Apple was big in education. But they were huge in Desktop Publishing. They owned that market for years.
missileman: doesn’t that depend on the service? Your service could have had a tower near, and his none nearby.
yep, the service provider can make a huge difference.
A year-ish ago some a-hole was pilfering copper by digging up underground cables near Albuquerque. In doing so they severed fiber optics too and . . Gallup, being so for out away from anyone’s priorities , as well as on the map . . had a complete IT blackout for the whole town ! Banks had to close,
most store’s interned base invoicing systems were down, WalMart had to close !, My ford dealer could to revert to paper invoicing and . . most cel phone services were out too.
Except the T-Mobile users.
T-Mobile is partnered with the Navajo reservation service, Cellular One. So all of our calls were being instantly diverted to the rez who had not lost service. ( had to always use area code too, but hey . . we had service. )
Seems like the true believers who find Apple products vastly superior to all others come up with a new rumor for Apple to jump into some other business. I have a friend who has lots of trouble hearing, and she is “waiting for the new Apple hearing aids”. Meanwhile we all have to yell at her.
Apple makes good stuff, but they have created a mythology to cover over the fact that once you start using their things it’s very difficult to go to Android or Microsoft, because the various software and linking systems are not compatible. They make a ton of money, and seem to keep it all hoarded, rather than spend on really needed research the way Google does.
Apple has unquestionably developed technologies that have changed the world, from PCs to Apple Phones to tablets. It could be argued that they stole some of it, such as LANs and mouses (or is that “mice”?), but they took it from others that didn’t have the vision. LANs, mouses (?), and even the desktop concept was copied, but not from competitors… from those without the vision to put the pieces together and make it all user friendly… fun, in fact. One was from a well-known copier company whose senior management didn’t think it had any future.
Creating a car totally designed from scratch as a tool to get places with the aid of computer and internet technology is a logical path for them. It’s a different perspective than we’re conditioned to use for a car, but that doesn’t make it crazy.
Honestly, they don’t deserve to be criticized for being cash-rich. They acquired their cash the old fashioned way - they earned it.
Thank God Steve Jobs regained control. Scully almost ruined Apple. He drove it into the ground. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if he’d remained in charge.
I looked at that system by a well known copier company and really saw a lot of promise with it, but it was just too dang expensive for us to even think about it.
That technologies were in the prototype stage in an engineering lab just down the street from Apple. Jobs visited there, saw the concepts, found out that the management there thought they had no future and didn’t want to invest in developing them, and Jobs took over the development of the concepts at Apple. At that point in time none of these things were products in the marketplace.
Looks like Jobs and I were on the same page at least.
One was from a well-known copier company whose senior management didn't think it had any future.
Xerox should OWN the computer market by now. What came out of their research center and upper management had no idea what to do with…is in almost every aspect of computer life today.
. Windows - Apple stole the idea from Xerox and Microsoft sole it from Apple.
. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) - Prior to Xerox creating elaborate documents on a PC was a royal pain. Most used some type of markup-language that didn’t look anything like the document you wanted. Then when you printed it out…find the mistakes…and reedit the document. WYSIWYG allowed you to see the document in it’s final output before you printed it.
. Ethernet - This is the standard network protocol used in pretty much all computers today. Designed by DARPA and implemented by Xerox.
. OOP - Object Oriented Programming. Almost all modern computer languages are Object Oriented Programming languages.
"missileman: doesn't that depend on the service? Your service could have had a tower near, and his none nearby."
That is true but we had the same carrier. Care to explain that away as well?
I’ve seen situations where my iPhone could make a call and friends window phone or droid couldn’t. One situation means nothing. I think you’ll find they all work about equally.
missleman, did you both have the same service provider? Around where I live, Sprint is marginal and Verizon is very robust. Hence, my work iPhone stinks and my wife’s Galaxy is the bomb. Typically, it’s not the phone…that being said, Apple did have a lousy antenna design at one point but fixed it in the next version…
I love all the comparisons regarding “ancient” computing hardware people worked on. We used to have a running joke that went something like this- “You had both ones AND zeroes??? Back in my day, we only had ones…”
I honestly can’t remember the year or sequence of events anymore but the first desktop computers we used were the Xerox ones (820 or something). They used CPM programming and had software for spread sheets, word processing, and data processing. They were about $2000 and we bought ten of them initially. Not networked then. Very low power and remember losing a 30 page document because when I went to save it, there wasn’t enough room on the floppy and lost everything. Back up, back up, back up. Well the main frame people went nuts because it would help put them out of business for all of the small programs people wanted but couldn’t afford the $50,000 mainframe programming cost or the long delay. It was the beginning of the end for the data processing department’s hold on productivity and also the beginning of the end for word processing centers and the secretarial staffs many places had. Remember hand writing a document, then giving it to a clerk to put it in a word processor? No more.
I think it was the first gen iPhone 4 that had the so called “antenna-gate” problem due to where they out the antennas… The next version was much better though.
We have sprint and out in the high desert the service is pretty spotty… But that’s just because sprint has poor service and has acknowledged they are working on it
T-Mobile has calling over internet protocol so your phone automatically receives and transmits calls through WIFI when it’s available. We have lousy signal strength at my house, so this really makes a huge difference.
Considering Apple’s history of abandoning existing customers to chase new shiny ideas, there’s no way in hell I’d ever consider buying something as expensive as a car from them.
I’m still annoyed that they burned me back in the late 80’s. “Buy the Apple IIGS” they said. “We’re gonna be doing amazing things with it!” And less than 3 months after I bought it they announced they were ending all support and development for the II family in favor of the Mac. And that’s back when ordinary computers cost thousands of dollars. I haven’t bought an Apple product since.
And they keep doing it. Video professionals are mad at them right now for essentially abandoning the professional video market in favor of people editing Youtube videos with their latest video editor.
Software that works on the current version of their operating system is pretty likely not to work on next year’s version, and not for any technical reason – just “because.”
And just to be annoying, in a recent OS upgrade they randomly changed the way the mouse works so that what you used to do now does exactly the opposite. Makes you wonder if some day you’ll get in your Apple Car and have to steer left to go right.
And they want me to trust them not to turn my $30,000 car into a dead paperweight? I think not.
Yeah but you could get it in pretty two tone colors.
Yep, pushing the envelope whether anyone wants to go there or not.
Technology ;
Just because you COULD . .does not mean that you SHOULD !