I am getting quite sick of this. I have no interest in an iPhone and was looking forward to the Galaxy S III (have a Nexus S currently).
Why is Apple so fearful of competition?
Companies learn from each other. That is how we progress. Especially when it comes to designs.
Imagine the early car manufacturers would have behaved like Apple... "Hey, you can't have a slanted windshield, because I have a design patent on it". Bah.
Because the battle with Android is going to have the same result as Windows vs. Mac did back in the 90s. If you look at the market share numbers, it's clearly trending in that direction. Apple is, of course, desperate to stop this by any means necessary, and that includes litigation.
In 1988 they filled a lawsuit against Microsoft and HP, alleging that Windows and HP's NewWave violated Apple's copyrights in Macintosh's user interface. They cited things like the use of resizable/overlapping windows in Windows and the whole thing was about "look & feel".
The parallels with Windows and the Mac don't stand up.
Standards, largely around the internet, mean that there is no real drive for there to be a single winner the way there was on the desktop at that time.
I have an iPhone, you have an Android phone and we can both text each other, mail each other, tweet each other, share photos, contact each other via Facebook, share links and documents, IM and the rest.
That wasn't true back in the days of Windows vs. the Mac and that was why Windows won out - if you were in the minority camp back then you were genuinely being excluded.
But now users can work together regardless of platform, Apple make money, Samsung make money, Google make money. There really is no drive towards a single platform. Sure those companies all want market share but there's no reason to believe that it has to end up with a single dominant MS-style player.
And in terms of market share numbers it's not clearly trending in that direction. Until very recently both iOS and Android were gaining market share (squeezing Windows Mobile and BlackBerry). Google has a larger market share yes but it's not winning at the expense of Apple, they're both winning at the expense of others and grabbing more of the first time smartphone customers.
As regards the most recent market share figures [1], if anything the momentum is moving away from Android. Android market share actually dropped while iOS continues to grow.
It's still around 50% and I don't think anyone is suggesting it's in any sort of trouble (Horace's headline is a little mischievous), but the narrative that you're suggesting isn't really supported by what's happening.
What really looks like it's happening is a market dominated by two players with everyone else fighting for scraps.
As they are so dependent on Samsung as a supplier I can't help thinking they're trying to get leverage for negotiations of future components, rather than actually kill the Galaxy
It's a mutually dependent relationship. Apple are Samsung's largest customer, Samsung may compete with Apple but they need Apple as much as Apple need them.
To understand how important Apple is to Samsung, Apple have just started buying RAM from someone else (in addition to Samsung). In response the value of Samsung dropped $10bn.
While I'm not the original poster, I'm in similar situation and I hope someone at Google is listening (for next Nexus):
- Hardware: S3 has better hardware. (I know, GN is 6 months old. We are comparing from the POV of today's purchase though). The camera also cannot compete to it's contemporaries. GN is more related to S2 than S3. Given that outside States, S2 was available for 6 months before GN, there was never a reason to upgrade to GN.
- Limitations: where I live, GSM GN is available only in 16GB version. S3 is 32GB + MicroSD slot. My current phone (Xperia Arc) has an 32GB card in the slot currently. Do you think that I would buy new phone with less memory than my current one? (That was rethorical, of course not). I do not have problem to be MTP only, but 32GB is minimum to be acceptable. At the end of the year, 64GB will be minimum.
Looking at available phones, the killer would be combination of HTC's One X design, finish and build quality, S3's hardware and GN's stock android upgraded by Google. However, no such thing is available :(.
Oh interesting, from memory I thought the GSM had a slightly smaller battery and I pulled those numbers from Wikipedia (they could of course be wrong).
That's exactly it -- low lighting situations are terrible. The year-old HTC Thunderbolt I used to use was better (and also higher resolution). But mostly, if you compare the image quality to the iPhone 4S, it's a no-brainer. The iPhone destroys the GN in image quality.
BTW, brings up another thought: I'm pretty sure Android is more aggressive about JPEG compression by default than iPhone. I haven't thoroughly researched this except to notice the relative sizes of files the two generate at the same resolution.
And Apple has said before that they'd rather have these companies (Samsung, HTC, etc) make a license agreement for the patents (like Microsoft's and HTC's deal with each other) rather than sue them or try to block the sale of their products.
It's not like Apple's the only one that does this either, most recently Motorola/Google tried to block iPhone/iPad sales in Germany over iCloud.
Our industry is quickly becoming a clusterfuck of lawsuits, so I don't understand why you feel the need to excuse Apple's behavior by pointing fingers, when they started this whole mess in the first place. I don't see how the old proverb "you get what you sow" doesn't apply here.
Also, what was Google's involvement in this? Stop reading the blogs of shills.
1) Apple is the largest company in the world (by market cap - Samsung $120bn approx, Apple $540bn). Specific to smartphones, Samsung ship more smartphones (by unit), Apple have higher revenues and profits from smartphones.
2) Apple have expressly stated that they have no interest in licensing their patents to Android manufacturers.
Suing over "auto-correcting typed text" features, come on. I think they are the only ones doing this sort of thing at the moment, it is patent trolling at its worst with entry level features. We are not talking about defending any sort of innovation here, it is simply gaming a flawed system to hold on to sales while keeping direct competition down.
Why is Apple so fearful of competition?
Companies learn from each other. That is how we progress. Especially when it comes to designs.
Imagine the early car manufacturers would have behaved like Apple... "Hey, you can't have a slanted windshield, because I have a design patent on it". Bah.