This Lightning and Maps things are just a long line of stupid choices that are making the iPhone a lot worse than it needs to be. I'm not even goign to go into the Maps thing, because I'm damn sure Google is scrambling to get their own standalone maps app ready to go for whenever they figure iOS users have had enough. Hopefully with voice control and turn by turn without Siri.
1- Launch features that are still missing.
I don't believe you that you couldn't figure out a simple function like "cut and paste" for a launch device, just like I still can't figure out why a simple, basic function like "Add to Dictionary" is still missing 6 OSes later. I work in the tech industry, and spent 2 years having "3D" corrected to "3G". This happened like 3 times a day during the work week, minimum.
2- Removeable batteries robustness and thinness
This obcession with thin devices is silly. I already had to buy an Otterbox for my Verizon (supposedly death grip fixed, oh boy it wasn't) iPhone 4 just so that I could hold the thing without dropping it (and so I could keep a call for more than 10 seconds). They're already too small and thin as it is, The lack of removeable batteries is for no other reason than the observation that about 80% of cordless phone buyers would buy a new phone when the old one stopped holding a charge, instead of dropping $2 at RadioShack on a new one. The constant obcession with locking us out of the devices (the 3GS based iPod touch literally takes an EE degree to change the battery on) simply because we don't think we should have to wait a week, lose our data, and pay $80 for what should cost us $5 and 10 seconds of our time to continue using devices we paid a fortune for is asinine. And while we're at it. I don't care how pretty you make the thing. I care that it works. So how about this? Make a iPhone Toughbook style version. Water-resistant, rubbered up, no glass backs and other silly breakable things and see how it sells. And please don't give me the "my battery lasted fine". I'm not upgradeable till June, and I've probably got 65-70% tops of the original battery life. On any other phone I would've swapped it out by now. Instead I'm forced to carry external chargers around when I do events
3- Lightning.
This was unnecessary and no one needed it, except you who, with $50 billion in liquid cash lying around decided you needed to shut down the cable knockoff market so you can continue to play Monster Cable on wires that only have a life of about 8-12 months before the rubber starts shredding and the wires instead oxydize and die. At $19.99 with a manufacturing cost of $0.40, you were jacking your customers, and now you've made the charging wire with the same flaws, and jacked up your manufacturing cost by almost 800%,all so that you can stick it to our wallets some more. Which brings us to
4- Pricing
There is virtually no R&D except in silly cosmetic crap left in the iPhone, and especially the iPad. A 200% markup should be entirely sufficient. You know how much the cellular radio costs in the iPad? $20, and that includes all associated costs. $120 markup people. The iPad is just a big iPod touch technologically, and any R&D they made was paid off in spades a long time ago. A 200% markup should be plenty, but because Apple wants to be Ralph Lauren, it's not. If Apple really valued its customers as people, as members of the family, it would conclude it's got plenty of money, and therefore can lower prices, or at least start bringing those jobs home. Given the 300% profit on each and every device sold, it would take a mere 8th of that to have them at least assembled in America. They're so proud of the "Designed in California" bit, what about the rest of the country that needs the jobs right now?.
Please Apple. This is meant to be constructive.
Please spare the "if you don't like it, don't buy it" stuff. Sticking with the status quo has never made societies, or companies better.
