iPhone

Android Oreo Review: An iOS User’s Review (Introduction) – BirchTree

Matt Birchler:

I have been using the Google Pixel 2, which is the latest and greatest Android phone out there. I chose this phone for my experiment because I wanted to leave no room for my conclusions to be colored by a bad OEM skin on top of Android or by a lower quality phone as my comparisons to iOS should be as fair as possible. Since I wanted to review Oreo, a Pixel was my only option in October, and thankfully that Pixel has top of the like specs and the best Android camera out there. This is Android how Google intended it.

The very, very TLDR version of my review is as follows:

Android has grown up considerably over the last decade. It’s no longer a complete disaster of a user experience, and some elements have actually surpassed what Apple is doing with iOS. Notifications are much better than they are on iOS and Google Assistant is more accurate and more helpful than Siri. That said, there are a million little (and not so little) things that truly make Android a sub-par experience for me. Your mileage may vary, but the abysmal third party software available for the platform, poor inter-app communication, and countless stability issues make Android a place I only want to visit for a month or two per year, not something I can see myself using full time.

I have been wanting to get out of my echo chamber lately and this review is just what I needed. It recognises the strengths of both platforms and describes the issues beautifully.

The First Trillion Dollars is Always the Hardest

Horace Dediu:

In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units, making it the most successful product of all time.

Look at this graph ↓.

The revenues from iOS product sales will reach $980 billion by middle of this year. In addition to hardware Apple also books iOS services revenues (including content) which have totaled more than $100 billion to date.

This means that iOS will have generated over $1 trillion in revenues for Apple sometime this year.

[…]

iOS users spend more and are more loyal than those on alternative platform thus qualifying the platform as “premium” and thus adding to its value in the eyes of developers, content producers and service providers.

As the install base of iOS increases and as users hire the devices to do more and spend more time with them the virtuous cycle of value creation will continue and accelerate.

This ↑. This is what iPhone (and by extension Apple) detractors don’t understand.

… Android was originally seen as the “good enough” iPhone, potentially disrupting it, it turns out to be the ersatz iPhone. Chances are higher that users will switch from Android to iPhone and not the other way. Again, the reasons have more to do with the ecosystem and quality of users (which are hard to measure) than with the hardware (which is easy to measure.)

The Macintosh Endgame

Jean-Louis Gassée:

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Instead of racing to the bottom as the market plummets, Apple appears to be taking the “high road”, in a sense: They’re taking refuge at the high end of the market by introducing new, more expensive MacBook Pros, with a visible differentiating feature, the Touch Bar. This is known, inelegantly, as milking a declining business, although you shouldn’t expect Apple to put it that way.

[…]

But what would an Ax Mac mean in the real world, to software developers? The mind reels at the thought of yet another upheaval as developers rush to convert third-party Mac apps. Or will they? With hundreds of millions of iOS devices sold year after year, and ever more software engineering resources allocated to the platform, iOS-based hardware will win the day. The billion dollar question, here, is when? As Horace Dediu a.k.a. @asymco put it in a June 2014 tweet:

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In the end, iOS numbers make the decision. For its part, Apple will stay out of the way and let customers — and developers — decide when it’s time to buy the last Mac.

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