Of course, this is a shift, not a revolution. Apple will never get to the point where their culture tolerates, say, employees publicly tweeting that their CEO should step down. Indeed, as a public company with fierce competitors, they’re obligated to maintain decorum and secrecy around things that are materially sensitive.
Still, around the things that aren’t core secrets – developer relations, employee personality, and standing up for their values – Apple is feeling more like a chorus of real people and less like a monolith.
Getting down to brass tacks, how well does the thing actually work? It depends. I trained the GS5 to recognize both of my thumbs and my right index finger, since those are the three digits I use the most when waking up the phone. Over the course of several days, I made dozens of attempts with each finger and it only recognized me on the first try about half the time — and that’s a generous estimate. More often than not, I had to swipe my finger two or three times before it let me in; typing in a PIN code would’ve been more efficient. Worse, there were other times when the scanner wouldn’t recognize me at all, even as I adjusted my swipe speed, angle and finger pressure. And even when it works, there’s a small delay after you swipe before the phone accepts your print.
As for one-handed use, don’t even bother. It’s technically possible, but the odds of success are so low I have a better chance of seeing Narnia each time I open my closet. Normally, I hold the phone in my left hand and try to swipe the sensor with my left thumb; however, my thumb is at such an angle that the sensor simply can’t recognize it. Sometimes it’ll work if I push the phone up a little higher and try to position the thumb at a more shallow angle, but even then, it takes multiple attempts, and it’s so off-balance that I’ve come close to dropping the device several times. Apple’s sensor, on the other hand, has no problem picking up my fingerprint from any angle.
When TouchID was first announced, critics called it a gimmick. Yet when people saw how it simply works and removed the hassle of unlocking the phone, other companies started taking note and implemented fingerprint technology as well. But merely copying the idea of scanning the fingerprint is not enough. You need to do it in such a way that gives a great user experience and people actually want to use it.
Samsung admits weak demand for its phones is damaging profits
Samsung’s marketing budget has always been vast, but in the last quarter it was far larger than even the manufacturer itself would have liked. The company admits that it’s been forced to spend extra money on promotions for older and lower-end devices that have been filling up its warehouses due to “weak demand.” This dip in trade, combined with the extra spend on publicity, is causing the company’s recent, gradual profit decline to quicken: it now expects to earn around 24 percent less this quarter than it did a year ago, with underlying sales down by an estimated 8-11 percent.
When you have so many different phones and provide little or no support for the older and lower-end phones, why would people want to buy them? The key lies in focus.
Of course, the idea that smartphones are fast becoming commoditized is often brought up as a reason why Apple needs to come out with a magical new product immediately. The often overlooked reality is that Apple works tirelessly to ensure that the iPhone houses features that competitors simply can’t match. We saw this most recently with the introduction of Touch ID on the iPhone 5s. While some competitors — namely Samsung — have attempted to mimic the functionality of Touch ID with their own offerings, the simplicity, usability, and more importantly, the reliability of Apple’s own implementation remains unrivaled.
Recently at WWDC 2014, we saw that Apple remains committed to enhancing the feature set of iOS in ways that are difficult, if not practically impossible, for competitors to copy. The mounting integration between iOS and OS X is the most glaring example. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple continues to blur the lines between the Mac and iOS. More importantly, Apple’s over arching theme of “continuity” brings with it a number of features that will have a real impact on the way consumers use technology; Handoff is a boon for efficiency while the ability to make phone calls from the Mac elicited boisterous applause from WWDC attendees.
This type of seamless integration will prove frustratingly difficult for companies like Samsung or LG to implement. Microsoft could presumably go down this path, but with the share of Windows Phone still obscenely low, they’ve still yet to prove themselves a major player in the mobile space.
Apple has started to move towards differentiating the iPhone from the competition. Perhaps the question we should ask is how Android can avoid becoming a commodity.
If anything, commoditization across Android handsets seems like more of a pressing issue than commoditization vis a vis Apple and Android.
What they missed was the next step from every desk and home: a computer in every pocket. It’s worse than that, though. They saw it coming, and they tried. Pocket PC, Windows CE, Windows Mobile — swings and misses at the next big thing. They weren’t even close, and damningly, Steve Ballmer didn’t even seem to realize it. That’s what’s so damning about that video of him laughing at the original iPhone.
Steve Ballmer laughed. Bill Gates didn’t.
Microsoft’s institutional lack of taste had finally come to bite them in their ass. While Ballmer laughed at the iPhone and presumably walked around with a Windows Mobile piece of junk in his pocket, Larry Page and Sergei Brin carried iPhones. Google never laughed at the iPhone; it made money from it by providing web search and maps. Google quickly became, and remains to this day, a leading developer of iOS apps. And it was Google that was fast to follow the iPhone with Android, slurping up the commodity-market crumbs that Apple, focused as ever on the quality-minded high end of the market, eschewed. I don’t think it was ever within Microsoft’s DNA to produce the iPhone, but what Android became — the successful fast follower — could have been theirs if they’d recognized the opportunity faster. The Microsoft of 1984, a decade away from industry dominance, wrote software for the original Mac, and learned from it. When Bill Gates first saw a Mac, he didn’t laugh — he wanted to know how it worked, right down to specific details, like the smooth animation of its mouse cursor.