Apple

So a friend of a friend needed a new phone, may as well get an iPhone. Coincidentally, the i-5 just came out. Cool.

What a stupid fiasco. Why do you people up up with this horseshit ? Does anyone think that Apple has no idea how many phones they will probably sell ? They didn't have enough time to prepare ? They can't afford to stock product ? They are too fucking stupid to manage a retail operation ?

Or they are playing all you fish for fools ?

Choose one.

I wouldn't buy a doghouse from those jerks, just on general principles. Someone needs to slap those assbreaths. Hard.

I'm all fine n' dandy with them coming out with a new model... 20% lighter and slimmer, faster processor, slightly bigger screen, whatever. Stuff to be expected. But how on earth can they call this thing the second coming of Jesus when there isn't a single thing it does, that the old model can't do?

Apple knows exactly what they are doing, and they do it very well. This is how they end up with all the money in the world.

Although I'm starting to figure out what these .panic.plist files mean on my 4S, so hopefully I can get it to stop crashing soon (not jailbroken, but with developer profiles; for my footstrike datalogger project) Everything is pointing to skype.app, I deleted that and the phone has been working for almost 48 hours now... what a bunch of plonkers.

Provider let me reserve one, it came in yesterday. Drove over, picked it up, no troubles. Only pain is getting everything backed up and transferred over (iTunes LOVES to delete shit on me, arg.).

First impressions? LTE coverage from Rogers in Ottawa sucks. Other than that, pretty sweet phone.

She just loves / my big ten inch / record of her favourite blues!~~ - Aerosmith

I'm done with the Apple treadmill. My Galaxy Nexus does what I need.

If you're going to hate Apple for that reason alone I also suggest that you hate Nintendo for the Wii.

There are couple more much bigger reasons also to hate Apple.

You mean, dislike Apple for treating their customers like dirt so they can project a phony image of themselves ? Yes. This is despicable behavior. What a bunch of jerks. If I hadn't promised to buy one they could kiss my rosy red ass.

Apple has a track record of valuing their customers and the customer experience, a hell of a lot more than Microsoft or HP or even SGI. If you feel like you were "treated like dirt" by an Apple employee, you should tell somebody. [email protected] is a good place to start. I've had a few phone calls and some corporate favors thrown my way in the past because I wrote to [email protected] to complain about something.

How did Apple treat you like dirt?

False scarcity has been a recognized marketing maneuver for a while.

My big beef with Apple is that they're capricious. Almost all other manufacturers commit to supporting a product for a set amount of time, whereas for Apple it gets dropped when it isn't cool any more (and OS updates seem to stop after one year, which is well behind the accepted standards (usually 5 years)). I understand that IBM probably required royalty payments for Rosetta/QuickTransit, but why not keep it around as an extra cost option for people who need to run PPC apps? MS kept around XP mode (as an "extra cost option" so to speak).

Also - MS may be a scumbag as far as business goes, but they do have a pretty good in-kind donation program for nonprofits.

It's the first rule of sales to overprice stuff and make it hard to buy. That makes it "desirable".

Like other people have said there are plenty of reasons not to like Apple from the Foxcon slave-labor manufacturing to the walled garden software sales and oh, so much more.

I have never bought Apple-anything and never been tempted (ok, I wouldn't mind having a g4 quad just to play around with PPC but so far no luck). I do have two old Apple PowerBooks a friend asked me to sell and I will eventually get rid of them but my own money goes to more useful less trendy stuff. Plus I am definitely against idol worship! Some people seem to need a false religion more than they need a phone or laptop.

Did Apple ever get real multitasking working on the iPhone or are they still bullshitting everybody?

If you consider it a "good customer experience" to have some twelve year old gushing at you about how sales have "exceeded expectations" rather than having a goddamned product in stock to sell then I'll agree. Otherwise, h o r s e s h i t.


This entire phony shortage is treating ALL their customers like dirt. It's a fucking telephone, not the keys to the Kingdom of God. They have the cash to buy stock. Put them on the shelves and quit screwing with people. "Oh la la ! It's an iPhone ! it will make your tits bigger and your dick harder ! Trust us !" What a pile of crap.

And the "just works" Apple os, with the "just works" Apple browser on the "just works" Apple website for preordering their "just works" phone, doesn't. It goes into an infinite loop.

As I said, if I hadn't made a promise, Apple could take their pretentious phony crap and jam it up their rose-filled asses.

Say hamei, have you heard of this project: http://longnow.org/clock/

I gave me some confidence in humanity back and for whatever reason I thought of you.

Seriously... I pre-ordered my phone and got it not 2 days after release. I didn't even have to wake up early for it. Maybe things are different in China?

Maybe things are different in Corte Madera. Go ahead and buy an iPhone 5. I dare you.

Oh sure, they'll hand you the indentured servant contract quicker'n mephistopheles can light a fire but buy one ? Dream on.

Went in Monday, little blue dwarf gives us the spiel about how to do it. Went home, didn't work. Apple browser, Apple website, Apple product, no dice. Looped out. Had to upgrade the operating system to get a button in a browser to function, man that is high-tech ! "It just works" yeah right. Well, he said the store gets a few extra daily to sell direct, no dice on that either. Thursday we dragged in the Macbook, found the same little misbegotten offspring of a troll and a blue ogre, asked him politely to show us how. He couldn't. "They must have changed the website."

Right.

Can we spell "imbeciles", children ? I knew we could. I was never an anti-Apple zealot but treating customers like shit doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

btw, there is a difference between a branded sheep and a customer.

Not with Apple there isn't!

Same here. Mine came Tuesday.

And to celebrate my new apple product, I'm having another dumpster save-a-sale-a-thon!

http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16726979

A little update, especially since I read that Apple is "targetting China as their next big market ! Hurrah ! Hooray ! O frabjous day, tralee, tra-lay !"

The Assist, being a girl, had to have the next glorious new accessory, and she put off buying a new phone all through the iPhone 4 years, since there really wasn't much there.

So she was stuck dealing with face. Even though the wunderkids at Apple decreed the iPhone 5 would be impossible to get since with their brilliant planning and execution they didn't have enough to sell, she eventually got one in Hong Kong.

Result : the size is good, it fits a girl's hands better. The os is the same as everyone else, nothing so great about it. If all your friends also have i-whatevers, there are some apps that make playtime fun ... for a while. The Group of Three is already bored with facetime. Doing everything through iTunes sucks. No USB card for transferring photos sucks. Having to mess around with a non-standard SIM card was not fun - and pointless. The "locked to a carrier" thing is flat-out not going to fly here. Let me be blunt : you people are idiots. You pay three times what it really costs to get a "free" phone.

The bad part for Apple : the killer is going to be that the consensus of opinion in China is that the iPhone 5 is junk. It gets scratches and dings at the drop of a hat. People here actually use their phones and they are not happy when the phones look like shit through normal daily use. Less than a month old and the Assist's "new" iPhone has several dings, nicks, and scratches.

She won't buy another one.

Another stock scam. Apple tells the US stock market that they'll be "going into China in a big way !! Next big market, we'll be rich ! and famous !" Stock zoooms up, Tim Cook cashes in, Timmy et al pick up a few million, the idiot American public is five bucks each poorer.

I have to say, you guys really are morons. And then you let these dickwads put your retirement money into the stock market .. why not just take it to Monte Carlo and put it all on red ?

Back to the phone's market potential :

When the product comes out and people can't buy them, drop five points.

When the 'features" are not compelling, drop five points.

When the company is from the US with Hillary Clinton blathering on and on about how evil China is while Samsung keeps its fat fucking trap shut , drop ten points.

When the products don't hold up in a society where appearances are very important, drop ten points. Gossip is THE rule of the day here, and the iPhone is getting nothing but bad reviews from real users. The Assist won't buy another one. The Samsung she bought for her mom is functionally comparable in every way yet it is also sturdy.

I don't see them doing very well in China. Our phone market is open and free, not tethered to "providers" who control your every move. People choose the product that works well. The iPhone 5 is second-rate. There will be a surge of interest since it's New ! New ! New ! but after a while that wears off. In a truly free phone market, Apple is downscale "junk" (and that's a quote from the Assistant, who has no slashdot hi-tech axe to grind.)

In the real world, there's a lot more assistants than there are slash-dotters. They will sell some but long-term they aren't going to be much competition for real players, like Samsung.

Conclusion : buy stock now while it's cheap. Apple will soon have to make a few announcements of grand and glorious new products, market share, 600 new stores in the biggest phone market in the world, etc etc. Stock will zoom up as the marks rush to buy. Sell at that point, before reality strikes.

Repeat, repeat, and you, too, can become a smart investor ! job creator ! hi-tech knowledge worker ! Master of the Universe ! con artist, shyster, thief, crook, swindler, jerk, asshole, worthless scumbag ...

I dunno, I like my iphone (zee 4s model, herr docktor), but I only use it as a phone, email, sms, music player, and some games... As an attempt to save face, I keep it in a rubberized case so nobody can actually tell what kind of phone it is. My father-in-law has a samsung and even the on-screen software looks very similar. So I don't see what makes it "fashionably" much different from other touchy-feely phones.

That being said, the iphone has this huuuuuuuge installed base of ipod "accessories" (car, hi-fi, clothes, wireless headphones, shoes , ant or zigbee transceivers, armbands and docks and boomboxes and etc) that people like me don't really want to get rid of.

But apple dumped all that anyways when they switched to the new plug so "meh". I would say I'd be happy to dump the iphone but after seeing my wife's HTC droid, a co-worker's Huawei droid, etc... I'm not so sure. The bundled PC software is crap.

So the one thing I can conclude for sure is that all this frothing-at-the-mouth rabidness to dump on a telephone handset is wasted energy. The average joe schmo like me who just wants to call his wife boss and family, and get sms messages, doesn't care about all that crap you go on about (fashion and stock market (de)valuations). Pretty much ALL cell phones here are subject to carrier lock-in so that is a non-issue. The same way it was over 10 years ago when I got my first cell phone.

Thankfully people are starting to realize this fact http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/26 ... le_status/

Samsung brought in a marketing bigwig from nike last year and rumors are speculating about making their hardware play nicely with only their other hardware, in addition to their own software and buttoned-up app store. Sounds familiar?

I was listening to something - a "tech" podcast I think - about how the iPhone and anything with Apple's logo prominently featured had been the darling of the fashionistas in Hong Kong and Korea for quite a while, but that the bloom was off that rose - and that as they went, much of Asia would follow. They asked somebody in Thailand about it who said, "Yeah, we pretty much do whatever Korea does."

Another point one panelist was making was that Apple is only available on something like the sixth largest mobile carrier in China - and therefore when they did complete the pending deal with China Mobile (?) there were another ~750MM potential iPhone buyers. So hamei did they release the iPhone with US-style lock-in there, or did this guy reveal a lack of knowledge about how the China mobile market works?

I have no idea what he's trying to say. Sounds like he doesn't, either. "Available on China Mobile "? Almost any phone you buy is "available on China Mobile." (They don't have CDMA.) The "mobile market" here is just like the bread market or the sweater market or the pizza market. We go to the phone store and buy one. Nothing special about it. Stick your SIM card in it and away you go.

Oh. You guys oughta try that 'free market" thing. It's not so bad, when you actually have one

China Mobile will trade in your old normal SIM for the mini-SIM for a small charge, that's about the only control they have over the iPhone. They do sell them but they aren't the only ones ... but it is a limitation. Apple is stupid. If they sold through all the 2.5 million little phone stores they could sell a lot more. We have phone stores everywhere . If they'd just sell the phones like Samsung and Nokia and Motorola do, they would sell more. But noooo they have to be special . Clue for Apple guys : China Mobile is not special . China Mobile is your grandma.

I think most people do go to China Mobile for the SIM exchange since the cut-down-yourself thing is not guaranteed to work. They also have a pay-as-you-go plan like the US - I forget the name - but only a few businesses use it. There is also a not-too-ridiculous data plan that China Unicom has. The only trouble with that is China Unicom sucks.

China Mobile is not the first choice for buying an iPhone. They are about $100 cheaper in Hong Kong. You also have to be careful if you buy from unknown suppliers - could be anything inside that patented plastic rectangle with the round corners



One of the Assist's friends was convinced anyone could get an iPhone for $200 by going to Best Buy and saying the secret password to 'the Chinese guy." Oh-kaaaay. Kind of odd ... I can't think of anyone I know who has bought one at the Apple store. Must be somebody but ... probably they don't have any in stock. When they didn't have any to sell in the US it was because "Sales are so high we can't keep them on hand !" now that the stock has crashed $200/share, it's because "sales were disappointing." It would be really nice if these people would get their lies straight. Assist is doubly pissed now, she bought something from iStore, paid for it, then when she went to download got a message "This is not available in your country." Nice work, dickwads. Couldn't bother to mention that upfront, eh ?

It does appear that the experience of owning an iPhone is something that could limit their sales here. Chinese people gossip. A lot . Easy to scratch and rob me of $15 bucks and honey, you got youself a potential enemy. iPhone is not that great. Take away the lockin and they're going to have a rough time competing with Samsung.

Does no one else think the stock market is a total fraud when the "value" of a company can change by 800 billion dollars in three days ? This is one of the stupidest things I ever heard of. Why do people listen to that shit ? The "financial news" is about as relevant to reality as stories about Janet Jackson's tits falling out. It appears that the US has jumped the shark.


Service-wise, you have China Mobile which is the big good one - decent coverage, good quality, locations everywhere, okay prices (costs me about $15 a month). China Unicom has CDMA and a reasonable wireless data plan and maybe has coverage in a few places that China Mobile doesn't go, but no one likes them. You do China Unicom if you have no other choice. I was stuck with them when I had a Linux powered patent-infringing (round corners) Samsung i519. Our office connection was a smaller company, pretty good, and then China Unicom bought them and two days later it was shit. They are kind of like China Eastern - if it's a choice between walking and China Eastern and you only have three days, you take China Eastern. Otherwise, for distances less than 1,000 km, walk

Oh, I see the confusion. China Mobile is a service provider and they sell phones. They may provide a phone if you buy a service plan but I have never heard of anyone doing that. We ain't stupid enough for that schtick. People use them as a pre-paid service provider. You can buy a $15 card within 100 yards of almost anywhere. Scratch off the number, punch it in and you're set for another month. It's totally easy. C Mobile aren't big in retail phone sales. So equating the number of users with the number of phone sales is total ignorance.

I read that you are going to put people in prison for unlocking their own phones now. Good work ! US isn't owned by corporations, oh no !

Girls like Korea stuff but they also like Japan stuff. And France stuff. Juicy was hot a while ago and before that Abercrummy and Footch. I would not say that Chinese people flock after anything in particular. They flock after whatever is stylish at the moment but Korea doesn't own the definition.

Did I ramble enough yet ? can try harder if it's necessary. Not sure what's wrong with my brain today, maybe the start of fireworks season