I think you're wrong about the write-once run-anywhere software ecosystem that Windows had to deal with. There was an incredible proliferation of different hardware -- including drivers etc. -- and it was mostly up to Microsoft to make sure that the OS continued to work flawlessly (or at least at whatever level of semi-stability it managed to attain) across all of these different configurations.
This is an enormous responsibility that Apple has never had to deal with -- there's a difference of at least 3 if not 4-5 orders of magnitude in the number of different types of hardware platforms that each company had to deal with.
Android has a few dozen phones to support. And yes, the "metaphor" is slightly different across phones, but it's nothing like having to deal with every random piece of hardware that every company puts out.
>This is an enormous responsibility that Apple has never had to deal with -- there's a difference of at least 3 if not 4-5 orders of magnitude in the number of different types of hardware platforms that each company had to deal with.
Apple is supporting two gens of hardware. The iPhone OS will support the iPhone 3GS, the latest iPod Touch, the next-gen iPhone (as of now, unreleased) and the iPad.
Android has 19+ phone configurations (not counting carrier specific nuances in the firmwares) to support.
I think its interesting that Mr. Lyons is "blown away" by Android features that will be coming to his iPhone in 30-60 days, with the exception of teathering (which isn't Apple's fault, but AT&T's).
Also, people hate to hear this, but a jailbroken iPhone provides a much better experience and much more competitive than Androids.
Apple's copyright infringement claim starts with the observation that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple's bootloader and operating system software. True enough -- we said as much in our technical white paper describing the jailbreak process. But the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.
So, Steve Jobs can say what he wants. The courts are the final arbiter. Jailbreaking, like "rooting" an Android phone, perfectly legal. Warranty voiding, maybe, but legal.
>Apple is supporting two gens of hardware. The iPhone OS will support the iPhone 3GS, the latest iPod Touch, the next-gen iPhone (as of now, unreleased) and the iPad.
It's three generations. The iPhone 3G is a supported platform for iPhone OS 4.0. You do miss out on multitasking though.
>I think its interesting that Mr. Lyons is "blown away" by Android features that will be coming to his iPhone in 30-60 days, with the exception of teathering (which isn't Apple's fault, but AT&T's).
Lack of tethering is both Apple's and AT&T's fault. It's AT&T's fault for not activating it in the carrier profile but its also Apple's for making sure that the iPhone only allowed signed carrier profiles with iPhone OS 3.1 so that you could no longer download an alternate carrier profile with tethering enabled.
> ts also Apple's for making sure that the iPhone only allowed signed carrier profiles with iPhone OS 3.1 so that you could no longer download an alternate carrier profile with tethering enabled.
This sounds like it was added at the request of the carriers. Free tethering for everyone costs Apple nothing, and improves the user experience.
> Also, people hate to hear this, but a jailbroken iPhone provides a much better experience and much more competitive than Androids.
That's your opinion, not a fact. There's no reason to hate you for your opinions, unless you somehow imply that your opinion is somehow more relevant than my opinion (hint: it's not).
No, it is fact. Let me rephrase: A jailbroken iPhone provides a much better experience (than a regular iPhone) and is much more competitive with Android.
Look at the features Android offers that Apple doesn't...widgets? Jailbreak. Multi-tasking? Jailbreak. Themes? Jailbreak? Customizable lock screen? Jailbreak? Multiple ways of loading apps? Jailbreak.
Do you have to pay for some of those features? Yes. Does the marginal utility of any of those features lead to a truly "must-have" experience for the average consumer? Not in the slightest.
That depends on how platform gets defined. At the OS layer, a reasonable argument could be made for (cpu, northbridge, southbridge). Of course the whole northbridge thing can actually not include usb support, or disk io support, which can then throw more multipliers in there based on chip...
Sure there are standards to describe hardware interactions, but any reasonably experience sysadmin will tell you horror stories of when they found a weird issue with chipset X not following the standard just right, and needing a special case driver that no longer worked with the OS of choice. This means there are combinatorial multipliers on a per device basis (or some percentage thereof...)
Drivers sit outside the OS and the BIOS get you to the point where you can install drivers so at the OS level it's really just a question of # of BIOS's per instruction set * number of CPU cores.
PS: Consider when you need to install a RAID driver before installing the OS.
> it was mostly up to Microsoft to make sure that the OS continued to work flawlessly
I would say that's the difference: Microsoft abstracted most of the differences through their APIs. Android obviously handles some of these issues, but devs have to pay far more attention to degrading gracefully on different screen sizes, lack of multitouch, lack of hardware keyboard, etc.
Of course, web devs have had to play a similar game with the various browsers for a decade and a half, so it isn't necessarily a show-stopper for the ecosystem.
This is an enormous responsibility that Apple has never had to deal with -- there's a difference of at least 3 if not 4-5 orders of magnitude in the number of different types of hardware platforms that each company had to deal with.
Android has a few dozen phones to support. And yes, the "metaphor" is slightly different across phones, but it's nothing like having to deal with every random piece of hardware that every company puts out.