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This post focuses on hardware which is a limited view, Apple certainly made very bold moves with respect to business. One reason I let go of my (very nice) Andr

by Jun8 11y ago

This post focuses on hardware which is a limited view, Apple certainly made very bold moves with respect to business. One reason I let go of my (very nice) Android phone and got an iPhone6 was that I was sick and tired of being at Verizon's whim for software updates and always had to use slightly older versions (while my friends with AT&T enjoyed a newer version of KitKat). I'd much rather deal with Apple, at least everyone's on same footing. For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google). I never agreed with idea in this passage: "In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!" If it's a necessary evil I, for one, would want to deal with a terrible Queen rather than the Dark Lord. And I sure hope that Apple aims cable companies next.

deleted 11y ago
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hinkley 11y ago
> For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google). Bless you my son. I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don't know how bad things were about to get. Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks. They had been squeezing the Moto/Nokia/Ericcsons of the world hard and their new idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand). It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were the carriers. They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups ("eating their own young") and it was a losing game. Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece. Then the App Store launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar. People in mobile danced in the streets. Finally, we can have margins! People who didn't know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of the profit for 'doing nothing'.

by Jun8 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

hinkley 11y ago

> For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google). Bless you my son. I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don't know how bad things were about to get. Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks. They had been squeezing the Moto/Nokia/Ericcsons of the world hard and their new idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand). It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were the carriers. They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups ("eating their own young") and it was a losing game. Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece. Then the App Store launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar. People in mobile danced in the streets. Finally, we can have margins! People who didn't know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of the profit for 'doing nothing'.