Joanna Stern writes for The Wall Street Journal, in part:
Dear Mr. Cook… See, I have this folder called Apple Apps. It used to be full of the undeletable apps I had no use for—Compass, Tips, Contacts. I mean, does anyone, even at Apple, use Find Friends?
But lately the folder has been growing as I add once-essential apps, including Photos, Music and Mail. Your competitors — Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others — have been releasing superior services that have taken their spots. And while Siri is still at thumb’s reach, I find myself talking far more to Amazon’s Alexa these days.
What makes Google better at this, of course, is its cloud-based data collection. It has records of what I search for in its search engine or in its Maps service, and also knows the contents of my email. By crunching all of that, Google has a pretty good picture of me.
You, on the other hand, have said Apple doesn’t want my data. You do most of the processing on the phone itself, away from the eyes of advertisers or hackers. While I applaud and appreciate your assurance of privacy, my worry is that you simply can’t afford to maintain that mentality when the competition has such a great advantage—and users haven’t shied away from their services.
At what point do you admit you need more user data? Your users trust you, but I don’t envy your position.
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, after acquisitions like Perceptio and VocalIQ, Apple has a way forward where they can compete and even surpass others’ offerings while maintaining iOS’ vaunted security and privacy.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Omor” for the heads up.]
Here Apple a few new ideas for smarter iPhone.
Consumers demand for smarter iPhone. There new ideas will help iPhone 7 and 7 Plus flying off the shelves, the iPhone 7 can read our minds & face expressions, but also can print out money, gourmet-foods, flying-cars and find love.
When iPhone 7 and 7 Plus users walk passed their soul-mates or loved ones, their iPhone 7 vibrates like a heartbeats and speaks up, “this person is the love of your life or Je t’aime, l’amour tous jours”. Voila 🙂
Oh, did I say flying-cars?. Yes, a flying-cars, not selfless drivers cars. It sounds crazy, but if Apple could do its wonders, then the market caps would be $2 trillions in no times. Good luck Apple.
Your ideas are wonderful (I seem to remember your expressing them before, but they’re just as inspirational now). They get at the root of the Apple spirit which is pure happiness.
Apple’s recent “missteps” don’t matter much to true believers because they are more focussed on the future than the dead past, on possibilities than pessimism. Apple have tapped into the neural well of sweet anticipation, the Christmas of the soul that other retailers sell their livers to attain. FUD hasn’t worked very well against Apple because their goods are, well, good. Sometimes sublimely good.
C O M P E T I T I O N
Is
Good
For
Apple
and their customers.
👞💥🍎
Apple slowly but surely has been getting beaten by it’s competitors. To me I see google as a company that is not afraid to take risks, sometimes failing miserably but when they do something right like email, sheets, drive, search, maps they are a powerhouse of innovation and experts at making these services easy and accessible. On the other hand, Apple is less innovative and software unfortunately taken a back seat to products. I use itunes, the app store, mail, pages and numbers as examples. There are so many issues with the above that Apple refuses to address. They have the money to fix these issues, to hire the world 3x’s over. So it is not an issue of costs or not enough people to manage it. Thier slogan for “It just works” is no longer applicable to Apple as I find out it just works less and less.
I agree with the author that I use other apps far more regularly than apps that come with my phone.
Here is what I use:
Maps: Google Maps
Music: Itunes
Email: Mail app but can never find what I am looking for in search. I do use a gmail account though for all of my email.
Storage: Google Drive
Documents: Sheets and Docs – Can not beat the collaborative nature of the program
Search – Google – willing to trade my privacy for accurate search
Photos – I back up to iCloud. It was not easy to get it to work but it seems to be doing the job.
Browser – Chrome – It is a memory hog but unless something has changed favicons are still not available in tabs. I use favicons as easy markers to switch between tabs.
Here are some things I think Apple needs some serious TLC with:
Finder – I don’t think it is me but I find it difficult to search for specific types of files. Why not have check boxes if I want to find only images or pdf’s or files within a certain date parameter.
Spell Check – Why can google always correct my spelling with a search and Apple’s spellcheck comes up empty most of the time in terms of suggestions.
App Store for Mac and IOS – is it that hard to come up with a decent way to find the apps I am looking for. If I was a developer I would be so pissed at making it so difficult to find my customer. How is it that one is not able to search within a category???
Pages – There is a reason it has only 2.5 stars and it is free.
Time Cook is a master dealing with the scale and logistics of new products but seems to ignore the software side of things. IOS, Mac OS, Itunes, Photo Storage, Apple TV continue to languish behind the newest and shiniest products.
If you use iCloud things are OK, but if you use a mix of iCloud and other methods like a device’s hard drive then things fall apart. For example, I have minimal information on my newer Mac, and, when the new Mac Pro comes out, I was thinking of selling my newer Mac Pro and getting the latest model. So, my thinking was to transfer the small amount of files I have onto a thumb drive. Unfortunately, this can not be accomplished with Notes files. There is no access to the Notes files on the Mac. There is an export as PDF, but guess what? There is no import from PDF. The only way I can accomplish the task of transferring files to a new computer is by email, text message, etc, but this defeats the whole purpose: I don’t want some of my notes going over the Internet. Having access to files is computing 101, but Apple makes life difficult.
This Notes problem is just one example of backward thinking. The photos app also has a ton of issues. For example, two of my biggest problems are the photo edits on an iPhone don’t translate over to the Mac after syncing the devices. The second issue is Photos can’t be put in folders on the iPhone. All photo management has to be accomplished on the Mac. There are many more issues with the photos app and other Apple apps, but it would take several pages of text to list everything.
Photos can be put into “folders” in the Photos app on the iPhone; they are called “albums.” And if you want you can transfer photos into another app like DropBox and create folders until your heart is content.
Edits do transfer from iPhone to Mac if you use iCloud photo library.
If you get a new Mac, the easiest way to transfer over your Notes is by using iCloud. It’s easy and fast.
All apps can be improved by all vendors; but most of your complaints are due to not knowing how to do stuff.
And your “solution” is due to not reading things through.
“I don’t want some of my notes going over the Internet”
I value my privacy more than convenience. Please Apple don’t change that.
I don’t use any Google or Facebook product, not even the search engine.
That may be the point. If you want to preserve your privacy, use the default Apple apps. If you want to get better search results tailored to you personally, use Google’s offerings.
However, there may be a middle ground. Why not accumulate your personal selections in a master database within your iCloud account that Apple’s apps can access to return better results, but aren’t available to third parties to push ads to you, or threaten your privacy? I don’t really think this area is really an either/or option.
The assumption is that Apple’s iCloud has not been hacked yet. You are willing to place your crown jewels in iCloud? Anything you put across the Internet is accessible by others.
Are Google apps superior because they provide less privacy? Or are they superior because the Apple apps simply suck?
Any advantage of Google apps is due to the fact that they mine your data. They sell this data to advertisers. That’s their revenue model.
Apple strives for a higher standard. I think with the right technology advancements in both hardware and software, they will be able to offer the same type of functionality without compromising your data, and perhaps even better. But if you handle these tasks on the iPhone, then you need a powerful processor to do this. So technology has to have caught up and allow for that. Perhaps with iPhone 7 the A10 chip will allow for that kind of processing power.
Apple please don’t listen her. Apple has succeeded by not listening to tech pundits.
Apple isn’t listening to Joanna Stern, it’s the other way around. Like everyone else who reads the news, she know what Apple is up to. That type of code doesn’t get written overnight.
She just see’s what Apple will be coming out with soon and then asks Apple to do it. Then she takes credit for the suggestion.
Typical tech pundit trick.
Apple isn’t listening to Howard Stern either.
I am NOT sticking up for Apple or Siri. I do agree Siri needs MAJOR improvements. But I did observe one thing….
I was over at a friend’s house where he has the Amazon Echo.
Just for the heck of it, we compared Siri to Echo, and I have to say that SIRI won. Sure, the echo is useful for some tasks, but when it came to the daily stuff – such as searching for appointments, telling when those appointments were going to be – Siri did come out on top.
Sure, one can download add-ons for Echo to do SOME of the stuff that Siri does, but for the people that don’t understand what that is, or how to do it (like my 80 + year old dad) Siri would do just fine.
But, again, Apple DOES NEED to open Siri to developers so that WE can make Siri even better than it is now.
You know, I noticed a trend with my apps, here.
I *rarely* spend money on iPhone apps. I’ve only paid for 5 out of the 40 apps I use.
Google doesn’t wan’t your data to help you, they want it to sell to spammers. No thanks.
You’d thing she would have gotten that point by now.
You’d “think” MDN would have allowed us to edit our typos by now.
Yes, I use Find Friends on a daily basis.
Joanna Stern doesn’t seem to be smart enough to realize everyone isn’t just like her. Typical when you lack experience.
Dear Joanna Stern,
Please don’t casually diss apps you don’t use in an open letter to Apple. It forces those of us who’ve come to depend on them to scramble to their defence, and we don’t have a megaphone like yours to do it with.
I’m another who uses FindFriends every day.
It is set up to alert me to when my wife is setting out from her office. If I have the time I look the route that she’s using and alert her to any traffic u=issues along the way. It also gives me a clue as to when to expect her home.
We also use it when collecting the kids from places. It’s easy to see exactly where they are waiting and home in on them.
There are a lot of Apple Apps that I never use, but I’m not so self centred as to imagine that if I don’t use something then nobody else would either.
Think about the people who are running for President. Pick your worst scenario, or even your best. Then imagine that person’s administration will gain access to your data and can find out anything they wish about you. Is there anything good that could come from that?