apple's in my opinion. But they have horrible UI issues, stubborn marketing, klunky features, and no motivation to innovate in a good way. Look what they put out last year, the Sony Dash. It's just about the stupidest device I've ever seen. That's Sony for you. A bunch of freakin morons with all the potential in the world right in their laps.
I tell you, God forbid Apple ever developing hardware technology as good as Sony. When that happens, it's over for Sony. They will have nothing left. All of these companies better be afraid of Apple, because they are coming on strong. If a guy like me bought an ipad, fighting every fiber in my body, then it's trouble for the other companies.
JavaJones:
I wrote up this big old long post as a response to an Apple rant here a few weeks ago and IE8 lost it for me before I had a chance to post it. So I've been reluctant to contribute to any of the Apple threads since as a good majority of my thoughts were well expressed (I felt) in the lost post. Oh well. One of the points I made though is relevant to this topic, and it's one of my biggest sources of frustration: people seem to assume that just because Apple succeeds at doing things the way they're doing them, that somehow means that you *must* do it that way in order to achieve the same benefits (e.g. good user experience, smooth UI, etc.).
The fact is that Apple simply makes some very specific things a top priority, and those are things that few - if any - other companies focus on. Apple's prices aren't really that high these days when you take into account the industrial design and materials. Another company could choose to make a similar quality product with similar materials, and they would need to sell it at a high price to do so of course, but the quality would justify it. Granted Apple gets away with it a bit more because of their brand strength, so it's a bit tougher for others. But that's a "spell" that needs to be broken. There are plenty of people who will pay for quality, plenty of people I know who have bought an Apple laptop not because of OSX or liking Apple at all, but simply because they're well-built machines with great battery life and decent features. It's *hard* to find a comparably well-built PC laptop for *any* price! And that includes Sony equipment, Thinkpad, and the rest.
But the important thing to remember is that these are choices that manufacturers make. Manufacturers can *choose* to make industrial and UI design a priority. They can choose to use better materials and charge accordingly. They can choose to create a more cohesive end-to-end experience and not bundle crapware for a few extra bucks. And if they do they'll be competing for the same (or similar) market that Apple does, or at least a portion of it. But most manufacturers either choose to compete on price/features, or they compete in the business market on reliability, support, and other aspects. Few, if any, focus on UI and physical design, both aesthetic and functional. Apple does this and they have succeeded largely on the strength of this; well, combined with some very effective marketing. But that marketing would not be nearly so effective if it weren't half true a lot of the time. I don't think PC hardware and software manufacturers are doing themselves any favors in the way they often develop their products and set their priorities, at least not if the market that Apple targets is desirable (which it definitely seems to be).
Is it impossible to have a Windows 7 tablet that is as nicely designed and works as well as an iPad? NO. It just takes a manufacturer giving a sh*t, spending time not just on the hardware specs, but on the design of the unit, the aesthetics and feel, being willing to put money and time into battery technology so that they get better battery life, opting for higher-level components - even though they're more expensive - so that things work better, feel better, batteries last longer, screens look better, etc. And it takes spending some time on the software side too, customizing the Win7 install to optimize it for tablet use, maybe developing a few key utilities of your own that enhance the experience. It's not impossible, it may not even be *that* hard, but everyone is afraid to do it I think. Probably they fear trying to compete directly with Apple, but they're having to do so anyway whether they like it or not - they might as well be doing it *right*.
I think maybe it's kind of like the TV thing we were talking about in another thread, or what's happened with the music business: entrenched business models are painful and slow to adapt to a changing market. The PC manufacturers are used to competing on price, that's been the PC differentiator, ever since the "clone wars" of the IBM/Tandy and the rest, and and back then buying a Mac really was a lot more expensive for what you got. That continued for a decade or more. But these days there's less and less to differentiate a PC from a Mac spec-wise, after all it's the same basic platform, and meanwhile Apple's got aces in hardware and UI design, and isn't *that* much more expensive. Buying a tablet at $400 or $500 (PC/Android) vs. $600-$800 (iPad) is *not* that big a difference. It's not like the old days of Apple where a lesser-speced Apple product cost literally twice as much. Apple is reinventing the game and pushing ever further into other markets, while doing it *their* way and making higher margins than almost anyone in the process. This is not an ability unique to them. I'm waiting for a manufacturer to realize this and do something about it. Waiting...
And if you thought that rant was long, just imagine how long my original (lost) post was where I made 3 or 4 other major points! :D
- Oshyan
JavaJones:
Damn, heh, superboyac with basically the same thing I'm saying, and beating me to it, hehe. Well at least I'm not the only one who thinks so! But I have to say I don't understand what's so great about Sony's hardware, at least these days. And while Win7 in a base config might not be ideal for a tablet, imagine if PC manufacturers customized things more. Imagine, just for one tiny example, if a PC manufacturer would turn off the default Win7 file contents indexing (something I've done recently resulting in tremendous performance gain and way less disk thrashing - I thought they finally got disk indexing right in Win7?). That may not even be something you'd think of to tune for a tablet, but it makes a lot of sense from a battery life and performance perspective, and it could make a noticeable difference. But you don't see manufacturers tweaking with deep settings like that. Why the heck not!? Maybe MS forbids it, I don't know, but I'd like to see more manufacturers getting their hands dirty with the OS to customize it for whatever machine they're on. MS just doesn't do a good enough job. If I got a netbook today with Win7 Starter, I would not trust MS to tune it well enough for me to be satisfied with the performance. It's not like Macs don't require tuning to have good performance either, the difference is Apple *does* do a good job of tuning the OS *for the specific device*.
All of this stems, I think, from the level of control that exists from top to bottom at Apple, pretty much led and enforced by Jobs himself. Or at least that's what everyone keeps saying, so I believe it. Hehe. But it makes sense. The key is that Jobs, unlike Ballmer, is smart, savvy, and has a good eye for design, as well as a good sense of functionality and the needs of the market. Ballmer just doesn't "get it", that much is clear.
- Oshyan
Stoic Joker:
Okay, so the fruit pad is a sparkling work of art ... Well that's just Jim Dandy if the object was to hang it on the wall so folks could ogle it at parties. But what if you have to actually do something with it? Like (Um...) print a report that you worked on for all 10 hours of its (alleged) battery life. Best option, Email it to a Windows machine. Apple's network printing is a total train-wreck functionally speaking.
...But then again it's a "Media Consumption Device" so I guess you're not supposed to be able to get anything back off of it.
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