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It's all about execution. When Android manufacturers make these "innovations," by and large they're sloppily implemented and poorly communicated. They're genera

It's all about execution. When Android manufacturers make these "innovations," by and large they're sloppily implemented and poorly communicated. They're generally part of dozens of features that companies like Samsung try to boast about - so the net result is that consumers don't know what to pay attention to, they aren't inspired to feel lust for the product or any of its particular features, and so the product becomes just one more indistinct phone on the scrapheap. Whereas Apple focuses on a few core features to improve on and communicate with each phone, and they're overwhelmingly cautious - like only integrating Touch ID with a few spots of the phone at first. But they nail the initial execution, and the communication. So their phones are still the absolute centre of the market. And no other company can inspire product lust to the degree they can.

bentcorner 13y ago
> But they nail the initial execution, and the communication. So their phones are still the absolute centre of the market. And no other company can inspire product lust to the degree they can. While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. How much would you pay for Touch ID? It offers little security benefit, only allowing you to log in a tiny bit faster. I can log in with my passcode fairly quickly and often without even looking at the screen. Maybe $5? $10 at a stretch. Definitely not worth getting locked into Apple's platform for another generation. Edit: It will be extremely telling of the politics of touch ID internally within apple when we see the uptake of this stuff on non-iPhone hardware. Does the entire company believe in this technology? Will we see it on the iPad, iPad Mini? On Macbooks? Once we see deeper integration of touch ID across the rest of Apple's hardware devices and software services would a moat start being formed, but it would require a stern guiding hand within Apple to make it happen.
- gfodor 13y ago
  > While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. Uh, how many times a day do you perform some type of authentication of your identity? I have a feeling this will be one of those foot-in-mouth statements.
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    Haha, I certainly hope so - that's what I meant by my edit above. If Apple pushes this technology across the entire company then only at that time does it become a compelling part of the Apple ecology. If too many services/devices "chicken out" and avoid integrating with Touch ID then Apple will continue to be forced to carry legacy authentication mechanisms, lowest-common-denominator style. If this tech remains an iPhone (or even just iDevice) only tech, it's a (albeit impressive) party trick. Nothing provided by touch ID can't be eventually replicated by a competitor, patents notwithstanding. No other OEM is positioned like Apple is to pull this off, but it won't be easy to elevate touch id to how we today perceive something like retina.
    - sbuk 13y ago
      It seems that the technology is intrinsically linked to the A7 processor. I hate linking to a Quora article, but this one actually highlights why the A7 is such a leap. http://www.quora.com/Apple-Secure-Enclave/What-is-Apple%E2%80%99s-new-Secure-Enclave-and-why-is-it-important http://www.quora.com/Apple-Secure-Enclave/What-is-Apple%E2%8...
      - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
        tl;dr; Apple bought a company that made fingerprint scanners (like the one in the Motorola Atrix HD) and put the secure info in the secure area of the ARM chip, which ARM designed for putting secure info in. Except make that sound like the moon landing, SpaceX, Tesla and the Oceans 11 heist all rolled into one. Are we still allowed to call Apple a cult? Or are they a full blown religion now?
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        sbuk 13y ago
        > Are we still allowed to call Apple a cult? Or are they a full blown religion now? What was the point of that?
- ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
  It's a consumer product, so it's more about the feeling that only your fingerprint can unlock your phone. If it takes off, and people like it, you're going to see it everywhere. The politicking is just slippery slope stuff, who knows what's going to happen.
- jonny_eh 13y ago
  If it gets rid of passwords, it's the greatest invention since the iPhone.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  Strategically it has a huge benefit to Apple. Touch ID provides a secure way to authenticate your iTunes account, which millions have linked to their credit cards. If Apple ever starts offering payment services through iTunes (using NFC or some other technology), authenticated payments can be done in an instant instead of "just wait a bit while I enter my password".
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    By strategically I mean that while it may offer great benefits to both customers and apple, the technology in and of itself offers only a small barrier to moving to another platform. That barrier will rise with the adoption of touch id across Apple devices and services. If you're an iPhone user and I took away your iPhone and replaced it with an Android phone, would the first thing you complain about be touch id? Build quality, accessories, apps (maybe?) are all things that Apple has going for it with the iPhone that at the moment are more strategically important than touch id. It's like free samples at Costco. They're awesome, you miss them when you shop at a different grocery store, but at the end of the day there are other reasons why you shop at Costco and if you decided you needed to go to a different grocery store, those free samples aren't going to sway you to come back.
    - gnaffle 13y ago
      If I was used to paying for goods with my iPhone using touch ID and I had to start entering a passphrase instead with another phone to make payments, it might very well be one of the biggest complaints I had.
- panacea 13y ago
  "Does the entire company believe in this technology?" Huh? Apple isn't a bunch of fiefdoms with competing and disparate product silos. Apple as a whole is completely behind this technology, and the fact that you don't understand that renders your opinion fairly moot.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. No, it's not. It has two properties that are very important: 1) It's very secure (not like Face unlock, which could be fooled by a photograph or fail to work depening on poor lighting etc). 2) It's very natural (you already press the home button to open the phone anyway, you don't need good light, you don't need to hold it so that the camera centers your face etc). So people will use it, unlike Face unlock which is usually discarded. Why are both of those things important? Because it means it can be used a authentication mechanism for buying stuff. In fact, Apple has already integrated it with iTunes IIRC. BOOM, you don't even have to add your Apple ID password anymore! Add Bluetooth 4, Passbook, camera for scanning codes and stuff, and half a billion iTunes accounts, and you have an "mobile payments" winner.
schuke 13y ago
I never used an iPhone 5s but I would agree with the importance of execution. Lenovo has been shipping ThinkPads with fingerprint scanners for like what? Almost a decade? (ThinkPad T43 had fingerprint scanner, it was released in 2005) Those scanners never defined anything. I thought it'd be handy to save all the passwords at one place and then just scan your way through all the websites. Turns out it didn't work. Successful scan rate was too low, having to swipe one's finger again and again made me feel like an idiot. Then there's software. That bulky ugly software that reeks of corporate. Although I kept buying ThinkPads, I stuck to my vanilla Windows Vista/7 and never installed those "utility tools".
- r00fus 13y ago
  I think your observation aligns with startup culture in general - an idea (fingerprint scanner) can be valuable, but the execution is what matters. Execution means in this case, identifying the probable use cases, picking one or two flagship ones, really refining those (i.e., ensuring the hardware & software are good enough to make it all work as smoothly as possible). I think Apple is in a unique place because they are beholden to no upstream provider (either hardware or software), retailer (they own their own stores) or component manufacturer (in the case of x64 chips, they flirt with AMD enough to keep Intel in check - for ARM solutions they run the show). They have volumes that can command suppliers' compliance. Lenovo is hobbled by Windows, and the margins in that space are small enough that it's honestly not worth their time to simply "make it work right" w/r/t their drivers, which is why my Thinkpad fingerprint scanner never got used after about day 3.
  - corporalagumbo 13y ago
    I think this is slightly apologetic thinking. Apple didn't start off with a complete ecosystem of obeisant suppliers, in-house hardware, software, and retail stores - they built up their empire piece by piece, starting I suppose from the late-90s. And we still don't know their master-plan. The space has been open for any other company to decide to compete on that level. Lenovo could have decided to do that. Any other company could have decided to rise up and play the long road too. It was not impossible to think like this in 2005. Instead Apple's competition has fallen over themselves to try and chase every short-term opportunity, leading to constant reinvention, total lack of focus, and squandered potential. Frankly, it's embarrassing - you would think that enough people outside of Apple recognise the scale of the challenge Apple poses and decide to respond. Instead these companies come off looking like cheap idiots.
nutanc 13y ago
You mean like how they executed with Siri. Siri was also supposed to define a market and take over the world. In the new iPhone there is no mention of Siri at all.
- corporalagumbo 13y ago
  Siri hasn't gone anywhere and it's still being improved. There's no mention of it anywhere? So what, there's many other previous headline features they're not highlighting. I'm not implying that Apple can't make mistakes - it's clear they can with Maps and Siri - but a) it would be extremely uncharitable to judge them on version 1.0 of Maps and Siri, both ridiculously complex features, and most importantly b) their overall product strategy is still the best in the business. Doesn't matter how much people kick and scream about the newest Apple mistake - does anyone even remember Antennagate? Tech people cling to these memories, but normal people forgive and forget.
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    You have a good and reasonable argument, but I'd like to offer a couple of counterpoints. 1. In other contexts, the sheer perfection of their 1.0 products are exactly what Apple is judged so successful by. As with the commentary on the fingerprint scanner: the praise is that while other manufacturers deliver buggy, incomplete features, Apple gets things right on the first try. 2. While it's true that everyone makes mistakes, Siri and Maps were arguably the highest profile features on the 4S and the 5, respectively.
  - geon 13y ago
    I don't think Siri falied, but disapointed. Apple hyped it up so much you would believe it could do anything, and work flawlessly. Instead it works halfway reasonably in a few soecific situations.
- AaronIG 13y ago
  I can't recall the last time I used Siri on my iPhone, or anyone else I know, for that matter; however, I've used Google Now on an almost daily basis on my Nexus 7. Execution is key.

bentcorner 13y ago

> But they nail the initial execution, and the communication. So their phones are still the absolute centre of the market. And no other company can inspire product lust to the degree they can. While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. How much would you pay for Touch ID? It offers little security benefit, only allowing you to log in a tiny bit faster. I can log in with my passcode fairly quickly and often without even looking at the screen. Maybe $5? $10 at a stretch. Definitely not worth getting locked into Apple's platform for another generation. Edit: It will be extremely telling of the politics of touch ID internally within apple when we see the uptake of this stuff on non-iPhone hardware. Does the entire company believe in this technology? Will we see it on the iPad, iPad Mini? On Macbooks? Once we see deeper integration of touch ID across the rest of Apple's hardware devices and software services would a moat start being formed, but it would require a stern guiding hand within Apple to make it happen.

gfodor 13y ago
> While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. Uh, how many times a day do you perform some type of authentication of your identity? I have a feeling this will be one of those foot-in-mouth statements.
- bentcorner 13y ago
  Haha, I certainly hope so - that's what I meant by my edit above. If Apple pushes this technology across the entire company then only at that time does it become a compelling part of the Apple ecology. If too many services/devices "chicken out" and avoid integrating with Touch ID then Apple will continue to be forced to carry legacy authentication mechanisms, lowest-common-denominator style. If this tech remains an iPhone (or even just iDevice) only tech, it's a (albeit impressive) party trick. Nothing provided by touch ID can't be eventually replicated by a competitor, patents notwithstanding. No other OEM is positioned like Apple is to pull this off, but it won't be easy to elevate touch id to how we today perceive something like retina.
  - sbuk 13y ago
    It seems that the technology is intrinsically linked to the A7 processor. I hate linking to a Quora article, but this one actually highlights why the A7 is such a leap. http://www.quora.com/Apple-Secure-Enclave/What-is-Apple%E2%80%99s-new-Secure-Enclave-and-why-is-it-important http://www.quora.com/Apple-Secure-Enclave/What-is-Apple%E2%8...
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      tl;dr; Apple bought a company that made fingerprint scanners (like the one in the Motorola Atrix HD) and put the secure info in the secure area of the ARM chip, which ARM designed for putting secure info in. Except make that sound like the moon landing, SpaceX, Tesla and the Oceans 11 heist all rolled into one. Are we still allowed to call Apple a cult? Or are they a full blown religion now?
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - sbuk 13y ago
        > Are we still allowed to call Apple a cult? Or are they a full blown religion now? What was the point of that?
ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
It's a consumer product, so it's more about the feeling that only your fingerprint can unlock your phone. If it takes off, and people like it, you're going to see it everywhere. The politicking is just slippery slope stuff, who knows what's going to happen.
jonny_eh 13y ago
If it gets rid of passwords, it's the greatest invention since the iPhone.
gnaffle 13y ago
Strategically it has a huge benefit to Apple. Touch ID provides a secure way to authenticate your iTunes account, which millions have linked to their credit cards. If Apple ever starts offering payment services through iTunes (using NFC or some other technology), authenticated payments can be done in an instant instead of "just wait a bit while I enter my password".
- bentcorner 13y ago
  By strategically I mean that while it may offer great benefits to both customers and apple, the technology in and of itself offers only a small barrier to moving to another platform. That barrier will rise with the adoption of touch id across Apple devices and services. If you're an iPhone user and I took away your iPhone and replaced it with an Android phone, would the first thing you complain about be touch id? Build quality, accessories, apps (maybe?) are all things that Apple has going for it with the iPhone that at the moment are more strategically important than touch id. It's like free samples at Costco. They're awesome, you miss them when you shop at a different grocery store, but at the end of the day there are other reasons why you shop at Costco and if you decided you needed to go to a different grocery store, those free samples aren't going to sway you to come back.
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    If I was used to paying for goods with my iPhone using touch ID and I had to start entering a passphrase instead with another phone to make payments, it might very well be one of the biggest complaints I had.
panacea 13y ago
"Does the entire company believe in this technology?" Huh? Apple isn't a bunch of fiefdoms with competing and disparate product silos. Apple as a whole is completely behind this technology, and the fact that you don't understand that renders your opinion fairly moot.
coldtea 13y ago
>While they may have implemented Touch ID really well, it's still just yet another way of unlocking the device. Strategically it has little benefit to Apple. No, it's not. It has two properties that are very important: 1) It's very secure (not like Face unlock, which could be fooled by a photograph or fail to work depening on poor lighting etc). 2) It's very natural (you already press the home button to open the phone anyway, you don't need good light, you don't need to hold it so that the camera centers your face etc). So people will use it, unlike Face unlock which is usually discarded. Why are both of those things important? Because it means it can be used a authentication mechanism for buying stuff. In fact, Apple has already integrated it with iTunes IIRC. BOOM, you don't even have to add your Apple ID password anymore! Add Bluetooth 4, Passbook, camera for scanning codes and stuff, and half a billion iTunes accounts, and you have an "mobile payments" winner.

schuke 13y ago

I never used an iPhone 5s but I would agree with the importance of execution. Lenovo has been shipping ThinkPads with fingerprint scanners for like what? Almost a decade? (ThinkPad T43 had fingerprint scanner, it was released in 2005) Those scanners never defined anything. I thought it'd be handy to save all the passwords at one place and then just scan your way through all the websites. Turns out it didn't work. Successful scan rate was too low, having to swipe one's finger again and again made me feel like an idiot. Then there's software. That bulky ugly software that reeks of corporate. Although I kept buying ThinkPads, I stuck to my vanilla Windows Vista/7 and never installed those "utility tools".

r00fus 13y ago
I think your observation aligns with startup culture in general - an idea (fingerprint scanner) can be valuable, but the execution is what matters. Execution means in this case, identifying the probable use cases, picking one or two flagship ones, really refining those (i.e., ensuring the hardware & software are good enough to make it all work as smoothly as possible). I think Apple is in a unique place because they are beholden to no upstream provider (either hardware or software), retailer (they own their own stores) or component manufacturer (in the case of x64 chips, they flirt with AMD enough to keep Intel in check - for ARM solutions they run the show). They have volumes that can command suppliers' compliance. Lenovo is hobbled by Windows, and the margins in that space are small enough that it's honestly not worth their time to simply "make it work right" w/r/t their drivers, which is why my Thinkpad fingerprint scanner never got used after about day 3.
- corporalagumbo 13y ago
  I think this is slightly apologetic thinking. Apple didn't start off with a complete ecosystem of obeisant suppliers, in-house hardware, software, and retail stores - they built up their empire piece by piece, starting I suppose from the late-90s. And we still don't know their master-plan. The space has been open for any other company to decide to compete on that level. Lenovo could have decided to do that. Any other company could have decided to rise up and play the long road too. It was not impossible to think like this in 2005. Instead Apple's competition has fallen over themselves to try and chase every short-term opportunity, leading to constant reinvention, total lack of focus, and squandered potential. Frankly, it's embarrassing - you would think that enough people outside of Apple recognise the scale of the challenge Apple poses and decide to respond. Instead these companies come off looking like cheap idiots.

nutanc 13y ago

You mean like how they executed with Siri. Siri was also supposed to define a market and take over the world. In the new iPhone there is no mention of Siri at all.

corporalagumbo 13y ago
Siri hasn't gone anywhere and it's still being improved. There's no mention of it anywhere? So what, there's many other previous headline features they're not highlighting. I'm not implying that Apple can't make mistakes - it's clear they can with Maps and Siri - but a) it would be extremely uncharitable to judge them on version 1.0 of Maps and Siri, both ridiculously complex features, and most importantly b) their overall product strategy is still the best in the business. Doesn't matter how much people kick and scream about the newest Apple mistake - does anyone even remember Antennagate? Tech people cling to these memories, but normal people forgive and forget.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  You have a good and reasonable argument, but I'd like to offer a couple of counterpoints. 1. In other contexts, the sheer perfection of their 1.0 products are exactly what Apple is judged so successful by. As with the commentary on the fingerprint scanner: the praise is that while other manufacturers deliver buggy, incomplete features, Apple gets things right on the first try. 2. While it's true that everyone makes mistakes, Siri and Maps were arguably the highest profile features on the 4S and the 5, respectively.
- geon 13y ago
  I don't think Siri falied, but disapointed. Apple hyped it up so much you would believe it could do anything, and work flawlessly. Instead it works halfway reasonably in a few soecific situations.
AaronIG 13y ago
I can't recall the last time I used Siri on my iPhone, or anyone else I know, for that matter; however, I've used Google Now on an almost daily basis on my Nexus 7. Execution is key.