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Comment by elblanco | Hacker News Reader

> Now we weren't the first to this party, but we're gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste.

I'm not sure if I'm more amazed at how something as inane as this basic operation is touted as a huge feature differentiator, or that the CEO of a multi-billion dollar a year computing company, who's been in the business literally from the start, talks about it with breathless urgency like it's the second coming.

Copy/cut and paste is not a major feature, it should be buried among a list of minor enhancements. It's like the equivalent and releasing a new keyboard with a shift key on either side!

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I think you are underestimating how hard it is to implement proper copy/paste on a touchscreen device with no keyboard. I must say that I find Apple's implementation very intuitive and easy to use.

Yes, I am calling it a basic feature. Like tires on a car. Every car has them, but rubber and tires are actually pretty complex things.

No, I'm not saying that it doesn't have certain considerations necessary to make it work well. We can't even get proper clipboard support in Ubuntu these days. So I'm not saying it's really that simple.

Yes, I am saying it's not a big feature. Again, it's like VW coming out with a new Jetta, and one of the specs they touted was "Now with tires!!!"

I think a slightly better comparison is if most other car makers had really lousy automatic transmissions that used 30% of the fuel, and VW waited to announce a car with an automatic transmission until they had one that worked really, really well and was just as efficient as a manual transmission.

You're right, it's exactly equivalent to releasing a keyboard with shift on either side in a world where keyboards don't yet exist. Multitouch is a different world.

> Multitouch is a different world

You are right, in a multitouch world, I have far more options for how to do this.

Having more choices generally makes it harder to find the best one.

Are you implying then that Apple:

1) Has trouble finding optimal solutions given numerous choices?

2) Has found the most optimal solution?

I'm implying:

1. It's unlikely that anybody has found an optimal cut+paste system for multi-touch devices.

2. The broader range of imaginable ways of implementing cut+paste means that the first solutions to market are relatively unlikely to be considered "good" once the various options have been more fully explored.

3. The large number of ways to implement cut+paste means that there will almost certainly be a significant difference in the quality/usability of different solutions. These disparities mean that the mere presence or absence of a cut+paste solution is not enough to judge whether a product does a good job of fulfilling the need for cut+paste. Simply asking whether a product has a cut+paste system is not helpful for comparing multitouch devices, because not all methods are equal, and some may be virtually unusable.

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