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I'm not doing the argue-every-sentence thing with you today, luis. That said, I will correct a couple of your misconceptions below because they warrant special attention. As to the rest:
Your entire argument boils down to: Apple is revolutionary because their products do everything I think they need to and they sell a lot of them. To which I have a two-word response:
Genius marketers.
Apple's hardware and software is not revolutionary in its specifications, its breadth of functionality, its price point, or its innovations. But they're really good at selling it.
I'd say actually the reverse (but agreeing with you). They
start with the marketing: what kind of product do we want to sell and how will we sell it. They envision the marketing first, and only then they try to build the product. They skim it to its very core.
And no, Apple is most decidedly NOT dominating the laptop market. If you'd care to look at total sales sometime, you'll find that PC manufacturers combined outsell Apple's portable computers by a pretty wide margin.
you're right, I made a mistake.
Apple has a very small fraction of the personal computing market - which, to harp back on one of your other misconceptions, is largely the reason for fewer malware infections: MacOS is just as vulnerable to attack as Windows, there's just a lot less malware that actively targets it.
This is not a misconception on my part (where in my words do I say anything against what you are saying here?).
It also runs quite a bit less in terms of overall software (fewer points of infiltration to work with). But I assure you, if you put Windows on an Apple machine without any sort of protection and don't utilize networking practices, it'll get infected just as quickly as any PC. Macs don't get viruses as often as Window PCs because the MacOS user base is an irrelevant portion of the computing market. Apple's market share is the only reason they can make that claim, which is dubious at best.
Nor is it dubious (since it's been confirmed for decades now), nor does it matter the reason. What matters is that it is true. And of course, if you install windows, you won't be protected from its own problems.
As for MP3 players, find a source that says Creative was underselling their competitors to the iPod. It was cheaper because the iPod was priced higher, not because of any underselling. While you're at it, do some research on early tablets. Colleagues of mine were using Toshiba's tablet PCs in 2006 with pen-touch interfaces for note-taking quite successfully.
They were windows based tablets, with pens. Bleargh. With 2, perhaps 3 hours of battery.
Oh, and since it was also a computer it could play video, surf the web, check email, and at the same time allow the student to write papers and look at Powerpoint presentations. And it was priced similarly to other laptops at the time.
Did I ever say otherwise? You are arguing strawmans, mp.
Again - all I see from your posts is justification about how Apple was brilliant because of things that essentially boil down to marketing. Nowhere have you actually demonstrated that any of Apple's products were/are unique and revolutionary. They weren't. They took products and ideas already available, bundled them up aiming at the lowest common denominator of end-user, and applied their marketing machine.
With that criteria in mind, no single product is revolutionary. Take what you will. I think that the iPhone is revolutionary because it spawned a new era of smartphones. It
revolutionized the market with its unique vision of what a phone should be. The iPad? Same. Just look at this picture:
http://iphonefizz.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/376167502.jpgNow look at ultraportables after the macbook air and decide for yourself where did they get counseling.
Now they're using the ridiculous sums of cash they've collected from doing so to stifle the competition (Samsung, anyone? Though the interesting thing there is that I suspect Apple needs Samsung more than Samsung needs Apple). Nothing you've said paints them in any other light.
Samsung's best "client" is apple, ironically. Apple didn't like the abuse they got from the biggest KIRF company in the world and sued them. It's business.
EDIT: Also, I'm not saying that Apple's marketing genius isn't a significant accomplishment (it is, and I'm thankful for the proliferation of tech that has resulted from it), I'm just saying that it is marketing and not innovation that drives Apple's success.
Alright, I'll disagree. I think Apple is innovative not only in the vision of what their products will be, but also in their design (does any other company cares 10% of what apple does to make their computers even "likable"? Apple products are
beautiful). And I agree with you that they know how to sell very well, and the important part of that is that they know how to "teach" their custumers on how to use their products, and what to expect from what kind of devices. I don't know what to expect from a samsung galaxy tab. They never showed me, and in the nearest shop, there's one of those turned off with some spec lists at the bottom.
