Sat, 06 Feb 2010
iPhone
Tell me again why should anybody bother to buy iPhone, when Apple is actively hostile to the application developers, and the device cannot do Bluetooth, does not have audio tracks in a portable format, accessible as a mass storage, and the manufacturer does not want you to customize the device?
4 replies for this story:
Milan Zamazal wrote:
It's all about marketing. A typical end user doesn't care about any advanced use, he just follows the crowd effect (why are exchangeable mobile phone covers so important?; or do you remember C mania at the times of our childhood?). One my friend mentioned that he had bought an iPod for his wife. I asked him why he had bought a device offering less features for higher price. He answered: "We walked around a music shop, I could see the iPod there, I liked it, so I've bought it. I'm not the kind of a person who performs market research when he needs such a simple thing like a music player." And then added: "BTW, I also like Macs. Their advantage is that *all* the applications work together out of the box, this is something I've never seen on Windows." (And I've never seen on GNU/Linux. Actually it doesn't seem to be that great on Macs as well, but it's probably indeed much better than on Windows. Got a clue why *restricting* available applications can work as an advantage?) Apple knows how to attract users and they (unlike most other manufactures) are not afraid of making products somewhat different from what others make, thus creating new (their own!) crowds. This is what matters on the market, not whether the products are really useful.
Yenya wrote: Re: Milan Zamazal
I can understand why the "non-thinking crowd" buys Apple products. But why would anybody buy them, and then try to develop software for them (and be pwned by the App store)?
Milan Zamazal wrote:
People can be easily exploited to make voluntary actions against their own profit. If you don't believe it, look at most election results. I don't know why people behave this way, perhaps you could find some answers in sociology literature.
Marcel Kolaja wrote:
Another story describing iPhone from a different point of view is the "hundreds of thousands of applications" myth. If you're interested in, you might want to take a look at this blog post: http://tomch.com/wp/?p=144