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Comment by Gaelan

8 years ago

Didn't the iPhone launch US-only?

It doesn’t matter. Subsequent iPhones are launched globally.

Microsoft does not launch subsequent products globally.

The surface takes many many months to reach many parts of Asia. Surface studio is only in a hand full of countries. Surface laptop is only in a handful of countries. Surface book is almost non existent.

The only thing Microsoft makes that it launches well is the Xbox.

  • Even that is not true - Xbox One didn't launch in a whole bunch of territories, including half of EU! If you lived in say, Poland, and wanted a next-gen console, PS4 was the only choice since X1 wasn't even available at all for few months after launch. Hell, Xbox Live didn't support 90% of the world until very recently, once again, if you lived in Poland, Czech Republic, Greece, you could kiss Xbox Live goodbye unless you had a way to purchase foreign top-up cards. Sony never had this problem, their products launch globally and work globally.

    Edit: to add insult to the injury, Microsoft teams seem to think that literally no one ever speaks a language outside of its original country. Until literally 2-3 updates ago(so for 4 years after launch) you couldn't set the language on your Xbox One to a different one than your Region, which of course would prevent you from accessing the store correctly. Live in UK but want to have the console in German? Tough luck, you better set your region to Germany, there was no other way. It's just gross incompetence.

  • > It doesn’t matter.

    Yeah, I remember this argument. It depends on whether it benefits Apple or not. For example, when Apple moved off of Google for it's mapping, people were saying that this was just the first iteration, the first version of Maps, when it clearly wasn't, and that the fact that it lost features and information that were there before, people were okay with it because it was Apple's first map software (when it really wasn't).

    I just find it interesting the way this argument is used for and against Apple.

    • And other people also said that it has to be as good as google maps now. And it has gotten better. Still not google maps good.

      1 reply →

Original yes, but it also launched only on AT&T in US as well and wasn't all that successful. The real uptick in popularity started with IPhone 3G (with AppStore) which was available world wide.

  • I can't help but suspect that Jobs would have been happy to leave the iphone US exclusive if it had not been for the gray market of jailbroken phones.

    Hell, i could have sworn he had to be talked down from lawyerbombing jailbreakers and cydia into the ground.

    • > I can't help but suspect that Jobs would have been happy to leave the iphone US exclusive if it had not been for the gray market of jailbroken phones.

      Why wouldn't he want to sell it worldwide and make Apple significantly more money?