
Always nice to get some balanced comments regarding Apple. Google could sleep with your wife, Samsung could run over your dog and you would still swear you loved the Galaxy S3 more than your kids ;)
Happy Christmas / New Year everyone!
The past year provided us with some wonderful tales of innovation and expertise, but we all like to see a car crash as much as success story, right? So here's a roundup of the most colossal cock-ups of the last 12 months, including face-plants by Google, Facebook, Apple, and others who succumbed to that most universal of human …
And then, just as the great man had proudly walked by to the fawning cries of "ooh' and "aah" from the sycophantic crowd, a small boys' voice was heard by everyone: "but the emperor has no clothes on!"
Read this and think how much iPads ect really fleece the iSheep: Are display devices becoming like light bulbs?
Yeah Apple really screw their customers over by giving them really nice devices - almost certainly the best if you factor in the build quality, iOS, service and support. Samsung may ship devices with similar functionality and even a few tweaks of their own but as a complete system and as for support they are sadly lacking. Maps cockup - yes not perfect but at least we iOS users have both Apple and Google maps and I welcome the competition which will improve both - unless you reckon less competition is good?
I have an iPhone 3GS that is probably getting on for 4 years old and on the original battery and 'shock' still working fine. If I wanted the battery changing I could get it changes - not as simple as clicking one off but for something that I may need doing every 4-5 years I can live with that if it makes the phone smaller, lighter or they could fit a larger battery in the first place.
Same issue with CD / DVD drives in laptops - well netbooks and ultra-notebooks are typically to small and given the choice of a longer battery life (that I can use every day) as opposed to a DVD drive (that I may use a few times a year) seems a sensible move. After all I can just carry a USB DVD drive or but a different laptop if it's that important to me.
Lol. Samsung with less functionality? Support sadly lacking? I read on the Reg Samsung throw more money at research than Apple and have for a while, iphone 4 to 5 has little changes and they try and advertise the bigger screen as if it was their idea, to fit a screen that allows your thumb to move across it, the world and dog having already done it doesn't equate to them. If support and service meant their manufacturing workers got better pay and conditions I would care more, but accroding to lots of reports it doesn't, so the money must be for fat patent lawyers and the execs.
Where in Apple do you work? The 'cult like' happy-clapping staff of a shop or the more creepy head office?
I do like the idea of having both on the apple, Google doesn't need another mapping app for android as it works fine. Apple does it seems. Not really a competition though if home grown is rubbish so lets bring in the compeition (and then see massive uptake for it)
Anyway, for me the two big stories were Apple or Metro, I was going to go with Metro as it is a massive functional overhaul for every user and a huge PR gaff for the worlds biggest OS. But then Apple deserves a good kicking for constantly taking the urine with Patent lawyers this year which is backfiring on the goodwill towards them. And because there are still too many fanbois willing to pay massive amounts of money for a small apple symbol on the back of a chinese made phone with appalling employee H&S records.
Not anon because I don't work at Apple (or samsung or google etc)
1. iOS (on a two week old iPad Mini). Press the home button. Choose "Settings". Scroll down to "Safari". Slide "private browsing" switch to "on". Press the hom ebutton. Select Safari. Browse. To return to normal browsing, do the whole rigmarole again.
2. Android (on a one year old Galaxy Tab 10.1). Long press "New tab" button. Select "New private browsing tab". Browse. To return to normal browsing, close private tab.
iOS is a very reliable but extremely clunky and very outdated interface. Apple kept the original Mac interface going for a decade after it was totally outclassed. Are they going to make the same mistake again?
You could equally substitute Google here (blatant info peddlers that are as bad as FB for reducing their customers to being the product), except the Emperor's new clothes still look fine to the Droid drones, even if they are surprisingly similar to Apple's cut.
Once upon a time, I'd have said MS could fit in too, but they fall down on the last point - were they ever actually cool?
@GitMeMyShootinIrons
Apple's very first act - before it had any products - was to copy. It took its name from the Beatles record label, then spent the rest of its existence basically polishing existing tech into a form just enough to fool those who prefer style over substance. This thou-shalt-not-copy hypocrisy was baked into its DNA from the start, and its legal antics are just the obvious extension of this - a smokescreen thrown up to try to disguise this fact. Now they are rumbled, and there is literally NOTHING they can put in any future products that a competitor hasn't done already, that little boy's voice is becoming the roar of the crowd.
Apples' peak coincided with Steve jobs death, but were he around today he'd not have been able to stop the rot.
"microsoft should have never bailed them out"
Samsung don't think so - it's the best thing that could have happened to them. Look at their runaway Android market share, and consider what it would have been had Nokia done the smart thing and gone with Android. Now, it would have been almost certainly a 50/50 split between the two. The official reason they didn't? There was "no way" to differentiate handset models if you run with Android, unlike the infinitely customisable WP8, which looks so different across all its various handset models, why, you can hardly tell its WP8 at all.
"Always nice to get some balanced comments regarding Apple. Google could sleep with your wife, Samsung could run over your dog and you would still swear you loved the Galaxy S3 more than your kids ;)"
Well yeah, but Apple raped me as a child and now they're after my children. I never really liked my wife's dog anyway.
Dont hold your breathe, that NEVER happens
Once manglement has the idea, it must be followed to its logical conclusion no matter what...lost $2 billion, 80hr weeks, chapter 11, zombie apocalypse, heat death of the universe... the manglement are always right otherwise they'd just be a bunch of tossers in suits.
And they are always looking for someone to blame.....
"You could argue – and you'd be right – that there was a lot of useful stuff in SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. We are going to need to take a good look at how rights and property are managed in an online world. But it's clear that one-sided regulation isn't the way to do it."
Right. It is important that the other side is also represented; you know, the side that profits from piracy and theft, that feels that the value of any human endeavor is judged solely by the value of the advertising that can be run against it, and is against all forms of digital rights and property and against any form of enforcement of those rights, and whose platform consists of expropriation of the many by those few who form the tech oligarchy.
Or the side that just wants to be able to buy a movie, watch it on their TV, smartphone, tablet and computer when they want without having to leap through hoops and get labelled a pirate over and over again - despite having actually paid for the content.
Heck, even just buying a Blu-ray and playing it on your Blu-ray player is fraught with obstacles - region coding, and even key revocation that makes it suddenly impossible for you to buy any new movies!
Power has swung to give complete and total control to the MPAA et al - they can take away your ability to watch something you have already paid for, just because they feel like it.
That's the "other side" here - your rights as a consumer to actually watch/listen/play the thing you bought and paid for.
@Richard 12 - 09:37
"despite having actually paid for the content."
Sorry to break it to you Dicky, but you never, ever pay for the content you rent it, OK. You got that now?
You may like to think you paid for it but you never have, never did and you never will all the time the scumbag media corps have their way. So stop pandering to the them, stop paying to rent their overpriced, over-hyped shit output starring short-arse, testorone-filled cretins saving bimbo heroines by essentially copying every nursery rhyme storyline ever written.
Make your own media, plenty of software and tools out there and it's lot more fun to write your own music. I don't watch movies and I make my own art to hang on my walls with my camera and copy of GIMP. The only media I pay for is music and then I buy direct from the artists via their websites so I know they're getting the money in their pockets to make the music I like to hear.
Why should people who understand that copyright isn't a property right, but a state-mandated monopoly on distribution of copies be excluded? Driving coach and horses through fundamental principles of natural law in camera to suit "interests" and their associated trolls perhaps isn't optimal.
"leaving more and more investors wondering just how they'd managed to come up with a $100bn valuation for the social network"
Really? I think we can all take a guess.
Also I was expecting the Dotcom bubble burst (no, the other Dotcom ;) ) to be the big news. White collar crime the police could have stopped while he was at their station drinking coffee, they instead use a terrorist crack force to arrest.
The issue is with the reputation of the company involved.... Apples is much bigger precisely BECAUSE no one expected it... Everyone knew that Facebook and Autonomy were overpriced, that RIM were a rudderless ship and that Googles advertising couldn't sustain the crazy growth that analysts seem to be panting after...
If life existed on Mars, it could conceivably have spread to our own planet. On the other hand, if Mars life is very different to life on Earth, this suggests a huge variety of possibilities for life to bloom throughout the universe.
And whenever life as existed/exists on Mars has spread to this repressive and GOD obsessive planet and is very different to life on Earth, are there countless surreal possibilities and innumerable zeroday vulnerabilities to exploit for novel life phorms to bloom and seed new intellectual property feeds which server future imaginative needs.
And that might not be so much an alien program but rather more likely AI@ITsWork for Media and IT Presentation of SMARTR Virtual Reality Programs and Pogroms which leave the Past and its Corrupted Hereditary Legacy Systems of Primitive Perception Control as Historical Memory Reminders of Failed Sub-Prime Lead Intelligence …… which are as Oxymoronic Power Stations in the Greater Scheme of Things.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't confuse "YouView" and "YourView" given that one is a telly box that connects to the internet (for catch-up services) and the other is a portal allowing businesses to monitor telephone and internet usage. Only a complete moron would confuse the two, and thats assuming they've even heard of one and the other.
Then again, after shoulder surfing my nephews Facebook news feeds there's an awful lot of complete f*cking morons, who seem to revel in their idiocity, about to be unleashed upon the world.
He gave out his CIA login? He didn't just use a public system like mail.com etc?
Surely giving out such sensitive details is not just worthy or firing, but of jail time, dishonourable discharge, and goodness knows what else? He gave unfettered access to his CIA email, and not happens, yet Manning rots in a military prison.
Seems in the USA (like in the UK) justice is no longer blind and actively favours the rich.
Surely work-related email would be more sanitised than that, like not available outside the CIA buildings and/or logins tracked (with the possibility of rejection if logged into by an unknown device - hell *Facebook* can do that much!).
Or is the reality that your average spook has POP3 with a cleartext passwords...god help 'em if a spook loses their smartphone down the back of somebody's sofa!
The problem as I see it isn't that they dropped the name metro, but that there wasn't a believable replacement. Ms has dropped codenames before release heaps of times, but in this case the replacement name really was inadequate to describe pretty much any standard windows application that opted for the TIFKAM look and feel but a more traditional installer. You know, like those crazies who think they should still sell to folk running win 7 or earlier.
And "wünderkind" does not take a trema, it's just "Wunderkind" (i.e. "prodigy")
Fail? NO U!
"Weunderkind" would lose you points in any exam, as would "Wünderkind".
What exactly is hard to understand in "It's spelled WUNDERKIND".
And certainly not "WEUNDERKIND", for Christ's Sake.
And the "probably" adjective is not to be used here. At all.
This post has been deleted by its author
Was sure it would be the number one cock-up. Launched years too late when so many people have already got alternatives. Confusion with regard to the packages on offer and then the major shareholders decide to pump big money into advertising it's biggest competitor Freeview+ on TV at Christmas!
Not just Doh, but Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) comes to mind...
While lots of the happenings in this article make good tech headlines, surely the single biggest tech foul up in terms of its impact on ordinary people was the RBS computer "glitch". When companies are threatened with going to the wall due to cash flow issues and when ordinary people are denied access to their own money, for 10 weeks in N Ireland I believe, then nothing else comes close!
Thought the same, but it is an American article.
Apple getting top position is questionable imo. It's just a single rushed application and I am horrified by the Objective C, itself, and some of the crap one has to put up with iOS (to program, that's it). AAPL is just not worthy the attention they get.
If it were just a rushed app then that would be understood alongside all the other rushed apps of history, but Apple managed to screw up an app that most users were happy with. Apple has always positioned itself as a premium offering but in the maps decision they really forgot their users.
American journalist or not, The Register is an international site based in Britain, and the RBS cock-up was on a far greater scale than anything mentioned here and is a cautionary tale to financial institutions everywhere why you don't outsource critical IT jobs and infrastructure.
I also think the NHS Project for IT should be on here, even though they finally killed it off last year. It should be on every list of IT disasters everywhere until the British government creates an even bigger cock-up.
Apple's map flap is shocking only to those that are deaf, dumb and blind. The quality of their code has been *obviously* suspect for years; map flap is just the latest example. They need to clean ranks in their coding department.
The MS Metro fiasco is far far far worse. It signals an inflection point for Microsoft. When *all* Win 8 products flop in the marketplace, it'll be obvious where they're headed.
Well said Sir!
The Apple Maps was just one APP in an Ecosystem
Metro is a whole Ecosytem.
Utter fail on Microsoft's part and El Reg's.
Then again, the Apple Haters rule here ok!
Androids ain't so wonderful (Her indoor's Samsung Galaxy corrupted the SD card over Christmas, my HTC Sensation regularly misses incoming calls)
And Google mapping is still far from perfect and the satellite images are old. Streetview is pretty good but realistically hardly ever *need* it. I've tried both Apple and Google Maps - it's not clear-cut by any means - Apple seem to give better routes, Google have more POIs but navigating to an address / post code (which is what many people will use it for) is about the same. Sure if you are a darwin award contestant and drive through Oz with no paper maps etc. you may have got caught out but Google Maps are not perfect with that either.
Was the Map issue so bad for anyone - Google are down more than 500bn a year and Apple are up the same? Apple users now have BOTH, Apple get breathing room to make theirs better, can provide cheaper / more access to developers, users could ALWAYS go to maps.google.co.uk anyway.
As for the quality of the maps - well for me Apple sat pics are more up to date and three routes I know well were navigated worse (further) with Google Maps than Apple Maps. And - you think Google Maps is perfect - think again - over the last week or so noticed many POIs around 1/2 out of their genuine position and another Australian police force gave a warning against Google Maps as well.
So to summaries - iDevices now have both - users = win, developers get better access = win, Apple saves buckets of cash = win
Actually, there is not much wrong with the map app from a software POV, the issue is with the dataset that it accesses and queries, but that has rapidly improved too. It's certainly more polished that Google's iOS offering. That has the opposite issue, great data, not so great software.
There are problems with the Apple Maps software - not just the data.
1. The colours are ridiculous. Stupid. Who's bright idea was it to make almost all roads pale grey on a pale yellow background?
2. It doesn't understand U.K addresses. In particular, it often seems to take the town from your postcode and thinks that's where you live. So if your address is '1 High street, Cookham, SL6 1AX'. It sees the 'SL' bit and thinks you live at '1 High street, Slough' - which is miles away.
Much as I'm an anti-apple-fanboi, (Their products are ok, but massively overpriced for what they do, and sometimes restricted in weirdly arbitrary ways, and thus I like el Reg's constant attacks on them), I agree, the maps fiasco was merely a one off mistake, the 'interface previously known as metro' is hideous, and apparently was designed by someone who wants microsoft to go under. I attempted to use a windows 8 machine in John Lewis, couldn't figure out how to use it.
Previous incarnations of windows have not been like that. Windows 98 was new to me (my previous computer experience had been DOS and CP/M), yet clicking the start menu was obvious, as it looked like a button and said "Start" on it. This new interface may be okay for touchscreens, but for a normal computer with a pointing device, and a screen bigger than 'tiny', it looks more ludicrous than XP's luna theme, and the fact it breaks the UI paradigm they've used for so many years may well be 'game over' for them.
Why do people keep harping on that Apple are 'massively' overpriced - guess you can say that of a BMW when you buy a Ford etc. When I bought my Macbook Air the competition was scarce and was about the same price (but the Air was better made). When I bought my iPhone I considered a Samsung Galaxy - it was about £3 less per month - hardly significant when the contract cost was about £45-50 anyway or about £70 less SIM free (which over 2 years is not much). However, with Apple the support is much better and when I dropped the phone and the camera lens got slightly dislodged the Apple Store just fixed it at no cost and in 20 minutes. I'm happy with the choice and suspect a lot of other people are as well - wait until you have a problem and that's how good you know a company is.
Don't try, commentards don't quite grasp this concept.
I could easily open a curtain making business and call it Windows or a shoe repair shop and call it Apple or a chair cushion called iPad.
So long as it is in no way confusable with the other item, then there is no issue (although the large megacorps try to bully others into giving it up)
Maps is just one 'app' and it was always a trivial issue to bookmark maps.google.co.uk onto an icon on your device. Most people who have tried the two side-by-side are not all that bothered as in reality Google Maps is better is some respects and Apple Maps in others so it depends on your usage. I find Apple Maps quicker, like the 3D view and routing seems better - Google Maps has streetview and a few nice features as well.
It's such a good phone / OS despite 'maps'. When you compare it to the fragmented, poorly service / support and insecure 'Android' it's clear. Anyone can make an Android phone - so next year Samsung may not be king of the Androids but Apple will still be growing it's user base of longer term, more loyal users.
I've never actually met someone that had a serious issue with Apple Maps - at least no-one who had tried both and could say Google Maps was definitely better. Most said the mapping on Apple was more up to date and Google still have inaccuracies - I reported 2 about a year or so ago - still not fixed - c'est la via ;(
Suspect most of the people on here who whinge about Apple Maps are probably non-iOS / Android users who:
1. have never used it / never compared it side-by-side
2. have a bigoted view of Apple and anything they do
3. are jealous as now iOS users have both Apple Maps and Google Maps
4. believe Google Maps is perfect (when clearly it is not)
5. do not appreciate that competition is good
6. work for Google ;)
It's not just in the US. They make lots and lots of very cheap phones that they probably make little / no profit on. That and the new Windows Phones which are probably make or (more likely) break for them. If Windows Phone catches on all the other (cheaper) manufacturers will wade in and obliterate any profits. At least Apple own / develop iOS for their own hardware.
The problem with the "old" google maps on iOS was that it was a monopoly, and one that was run by Apple's biggest competitor int he mobile space.
Some time agoe, Apple went cap in hand to Google saying "please sir: can we have some of that turn by turn direction goodness that you get on Android?".
Google: "Sorry sonny, You don't need that on your shiny black iPhones. We're keeping the good stuff for our own unwashed masses"
Put in this position, Apple had no choice but to go out and roll their own turn by turn mapping app. And to be fair it does work (at least every time I've tried it in the UK). The traffic info works (I just need to pay attention to it!) It lacks some of the location data that Google has managed to accumulate over the years, but give it at least 6/10 for the features it does have which work and work well.
Google, having noticed that Apple has cut it's connection to the cash cow that is iOS maps, realises that it needs to pull it's finger out and deliver a decent upgrade to Google Maps for the unwashed iOS masses.
Result: three months later Goole says: "Ok, sonny, looks like you do need that turn by turn mapping after all"
So for Apple the result is that they now have Google pretty much where they want them: they have been forced to deliver a mapping application with turn by turn mapping and all of the excellent location data that we expect from them. Apple also have the opportunity to develop and enhance their mapping app over time, and eventually suck some of that mapping goodness out Google's accounts.
Yes, the mapping app could have been better when launched, and a few Apple execs have paid the ultimate sacrifice for that. But the launch date was probably driven as much by the iOS release schedule and the need to support new hardware as by the readiness of the app itself.
iOS users are happy as now have both. I imagine it may have delayed some people from buying an iPhone 5 or upgrading to iOS 6 - but probably just delayed.
No mapping app is perfect - Google have been doing this for a long time and still have many errors. Apple and their shareholders are happy as read they had paid $2bn over the last 4 years (and most of that will be in more recent years as total installed base has increased) - so savings of at least $500m a year straight off a competitors and onto Apple's balance sheet.
I've actually used both - Google Maps is nagware trying to get you to login all the time - why - to get better access to you / your profile / data. They could have stored bookmarks locally or probably in iCloud but no they want you to have a Google login and nag you over and over.