Woz Misquoted About Android Dominating iOS 251
bonch writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's quote that Android would dominate over iOS was widely covered by the tech press, but after seeking clarification, Engadget reports that Wozniak was misquoted by Dutch paper De Telegraaf. 'Almost every app that I have is better on the iPhone,' says Woz, claiming that he would never say that Android was better than iOS. 'I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy.' Woz has an Engadget account and has posted further comments to the linked article."
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:5, Interesting)
AAPL was up about $8 this morning before Engadget posted the correction. Dutch commenters on Engadget have equated the Dutch paper doing the quoting with the UK's The Sun or The National Enquirer in the US.
Me, I just remember the numerous times I've been interviewed or quoted by publications, or read a report about something that I witnessed. Almost without fail I'll be misquoted at some point (usually not horribly, but it's certainly not exactly what I said), and the report of what I witnessed gets something wrong. So I'm more willing to believe that a paper with a less-than-stellar reputation got it wrong rather than spin off into some conspiracy theory.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:2, Interesting)
Who said I was doing any of this for the love of money? I do have a day job.
You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do. Not sure if you actually have checked or just are basing yourself off all the /. noise, but Apple rarely rejects apps. The few that get rejected love to make a lot of noise.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sorry Woz (Score:1, Interesting)
Your coworker is talking about the programming environment. Similarly, JRE and Microsoft Windows programmers think their environments are also awesome (in Windows' case, it actually is, kinda)... but the users of both think it's crap.
In my opinion, as someone who hasn't owned a single Apple device, but who has a Nexus One with stock firmware and a G1 with Cyanogen 6.0... the quality of the Android marketplace absolutely fucking sucks. Even the top 1% of apps are so simple that they can hardly be called applications. I don't know if iOS is any better... but I can't imagine it's actually worse.
Apple vs. Android. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is exactly the same battle as Apple vs. Microsoft a decade ago. And Apple will lose again for the same reasons: Inflated price, locked platform, and developer exclusion. Woz sees the obvious. Jobs apparently does not.
Re:Apple vs. Android. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Apple losing? Apple's in a really great spot - they're raking in cash. So is Microsoft, except that Apple is moving far less units than Dell, HP, Acer and other hardware manufacturers, so their actual costs per sale is lower and margins are higher.
They also only have 2 iPhone models out that's outselling individual Android phones out there. The only reason Android phones are "winning" is the sheer number of models of Android phones out there. They also rake in close to 50% of mobile industry profits, despite only having anywhere from 1-2% total mobile marketshare. All the other bigger companies (LG, Samsung, Nokia, RIM) are scrapping over the remaining half, despite accounting for over 90% of units shipped.
Yeah, Apple is losing. Apple's not participating in the race to the bottom, instead letting Dell, HP, Acer, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia compete against each other driving their margins and profits down.
Apple in 10 years? Well, I don't know. Just like I don't know where Microsoft willb e in 10 years. Or what Android will be in 10 years. Hell, in the past 10 years, we saw the rise and fall of PalmOS, and the rise and fall of Windows Mobile. Symbian's a bit longer lived. Android and iOS may not even exist in the next 5 years.
Re:Who cares about iOS or Android, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're from US?
Welcome to the free world - over here (Hong Kong) we have plans, usually no contracts. Discounts on phones (for those who opt for it) are given in the form of pre-payment and discount later on your monthly bills.
Phones and plans are not much related. Sim cards are freely exchangeable, and you can switch easily between carriers (it takes only a few days to port over your number).
And yes Hong Kong people are known to buy, on average, a new phone every six months. Crazy I agree, but that's the reality. After all, you don't want to be seen with the previous generation iPhone, do you?
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Interesting)
In all fairness, I don't think anyone doubt that Android will outpace the iPhone. I mean, 5 major phone manufacturers all produces Android smartphones at a pace of 5/year each and with one thing in mind: bring the iPhone down. Of course, 50 handets to 1, they will collectively win.
That said, I don't foresee very clearly the time when the iPhone will be outsold by ONE handset.
Re:News at 11 (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the Telegraaf newspaper. Although it may come across as a "quality" paper compared to most tabloids worldwide, it is the paper equivalent of Fox TV in the Netherlands. Bigoted, racist, always ready for a little setup to do some bashing. It was the only paper that was allowed to appear during the nazi-occupied years in WWII.
Does shit like this: publishes non-factual, fingerpointing article about left-wing journalists,falsely accusing them of terrorism. Journalists then get arrested, detained for weeks and their careers destroyed, based on "information in the media". Author of said article turns out to be a former cop and still is a Dutch secret service employee.
And this kind of stuff over and over again.
Just to inform you on the accuracy and dependability of the paper the article was in.
No, not really (Score:5, Interesting)
"De Telegraaf" is not that right-wing. THAT would be a political view. Its view of the world is more "against". Not against left or right, just against. Immigrants? Against. Deporting immigrants? Against. Restrictions on immigrants? Against.
It will one day warn of the risks of 2nd hand smoke, then next day run an article that bans on smoking are bad. If anything the Telegraaf is the Teaparty. They don't have any ideas, they just know everyone elses ideas suck.
The Sun and Fox News have very clear political agenda's. When The Sun backed Labour this was clear throughout its pages. De Telegraaf isn't clear on a single page. That makes it far harder to deal with. How do you deal with a newspaper and its audience that in one paper can argue against a powerplant being build in an area AND argue that we got to cut through this red tape and get powerplants build? Impossible. It is the ultimate NIMBY newspaper.
All the other newspapers in Holland however are just as unclear. For instance shouldn't the Volkskrant (left) be more worried about the effects of immigrants on wages? Shouldn't Elsevier (right) be more honest about business demand for cheap immigrant labour?
That is the real reason The Telegraaf is so hated (and the most read), it is sure to upset everyone, except its readers.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet, that's a Rovio specific problem, because other games which are far more resource intensive are developed for Android just fine without facing such issues.
The problem is almost certainly that Rovio tried to pull of a lazy port, and rather than rewrite specifically for Android, likely pulled across a bunch of C code from the other platforms they initially wrote for and interfaced using the NDK. This means you need a higher spec on average than on the original platform to achieve the same performance results, and that if you haven't taken advantage of the available abstraction layers, then you're bound to face unpredictable results. This is how things like SCUMM were ported across- sure it was done quickly, but the end result isn't very good.
This is similar to the problems that even single hardware platform devices have faced with ports in the past such as the PS3- on release many PS3 games were poor ports of the XBox 360 version, and it wasn't because the PS3 couldn't cope, it was merely because they'd been ported over in the fastest, cheapest way possible, without care for the fact that'll make it a second rate product on that platform.
So effectively you're conflating the issue of Android development with the problems caused by a poor porting process by using Angry Birds as your example. These are two different issues, and in mixing them up as you have, you've made out the issue of fragmentation to be more of a problem than it really is. There's really no reason developing for Android has to be any more problematic than dealing with the fragmentation with Apple's platforms- screen resolution differences between the iPhone 4, iPad and other devices, OS differences between the iPhone, iPad, and iPhone 3G/3Gs/4, differences in processing power across devices, and differences in available hardware between devices.
If you think programming for Android and dealing with fragmentation causes headaches, you've clearly never developed for any platform over any period of time. Fragmentation exists on every platform designed to last more than a generation be it Android, Windows, iOS. Exceptions would be things like the PS3 or Wii or XBox 360 where they are only designed to last a generation but even here if you develop a game designed to be released on more than one of these systems you face the fragmentation problem.
Fragmentation is something for non-programmers, inexperienced programmers and trolls to whinge about. For skilled, professional developers, it's a fact of life you've long learnt to deal with because it's merely the price of progress, the only alternative is to simply use a platform that never progresses and rapidly becomes outdated, something which Apple, despite holding out on what quickly became an abysmally low screen resolution of the iPhone compared to the industry standard all the way up until the 3GS finally accepted is a bad idea unless you want to be seen to have a product that sucks.
It's a shame people like you who are clearly inexperienced at software development keep parroting this myth, because it sounds so dumb to those of us who do know the topic, and do know what we're on about. It's also why it's not scared people off Android and why Android is powering ahead in terms of developer numbers and handset sales, because people who do know what they're on about know that the fragmentation argument is little more than a troll made by people who simply don't know what they are talking about.
Re:Founder of Apple realizes what he said (Score:3, Interesting)
I do love my day job, why else would I do it?
I use a lot of FREE(libre) software both and home and at work I have no plans to write any software for a mobile platform that is not FREE.