It pains me to write this, but I'm glad Google support Apple with nearly all their apps and services. because the way Apple is falling behind on such things, these Google products may end up being a lifeline to Apple hardware and the main reason people continue to purchase the company's products until it loses relevance all together or is forced to produce hardware running Android! This prolonged product silence from Apple over the last 6 months or so has been quite disastrous I think and a mistake on their part. Google/Samsung are seemingly speeding ahead of Apple (especially Google with its cross-platform support, a distinct advantage they will always have over Apple, unless Apple decide to go cross-platform too)...please get your act together pronto!
The WWDC next month needs to be something very-very special indeed! An example - where I live most people with smartphones and tablets used to use Apple products, nowadays though it seems most of those people have upgraded to or are using Samsung products instead - that's not a good sign! The Apple store upstairs in the mall is mostly empty now, while the Samsung store exactly opposite across the hall always seems to have a decent amount of people checking it out - another bad sign!
I don't want this situation to continue!!!
Be patient. We'll know more in 3 weeks, and we'll know a lot more by Christmas. Who knows, we may see 2 new iPhones this year, a retina mini, a faster, narrower, slimmer iPad 5 with a 30% weight reduction, a retina MacBook Air, the new Mac Pro (whatever they change its name to), and perhaps an iWatch.
Sadly, it seems the main thing holding up iTV is the lack of a contract deal, because the content owners are so afraid Apple would invent the killer product consumers couldn't resist. The key reason why Apple need a contract is to allow people to pay monthly, so they can sell them an extraordinary subsidised TV product for a low price they couldn't refuse, while given them all the shows the want. This is what people want. They are comfortable paying a monthly fee, especially if it means getting a revolutionary product that works well, comes with great support, an unparalleled developer community, and for a low price. Imagine a 50" iTV from Apple with its own App Store starting at $499? People would eat it up. And Apple could continue to sell the Apple TV little black box to those folks who prefer to pay $99 and are just looking for the TV part of the equation.
Personally I think Apple needs to be more aggressive in the content area. I think they should go after sports. The Sky Sports contracts are coming around soon, unsure when, Apple should buy them up. Currently, over here BSkyB owns exclusive rights to most sports. That should be Apple. They have the money. They could sell an Apple TV to everyone I the UK and Ireland if they had this.
Well, a lot has been said here and I'd like to respond to a few things because I don't really see and understand this state of panic.
For one, regarding this whole being forced to Android thing: I have yet to see an Android phone that can scroll something as simple as the Settings App smoothly.
Regarding this whole Game Center competitor, let's not forget that Google does a lot of experimentation and while being able to save state in the Cloud and have a unified way for Achievements and Leaderboards, let's not forget that Game Center is so much more from a developer's perspective.
It gives you fantastic APIs for turn based or real time multiplayer, based on various P2P or P2P and mixed server architectures. All of this service is given to you for free, most small devs will not require to host any game servers whatsoever. It also spares them to actually get down to the nitty gritty of low level network programming, sockets and whatnot. It gives you real time voice chat capabilities, again without any servers whatsoever. It also gives you matchmaking, queue estimation and many, many other things.
All in All, Game Center is a fantastic set of APIs and consists of much more than most users see. It enables developers to produce great results easily and quickly without requiring any kind of investment into own architecture. This is a huge deal and goes far beyond save games in the cloud.
Loren Brichter may disagree with your overly positive assessment of Game Center and its APIs. And as a user I would. Something as simple as inviting someone to play a game fails quite often and is usually mega slow to initiate. I recently played SSG2 with my niece over Game Center in the same house on 50Mb Internet and the invite kept failing and eventually whe it worked it invitation made out like we were on a 1Mb connection. Game play latency was fine.
Comments
Be patient. We'll know more in 3 weeks, and we'll know a lot more by Christmas. Who knows, we may see 2 new iPhones this year, a retina mini, a faster, narrower, slimmer iPad 5 with a 30% weight reduction, a retina MacBook Air, the new Mac Pro (whatever they change its name to), and perhaps an iWatch.
Sadly, it seems the main thing holding up iTV is the lack of a contract deal, because the content owners are so afraid Apple would invent the killer product consumers couldn't resist. The key reason why Apple need a contract is to allow people to pay monthly, so they can sell them an extraordinary subsidised TV product for a low price they couldn't refuse, while given them all the shows the want. This is what people want. They are comfortable paying a monthly fee, especially if it means getting a revolutionary product that works well, comes with great support, an unparalleled developer community, and for a low price. Imagine a 50" iTV from Apple with its own App Store starting at $499? People would eat it up. And Apple could continue to sell the Apple TV little black box to those folks who prefer to pay $99 and are just looking for the TV part of the equation.
Personally I think Apple needs to be more aggressive in the content area. I think they should go after sports. The Sky Sports contracts are coming around soon, unsure when, Apple should buy them up. Currently, over here BSkyB owns exclusive rights to most sports. That should be Apple. They have the money. They could sell an Apple TV to everyone I the UK and Ireland if they had this.
Loren Brichter may disagree with your overly positive assessment of Game Center and its APIs. And as a user I would. Something as simple as inviting someone to play a game fails quite often and is usually mega slow to initiate. I recently played SSG2 with my niece over Game Center in the same house on 50Mb Internet and the invite kept failing and eventually whe it worked it invitation made out like we were on a 1Mb connection. Game play latency was fine.