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Apple Releases New 'FaceTime Every Day' Ad
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You're almost right, it's actually, "MacRumors is full of Apple lovers and PAID Apple haters."
Nice ad, but...
At six seconds into the video, when the little boy says "Hi, Grandpa," look at the screen on the phone. You can see the grandparents, and then in the tiny secondary view of the person making the call, you can see ... a grown man!
Image
That would be the grown man holding the iPhone. Look at all the hands on the left side of the frame. It appears to me that a man and woman are holding their two kids. You can see a woman's hand holding the "hi Grandpa" kid, and another baby's arm next to him.
I think that the ad should have showed that the grandparents could use FaceTime to see their grandkids, rather than show the first few moments of the call - before the parents turned the phone toward the kids - but I don't think you spotted any shenanigans.
Skype is superfluous when your phone comes with FaceTime built in and it's much better quality. Why download a 3rd party app if you don't have to? I recently HAD to Skype with a friend in Tokyo (I'm in Osaka) and the reception was soooo FN piss poor. There was a constant loud whirring noise and the video was very pixelated. Japan has really fast fibre and this was late at night when there's not much traffic. I FaceTime with my mum back home and it's quite good. Not perfect but much better than Skype. The audio is flawless and the video is quite good. The only thing Skype is good for is cheap international phone numbers.
My mom calls me everyday and we talk for at least half an hour, she calls my aunties three times a week as well. I used it to chat with my friends on the weekend.
I agree. Some of my friends don't have Apple devices so we use Skype or Google Hangout sometimes, or SMS and regular call. But with the people who do have access to facetime, we never want to use any other thing, it smooth, stable and the video quality is much better.
Here's what Apple sold in the last quarter:
- 31.2 million iPhones (down from 37.4 million sold in the first quarter of 2013)
- 14.7 million iPads (down from 17 million sold a year ago)
- 3.8 million Macs (down from 4 million sold a year ago)
profits are down 18%.
Apple is NOT selling more than ever - they're selling considerably fewer devices than they used to. At the same time, they're bleeding market share in the phone and tablet sector - both of which have grown considerably while Apple has been selling fewer devices. The computer market share has stagnated somewhere below 5% in an overall shrinking market.
So please stop trolling here.
Really cool to see how FaceTime has given us more options to communicate without required plans from carriers.
Really interested to see how FaceTime Voice Only in iOS 7 will shape that even more, and how the carriers will respond.
Really interested to see how FaceTime Voice Only in iOS 7 will shape that even more, and how the carriers will respond.
The usage data only shows that iOS users consume more Internet bandwidth than others, and that can mean anything and nothing. It could mean that those Apple products don't work properly without an Internet connection, it could mean that IOS users spend more time on YouTube than others or play more online games. But it certainly doesn't show in any way that iOS is "the winner by far".
But yes, the market got bigger and it now also includes the vast majority of the human race -- who happen to live in second and third world countries where people will never have the money to buy an Apple product. That's the reason why all those cheap "junk" phones are now being produced and sold: To bring communication technology to those who were not born with a golden piss pot under their beds. That's something that Apple (and its average customer base) very clearly will never care about.
Facetime vs Skype:
Facetime only works on Apple gadgets, Skype works everywhere. You don't need to be a genius to figure out which solution will win this competition, even if the other one might actually work better in some cases and regions.
Hint: It won't be the one that only works on one rather expensive platform.
Eventually, open platforms will ALWAYS win.
No. Skype is actually good for communicating with the rest of the human race that doesn't own Apple products - and that is the vast majority.
A chill pill tends to work for your issues. Try one. It's really not that serious.
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These kind of ads I really like, Apple focusing on what their product can do vs. Nokia's ridiculous ad showing, "My camera is better than Your Camera".
I'd love if this were the case! But where is it?
Years and years after skype set the standard for voice/video over a data connection, we still don't have a real alternative... And the world is crying out for a skype that isn't skype!
Why on earth have hangouts decided that listing by conversation is better than listing by contacts (unless I'm missing something huge here).
Open audio and video codecs that are scalable and comparable (better...) than anything proprietary have always existed, so where is our defacto oss client/solution?
Why does almost everybody keep bringing up Skype over FaceTime? Yes it is offered on more platforms, I use it everyday for business calls but there's no video chat on the iPhone version of Skype so what's the point here?
Why does almost everybody keep bringing up Skype over FaceTime? Yes it is offered on more platforms, I use it everyday for business calls but there's no video chat on the iPhone version of Skype so what's the point here?
Ummm, of course there's video calling on skype's iphone client, has been for years.
To reverse your argument, how is facetime even comparable (pre-ios7?) when it doesn't allow (proper) voice-only calls? Almost as silly as another previous comment that said that facetime on the iphone was the first native implementation of video calling on a mobile phone
Ummm, of course there's video calling on skype's iphone client, has been for years.
To reverse your argument, how is facetime even comparable (pre-ios7?) when it doesn't allow (proper) voice-only calls? Almost as silly as another previous comment that said that facetime on the iphone was the first native implementation of video calling
He was probably meaning in relation to this ad.
Exactly. Most smartphones have basically the same features these days, but what makes iPhones stand out to me is that they're just straight-up easier to use. You can complain that they're not customizable enough until you're blue in the face, but ultimately, at least in my experience, they work. They do what you need them to do and do it quickly by cutting away all the clutter that can possibly be cut. I've used several Android phones and the main thing I noticed was that they're a lot like iPhones but with more clutter. More menus to navigate, essentially twice as many home screens (in the case of the Galaxy S phones, there's an app screen like iPhone's and an Android home screen on top of it for no reason), and a bunch of junk that makes it harder to navigate for your joe-average user. It's not that I CAN'T navigate Android, it's that I'd RATHER not have to navigate at all-which is how I feel using my iPhone. I've had multiple Android users come to me asking how to change a setting or something, and I'm able to do it for them. The thing is, I don't get iPhone users doing the same thing nearly as much, and I know a lot of iPhone users.
Not to be a fanboy... which this post definitely came off as... but I guess I'm on this site for a reason.
"It just works."
/fanboy soapbox
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If you don't mind using the king of dropped calls...
Probably shouldn't feed the trolls.
Thank you! This is exactly how I feel as well. Most phones do the same thing, but what makes them different, or special, is the way they do it! The experience, and I believe Apple has that. And yes.. I have had many Android phones up to a year ago before I switched to the iPhone. Happy with it, and sticking with it.
I see you're under the emotional effect of the video ad. come back tomorrow with a non-hormonal reply.
Yes, once or twice every two weeks.
At the minimum, it definitely beats the cost of international calling by a huge mile. Sometimes our Facetime conversations go over an hour. Then add on the benefits of seeing each other, possibly collaborating on things.
Just last week, two households needed to decide on some cabinet type and color. We could not get anyone to agree on anything by email. Then on facetime, both of us got on the web, looked at pages, occasionally pointing the phone to the PC, pointing at things for the right type and color etc. (I think) We came to some agreement after half an hour of talking about it! ( We needed to use the rear facing camera for such things, thanks Apple for making that switch so intuitive and easy).
For this purpose, we could have used screen sharing etc. but that is all too geeky a stuff for my counter party. Icing on the cake, I put them on my big screen TV using Apple TV, so a few of us on my side can participate in this family activity.
So it is not about technology. It is about getting day to day things done, in whatever way it feels comfortable to people.
Whenever I use Facetime across continents, it indeed feels a bit unreal that it is even possible to do this. I wonder if iPhone owners know about Facetime enough to put it to use.
So, I very much agree with basic message of the Apple Facetime Apple commercial. And this should inform people that this great feature exists and they should use it to enrich their lives.
One thing Apple can do to surface this feature better is to properly integrate this with the Phone app. It is currently not intuitive on the iPhone how to setup a Facetime call. Since the experience is similar to a phone call, it is probably better to have a button right on the Phone app.