It worked for Microsoft.

And you know all this... how?

The 10%.

Except that isn't what's happening. You don't have to buy Apple products. No one's forcing anything on you. If you don't like the Apple way, buy Android. Buy Palm. Buy Windows Phone 7. There are plenty of options. Some of them aren't even all that bad. ;)

There's probably nothing I can say to convince you that I'm not a fanboy, so I'm not going to address that.

Not at all, but RIM's sort of in its own little bubble catering to the enterprise crowd. Neither Apple nor Google is eating their market share because neither one cares all that much about that sector of the market. More people need good personal phones than awesome email phones. Plus, BlackBerry apps are a joke.

I view no Flash as a plus, but I hear you. Fragmentation may be a blown-out problem, but it isn't nearly as bad on iPhone as it is on Android. The 1.6 SDK is trash, and the apps bear that out.

That may be the case, but I don't think that's sustainable for Apple. At some point they saturate the market, just like they did for iPod. They need to keep expanding, and at some point the only way to do that is to allow other carriers in on the action.

Bullshit. How do you think the PC took off in the first place? Who were the first people to buy PCs? Developers. Developers had to build software that consumers would want, thereby making consumers buy the hardware that ran that software. Here, Apple made a device that consumers wanted -- the original iPhone never ran native software. It didn't matter. They sold a boatload, and cemented their status. It wasn't until after they were firmly established that iPhone OS 2.0 was released, bringing with it an SDK for developers.

And in that respect, you're probably right. Apple could easily give us the option to turn on full multitasking and out-of-band app installs. Consumers at large don't seem to care, and until they do, we won't see it. This is - again - the beauty of Apple's positioning. If any of this ever starts to matter to the mass market, they can turn these things on. I'm not saying Apple's decision is the right one; I'm saying they're positioned to win because average consumers don't seem to mind.

The difference is the open platform was better than what Apple had to offer. The PC won because it was technically superior. That isn't the case re: iOS vs Android. Restrictions or no, Android as a platform has quite a ways to go to catch up to iOS. If you need proof, look at the HTC EVO 4G. Beautiful phone, well-designed, powerful CPU, lots of RAM, lots of features, and a huge battery => can't make it a day of even light usage. Someone's doing something wrong, here. Add in market fragmentation, and the problems multiply. Adobe just shipped Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, which requires an OS that most Android users currently don't have, and who won't for a while. That "open" platform isn't doing much for actual customers.

Yes, and how does iPhone do relative to Android in countries where it's available as well? How many different Android devices have to be sold to make up those comparable numbers? Sure there are lots of Android devices, but the amount of money companies like Motorola, HTC, et al are making is a pittance compared to what Apple is making with its strategy.

You can make statistics say whatever you want. 90% of the apps in the app store are trash, and I can say that as a happy iPhone owner. The guys who are putting major time into creating good apps are actually making money. How many fscking flashlight apps do the numbers from that article include? How many fart apps? Just saying.

You (and most of the rest of the /. community) represent a tiny, tiny sliver of the consumer market. They've sold nearly 100M iOS devices. Apple haters love to say it's all marketing, but marketing only sells a shitty product the first time. People learn after that. If people keep coming back to buy, they're getting what they want. What you really mean to say is that Apple isn't giving you what you want; not the average consumer in general.