Apple Is Giving Away Its Secrets By Litigating 149
An anonymous reader writes "Apple, by going to a jury trial to defend the patents of its most prized products, is allowing competitors and the public to see inside one of the most secretive companies in the world. From the article: 'While in court on Friday, Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, pulled the curtain further back when he divulged the company's advertising budgets — often more than $100 million a year for the iPhone alone. Also at the hearing, Scott Forstall, senior vice president for iPhone software, explained that the early iPhone was called "Project Purple." Mr. Forstall said it was built in a highly secure building on Apple's campus. A sign on the back of the building read "Fight Club." Behind the security cameras and locked doors, most employees on the project did not even know what they were working on.'"
These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
Re:These are secrets? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes.
I mean iYes.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Funny)
So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
It's so easy, a caveman could do it.
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But all it takes is one monkey boy to drag it back to the stone age.
Ballmer is busy at Microsoft right now.
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Re:These are secrets? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The current management at Nokia is plenty competent - they just have ..*puts on tinfoil hat*.. a slightly different target than one might expect.
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So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising
You had it in the first one. The rest is meaningless window-dressing.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to Microsoft. They spent half a billion marketing Windows Phone 7 when it launched, but that didn't seem to help. They spent a fortune marketing Bing, even paying people to use it, but that didn't help either.
Marketing alone is never enough. You have to have the right product at the right time.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing isn't just about how much money you throw at it - your ads have to actually be good. The WP7/Bing ads have been awful.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't hurt to have a big enough legal budget to litigate the small fry out of the market.
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Which "small fry" are you referring to? Samsung? HTC? Motorola? Nokia?
Yeah, they're tiny shops.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Marketing isn't just about how much money you throw at it - your ads have to actually be good. The WP7/Bing ads have been awful.
The product you're selling also has to be good. "Fool me once..."
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Marketing isn't just about how much money you throw at it - your ads have to actually be good. The WP7/Bing ads have been awful.
For that matter, Marketing isn't all about ads, otherwise it would be called Advertising. Marketing involves lots of other steps like coming up with a good product for the market to begin with.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand Apple's marketing has been rather catchy (I'm a Mac, I'm a PC and the MacBook Air commercial)
The biggest problem with Microsoft is that it tries to come up with improvements after the product is already out in the hands of the masses and makes so little improvements that for most its not worth changing. Apple comes up with a product and makes it desirable, it creates a mass market where there only was a niche market before. Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, it invented the market for the MP3 player other than among geeks. Apple didn't invent the smartphone, it made the consumer smartphone market.
Apple is brilliant in creating a market where there wasn't one before. That, is great marketing.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're almost there. Apple's initial designs have some fairly serious problems, and then they iron out the bugs. Microsoft on the other hand seems intent to rush something out and play catch-up, but they never spend the kind of effort needed to fine-tune the design. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs, wanted everything to be perfect for the user so they are willing to pay a premium. Microsoft is aiming at the general market, often balancing price vs. design.
iPod was not well-received until the third generation (2003) when a few redesigns were made and iTunes took off.
iPhone had (relatively) abysmal sales until the end of the second generation, after at least one OS upgrade, and the third generation was on the way (3GS), making second generation less expensive.
iPad was done very well, mostly because they were in development, realized the same could be done in a phone, and shelved it while they worked out the iPhone. The market was already there, in the form of subnotebooks such as ASUS EEE. They applied what they learned from the iPod and iPhone and got this one right early.
Apple's marketing is the same way - lots of attention spent on the end user's experience, rather than how much it costs. Just looking at what we've seen already from the trial, Apple continually gets feedback from focus groups, and from various sources it seems they start before the product is out the door. I wouldn't be surprised to see many revisions of advertising before it gets out the door as well, although those are easier to update if it's not hitting the right note.
Apple: worry about design over price, change the product based on user feedback
Microsoft: Know corporations will buy whatever you're selling, eventually, and people will buy consumer goods for compatibility
Different markets, different tactics. It doesn't help that Microsoft's "lost decade" basically left them with barely anything to show for it - a new OS that finally caught up with OS X because it was make-or-break with Vista's debacle, XBOX 360, and advances in its development tools. Microsoft's focus is not on the consumer, and "good enough" is ready for a release. "Good enough" does not exist for Apple, it always needs refinement. Not the mindless UI changes Microsoft has been putting on Vista, Office, and the Xbox dashboard, but addressing actual usability issues.
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Apple: worry about design over price, change the product based on perceived user needs
Fixed that for you. I never asked for them to take away the "save as" option. I never asked them to reverse the default mouse orientation in Lion. I never asked them to change the Safari icons to an asinine color combination where I can't tell the difference between enabled and disabled back buttons. I never asked them to take away functionality from my scrollbar. That is just their OS product.
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On the other hand Apple's marketing has been rather catchy (I'm a Mac, I'm a PC and the MacBook Air commercial)
Not [youtube.com] any [youtube.com] more. [youtube.com]
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also a matter of timing. NeXT was doing pretty much everything that the first OS X Macs did - in some cases better - up to a decade earlier. But back when NeXT was doing it you couldn't sell the machines at a profit for anything under $5000, $10000 for a decent one. A bit later, Apple was selling more powerful machines around the $1000 mark.
The same thing happened with portable media players. The 1.8" hard drives made mass-market ones possible. Earlier ones had used 2.5" laptop drives (too bulky) or flash (64-128MB - enough for one or two albums) and weren't that appealing. The iPod would have been a disaster if it had been released any earlier, because the technology just wasn't there. If it had been released later, then it's possible that the Nomad would already have had enough mindshare that it would have been hard to compete. Apple entered the market at exactly the right time and advertised the hell out of their product so everyone knew about the iPod, whereas only people who read geek news knew about the Nomad.
Their phones and tablets are a similar story. It's not surprising that everything looks like an iPhone now - the availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens make finger-based touch interfaces popular. We're around the 20th anniversary of Microsoft's first entry into the tablet market, but these machines were huge (remember the size of a battery on a 386 laptop?) and needed a stylus. Being able to interact with the system with your finger - or fingers - is a big shift. Apple jumped in right at the right moment, when a new technology made a new market possible. And, once again, they threw huge amounts of advertising money so people think iPhone-like phone instead of phone-with-capacitive-touchscreen.
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Being able to interact with the system with your finger - or fingers - is a big shift.
Yes, a big shift backwards into the land of Fisher Price.
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On the other hand Apple's marketing has been rather catchy
One person's "catchy" is another person's "twee, smug, cloying, self-satisfied pseudo-hipster brainwank".
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The surest way to make a club desirable is to restrict its membership.
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The surest way to make a club desirable is to restrict its membership.
The club for "fanboy purchasers of overpriced consumer electronics" is not a particularly exclsive one. You just need to unplug your brain and hand over your wallet to the man in the shiny shop.
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Microsoft also announced that WinPhone 7 was obsolete within 4 months of releasing the first decent phones for it, which is why when mine broke I bought an Android to replace it.
Lovely phone, but the fact that it's never going to get any updates to give it the features it's missing is kind of a death knell.
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What's funny they announced they would give feature updates to WP7 at the same time they announced they couldn't update WP7-hardware to WP8, somehow you end parsing 'will receive updates that will work on their hardware' as 'will not receive updates'. Now, is that a fault of MS, or a fault of your reading comprehension?
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It's had feature updates, it got wifi tethering, and multi image MMS. It needs a hell of a lot more than that. The phone has a lot of really neat things, but it's about comparable in a lot of ways to a first gen iPhone. Without the update to windows 8 phone, you're not going to see it get where it needs to go. Add into that new phone OS comes with a complete new API which won't be supported by the old devices, but will be supported on tablets, the new win phones, and the three desktops that update to Window
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The fact that Microsoft isn't putting windows phone 8 on the phone is public record, the fact that this means the phone is dead is evident to anyone who owns one.
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Apple tend to be the first to market with viable (thats important) product niches which create a market and are good enough to earn loyalty early on.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which indicates another way to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation: Sell advertising.
Re:These are secrets? (Score:5, Informative)
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I recommend an ace team of ninjas.
Sure, they cost a little more, but unlike lawyers they have standards.
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Don't forget Megacorporations like Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia; none of which don't have their own ace teams of lawyers and ongoing lawsuits.
Everyone seems to think that Apple is the only one doing this.
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Hell, it's not even a new thing. Even way back when there are plenty of lawsuits that targeted Apple - especially in the iPod (but pre-iPhone) era. Creative, Sony, they all launched lawsuits. Nevermind the plenty of class actions and individual actions. It was enough that really, if there was a week where A
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So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
Well, if the I you mean a charismatic CEO/Founder with a cult following.
And if you were able to brand your product in such a way that people identify with it to the point of making it an extension of their personality.
Yes, that's all it takes.
Although, Apple being the market leader and controller, they have become mainstream and subsequently "un-cool". It doesn't help either that Steve Jobs is dead - their cool-break-the-rules-did-it-his-way-anti-big-corporation-stick-it-to-the-man-and-still-became-a-billi
Re:These are secrets? (Score:4, Funny)
"And if you were able to brand your product in such a way that peopleÂidentifyÂwith it to the point of making it an extension of their personality."
You meant iDentify, don't you?
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Well, if the I you mean a charismatic CEO/Founder with a cult following.
You mean Bill Gates of course.
At least Bill Gates doesn't go around taking handicapped parking spaces.
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What it really means is that the next time there's a rumor on the internet about Apple working on a new project called "project " it means it will be some new product. The secret is out!!!
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I guess it's interesting what they did and how they did it but it only that, interesting.
LoB
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So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
Lumia sales provide evidence that such is a falsehood. At least Microsoft was useful for something.
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Patents (Score:2)
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
This story isn't about patents, even though the trials are. The things being exposed is exposing stuff like Apple's development methodology and advertising tactics. I guess it also goes to show that the secret to Apple's success isn't it's technological innovation, but it's marketing budget.
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" I guess it also goes to show that the secret to Apple's success isn't it's technological innovation, but it's marketing budget."
Right and marketing has worked so well for Microsoft.
If all it takes is marketing to make a product a success without a product that people want, then why can't every company do it?
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So you're saying neither Microsoft, Motorola, HTC, LG, Nokia, or RIM had the capital to advertise? You do remember that Apple was a relatively small player compared to these other companies when the iPhone was introduced? If Apple only markets, then why didnt any other company come out with a phone like the iPhone before 2007? Why were the first Android prototypes BlackBerty imitators? What happened to the Kin? What happened to Nokia? All of these other dead or dying phone companies were out years before A
Slow day? (Score:5, Insightful)
This a slow day samzenpus? This article is bad, and you should feel bad [youtube.com].
Possibly the worst headline ever. I notice nowhere in the summary or the linked article where Mr. Schiller specifically avoided commenting on the new iPhone due this fall. Don't worry, I'm sure there will be plenty of back and forth between fanboys and fandroids. Slashdot will get pageviews, and my karma will end up in the terlet.
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I'm with you. I read through the article, and I want my 2 minutes back. Though, that link to the patent for sawing the woman in half might have been worth it.
The things they "revealed" are just standard shit people do in development work. $100mil for iPhone marketing is chump change - J&J spends billions in marketing annually. Hell, AT&T spent $150mil in marketing the Lumia - so fucking what?
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J&J?
And yeah, the woman sawn in half bit was kinda fun.
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Johnson & Johnson would be my guess.
It's a weird corollary of the Streisand Effect. (Score:1)
So, by the way, is patenting something. The moment any big tech company files for a patent, hordes of onlookers start speculating on what's behind it.
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I would argue that the predominant perception of patents is that they exist to secure the privileges of the inventor. Nowadays they seem to serve as the fulcrum by which litigators pry large sums of money away from alleged violators of their clients' dubiously-granted rights. Whatever the original intent of patents, it was obscured by virtual mountains of cash a long time ago.
Now I know what purple means (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it's all a great secret until... (Score:2)
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One of my friends used to work at Rogers. Rogers and RIM have a deal where any time and unrecognized* BB device ends up on Rogers RIM gets notified immediately. And that can go very badly for whomever has the device because it's almost certainly stolen.
One of my students did a co-op at RIM before that was the case, and I guess this deal with rogers came into being about 3 years ago. He worked there during a transition, where they initially had 'security' that didn't actually care all that much if you wal
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That's because most other companies are pretty open on when they are going to release stuff.
So when exactly will the Galaxy S IV be out?
Secrets? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, ok. I admit - I'm an Apple fanboy so I follow Apple news pretty closely but, thus far, nothing secret has been revealed. A large marketing budget for their key products? Uh, duh! A massive and secretive development process behind the iPhone? Seriously, duh! Literally, nothing at all that has been revealed thus far is anything remotely close to a "secret". The closest thing to a secret has been the revelation of specific prototypes but everyone knew there were prototype iPhone designs and most people already had a basic idea of what they looked like - now we have pictures. But the only people who consider any of this a secret are people who don't follow the tech industry at all and anyone who follows Apple surely finds nothing to be a shocking secret thus far.
Total confusion (Score:2)
...most employees on the project did not even know what they were working on
That's supposed to be surprising? I've seen many a project where the engineers, after a period of spec and requirements changes, didn't know what the hell they were working on...and they had to do it anyway. :]
Remember the old days ... (Score:3, Interesting)
<old man rant>
When Slashdot didn't cover the smart phone wars and we conversed open source and linux, then did a healthy microsoft bashing for good measure. I miss those days.
I get that the editors love the traffic from Apple stories but I find them so damn tiring. Yes, they are a tech leader but does the Slashdot community need to notified about every little quibble? (hey look, a slashdot headline!) If Tim Cook so much as farts, it makes frontpage news here, followed by some idiotic editorial that would be modded flamebait if posted to a story.
Slashdot reminds me of this video ... with Slashdot playing the role of Paranoia. Now, if only we could successfully "stab em".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bCD8M0EnxA [youtube.com]
</old man rant>
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<old man rant> When Slashdot didn't cover the smart phone wars and we conversed open source and linux, then did a healthy microsoft bashing for good measure. I miss those days.
Well, Balmer's to blame... no fun in bashing microsoft any more.
Different market. Not scret sause. (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple's not doing anything spectacular. The company is just creating a product design that differentiates themselves from the competition and marketing it. They have a lot of money to do that. It's not like they really have anything all that unique functionality wise. They are dependant on the same companies Dell, HP, and everybody else is. That is they are dependent on Samsung for hard drives, Atheros/Realtek/Intel/etc for wireless chipsets, Intel/AMD for CPUs, etc. If they actually were to create a new pr
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Yes, people are stupid for not liking things for the same reason I do.
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If Apple isn't producing anything spectacular, does that make their financial success more or less impressive?
No, I mean yes.
Seriously? (Score:3)
These are the important secrets?
It's more likely that Apple's competitors are going to look at this thin slice of evidence and apply it badly, as has been done so frequently in the past.
I'm more worried about Apple drifting away from its own successful values than I am about somebody else "discovering" them on the basis of this trial's discovery.
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Agreed. These are the sorts of things any serious competitor knows already, if not exactly they have a good idea about how much apple is spending on things and so on. They will hire former (disgruntled) apple staff, they'll pour over their public books, half of their competitors are also their suppliers so they know component costs, they can hire people from the phone carriers etc.
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Agreed. It would be a shame to see Apple forget the values it was built on: Steal ideas, Maximize profits, Lock in the consumer, and most importantly, lie. Always lie.
Good for the poster-company (Score:1)
How much is paid to astroturfing? (Score:2)
I find it curious Apple spends so much money on advertising yet its pretty seldom i have seen an Apple advert at all. Where does all that money go really? Since not much seems to end up in normal advertising one could suspect it was spent on guerilla marketing or astroturfing as i call it.
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And they have that many people lining up around the block and having fights over the iPhones on launch dates? Seriously?
Apple doesn't have to copy RIM for that kind of bullshit
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Not everyone in line is paid but a portion probably are.
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Re:Is Apple using undercover marketing? (Score:5, Funny)
Geeks can make serious money at suburban malls these days. Apple pays me to stand around in front of their store, and Abercrombie and Fitch pays me to stay away from theirs.
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The amount of people in line is eerily similar with each product launch, how many of these people are the same and what is their association to Apple?
Or maybe the same early adopters line up for upgrades each time. No conspiracy theory necessary.
Much like the same people line up to buy [insert appropriate video game franchise name here] at midnight on launch day.
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Yesterday I was at the Mall of America to let my kid ride some rides while it drizzled outside. I needed a new Invisible Shield for my phone (not realizing that the one that began to peel off, had I gone to a kiosk with it still on the phone, would have been covered by their lifetime warranty) and had one put on there for an additional $5 (saving me 20 minutes of utter frustration and sweat).
After waiting the 30 seconds for the dude to do it for me, I was about to walk away when a young guy and his family c
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No, it's mostly product placement in TV shows, movies, and other popular media. Watch the shows popular with the 18-34 crowd and count how many iphones, ipads, macbooks, and apple logos you see in the course of each show. You'll be surprised how large the number is.
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No, it's mostly product placement in TV shows, movies, and other popular media. Watch the shows popular with the 18-34 crowd and count how many iphones, ipads, macbooks, and apple logos you see in the course of each show. You'll be surprised how large the number is.
Actually, you'll see pretty few Apple logos.
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How many of those Apple users lining up to buy the new Iphones are Apple employees or associates paid to stand in line? The amount of people in line is eerily similar with each product launch, how many of these people are the same and what is their association to Apple?
Undercover marketing is real. For all who don't know what it is, here is a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcZkbUH-lOc [youtube.com]
The man in the video does not appear to be honest.
Why would you pay kids to walk around and eat popcorn and cotton candy when you could just hand out a few free ones?
Same with the "leaners", it sounds too contrived, a poster, coasters, or again, giving away free stuff would be cheaper.
A huge line doesn't make people want to go stand in it. Disney puts a lot of work into hiding long lines to make the wait appear to be shorter.
What is supposed point of secret marketing other than an explanation for the popul
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A huge line doesn't make people want to go stand in it. Disney puts a lot of work into hiding long lines to make the wait appear to be shorter.
A fundamental difference being that in Disney's case, people have already paid for whatever is at the end of the line. People really, really, really hate that scenario.
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Sorry I know too many regular people who get excited by Apple products and do that sort of things. On the annual WWDC when new hardware is often announced there a 1/2 dozen websites live blogging for the people who can't wait till the next day to watch the video.
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I've been excited about product launches in the past, I can understand that. I can't understand getting excited about a video of a product that I know nothing about, which may or many not exist just because it's rumored to be some unknown new thing from a company which has produced products that I liked in the past.
If you can offer any insight, I'm all ears.
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The people who follow Apple are technology enthusiasts. They use Apple products all the time. They are already strongly committed to Apple. So what Apple chooses to do has a strong influence on their life. Which means that these people are not relating to Apple as "a product that has produced products that I liked in past" but rather "unless things change drastically the product I'm going to get, and use all the time". They are experiencing the same kind of excitement kids do on Christmas morning, be
@jbolden - Re:Is Apple using undercover marketing? (Score:2)
However it is not comparable with "the debate" over loyalty arising over Unity or Gnome 3. Those are, as you say, debates. There does not seem much debate among
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However it is not comparable with "the debate" over loyalty arising over Unity or Gnome 3. Those are, as you say, debates. There does not seem much debate among Apple fans when each new product comes out - they just love it.
That's not true at all. Let me give you an example of where there was a pretty substantial debate. The shift from Final Cut Pro to Final Cut Pro X. There was a modernization of the workflow and interface. Another way of looking at this was the product moved from "Adobe Premiere fo
Brand loyalty is mental illness. (Score:2)
It's a form of mental illness.
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It was not an emotional thing, and there was no brand loyalty.
Was it really easier to switch to Mepis then set up a repository and "sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment"? You sure there wasn't a bit of emotion there, when you switched? But even if so, that isn't everyone. For many people there was brand loyalty to Ubuntu and Gnome and it was quite emotional. Just reads the threads here.
You seem to have a wide definition of "emotion". To me, an emotional decision is a proactive one taken with no rational basis. Thus most people stick with Windows because of inertia, not emotion, although others do love Windows emotionally; such as our IT department at work (or was it bribery?).
.. sudo apt get- ?...". Yes it was. I needed to update my laptop Ubuntu installation anyway (was v8.04) and from past experience I prefer a cle
I take it you meant "Was it really easier to switch to Mepis THAN
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To me, an emotional decision is a proactive one taken with no rational basis.
I'm not sure there are many decisions people ever make like that. That's a definition of emotion far too high. Certainly since you are talking about Apple fans, they have ration basis for their preferences. From better service plans, to simplicity of the shopping experience, to better quality software to... there are clear rational reasons. So if you set the bar for emotion that high, that is no reason at all. You no longer
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No, that is an Apple enthusiast, not a technolgy enthusiast. If they were technology enthusiasts, they would be following the trends and happenings of more than just Apple along with other technologies that Apple does not make or use in its own products.
Most of them do. The most common being Adobe enthusiasts, but other software companies like Omni have followings. Quite a few follow Nikon or Canon. Avid and Microsoft products get mentioned.
And I'd consider a Ford Mustang enthusiast to be a car enthusi
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A tour through Willy Wonka's chocolate factory? Where's the sweatshop full of Oompa Loompas?
iOompa iLoompas you insensitive clod.
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You're talking about the Newton, and yes it was Sharp. The OS wasn't the same as Sharp put on their hardware, and the Sharp version was not really a consumer targeted device (it was built for use on factory floors and for out of office employees as an easy to use portable terminal). Sharp later evolved it into the Zaurus series which was quite popular as a consumer level device in Japan and Asia, and in the mean time Apple gave up on the idea I'm guessing about the time they got rid of Jobs.
I've got 4 diffe