Speaking at the Apps World
conference in San Francisco, Steve Wozniak has suggested that Apple might want
to consider offering an Android-based phone, before it potentially suffers the
same fate as BlackBerry. ”There’s nothing to keep Apple out of the Android
market as a secondary phone market,” said Wozniak. Woz,
who co-founded Apple, seemed to be making the remarks in response to the fact
that Apple might not be able to produce the next killer product that everyone
expects, and that unless it can continue to innovate, it could go the way of
BlackBerry, which was knocked out of the running far faster than anyone
would’would've expected. Personally, I think hell would freeze over before Apple
released an Android phone.
Apple,
according to Wozniak, has been rather fortunate in the last decade with the
massive success of the iPhone and iPad. ”A whole new category of product doesn't happen very often,” said Woz.
If it can’t create another new category, then Apple will have to face some
tough decisions — such as releasing an Android phone. Woz thinks that
BlackBerry could have saved itself if it had switched to Android, rather than
developing its own OS. ”BlackBerry’s very sad for me… [but] I think
it’s probably too late now [for an Android-based phone].”
Now,
if we just loosen our grip on reality for a moment and actually consider what
an Android iPhone would be like… well, I think we can all agree that it would
be pretty awesome. Imagine a version of Android that has been tweaked to be as
polished as iOS, running on iPhone-like hardware. I guess Apple would call it
the aPhone — and, presumably, it would have the usual slew of first-party
Google apps (Gmail, Chrome, Play) and access to the million-odd Android apps. I
can’t see any reason Google (which retains control over who can make official
Android devices) wouldn't let Apple join the party. And yes, if such an aPhone
ever came to market, I’d buy it in an instant – especially if it played
nicely with the iOS ecosystem (Apple TV, AirPlay, AirDrop, etc.)
The
Woz also spoke a little about Tim Cook, saying he needs a little more time as
CEO before any judgments should be made. Woz had harsh words for Microsoft’s
lack of innovation (“Microsoft sat there for decades, saying, ‘We’ are the
company of innovation, innovation, innovation.’ And I never saw anything
compared to what Apple was doing.”), and also for the NSA’s wide scale
wiretapping. Rounding out the talk, he also touched upon the silliness of
patent warfare(“Why don’t we just agree we’ll cross-license?’), and his
dubiousness of whether we’ll ever be able to produce a human-like machine
intelligence (“We don’t understand the brain. How do we make a conscious
computer?”)
The
odds of Apple ever producing an Android-powered aPhone are slim to none, of
course. But perhaps that’s what Woz was trying to get at — if there ever comes
a time when Apple realizes it has to make an Android phone to stay alive, it
might already be too late, just like BlackBerry. Once the world’s demand for
high-end smartphones is finally sated, probably in the next few years, it will
be interesting to see where Apple goes. Android, with competitive flagship
devices and its dominance of the low- and mid-range market, shows no sign of
slowing down. If Android’s market share gets to the point where developers no
longer priorities iOS, Apple might have to make some difficult decisions about
the direction of its future mobile products.
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