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Comment by groxter | Hacker News Reader

The reason that it IS a BFD is that Steve Jobs is now saying they have "high performance HTML5" on iPad. This is evidently not true. Here is an app for which it makes a big difference, something I prepared on my MacBook Pro (with the iPad in mind) only to be pwned by Apple's anti-competitive exclusion of the JS JIT compiler from iPad Safari: http://grokware.com/ff.php

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How exactly is that exclusion anti-competitive? Presumably Apple wants JS to be fast on the iPad just as much as anyone else does, and would only exclude something like that for a good reason.

You presume too much. Think, man. Free high-performance HTML5 web apps are 1) not under their control and 2) not profit-making for Apple, as they bypass the App Store.

You honestly think that Apple would deliberately hamstring javascript performance on the iPad so that people have to use native apps? I think it's pretty ludicrous to think they'd do that: their sales of the iPad are directly, heavily affected by perceived performance of the device. If it's slow, people won't buy it.

How many extra apps do you think that move would make people buy: 2? 5? So you think they'd cripple performance and lose hundreds of thousands of sales so that they can get people to spend an extra $20 or so at the app store, of which they'll get all of $6? If they wanted your extra $6 that badly they'd just up the price on the device.

I just don't understand this constant assumption that every decision Apple makes is anti-competitive and designed to achieve lockin. Isn't it way more rational to assume that they want to make the device as good as possible because they make money by selling devices, and that their decisions are primarily driven by that motive?

Naive.

I like the part where you addressed the glaring holes he pointed out in your argument and provided compelling counterpoints.

I got -4 karma points on this, for refusing to answer point by point the arguments of a naive Apple fanboy. I'll go back to just scanning HN, instead of participating. I've been a professional programmer for over 30 years, Written for Macs since 1984, I know what I'm talking about, and I find the current generation of developers to be, well, babies.

That wasn't a civil and thought-provoking contribution to the discussion, which is what HN at its best is about.

On the contrary, it was quite civil and thought provoking. It was simply terse, elegant, and to the point. "Naive" needn't have been interpreted as a personal attack, it was a sufficient and complete summary of the argument presented, implying it undeserving of response. Only lack of creative imagination would consider "Naive" not thought-provoking. It is not my responsibility to hand-hold and lead a conversation. If someone cannot immediately mentally extrapolate the implications of a statement, maybe they should ponder it and explore the possible meanings, giving me the benefit of the doubt as to poignancy. Instead, they vote it down, because it's not full of the superficial spoon-fed explicitness the down-voters expect.

Apple makes (much) more money selling iPad hardware than they make selling apps. They are not going to make more money by intentionally crippling Javascript performance, especially after so publicly touting it as an alternative to Flash.

If you're going to make up some conspiracy theory, at least make sure it has some foundation in logic.

Incidentally, I just tried the latest "fastest ever" Google Chrome with this. The frame rate DROPPED on my machine from 48fps to 18fps. I'm getting the feeling that pushing the performance limits of compiled JavaScript is not an effective endeavor right now.

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