Apple Watch is like an invasive weed says Gartner Analyst outfit Gartner has likened the Apple Watch to the invasive Kudzu vine, an Asian plant that has become a pest around the world. Kudzu's survival strategy, says analyst Robert Hetu, relies on its ability to find deep water with carbohydrate-rich roots and a habit of growing vines and leaves in triplicate to give it …
I buy music from iTunes because AAC sounds good and the files work on non-Apple devices. I'd buy even more if I didn't need to run that steaming pile of iTunes.
I'd say Apple is attempting lock-in by holding your data hostage to the platform: proprietary file sharing, proprietary filesystem, proprietary RPC, hidden user data, iCloud, patent trolling, and integration of Apple apps into the OS. It's the 1990s all over again. Analysts will predict never-ending growth due to lock-in and then one day customers will stop putting up with it.
"No they don't. Most devices play MP3s. Not so many play AAC. Particularly, say car radios, TVs, etc."
Ten years ago I tried with my cheap DVD player. Burnt about 90 CDs worth of music in AAC format on a DVD, put it into the DVD player, it displayed all the albums on my TV and just played them.
There are ways of stripping the DRM out of itunes purchases so you just get that nasty taste when you buy your stuff and you can use it as you please later.
Apple products are just too expensive for them to completely dominate the industry but that won't stop them from spooking a lot of players.
"There are ways of stripping the DRM out of itunes purchases so you just get that nasty taste when you buy your stuff and you can use it as you please later."
There is no DRM in any music purchases from iTunes. Hasn't been for many years. Would never have been in there if the music industry had listened to Steve Jobs.
>Pebble have got the power/functionality balance right imo.
Exactly. There are few different sweet spots on that power Vs function graph (Casio and Citizen at one end, Apple at the other, and Pebble sitting in the middle), and people will have their own preferences. (Mine would be a conventional looking analogue watch with a monochrome dot matrix display behind the hands, invisible when not in use... much like Martian Smartwatches*)
With regards to the article, the 'ecosystem' that the Apple Watch is a part of is contactless payment. It's up against banks, Google, retailers and mobile operators, depending upon the territory. Apple's system looks to be the best for the consumer (doesn't collect purchase history as the retailers, banks and Google would so dearly like to), its only significant downside is that one must own an iPhone to use it.
*I just learnt about them today. Price point of just over £100, two day battery life, vibration notifications, unobtrusive dot matrix display behind analogue hands, iOS and Android, mic and speaker for Siri / Google Now integration. They have partnered with an existing fashion watch brand - 'Guess' - which strikes me as a sensible enough move; make an unobtrusive module and let let experienced watch brands take care of the industrial design and marketing. http://www.martianwatches.com
You need a stomach strong enough to write that kind of buzzword laden nonsense without vomiting up your last vestiges of self respect. It also helps if you have no soul, but they can help you remove that pointless frippery if necessary.
Follow obvious trends; Add a touch of management bullshit terms, Give the basic version away free and sell the 'inciteful' full version to people with more of other peoples money than sense.
But they screwed up with this one. I suspect they got too close to the fabled reality distortion screen.
Apple did not add touch screens to phones, I had a Sony Ericsson p800 with touch screen, email and handwriting recognition five years before the iPhone.
harumph....
Yeah yeah yeah, and I wanted a Sony Clie (again, Palm-based) with colour screen and multimedia playback, QWERTY keyboard in a clamshell design with pivoting camera. Shame Sony were still faffing around with proprietary memory cards and music formats.
No one said Apple did invent touchscreen phones, merely that their implementation gave them an edge in the market. LG were first to market with a capacitive touchscreen phone, but it had buggy software, patchy Java and MP3 support, a proprietary OS and headphone socket and no virtual QWERTY keyboard. Remember that Palm and Symbian - for which 3rd party applications were available - were designed for hardware without much grunt, and the iPhone had to sacrifice features (3G) to get a battery life even approaching adequate).
Apple products did not invade my workplace because of their game-changing features. They did so because our non-technical managers saw other companies' managers using shiny Apple tablets and phones. Their desire to have one too was purely visceral, based on bling and shiny, not features.
It backfired for Apple in the long run. Itunes bugs and lock-in drove them all insane, and were a large part of the decision to select Galaxy S4s for company-issue. Having had Apple devices themselves, the managers didn't want to inflict them on our staff. Price was not a factor, our IT shop is well funded.
We need to stop this monster Apple, before it kills again. Enormous harm done to the free Internet and the common infrastructure of human freedom, open software, configurable, maintainable hardware. If you can't open it, look at it, fix it, you don't own it, it owns you. At a minimum, boycott Apple products. For instance, the Apple Retina Macbook. $1299. Pure junk. The Apple watch? Similar to the Red Porsche buyers. Three inch penis.
My, we do have issues, don't we? No one's forcing you to buy or use their kit, are they?
People with money burning holes in their pockets will determine whether the Watch, or the MacBook, or whatever the next piece of bling will sell, not the tech- and business-savvy readers of this site. While it may cause heartburn to the readers, I'm going to take a wild guess, based on not on southern US nuisance plant analogies, but past performance of both sales and stock price, that Apple will continue doing quite well for a while. People buy the stuff because (for whatever reason) they like the stuff. A company that sells stuff people like will usually do well. Nothing to see here, move along.
I assume the toad in the picture is a cane toad. According to the Australians, with whom I was deployed, they are a major nuisance. Actually Australians generally hate them so much I was told stories about how some people get golf clubs and use the toads as balls. Originally imported to Australia to eat pests that eat sugar cane they ended up being so invasive they are severely impacting the native animals/plants.
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