I don't have a problem with any of this, but I must disagree with the assertion that Apple has some sort of
technological leadership.
It simply does not.
It uses much the same chips as everybody else uses, or the same chips as are available to any other high volume consumer IT producer.
The rest is software, as they say
And IOS is the slickest implementation of the "finger interface" currently out. The degree to which this is important depends on what you use the device for. For the simple usage probably intended by Apple i.e. multimedia consumption, this slickness is key to getting the sales.
In every other way, IOS is a pig. A very inflexible, one trick horse. But I can see why Apple did that. If somebody could email you an MP3 with DRM protection, and you could then email that attachment to somebody else, Apple could not have got all those media vendors to come on board.
In some specific ways, the IOS devices are poor.
As a
phone, the Iphone is poor. I happen to think that a phone should work like a phone, with a decent reception, etc. It also has weird bugs e.g. incoming GSM texts are OK but incoming calls do not make it ring (reproduced in the shop, too, resulting in a swap). You can throw half a dozen phones on the table in any marginal signal area and you can be sure that the Apple one will be the first to stop working.
For
data, the wifi implementation is problematic - see the ~100 page thread on Apple's own "community" from people tearing their hair out with (mostly) the Ipad2 and a large variety of what Jobs would call "edge cases"; basically a load of existing wifi routers and access points. This is a bit of a hot issue in IT, with "Ipad compatible" firmware updates being quietly issued, but you won't get these for a bit of hardware which is no longer supported, which is basically anything over a year old. And the phone has problems determining connectivity between GPRS/3G and WIFI, often resulting in no data access at all. Of course this cannot be reproduced in the shop because they use Apple or specific Cisco APs.
The GPS works well on the ground, with GSM assistance, and is crap without it (e.g. in the air). It has been compromised for low power and has a rubbish Kalman filter, and the API is crippled to not reveal the satellite constellation to the app. The app has to guess whether it is getting real reception, by looking at how the estimated position error figure is varying.
Apple have the best designed app shop whereby you can buy multiple IOS devices and download the apps you have bought into all of them, while paying only once. This is kind of possible with Nokia but is difficult at best. And much as I detest Itunes (whose windows implementation must be one of the worst apps written in the last 10 years) it does actually do a full backup/restore which cannot be done with e.g. a Nokia, or with any device which is not backed up by an online app shop which knows your identity (to keep a lid on bootlegging). However its "sync" is horrible and it's easy to wipe out stuff by mistake.
I don't think discussing these issues is "pro fanbois" or "anti fanbois". I could have written similar stuff on any predecessor, right back to early PDAs some of which were only just usable in narrow applications (e.g. running TomTom in a car holder
) and it is no suprise that smartphones have killed the PDA business.
Apple have been astonishingly clever in the way they have created the massive fashion following. Good visual styling, good
PR, a high street presence which nobody can even approach.
But a technology leader? No.
Nothing is perfect. I have a Nokia 700 (chosen largely for its small size while doing "everything" the bigger smartphones do) and that has a collection of issues. The finger interface is nothing as slick as IOS. But at least it delivers GSM, GPRS/3G and WIFI connectivity without issues, and is "open" in as much as all the parts which you need to get to are accessible with file browsers, which makes file management possible. And it has cursor keys on the keyboard