Samsung may be the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer – almost a third of the one billion handsets shipped last year were from the Korean OEM – but it’s Apple that still enjoys the greatest profits, and with a record number of iPhones sold last quarter, they’re obviously doing something right.
But Steve Wozniak believes that the company that he co-founded is missing out on a big opportunity in the smartphone space, and that there are considerable spoils to be enjoyed by bridging the gap between Apple and Android.
Speaking with WIRED, Wozniak said: “There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.” He continued: “We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.”
But he also highlighted a key distinction that separates iPhones from their Android flagship counterparts: feature overload. Apple, he reasoned, takes a more measured approach to adding new features to its devices. “If you have something really good, don’t change it, don"t screw it up,” he said. “You pick up a Samsung phone and say "smile" and it takes a picture, but how much innovation is that? That’s just throwing in a lot of features. People don’t really choose their smartphones based on features. I think Apple is superior at being able to say no.”
Wozniak"s comments come after it emerged that, over a decade ago, Steve Jobs had wanted to get Apple"s OS X running on Sony Vaio notebooks. If Apple could share its software for use on another manufacturer"s hardware, would it really be such a leap for the company to use a different OS on its handsets?
Despite Woz’s enthusiasm for the idea of an Apple iDroid, let’s face it – it’s incredibly unlikely to ever happen. And don’t even get started on the idea of a Windows iPhone.
Source: WIRED