FaceTime and Why Apple’s Massive Integration Advantage is Just Beginning

TechCrunch ^ | Jul 3, 2010 | Steve Cheney

[stripes1776]

The success of iPhone 4 has been astonishing to witness, despite the antenna issues, proving once again that Apple has a unparalleled ability to differentiate around design and integration, not simply “features.”

Perhaps the best example of this so far is FaceTime, Apple’s take on video-calling. FaceTime makes video-calling on the Android-based Sprint HTC EVO look silly, because the EVO awkwardly requires users to sign up and download a third-party app, then launch it every time they want to talk. Normal people simply won’t do this...

[stripes1776]

I didn’t say mac sucked. It’s just inferior to Windows especially in regards to being able to do what you want and having off the shelf software available.

If you're a gamer, you will probably like to have a Windows machine around, although a lot more games these days are now being ported or written for the Mac. But for most people's everyday needs, the software is available for the Mac. Exactly which functionality do you need that you can not find the same program ported to the Mac, or a program with the equivalent functionality?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"On the site, there's a live feed of people currently recording video with their phones, so yep, it records, feeds to the web and posts it on their site. It also uses GPS to give an exact location on Google maps for some of the feeds. I wonder how many people realize this happens?"

Thanks for taking the time to verify that. Frankly, I had not done so, since the info came from an Android partisan who's quick to post to his whole address book with every anti-Apple op-ed and article he encounters.

Meanwhile, the sound you hear is "The Silence Of The Anti-Apple-Trolls," the very folks who view Steve Jobs as a real-life Hannibal Lecter who feasts on user security with fava beans and a nice chianti.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"The vast majority of the programmers who attend the programmer meetups I go to are working on Macs."

Intriguingly, same's the case for the Blackhat crowd. As much as they delight in arriving at crackfests armed with arcane vulnerabilities they found over months of research, unethically failed to report, and unveil to inaccurate hoots and hollers of "Two Minute Mac Heist!", I've noticed a preponderance of Macs among them. Including uber-attention-whore Charlie Miller himself:

[tacticalogic]

I am talking about the programmers who write the applications, not the average person in a cubicle. No matter what the clerks might be using as a desktop system, the back end of those finance companies with be using some form of UNIX for their database. It's quite natural and easy for a programmer to use a BSD UNIX system like the Mac.

I work for a financial institution. There's an IBM mainframe doing the heavy lifting for the transactional systems, and a bunch of MS SQL server databases for various support systems. We have a few UNIX databases that came as part of "turnkey" applications. We have a few Macs we use for QA testing of our online applications, and we have mix of Windows Mobile and iPhones as Exchange clients. The iPhones are consistently more problematic than the Windows Mobile devices in an Exchange environment.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“Samsung, LG, RIM all dominate Apple in terms of mobile devices. It’s not even close. “

As an outside observer of your discussions...

You seem to define success in a peculiar way.

Apple is a healthy company that makes products its market
wants to buy (in large numbers) because that market values
what they receive - and Apple delivers for its stockholders.

So why be all whiny about Apple?

I don’t get why you are so obsessed.

Buy what you prefer and use it. If total market share
is your deciding factor, have at it.

Some people make decisions based on all kinds of reasons
that have nothing to do with market share. Competition
drives them all to deliver better stuff for us. I’m thankful
the Android is putting some heat on Apple. As an iPhone
user, I’ll get increased innovation in the future. Android
users will also.

Since that is life, your whining comes across as
some unresolved personal issue...

Somehow your discussions remind me of atheists that
want to convert believers to non-believers...

Do you need a hug?

ampu

[driftdiver]

No, we just have a life.

[driftdiver]

‘Same price point, both subsidized and unsubsidized.
135 poste”

Untrue the earlier versions were more expensive when first released. $400

[driftdiver]

Wow how liberal, if you can’t win the argument using the measurement of success being discussed just change the definition of success.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Untrue the earlier versions were more expensive when first released. $400"

Nope. I paid the same $199 for my 3G as I will for my 4 when I get it in a few days. Unless I opt for the 36GB model... [lust]... which will cost me $100 more. Which is not badly priced: a quick review of online prices for quality, name-brand 16GB CF cards looks like the going rate is around $140. (And while I'm at it, a word to the wise: there are few things more costly than cheap, no-name flash cards.)

You may be recalling the very first month of the very first iPhone's sales. Apple did lower the price after it was clear there was resistance at the original price-point, and it gave early adopters a credit. And just as lowering tax rates has been shown time and again to result in a boost in revenues, Apple's re-pricing helped the iPhone take off in numbers, revenue and profitability. Pricing for something like the iPhone was uncharted territory at the time, and now it's not, which is why the price points remain the same now. Basically, they haven't changed in almost three years, despite the skyrocketing functionality of the thing. And that's why you're mostly wrong, though there's a bit of ancient truth in your contention.

Meanwhile... Let's just say there's a reason the iPhone's competitors rapidly fall to the two-for-one or even free category a few weeks after introduction.

[driftdiver]

Ahh so you agree you were wrong.

“Let’s just say there’s a reason the iPhone’s competitors rapidly fall to the two-for-one or even free category a few weeks after introduction.”

You mean the competitors like RIM who actually charge more and yet sell more?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"No, we just have a life."

[singing] Then why are you heeeeerre?? [/singing]

[driftdiver]

Why am I here? Cause I’m relaxing after a long day at the beach.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"So you’re saying you work for a financial institution who uses mac’s?"

Intriguing point. A few weeks ago I had occasion to work deep in the bowels of one of the leading financial institutions in the world. Deep, deep inside their ops center, where hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth are managed every second of every day. Guest of the Sr. VP who basically runs the joint. The guy is a rather heavy hitter-- remember that meeting with Treasury that a handful of top bankers was required to attend to learn how they'd all been pwned by the government? He was one of 'em.

And he's gone all-iPad. Even I, who through comparative experience vs. Windows and Linux has come to become quite the Apple fanboi, was impressed.

As I type, my wife is sprawled on the couch, doing emails, playing Words with Friends and watching a streamed movie on Netflix on her iPad. She's been doing this for the weekend so far. The battery life on that thing is freaking amazing.

[driftdiver]

intriguing, all of the global banks I’ve worked with and done security for don’t allow apple products on their networks.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Ahh so you agree you were wrong."

Typical. I politely point out where you were wrong, provide you with facts and details you were unaware of, and you try to make it my problem. Artful.

The competitors I was talking about were the insecure, poorly-supported and vaguely clunky Google Android phones, of course. RIM continues its dominance, with iPhone nipping at its heels as it adds features such as Exchange-compliant hardware encryption, introduced way back with the 3GS and still lacking in any Android phone.

And hey, how about that video-chat feature for Android, eh? Scroll back up if you missed it, or search the thread for Qik. Of course, the pornophiles among the Android fandom probably wouldn't mind.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"intriguing, all of the global banks I’ve worked with and done security for don’t allow apple products on their networks."

That's strange. I can name two of very personal acquaintance that do, though I must admit that Windows has a big head start. As the CTO of one very large and well-known bank told me, and this is a direct quote from an email: "Looking forward so I can trade in my blackberry someday…" He was unaware when he wrote that that (today, not "someday") the iPhone can be remotely wiped and was Exchange-compliant with hardware encryption, and he'd bought wholesale the false reports that a late build of Ubuntu could access the data on an iPhone, when actually Ubuntu was seeing just the publicly shared folder, as with any digital camera, and no system or user directories like \usr or \var were exposed. His response: "Thanks, [real name]. Great news."

It's only news to him because he's ill-informed due to abysmal work by the tech media and the frantic fanning of the flames of FUD by folks such as a few on this thread. My impression is that RIM's stranglehold on this market will weaken quickly once actual facts break through the inertia-based shield of high-finance IT. I've already witnessed it in action among that very high-placed early-adopter mentioned earlier.

[tacticalogic]

We let people use iPhones as Exchange clients via activsync or imap, but that’s external access from a public network. That’s not what I’d consider to be an example of having a Apple product “on the network”. To me, that means on the private, internal network, behind the firewall.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"We let people use iPhones as Exchange clients via activsync or imap, but that’s external access from a public network. That’s not what I’d consider to be an example of having a Apple product “on the network”. To me, that means on the private, internal network, behind the firewall."

Agreed. And I have seen that, with both iPhones and now (per my previous post) iPads-- in the hands of one of the heaviest hitters in finance. Unix rocks.

And why not? They're supremely secure devices, as their record of imperviousness to viruses and malware has shown.

[driftdiver]

“Typical. I politely point out where you were wrong, provide you with facts and details you were unaware of, and you try to make it my problem. Artful.”

No you said the previous versions were the same price, then subsequently you admitted they were higher when they were first released.

Video chat? Who cares, if I want it I can download it. Mac video only works with wifi anyway.

“Of course, the pornophiles among the Android fandom probably wouldn’t mind.”

once again with the cheap insults. so much for the high road

[driftdiver]

arbitrary code execution according to apple. so much for the FUD claim.