Not with the ban system. Here in France, you can report companies that make automated phone calls and they get strongly punished. I haven't received one in years.
Of course, sometimes I get calls from actual humans for polls or advertising a product, but it's much less of a bother since it happens less often and you can reject them.
I think we are all just surprised there are so many design decisions we can't agree with, precisely with the first major update for iOS comes since Jobs died. Up until the iPhone 4, I don't think I've had any criticism towards the design of Apple products... since Jobs came back to Apple.
I don't think these are coincidences. Jobs may have been more than a good businessman. He was a source of inspiration.
Before iOS 5 - the first to overdo skuemorphism - the last major design hoopla was when Apple couldn't decide on a single on windowing theme. It was brush-metal, then just white, then just gray, then all of them at the same time in different windows, sometimes with candy buttons, sometimes now. It was probably due more to Jobs' indecisiveness.
It wasn't an argument made in the courtroom, it was an argument made by one of the jurors during their deliberations. Obviously it's completely false: which processor a the program runs on ought to make no difference whatsoever to whether a system including that program infringes a patent.
In a just world, this would constitute grounds for an appeal by Samsung all by itself, but I've no idea what the legal position is.
Tablets are another thing. Google hasn't been thinking about it too much (N7 is their first attempt) and the iPad is still king.
There's a lot of work to do in that field, and that's catching-up work more than improvements. It's much like discussing the Nexus One. Let's talk about it again in a year or two.
You know, I'm starting to miss Steve Jobs. He was a businessman as well, but he also knew how to treat his customers right, because keeping the customers in the hype is extremely important in his high-benefits scheme. I don't think he would have let that kind of stuff happen. He would have paid the price: it's not like Apple can't afford Google Maps for another version of two of the iPhone, and now some customers are considering switching. If they get out of the walled garden that turns into a prison, they might not come back.
Not so sure about that. I tend to think he would have been less likely to put this new maps out though. Perhaps paid Google for a bit longer until the Apple maps were real competition.
You must have confused innovation with improvement. This time on, they picked safe improvements from the competitors and integrated them. Very nice improvements which make a very nice phone, but nothing I would call innovation.
I hope at least the competitors will come up with truly novel ideas. Hardware improvements are more than expected from every manufacturer as time goes. But no one can predict innovation.
"You must have confused innovation with improvement."
You're mistaken, there's a good deal of overlap between improvement and innovation. Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb (nor did Swan the only other person remembered in connection to it). Edison's actual technical innovations for the light bulb boiled down to more efficient materials (higher resistance, longer lasting) and more exacting industrial standards (better evacuation). He also had a better ecosystem.
The "revolutioniphone revolution occurred at the precise time that a large number incrementally improving technologies -- processors, batteries, flash memory, screens, capacitive touchscreen, multitouch language library -- first allowed you to build something like the iphone at a consumer price.
Yes sometimes improvements are just improvements. But sometimes improvements lead to a new level of viability for consumers. Miniturization matters when you hit certain levels. A clock you can put in your pocket was one such level, the next was the pocketwatch small enough to put on your wrist. Incrementally better hardware and software has by many accounts erased Android's lag deficit. Lag still exists for all devices of all OS's but the key step is the one that takes you over a certain level of perception and if you look at early iOS they employed all sort of hacks and tricks to help erase the perception of lag. If you're making an audio product CD quality is one such plateau that matters. Audiophile quality may be the next major one. Similarly for tiny computers console quality graphics is an important improvement.
Some would argue for a consumer oriented company selling expensive goods to be profitable, a marketing company is the only kind of company it can be.
Marketing means understanding your users, and if you don't understand your users how do you convince them to give you the money? Users are not like government officials or company executives where you can convince them by a slideshow or a list of bullet points about why the product is great; the product itself needs to be great because consumers are the ones using it.
I disagree - yesterday's event was not flashy at all. It was all about hardware and specs. Even the short jab at marketing didn't seem too serious ("lightning and thunderbolt, haha").
I'm still not sure how to feel about this. I think I love the iPhone 5, but iOS6 feels underwhelming.
My entire beginning programming class had to install Ubuntu and no one even complained about it, with all the various computers in the homes of 60 novice students. Some installed it on their laptops, no connectivity problem. We did a lot of stuff on it, including surfing, coding and watching movies. No software issues whatsoever.
Look, sometimes people have a lot of issues with Windows too. No OS is perfect. But those are not very common instances. I think you are just not lucky.
