Cult of Mac is reporting news of more Apple rumours. Speculation is always rife around Apple, and it quite often turns out to be wrong – from the iPhone 5 announcement speculated to be last year to rumours that it would have a 4″ screen. Nonetheless, the speculations are worth exploring and they sometimes turn out to be true.
One of the arguments is that a smaller iPad will be used to rival the Samsung Note, which is apparently competition because it comes equipped with a stylus. The obvious response to this is that many phones came with a stylus just a few years ago, but the move to capacitive screens – which Apple spearheaded – forced the move away from styluses. The suggestion that the Note will have an impact is to suggest that we should have just stuck with PDAs. As for the Samsung Note being a competitor, it should be mentioned that with the iPad being nothing more than a bigger iPhone, Apple already have an iPad with a smaller stature.
According to a survey of 482 iPhones 4S owners conducted by research firm Parks Associates, more than half said they were “very satisfied” with how it performed, with 87% saying they use it at least once a month. A further 21% said they were “satisfied” and 9% said they were “unsatisfied”. Considering Siri is still a beta product, having over 70% satisfaction rate is quite good. However, it’s also worth noting that the survey was US iPhone users only, and it’s a fair bet to think that users from other countries would be less satisfied as Siri has a reputation for not recognising words very well from non-US accents and it does not perform as many tasks outside of America – it doesn’t find local businesses, for instance.
An interesting finding from the study was that most of the users only use Siri for a handful of simple tasks, like sending emails or calling a contact, despite Siri being able to schedule reminders, browse the web, play songs and answer myriad questions. In fact, 32% of those surveyed have never used Siri for playing songs, and 35% have never scheduled a meeting with it. While those features are going unnoticed, the ability to send an email is something of a hit, with 26% saying they use Siri to do just that on a daily (or almost daily) basis, although 30% have never used it for that function either. Whether these people do not use Siri much for anything, or if they don’t send many emails, or if they just prefer to type them was not explored. The statistics from this report suggest that Siri is useful to those who have tried it, but it’s not a runaway success and arguably hasn’t shaped up to be what was expected of it in Apple’s 2011 keynote.
Indeed, John Barrett, Parks Associates’ director of consumer analytics, spoke of some drawbacks to Siri: “Some said Siri didn’t work well against background noise. Others said it had trouble understanding commands. These problems could be amplified in a noisy living room, where the main TV would be located.”
How Siri progresses in future software updates and upcoming handsets will be interesting to see. Will it cope better with noisy backgrounds like Shazam does? Will it recognise more accents? And if it performs perfectly, will it have much bearing on who uses it and how?
When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, the main feature to set it apart from previous offerings was Siri, a virtual personal assistant. With all its products, Apple claimed Siri was amazing, incredible, and unlike anything else (which no doubt angered Vlingo). What wasn’t so readily mentioned by Apple (instead buried away in a crevice on its website) is the fact that Siri is still in beta. The adverts showing Siri behaving like a portable Yellow Pages and fortune teller also omit this, along with any disclaimer that the feature may not work as well as advertised. To make matters worse, Siri doesn’t know business information or certain location-based information outside of the US – unlike its rivals Vlingo and Windows Phone’s Ask Ziggy.
So Apple’s flagship feature has landed the company in legal trouble once again – following the tradition of Apple being sued after an iPhone release, with users suing the company over the iPhone 4 “antenna gate” problem whereby holding it a certain way dropped calls (leading to Steve Jobs’s famous retort to “not hold it that way”, before getting up on stage to declare (falsely) that it’s a problem to plague all mobile phones), and an earlier court case where Apple got in trouble for claiming the iPhone offered a “full web” experience when it did not provide access to Flash content. This time around, it’s a man from Brooklyn, Frank Fazio, suing Apple, with the case claiming that Siri does not work as advertised because it produces incorrect answers, fails to understand what is said, doesn’t locate local shops and can’t understand directions, whereas the adverts show Siri understanding and replying to all these things without missing a beat, and even assisting people to learn music.
The inclusion of Siri led Fazio to spend $299 on an iPhone 4S, and his disappointment with how it performs has led to the case, which states that “The iPhone 4S’s Siri feature does not perform as advertised”. While it has yet to be decided in court if Apple has been misleading or not, Fazio is only one of a growing group of 4S users and critics frustrated with Siri, which seems to be hugely overhyped in the adverts. Other complaints of the service include it having a difficult time understanding non-US English accents (although it also seems to have trouble understanding American accents), and with Siri requiring an Internet connection to work, as most processing is done not on the phone but on Apple’s servers, it will not work for anyone without a connection. This particular problem was particularly troublesome when Apple had an outage that rendered Siri unusable for about a day.
Whether Apple’s claims are misleading has yet to be decided, but Fazio is part of a growing chorus of discontent over Siri. Despite an initially positive reception from reviewers when the iPhone 4S launched in October, users and critics have raised complaints about the iPhone 4S’ oft-hyped feature. The biggest complaint is that Siri requires an Internet connection to function since most of the heavy-duty processing is done on Apple’s servers and not the phone itself. So if you are without connectivity, Siri will not work. And the phone doesn’t even have a backup feature, such as the iPhone’s old voice control features, for basic Siri-like functions such as voice dialing. Siri’s connectivity limitations were highlighted in November when Apple suffered an outage that knocked Siri service offline for about a day.
The above video is Apple’s (in)famous advert announcing the launch of the first Macintosh computer, which would compete with IBM’s latest offerings. At that time, Steve Jobs, ever the drama queen, expressed that being outsold by IBM would lead to a “Dark Ages” of technology, and that Apple – as the tacit technological heroes – must come in and save the day. With the Mac due to launch in January 1984, the advert was portraying the masses blindly going along with other computers, and the individuality expressed by Apple saving the day – and thus saving the world from a technological Dark Ages.
The irony though is that Jobs has always been bent on controlling Apple computers and how the user interacts with them. So intent was he on moving towards point-and-click with a mouse that he instructed the original Macintosh to have no arrow cursor keys on the keyboard, thus forcing users to interact with a mouse even if they didn’t want to. When asked if he wanted to conduct market research into what the public wanted, he responded that he didn’t because the consumers “don’t know what they want until we show them.” Far from being the antidote to the Big Brother of 1984, then, Jobs was shaping his company to be exactly that by controlling how the user interacted with the machine. This control went right down to such levels as designing the computer’s case in such a way that only Apple engineers could open it, removing the possibility for users to open it up to look inside.
Fast-forward to today and Apple’s portable devices – the iPhone, iPod and iPad – still adhere to this philosophy. In some ways it’s beneficial – by controlling the hardware and software Apple is able to produce a seamless user experience. The downside, however, is that the user is severely limited in how they use the devices. This means that, by Jobs’s own acknowledgement, the portable devices all look and act exactly the same. And the focus on simplicity has meant that many features have been stripped from the products. The iPhone, for example, was extremely limited in its first release, to the point that it lacked 3G connectivity, GPS and bluetooth transfer capability. Although it has progressed a lot since 2007, it hasn’t introduced anything revolutionary since its inception and indeed still lacks many features offered in other devices. Its uniqueness now lies mainly in its number of applications available – yet many of these apps are merely making up for the lacking native functionality.
Apple workers were quick to talk of Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion”, which essentially means his ability to twist and distort facts to suit his ideas, and persuade others to believe him. This is something the public has been able to witness in his public keynotes, and it allowed him to sell products that lacked many features as “revolutionary” and “amazing” – buzz words he used for all his products to convince the public that that’s exactly what they were.
While the “1984” advert has gone down in history as one of the greatest advertisements ever made, there is the wondering of whether Apple should have been the company to release it. After all, what’s more Big Brother than restricting something to such a degree that users are forced to adapt how they use it? While cursor keys have made it back to Apple keyboards, the ethos is still present. In iTunes, purchased items can only be played on Apple’s software – forget trying to put the iTunes film you purchased onto any other device than an Apple one. If you have an iPad, thanks to it missing the industry-standard of a micro-USB port, if you want to connect a digital camera to place your photos onto it, you need to spend more money purchasing Apple’s own cables to allow you to do so.
But to what degree does this “walled garden” approach genuinely benefit the user? Certainly, a good experience is given to the user by Apple managing its own hardware and software, so it can ensure that the experience is seamless. But it’s likely a stretch of the truth to suggest that micro-USB ports cannot be included without ruining the user experience, or giving a degree of customisation to the iPhone and iPad will ruin the experience. It seems instead that the ideology was born from Jobs’s desire to control – something that he never tried to hide, and Walter Isaacson’s biography of the man explains in great detail the lengths to which Jobs would go to ensure control of his products.
With Jobs’s untimely death and a new CEO at the helm of Apple, it will be interesting to see if more flexibility becomes of the iDevices.
