iPhone market share

[Pseudomammal]

I do not understand the desperate need some geeks have to prove that Apple sucks. John Dvorak has it covered. The rest of you can relax.

Let's establish some cred: I was running Linux on my desktop before Ubuntu existed. Before OS X existed, in fact. And I wasn't dual booting either -- no cuddly Windows to fall back on. I was playing slow, jittery DVDs as soon as deCSS hit the net. I installed nightly builds of GNOME, and eagerly awaited the latest voodoo drivers for X Windows so I could maybe squeeze a few more FPS out of Quake 3. I compiled everything so I could make sure I was using the perfect opt flags for my processor. My desktop was customized to within an inch of its life. I had just the right window manager, and just the right launchers, and everything was slick and occasionally translucent.

I was, it's safe to say, a Linux fanboy.

Then I went to school, and suddenly I didn't have time to pimp my computer -- I just needed to get some work done. I got an Apple powerbook, and damned if it didn't just work. I thought surely I'd miss the control. How can you ever be productive if you can't change absolutely everything? Turns out sane defaults and some widgets that aren't ugly but don't hog all the attention are actually pretty swell.

The powerbook was a little more expensive than, say, a comparable Dell. But after four years, all my friends who started out with Dells had paperweights, and I still had a decent computer. It survived four years of daily bicycle commutes in a backpack crammed with heavy textbooks and suffered nothing worse than a little chipped paint. It was worth every penny.

I still use Linux daily -- for servers. And I love it. For servers. Which I access via SSH from my Mac. My sweet little Mac that just gives me my applications and gets out of my way.

The moral: Apple is making stuff that at least some people find extremely useful. If it's not for you, great, so what? Apple doesn't care, and neither should you. By predicting that lots of people will want iPhones, Apple is not, in fact, denying your free will and predicting that you will want an iPhone. Thanks to the twin miracles of universal computation and open standards, we can all just use what works best for us. I'm posting this from a Mac, and you're posting from whatever, and we can still communicate, which is the whole point.

The second, bitchier moral: humans are not particularly good at knowing what works best for us. What feels productive and what is actually productive are frequently very different things. Self-reporting doesn't work. Empirical evidence does. E.g., most users will swear keyboard shortcuts are much faster than mousing, until they have to try it with a stopwatch. They've been slipping a little of late, but overall, actual usability testing is one of the things Apple does better than most of the competition.

PS: Bill Gates is my favorite billionaire. Except for maybe Warren Buffet.

[Devilsaur]

Woah, a company in a capitalist market releasing a public statement that is optimistic for their projections?

No wai!

Why is this such a big deal? Did Apple promise $10 to everyone they would or something? Or were they really smug and rubbed it in everyone else's face?
(I don't typically follow apple because I'm sick of hearing about them on digg/reddit and because they usually do the previously listed point.)

[Pseudomammal]

No wai!

... lolcorporations?

[wing]

Or were they really smug and rubbed it in everyone else's face?
(I don't typically follow apple because I'm sick of hearing about them on digg/reddit and because they usually do the previously listed point.)

That. SOP for Apple marketing.

[TheTankengine]

Turns out sane defaults and some widgets that aren't ugly but don't hog all the attention are actually pretty swell.

This sounds exactly like GNOME. What was the last version you used?

Perhaps you should come back and join your ex-brethren on the Linux Desktop. The water's fine!

[Pseudomammal]

Turns out sane defaults and some widgets that aren't ugly but don't hog all the attention are actually pretty swell.

This sounds exactly like GNOME. What was the last version you used?

Perhaps you should come back and join your ex-brethren on the Linux Desktop. The water's fine!

Heehee. Thanks. I'm happy with my desktop, but it always warms my heart a little when people evangelize Linux.

I keep checking in. Thanks to virtualization I can continue to play with desktop Linux on my Mac, and keep Windows around in case I feel like arguing with IE over layout issues. (Yesterday I ran Xen inside VMWare. Mmm, recursive.)

GNOME is seriously impressive, and I've got nothing but respect for the developers. It's also full of a thousand little annoyances that, after OS X, drive me nuts. They've grasped that simplicity can be a virtue, but sometimes forget that real simplicity for the user comes at the cost of a lot of tedious nitpicking for the designer. When it comes to software you can only move the complexity around, not eliminate it. Gritty details are open source's weak point. Eventually someone has to worry about them, but volunteers want to work on cool stuff.

I'll spare you my list of annoyances. If anyone really wants to talk about interface design, I'd love to have that discussion, but I don't want to come across as flaming here. I really dig Linux (my favorite server is a Gentoo Hardened box, and it's a dream to maintain), but for a desktop OS X just matches how I think. If GNOME matches how you think, awesome.

Apple does plenty of stupid shit, but I get tired of people hating them for silly reasons. "OS X is proprietary." Meh. It uses free and open formats. My data is not locked in. If OS X ever stops working for me, I'll switch to GNOME, and won't lose anything except a shell I liked. (This scenario alone makes me grateful GNOME exists, but it remains unlikely.) "People only buy their stuff 'cause it's so popular." No one seems to remember this, but a few years ago geeks criticized Apple for being too obscure. The iPod could not possibly have taken over the music player market by trading on Apple's popularity because, prior to the iPod, Apple was not popular. Most iPod users are still Windows users. Half of them don't know Apple even makes computers. They started buying iPods because there was a real demand for a simple music player that looked nice and didn't suck.

Example of legitimate gripe against Apple: I feel like a complete tool capitalizing "iPod" like that.

[Delbin]

Comparing projections to only the population of the US isn't a very solid base for your argument. A lot of people can change cel phone services within a year and a half. A lot of people who now have gadgety phones could be a big part of the market in the future. The phone is expensive, so people, if they really want one, will have to take some time to save for one. The sales could easily peak later in the year.

There are a lot of factors to consider that population and raw cel phone sales don't account for.

As for the side discussion in this thread:
I like to say that the Macintosh is apple's best iPod accessory.

[Jacque]

Half of them don't know Apple even makes computers. They started buying iPods because there was a real demand for a simple music player that looked nice and didn't suck.

That or they just wanted to be cool like their friends or someone they saw on TV.

[TheKhakinator]

I am sick of having to format my PC every 6 months when Trend Micro fails for a day and I get loaded with viruses. I'm now running Linux on a seperate partition for all my day-to-day web browsing and usage.

[Castaway]

I'll bet the market for phones (and iPhones) grows quickly enough in the next year to compensate for the current standings. I won't be at all surprised if the iPhone breaks 10000000

[semicolon]

Apple would need to rely on their fanbase to go insane to get that number.

Their odds are pretty good then, I think.

Edit: beaten by a page. Oh well.

I am sick of having to format my PC every 6 months when Trend Micro fails for a day and I get loaded with viruses. I'm now running Linux on a seperate partition for all my day-to-day web browsing and usage.

Is everyone except me downloading gigs of child pornography off of Limewire or something? I've been running my most recent installation of Windows 2000 for like a year and I haven't gotten a virus. In the entire time I've used Windows (at least six years), I've gotten maybe two viruses. And I don't even use a virus scanner! I have one installed, I think, but I don't remember the last time I used it.

[TheKhakinator]

Virus scanners work even while you're not actively scanning to prevent viruses. Mine was completely down when I removed my WiFi card and Trend Micro couldn't handle that, hence me getting some viruses.

How the hell do you know if child pornography has viruses or not?

Apple would need to rely on their fanbase to go insane to get that number.

You mean they're not already!?!?!?!

[toysbfun]

Just a few more numbers to play with:
- There are four billion phones on Earth. However, most of these are obviously not smartphones. It's just an interesting statistic.
- The 4 GB iPhone is now only $300 dollars while supplies last. You may now laugh at the early adopters.

[wing]

2 months, 1 million iPhones.

Better than expected, and a price cut to boot. We'll see.