Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone 249
snydeq writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for Apple CEO Tim Cook: consider offering a phone based on the rival Google Android platform. Speaking at the Apps World conference in San Francisco, Wozniak made the suggestion of an Apple Android device when responding to a question about the fate of the faltering BlackBerry platform, saying that BlackBerry should have built an Android phone, and that Apple could do so, too. 'BlackBerry's very sad for me,' Wozniak lamented. 'I think it's probably too late now' for an Android-based BlackBerry phone. Apple, Woz said, has had some lucky victories in the marketplace in the past decade, and BlackBerry's demise may provide a cautionary tale: 'There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.'"
Re:Slashdot readership to Dice (Score:3, Interesting)
agree...i hate that we have to hijack threads to say this but they need to stop
plz Dice...stop...just stop
slashdot's 'look and feel' is fine how it is...ok, some could say its dated...but the is **not** to hack the content down to a big 'feed' that buries content under graphics
leave the main layout the same! tinker with logos/colors/menu types etc. but **don't remove whole sidebars** and put giant squares of color where informative text used to be
this is the worst trend in "U/X" right now....the idea that less information is somehow better and that users somehow prefer all content from one giant feed pipe
please...just stop...
if you want to make it look snappy, fine, but dont reduce the complexity & information level
Re:first (Score:5, Interesting)
Wozniak has ruffled feathers before (Score:4, Interesting)
Wozniak has ruffled feathers before, in fact many times. This post concerns merely one issue though.
That is why, even as a longtime apple 2 -> Mac - OS X -> iOS pro developer I admire him for his candor when he slams Apple.
Usually he is right, even if he attacks his own investments, both financial or intellectual.
The best time he attacked apple was back around 1991 or 1992, when in a little publicized shaming of Apple, he complained about Apple's near retarded renaming of names and macros in the header files so that everything you compiled year to year would continually break. Including... THE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE interface headers!
I had 500 kilobytes of hand crafted assembler and I got so sick of apple ruining my life with capricious and continual spelling changes (they foolishly use way too many abbreviations, and then gradually add more letters over time, like microsoft)... that I made my own headers for assembly language based off frozen header forks.
That way my stuff can always assemble and compile for many many years. This was for a variety of products with over 500,000 paid for licensed copies.
When wozniak bitched about the header utter disrespect at apple, I was so happy to have him in my corner.
Truthfully, Apple source code headers have always been 4 times more logical and better than microsofts, but in OS X they at least have various mechanisms to allow older code to compile with newer headers, with over 5 year overlap, if not 7. Also in OS X there are tools that can extract headers from apps or from the entombed headers in ".framework" files. So the header horror years are long over, except when bridging legacy mac, legacy windows, and Cocoa all into one huge namespace. ... i am digressing...
Breaking it year to year was foolish and wozniak called apple on it, for apple hiring morons.
Wozniak was always semi approachable, and I also like the fact that one of two of wozniaks non personal phone lines was always listed and publicly accessible in his den his whole career, for the polish joke on the tape he left. Many I know called it up in the late 70s early 80s. I was thrilled to see the thing in the recent movie "Jobs". Truthfully, Steve Jobs too, except in person on the sidewalk, was also very very openly approachable, primarily via beth or his other secretaries as intermediaries. And steve was far more humble than biographers give credit. In mid 2000s he drove his own kid to school every day on the way to work, not too many fathers did that.
Re:Alleged Apple patents on Android (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Alleged Apple patents on Android (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. Apple would be foolish to make an Android phone, just as Blackberry would have been foolish to do so. In BB's case, you don't drop a superior OS in favor of a dramatically inferior one. That's not a recipe for success! Whatever Blackberry's problems were, it wasn't the technology.
If Woz wants Apple to produce Android phone, that can mean only one thing: He wants to see Apple die.
Re: Alleged Apple patents on Android (Score:4, Interesting)
1995: "Unbundle The OS, 2014: "Unbundle The H/w" (Score:4, Interesting)
The margins on Android phones are razor thin. Apple has complete control over the iPhone, giving them a plausible rationale for marketing a premium phone. If they release an Android phone, that rationale evaporates.
How well has Nokia made out since dumping Symbion and MeeGo for someone else's OS? Yeah, that bad.
That's why it's good that Woz isn't CEO of Apple. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why it's good (for Apple) that Woz isn't and never was CEO of Apple. He obviously has absolutely not the faintest idea what he is talking about marketing and business-wise. I use Android for my phone and tablet, just recently backed off of buying an iPad Mini for development because it was to expensive ... and even *I* get the value-add that the sophisticated iOS devices bring along.
Apple should stick right where they are, perhaps move in closer with the opinion leaders a little again. Like XCode for free and without registration, direct access to iOS devices and filesystem, direct deployment of apps to iOS devices and some other stuff that's pissing of the top 0.2 % expertlayer of computer users, i.e. us, with Apple. That would be about all the changes I would make if I were in charge.
The rest is going absolutely perfect for Apple, a fashion mindshare Google, Samsung, MS and others would kill for and bizar gros margins of 30%+ on post-PC devices included. Thinking of bringing Android into that picture makes me cringe - and I'm not even an Apple Fanboy.
My 2 cents.
BlackBerry 10 Android (Score:2, Interesting)
And BB 10 > iOS.
Seriously. Give BB 10 a try. It's clean, responsive and secure. Plus with the latest 10.2.1 OS you can load Android APK files directly on the device. It really is a solid platform.