I shit bricks when I saw the iPhone being demoed by Steve. It was like nothing I had imagined it would be at that time. Thank goodness I did not work for RIM, Motorola, Samsung, etc.
The reactions from the audience were priceless during that keynote.
It will definitely go down as the greatest keynote ever!
"we are introducing three revolutionary products!"
Everyones head was exploding and Steve was loving it.
On the other hand...the iPad introduction was the polar opposite.
The oh so wise tech press poo-pooed the iPad with cries of "that's all".
They all said it would be a flop. It was too limited. Just a big iPhone.
A decade from now iPads will be everywhere and will totally reshape personal computing.
... RIM was allegedly "in denial" about the iPhone...
They still are. Instead of trying to build on BlackBerry's strengths, they're trying to blindly copy iPhone. And instead of doing either of those well, they're falling all over themselves to build a pad computer like iPad.
The problem with copying Apple is that Apple moves too quickly. You are copying a design that Apple began work on two years ago, and the next two generations are already in the pipeline.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
... the company also announced that it will no longer reveal new subscriber numbers, which have slowed in recent quarters. ...
Many industries, including some parts of tech, are unbelievably slow and lazy.
The car industry... GM is still producing the Chevy Impala for 2011. Even after Hyundai introduced its new Sonata, which is roughly 10 years newer as a product. That's incredibly lazy.
The airline industry... many of their interiors (a hospitality product) are unchanged since the 1980s. If you went to a Four Seasons hotel from the 1980s, you'd ask for a refund. Airlines fail to adapt to changes.
Electronics is no different. My parents' HDTV / digiCable interface is just horrible. To watch a DVD, you must press "Input" literally six times. It's a failure of design and standards. So bad that the customer can't even use it. Four different components have their own different menu. Electronic companies are catering to the 5% nerd and ignoring the 95% public. Guess where the real money is made.
You are so right! I am always amazed that car radios are so pathetic. The whole car "entertainment system" is lame in most cars. Even luxury cars have clumsy GUIs.
Apple could make a huge improvements the whole car experience. Imagine an Apple interface in your car. You know it would be so simple to use and yet do all the things you want (well, after drawn out updates dripped to you). But you know it would be great.
I'm sure there were similar comments made inside the offices of Nokia, Palm and Motorola at the time. Assuming the report is true, it speaks to a failure of thinking outside the normal constraints of building a product...in other words, a lack of imagination. The iPhone's processor wasn't a huge surprise. ARM had been making or licensing processors in the mobile space since the early 90s....even the Newton used one. But Apple was able to use all the knowledge of minuturization that they had learned from building laptops and especially iPod for years to get the size of the motherboard down significantly.
I remember some time ago and somebody published a picture seen here that showed what state of the art smartphones looked like in the first week of 2007. It featured a Blackberry, a Palm Treo and a Nokia phone. All of these phones had batteries that took up 25-35% of the back of the unit. The rest of the phone went to the mainboard, radios, antenna circuitry and a card slot for memory. Apple first did away with the removable battery gaining a few millimeters of extra space (huge amounts of real estate in a phone). Memory card slots were eliminated in favor of a single memory chip which Apple used previously in iPod Nanos. Finally, the mainboard was shrunk dramatically...way past the expertise of most consumer electronic companies. That allowed the previously mentioned battery to expand to 2/3rds or more of the available space.
RIM engineers were right about that you'd need a serious amount of power to run a phone like that. What they failed to realize was that making a battery that was most of the phone was even possible. Add to that Apple's software engineers that squeezed every single ounce of power by making the software run efficiently and you had the makings of the original iPhone. Fast forward to today and you have Apple extending the engineering lead by even smaller mainboards, proprietary battery technology and a host of other features. A curious effect of this tech is the iPad. When people tore that down, the amount of empty space in the thing was almost comical.
One thing about the new Playbook....RIM may think they have a nice product to compete with Apple. The problem I see happening is them competing with last year's iPad. RIM is pining its hopes on the new dual-core ARM technology, which frankly everybody is going to be doing in 2011. What nobody knows right now is what Apple's technology buys in the chipmaking development space is going to do for the next generation A4. Oh sure we expect multi-cores, but what else can Apple do that will be exclusive to them? Time will tell.
... A decade from now iPads will be everywhere and will totally reshape personal computing.
iPad has already reshaped personal computing. The tech media and the rest of the personal computing industry are just barely realizing it now. Long after Apple has tested every screen size, every multi-touch gesture, and every media cloud and TV interoperability option. And long after Apple patented the technology they created.
So someone on the internetz posts a comment somewhere at some site, claiming to have "pals" in RIM and, why not, in Redmond (dontcha know, they are neighbours!! oh wait), and then say they were flabbergasted by the ridiculous awesomeness that Apple is, that they all looked at the big fruit's manlihood's size and suddenly their jaw was wiping their tears on the floor, and that's enough for Apple Insider to make an article about it.
Heck, this is the twenty first century news'! Fair and balanced all the way!
If only AI had noted it was not a verified fact, like, by starting off the article with the word "alleged"¡
It's great how you keep your mouth shut about AI's reporting when they mention negative rumoura about Apple.
It is possible that Apple is just really getting started?
It's been a while now, but Apple seemed lost until they (or Jobs) decided on changing course
and doing the lowly iPod.
A computer maker going into the MP3 market did not really make a lot of sense then. But if
they had not gone that route things would have probably been a little tougher for Apple.
With the iPhone, they went from a sailboat to a speedboat. The thing is, all the other guys
were more like oil tankers. They figured they were all set. They should have paid a little
attention to what had happened to Palm.
With the great success with the iPhone and now the iPad. Apple has a lot of confidense.
And all the other guys are are really worried. Nokia share is slowly shrinking, Rimm doesn't
want to believe the reality. Microsoft will probably do better than expected on their phone. They will do real good with the Kinect, and the new game platform that will follow soon.
The Android phones will continue battling Apple, but that will be only on the phone side of things.
The ones that should start worrying are the other guys. The ones that without knowing it yet, are about to have Apple start going into their realm of things.
Apple is just getting started with a whole lot of other stuff.
I'm sure there were similar comments made inside the offices of Nokia, Palm and Motorola at the time. Assuming the report is true, it speaks to a failure of thinking outside the normal constraints of building a product...in other words, a lack of imagination. The iPhone's processor wasn't a huge surprise. ARM had been making or licensing processors in the mobile space since the early 90s....even the Newton used one. But Apple was able to use all the knowledge of minuturization that they had learned from building laptops and especially iPod for years to get the size of the motherboard down significantly.
I remember some time ago and somebody published a picture seen here that showed what state of the art smartphones looked like in the first week of 2007. It featured a Blackberry, a Palm Treo and a Nokia phone. All of these phones had batteries that took up 25-35% of the back of the unit. The rest of the phone went to the mainboard, radios, antenna circuitry and a card slot for memory. Apple first did away with the removable battery gaining a few millimeters of extra space (huge amounts of real estate in a phone). Memory card slots were eliminated in favor of a single memory chip which Apple used previously in iPod Nanos. Finally, the mainboard was shrunk dramatically...way past the expertise of most consumer electronic companies. That allowed the previously mentioned battery to expand to 2/3rds or more of the available space.
RIM engineers were right about that you'd need a serious amount of power to run a phone like that. What they failed to realize was that making a battery that was most of the phone was even possible. Add to that Apple's software engineers that squeezed every single ounce of power by making the software run efficiently and you had the makings of the original iPhone. Fast forward to today and you have Apple extending the engineering lead by even smaller mainboards, proprietary battery technology and a host of other features. A curious effect of this tech is the iPad. When people tore that down, the amount of empty space in the thing was almost comical.
One thing about the new Playbook....RIM may think they have a nice product to compete with Apple. The problem I see happening is them competing with last year's iPad. RIM is pining its hopes on the new dual-core ARM technology, which frankly everybody is going to be doing in 2011. What nobody knows right now is what Apple's technology buys in the chipmaking development space is going to do for the next generation A4. Oh sure we expect multi-cores, but what else can Apple do that will be exclusive to them? Time will tell.
I agree with almost all of this.
What a lot of the players in this game also don't seem to realise is that it's a new *platform* we are talking about, not just particular devices. Even if the playbook has good performance, irons out all the glitches in their new OS and comes out on time (all highly improbable actually), they still have to very rapidly build a huge following to even compete with the iOS platform.
WebOS is the perfect example in that it's already available, and already competitive feature wise with iPhone. It's far better for the average user than the mess that is Blackberry or Android, far easier to use, responsive, innovative, attractive, etc. etc. ... but it still fails (at least so far) to get any traction against iOS. For any of these OS vendors to even get in the game, they need to attract and energise a huge following for their platform devices.
You aren't alone. Just visit my office. They carry it like a damned brick.
I've used the Blackberry for about 5 years, having owned the 8300, 8100, 8310, 8900, 9000 and now the 9800. I thought the Torch (9800) would have given me the media features of the iPhone and the coolness I so drooled about for the past few years. Boy, was I disappointed.
I think RIM is pretty much following the steps of PALM. Users like me were once fanatics, then became passive users when the platform was flat with no real innovation, then to ultimate rejection of the brand.
The problem with copying Apple is that Apple moves too quickly. You are copying a design that Apple began work on two years ago, and the next two generations are already in the pipeline.
The original iPhone was announced Jan 9, 2007 -- it included live demos, specs pricing and availability announcement,
The original iPhone was released, on schedule, Jun 29, 2007.
In the keynote, Steve said that Apple had been working on it for 2 1/2 years -- that means that work goes back to at least Jul 2004.
Recently, Steve said the original concept was for a Tablet -- but they decided, at some point, to do the iPhone first.
So, RIM has been unable to successfully copy the iPhone after 4 years of seeing a live demo -- unless they release something before Jan 9, 2011.
RIM acquired QNX in Apr 9, 2010 -- so we can assume that they recognized a need (for a smartphone OS) and began to look for a solution, say, Jul 2008.
The iPad was announced Jan 27, 2010 and began shipping Apr 3, 2010.
Since the iPad was a revolutionary form factor for a Tablet -- it is reasonable to assume that RIM, and others, could not have begun aan iPad knock-off design before Jan 27, 2010 or Apr 3, 2010.
We can assume, that RIM immediately repurposed their QNX purchase to work on the PlayBook (instead of a replacement for BlackBerry OS). But, because of a lack of apps, RIM chose to use AIR (Flash) and overpowered hardware to compensate for the RAM/Performance issues of Flash.
The PlayBook was announced on Sep 27, 2010 (but not shown) with partial specs and abstract videos (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
The PlayBook was first demo'd on Oct 25, 2010 (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
As of today, the PlayBook specs include: (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
I believe that the earliest the PlayBook can be released in any reasonable quantity and stage of completion is Jul 2011 -- with minimal apps and infrastructure (hmm.. I almost typed "infostructure" -- I kinda' like it!).
By that time we should expect that the iPad 2 will be released. I expect Feb 2011 Announce/Release for the iPad 2.
By mid 2011, there should be a plethora of knock-off "also-rans" running Android, Windows 7, WebOS, WP7 to compete with the PlayBook for the scheissegeist of the tablet marketplace.
They still are. Instead of trying to build on BlackBerry's strengths, they're trying to blindly copy iPhone. And instead of doing either of those well, they're falling all over themselves to build a pad computer like iPad.
Mmmm..... "pad computer"... I like the sound and connotation of that!
Comments
I shit bricks when I saw the iPhone being demoed by Steve. It was like nothing I had imagined it would be at that time. Thank goodness I did not work for RIM, Motorola, Samsung, etc.
The reactions from the audience were priceless during that keynote.
It will definitely go down as the greatest keynote ever!
"we are introducing three revolutionary products!"
Everyones head was exploding and Steve was loving it.
On the other hand...the iPad introduction was the polar opposite.
The oh so wise tech press poo-pooed the iPad with cries of "that's all".
They all said it would be a flop. It was too limited. Just a big iPhone.
A decade from now iPads will be everywhere and will totally reshape personal computing.
... RIM was allegedly "in denial" about the iPhone...
They still are. Instead of trying to build on BlackBerry's strengths, they're trying to blindly copy iPhone. And instead of doing either of those well, they're falling all over themselves to build a pad computer like iPad.
The problem with copying Apple is that Apple moves too quickly. You are copying a design that Apple began work on two years ago, and the next two generations are already in the pipeline.
... the company also announced that it will no longer reveal new subscriber numbers, which have slowed in recent quarters. ...
Their new subscriber rates fell off a cliff late this year. RIM sells roughly 2.6 new BlackBerrys for every new subscriber: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.co...berry-and.html
... Lazaridis revealed in an interview that the QNX-based tablet OS will eventually be used in multi-core BlackBerry smartphones. ...
Aha. So that's what he was trying to say. He stayed on the RIM multi-core PR message even though the questions had nothing to do with processor technology: http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/07/m...-the-playbook/
Many industries, including some parts of tech, are unbelievably slow and lazy.
The car industry... GM is still producing the Chevy Impala for 2011. Even after Hyundai introduced its new Sonata, which is roughly 10 years newer as a product. That's incredibly lazy.
The airline industry... many of their interiors (a hospitality product) are unchanged since the 1980s. If you went to a Four Seasons hotel from the 1980s, you'd ask for a refund. Airlines fail to adapt to changes.
Electronics is no different. My parents' HDTV / digiCable interface is just horrible. To watch a DVD, you must press "Input" literally six times. It's a failure of design and standards. So bad that the customer can't even use it. Four different components have their own different menu. Electronic companies are catering to the 5% nerd and ignoring the 95% public. Guess where the real money is made.
You are so right! I am always amazed that car radios are so pathetic. The whole car "entertainment system" is lame in most cars. Even luxury cars have clumsy GUIs.
Apple could make a huge improvements the whole car experience. Imagine an Apple interface in your car. You know it would be so simple to use and yet do all the things you want (well, after drawn out updates dripped to you). But you know it would be great.
I remember some time ago and somebody published a picture seen here that showed what state of the art smartphones looked like in the first week of 2007. It featured a Blackberry, a Palm Treo and a Nokia phone. All of these phones had batteries that took up 25-35% of the back of the unit. The rest of the phone went to the mainboard, radios, antenna circuitry and a card slot for memory. Apple first did away with the removable battery gaining a few millimeters of extra space (huge amounts of real estate in a phone). Memory card slots were eliminated in favor of a single memory chip which Apple used previously in iPod Nanos. Finally, the mainboard was shrunk dramatically...way past the expertise of most consumer electronic companies. That allowed the previously mentioned battery to expand to 2/3rds or more of the available space.
RIM engineers were right about that you'd need a serious amount of power to run a phone like that. What they failed to realize was that making a battery that was most of the phone was even possible. Add to that Apple's software engineers that squeezed every single ounce of power by making the software run efficiently and you had the makings of the original iPhone. Fast forward to today and you have Apple extending the engineering lead by even smaller mainboards, proprietary battery technology and a host of other features. A curious effect of this tech is the iPad. When people tore that down, the amount of empty space in the thing was almost comical.
One thing about the new Playbook....RIM may think they have a nice product to compete with Apple. The problem I see happening is them competing with last year's iPad. RIM is pining its hopes on the new dual-core ARM technology, which frankly everybody is going to be doing in 2011. What nobody knows right now is what Apple's technology buys in the chipmaking development space is going to do for the next generation A4. Oh sure we expect multi-cores, but what else can Apple do that will be exclusive to them? Time will tell.
... A decade from now iPads will be everywhere and will totally reshape personal computing.
iPad has already reshaped personal computing. The tech media and the rest of the personal computing industry are just barely realizing it now. Long after Apple has tested every screen size, every multi-touch gesture, and every media cloud and TV interoperability option. And long after Apple patented the technology they created.
Well I think RIM is lying about the Playbook.. I don't think it can do what they say it can do.
;-)
It can't. It doesn't exist yet. This is a classic example of "pre-announcement vaporware."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
So someone on the internetz posts a comment somewhere at some site, claiming to have "pals" in RIM and, why not, in Redmond (dontcha know, they are neighbours!! oh wait), and then say they were flabbergasted by the ridiculous awesomeness that Apple is, that they all looked at the big fruit's manlihood's size and suddenly their jaw was wiping their tears on the floor, and that's enough for Apple Insider to make an article about it.
Heck, this is the twenty first century news'! Fair and balanced all the way!
If only AI had noted it was not a verified fact, like, by starting off the article with the word "alleged"¡
It's great how you keep your mouth shut about AI's reporting when they mention negative rumoura about Apple.
It's been a while now, but Apple seemed lost until they (or Jobs) decided on changing course
and doing the lowly iPod.
A computer maker going into the MP3 market did not really make a lot of sense then. But if
they had not gone that route things would have probably been a little tougher for Apple.
With the iPhone, they went from a sailboat to a speedboat. The thing is, all the other guys
were more like oil tankers. They figured they were all set. They should have paid a little
attention to what had happened to Palm.
With the great success with the iPhone and now the iPad. Apple has a lot of confidense.
And all the other guys are are really worried. Nokia share is slowly shrinking, Rimm doesn't
want to believe the reality. Microsoft will probably do better than expected on their phone. They will do real good with the Kinect, and the new game platform that will follow soon.
The Android phones will continue battling Apple, but that will be only on the phone side of things.
The ones that should start worrying are the other guys. The ones that without knowing it yet, are about to have Apple start going into their realm of things.
Apple is just getting started with a whole lot of other stuff.
Can't wait.
I'm sure there were similar comments made inside the offices of Nokia, Palm and Motorola at the time. Assuming the report is true, it speaks to a failure of thinking outside the normal constraints of building a product...in other words, a lack of imagination. The iPhone's processor wasn't a huge surprise. ARM had been making or licensing processors in the mobile space since the early 90s....even the Newton used one. But Apple was able to use all the knowledge of minuturization that they had learned from building laptops and especially iPod for years to get the size of the motherboard down significantly.
I remember some time ago and somebody published a picture seen here that showed what state of the art smartphones looked like in the first week of 2007. It featured a Blackberry, a Palm Treo and a Nokia phone. All of these phones had batteries that took up 25-35% of the back of the unit. The rest of the phone went to the mainboard, radios, antenna circuitry and a card slot for memory. Apple first did away with the removable battery gaining a few millimeters of extra space (huge amounts of real estate in a phone). Memory card slots were eliminated in favor of a single memory chip which Apple used previously in iPod Nanos. Finally, the mainboard was shrunk dramatically...way past the expertise of most consumer electronic companies. That allowed the previously mentioned battery to expand to 2/3rds or more of the available space.
RIM engineers were right about that you'd need a serious amount of power to run a phone like that. What they failed to realize was that making a battery that was most of the phone was even possible. Add to that Apple's software engineers that squeezed every single ounce of power by making the software run efficiently and you had the makings of the original iPhone. Fast forward to today and you have Apple extending the engineering lead by even smaller mainboards, proprietary battery technology and a host of other features. A curious effect of this tech is the iPad. When people tore that down, the amount of empty space in the thing was almost comical.
One thing about the new Playbook....RIM may think they have a nice product to compete with Apple. The problem I see happening is them competing with last year's iPad. RIM is pining its hopes on the new dual-core ARM technology, which frankly everybody is going to be doing in 2011. What nobody knows right now is what Apple's technology buys in the chipmaking development space is going to do for the next generation A4. Oh sure we expect multi-cores, but what else can Apple do that will be exclusive to them? Time will tell.
I agree with almost all of this.
What a lot of the players in this game also don't seem to realise is that it's a new *platform* we are talking about, not just particular devices. Even if the playbook has good performance, irons out all the glitches in their new OS and comes out on time (all highly improbable actually), they still have to very rapidly build a huge following to even compete with the iOS platform.
WebOS is the perfect example in that it's already available, and already competitive feature wise with iPhone. It's far better for the average user than the mess that is Blackberry or Android, far easier to use, responsive, innovative, attractive, etc. etc. ... but it still fails (at least so far) to get any traction against iOS. For any of these OS vendors to even get in the game, they need to attract and energise a huge following for their platform devices.
Lesson learnt: Dont cry foul w/o knowing your foe.
Well it was very nice of Apple to release the iphone. I got tired of Microsoft, with them thinking IE4 was a modern browser.
NO. They didnt think that was modern. They just didnt give a fuck to who think what.
Nobody really buys Blackberries anymore. They're usually given one and they're stuck with it.
I hate my BB Torch.
You aren't alone. Just visit my office. They carry it like a damned brick.
I don't think this report is far off considering that the best they came up with were iPhone clones.
Congrats that your UNRELEASED device is, in your opinion, "way ahead" of year-old technology.
gee, it's a good thing apple will never ever update the iPad, otherwise, you'd be FOOKED.
My unreleased teleportation device is years ahead of anything NASA has. I pity the fools.
You aren't alone. Just visit my office. They carry it like a damned brick.
I've used the Blackberry for about 5 years, having owned the 8300, 8100, 8310, 8900, 9000 and now the 9800. I thought the Torch (9800) would have given me the media features of the iPhone and the coolness I so drooled about for the past few years. Boy, was I disappointed.
I think RIM is pretty much following the steps of PALM. Users like me were once fanatics, then became passive users when the platform was flat with no real innovation, then to ultimate rejection of the brand.
NO. They didnt think that was modern. They just didnt give a fuck to who think what.
Ok, I don't recall paying them a compliment the first time...
to who think what... WTF?
The problem with copying Apple is that Apple moves too quickly. You are copying a design that Apple began work on two years ago, and the next two generations are already in the pipeline.
The original iPhone was announced Jan 9, 2007 -- it included live demos, specs pricing and availability announcement,
The original iPhone was released, on schedule, Jun 29, 2007.
In the keynote, Steve said that Apple had been working on it for 2 1/2 years -- that means that work goes back to at least Jul 2004.
Recently, Steve said the original concept was for a Tablet -- but they decided, at some point, to do the iPhone first.
So, RIM has been unable to successfully copy the iPhone after 4 years of seeing a live demo -- unless they release something before Jan 9, 2011.
RIM acquired QNX in Apr 9, 2010 -- so we can assume that they recognized a need (for a smartphone OS) and began to look for a solution, say, Jul 2008.
The iPad was announced Jan 27, 2010 and began shipping Apr 3, 2010.
Since the iPad was a revolutionary form factor for a Tablet -- it is reasonable to assume that RIM, and others, could not have begun aan iPad knock-off design before Jan 27, 2010 or Apr 3, 2010.
We can assume, that RIM immediately repurposed their QNX purchase to work on the PlayBook (instead of a replacement for BlackBerry OS). But, because of a lack of apps, RIM chose to use AIR (Flash) and overpowered hardware to compensate for the RAM/Performance issues of Flash.
The PlayBook was announced on Sep 27, 2010 (but not shown) with partial specs and abstract videos (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
The PlayBook was first demo'd on Oct 25, 2010 (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
As of today, the PlayBook specs include: (No Price, No Release Date, No Battery Specs, No Infrastructure).
I believe that the earliest the PlayBook can be released in any reasonable quantity and stage of completion is Jul 2011 -- with minimal apps and infrastructure (hmm.. I almost typed "infostructure" -- I kinda' like it!).
By that time we should expect that the iPad 2 will be released. I expect Feb 2011 Announce/Release for the iPad 2.
By mid 2011, there should be a plethora of knock-off "also-rans" running Android, Windows 7, WebOS, WP7 to compete with the PlayBook for the scheissegeist of the tablet marketplace.
.
They still are. Instead of trying to build on BlackBerry's strengths, they're trying to blindly copy iPhone. And instead of doing either of those well, they're falling all over themselves to build a pad computer like iPad.
Mmmm..... "pad computer"... I like the sound and connotation of that!