Posted on 06/06/2011 12:35:21 PM PDT by ctdonath2
Apple introduced OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud today. Lots of articles at the link and elsewhere.
Look, cat, this has been discussed in the press for the last several months! I am not making this up, no matter how much you want to claim that I am! The press has reported the refusal of the labels to sign with Google and Amazon. This is a fact! Both have offered money incentives to the Labels and publishers to sign and they have refused. Insiders have cited a lack of trust. Apple HAS succeeded in getting the labels to sign in exchange for a reported $150 million. Perhaps they will now sign with the others, perhaps not, now that Apple has blazed the trail, once again. You are the one ignoring the news that has been reported. . . But as of now, neither Google nor Amazon has contracts that allow them to do what Apple will be doing, no matter how much you wish they did.
I’m not here to defend ComScore or their methodology, but they are widely accepted as the industry standard. I’m thinking that if the numbers were a more rosy for Apple you wouldn’t be questioning it as much.
“Later statistics show Android is stalling now that the iPhone4 is available in more markets.” In fact the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3Gs are the #1 and #2 best selling handsets in the world, not any of the hundreds of the Android models.”
LOL at that. So Android has “stalled” only picking up 5.2% market share. Apple gained 1.3%, so what’s that? I’m sure any phone maker would be delighted to pickup 5% market share from 1 quarter to the next. That reminds me of the games Democrats play when Republicans propose slowing the growth in program “X” by “X” percent...only giving a 2% increase instead of a 5% increase. The program in still growing, yet the Democrats call that a “cut”. Same tortured logic.
You can question the data all you want, but I’ve seen nothing to indicate a “stall” in android, especially with all the new android handsets being released over the summer. And considering from a hardware standpoint that the iPhone is now outmatched by several Android handsets, Apple has some work to do. Samsung can’t churn out phones like the Galaxy S II fast enough.
“In fact the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3Gs are the #1 and #2 best selling handsets in the world, not any of the hundreds of the Android models.”
So what? Samsung has 3 times the market share. There are 3 times as many people using Samsung phones than Apple, so if the fact the iPhone 4 and 3GS sell great makes iFans feel batter, then so be it.
And in a year from now, all these “cloud” services will all be doing the same thing in one form or another.
As I said, the “cloud” idea is nothing new. The only “twist” is you can have your entire 100GB (or whatever it is) available to you, which I’m sure is probably nowhere near what the average user has.
Why is it that when Apple comes out with this “revolutionary” stuff, the only people calling it that were already Apple zombies to begin with? Everyone else just sits back and laughs at you guys while saying “Yeah, that’s nice, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about”.
Sounds like a sickness.
Please show us WHO is providing this FREE easy-to-use integrated, transparent service across multiple devices to their customers already. And who is offering a subscription music system for the equivalent of $2 a month? Please, tell us. Once you've done that, then you can continue being snarky and insultingly calling people names like "Apple zombies" in violation of Jim Robinson's rules against attempting to instigate flame wars on FreeRepublic.
No, F1re, that's not what I said. I said there's something wrong with the chart which shows the major Android makers LOSING overall market share in the total cell phone market while APPLE is the ONLY maker who GAINED significant marketshare in the overall cell phone market during that quarter! This means they are cannibalizing their own sales, and LOSING overal market share! Look at the big picture, not the niche.
The stall in Android sales came at the END of the quarter when the iPhone4 became available on Verizon and was also made available in 25 other markets throughout the world including China and India, and the release of the white iPhone4. Most people don't buy phones on specs... They buy phones on the ecosystem they tie into, and the advertising they see.
No, F1re, that's not what I said. I said there's something wrong with the chart which shows the major Android makers LOSING overall market share in the total cell phone market while APPLE is the ONLY maker who GAINED significant marketshare in the overall cell phone market during that quarter! This means they are cannibalizing their own sales, and LOSING overal market share! Look at the big picture, not the niche.
The stall in Android sales came at the END of the quarter when the iPhone4 became available on Verizon and was also made available in 25 other markets throughout the world including China and India, and the release of the white iPhone4. Most people don't buy phones on specs... They buy phones on the ecosystem they tie into, and the advertising they see.
Yeah, most Android folks are laughing at the use of ‘revolutionary’. But, the Apple fanboys will believe it.
Meh. "Revolutionary" is marketing-speak. All manufacturers call every new thing they do "revolutionary", but few truly are.
The big difference between Apple and the other players isn't technology, it's integration. Apple treats technology as a tool but the product is the overall end user experience. Most other makers treat technology as the end product in and of itself.
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You obviously don't understand the situation. The posts in the running narrative read from bottom to top of the document. (There must be well over 300 entries.) Swordmaker laboriously copied and pasted the entries in reverse order -- so that the document he pasted into FR read from Top to Bottom.
Swordmaker, thank you for all your hard work on our behalf!
Then, some irrational and dictatorial Admin Mod wasted all of Swordmaker's hard work -- by arbitrarily deleting his innocuous and newsworthy thread.
I saw no benefit in even pasting the document here without modification, since the same material (time-reversed) had already been arbitrarily deleted earlier. IOW, I refused to give some immature, Apple-hating [your favorite pejorative] the warped pleasure of doing the same to me.
So, I just posted the link. I don't play childish games.
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TXnMA -- 10 year+ FReeper
So what does iCloud do exactly? What happens if you are somewhere without service, are all of your songs still available to you?
Your stuff is stored locally. The cloud acts (sort of) more as a distribution buffer, ensuring that all your devices have copies of all your files. (Granted you may not fit all files on all devices; they’ll do what they can.)
The emphasis is on _downloading_, not _streaming_. If you are somewhere without service, you have all the songs that were synced just before you lost service.
Even if your collection is low-quality 128 kb MP3 taken from a commercial CD, the iTunes-matched songs will be available back to you in 256 kb AAC from the master. No DRM either. Apple doesn't mind because it doesn't cost them anything in storage. Ten million users just point to the same song in iTunes, while Google will have to store ten million copies of that song.
The amazing thing here is the labels making the assumption that you paid for the music on your computer, while they usually operate on the assumption that you pirated everything. Apple paid some big $$$ for this to happen.
I use Dropbox, and I have all of my files synced on not just my Apple products, but also on my Windows boxes as well.
You don’t have much music, do you?
My CD collection is not unusually large for 30 years accumulation - and takes up some 46GB averaging ~128kbps bit rates. Most got correct album art & track list info from iTunes/Gracenote. I plan to re-rip them all to lossless, which will increase total size several times.
Thanks to Apple writing some large checks, I don’t have to upload dozens of gigabytes of audio, I just shell out $25/yr (meh) and it will match & sync most of that in minutes WITHOUT having to upload or occupy significant storage. So ... I buy a CD (as I prefer to), pop it in the PC, and wander off - without any further effort than insertion, the music appears on my iPad.
Thanks to Amazon and Google touting “upload your music!” _without_ writing some big checks to music publishers, that “match and sync” feature will not be available except for what you buy from them.
Maybe not life-changing (or maybe it is; iPad made a notable shift in mine), but it’s sure a far more advanced implementation of “cloud” technology than anyone else. You deride it as “a cloud drive is not a new idea” - you miss the point: it’s not implemented as a “drive”, because the paradigm of “drive” has been eliminated and everything just seems “right there”. This IS a big deal, even if you insist it isn’t. Apple got their $0.3T market cap precisely because of attention to such nuances.
How well Google will do remains to be seen. Android is fighting proliferation of versions and a dearth of paid apps. They might pull it together, or not. Apple has. Google may have an OS running on 34% of smartphones, but what percentage of that matters? (to wit: what percentage of Android users wouldn’t notice a difference if it was running anything else, or practically no serious OS at all?)
Someday, maybe. After they've written some VERY big checks to backtrack on the "we don't need your approval" attitude, and that AFTER they sort out the serious security problems. Apple said "how much do you want", while Google said "**** you"; there are consequences to attitude.
Thing is, they haven't done it, and they're not doing it now.
And thing is, Apple just did it, and it's already rolling out to devices. Some new icons just appeared on my iPad, so the iCloud music service is already coming on-line and I didn't have to do anything. Google has a lot of catching up to do.
Never mind Microsoft with Ballmer's stance of "stand back and watch everyone else take over the new frontier."
Most of my music is ripped 160 kb AAC because I wanted a lot of songs to fit on my 4 GB iPod Nano. It would be nice to get the quality upgrade. If you think in terms of payoff, $25 a year will take a very long time to eat into the time investment of re-ripping over a thousand CDs.
Note that iCloud is supposed to also work on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
That said, I'm going to keep some files in Dropbox even after moving most to iCloud, because I want to access those specific documents (mostly OpenOffice stuff) from a Linux (Fedora Core 14) box as well.
Your post is self-contradictory, downplaying Apple’s new offerings as old news, yet observing that everyone else will catch up in about a year. You deride the cloud as nothing new (ok, so it isn’t), and downplay the “twist” which changes the game and which others won’t catch up to for months if not years (Android isn’t trusted, Amazon told publishers to p!$$ off).
Buying a CD a month is hardly extravagant. Over 30 years, compressed to 256kbps, that’s around 265GB easy.
And as for sickness, which is more so: being happy that a shiny new leading-edge product has arrived, or passionately bashing it? So we like our toys; why do you feel compelled to insult them?
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