The difference between iPhone + Android: Great since day one
marco.org
marco.org
But now, some influential people start saying how much better their version is. Specifically their closed, sealed-off, experience-driven version. Arguing "ease of use" and "shiny end user experience" rings really hollow to me. I use vim -- think I care about easy to use or shiny user experiences? -- and I use it because it's a powerful tool for its job. I just don't get it when hackers start telling other hackers that they should use a more restrictive environment because it'll make them feel better or is easier to use. Instead, ask yourself: is it the most powerful tool for the job?
So sure, tell your parents and siblings to buy an iPhone. Hell, use your iPhone for anything you can -- it's a fantastic device. But stop telling future developers that it's worth giving up control for rounded corners and subtle shadows. And stop comparing its competition negatively to an environment that I, and others, find superior to any other.
Can we stop this silly meme of calling a switch between two unrelated products an "upgrade"? WinXP => Linux is an "upgrade" that has 0% software compatibility, and requires a massive amount of retraining and reconfiguration. Which is to say, it isn't an "upgrade" at all.
Naaah. Too easy. No comment.
Ubuntu is a software platform that provides improved performance in a variety of ways, including 90% software compatibility, since most of the important software is web, Flash, or Java based. (Of course, I'm talking about home use.)
Marco is a developer with some very successful products, and I really respect his work. I feel that makes him influential in the hacker community and this post did make it rather high on HN. However, respecting Apple's products has gone too far when I can barely tell it from a PR piece. I don't know what it is, but it's not news.
I really don't want to begin discussing regular Joe's desktop experience -- summarizing people into 2 camps trivializes the actual wants and needs of a computer user. What I can tell you is that on a site devoted to hacker news, this post seems like 'dog bites man' with an easy shot at a strawman.
I don't mean this to be a biting criticism. As a developer, I just wish that I had started using linux earlier because I would have learned a lot more and it would be more second nature. Out there, someone 10 years younger than me is being turned off from using linux on the desktop because of posts like this, and that's a shame.
Total agree.
After years of windows, i moved to Linux Desktop since last 2 years. How i wish, i had done that earlier.
What you are missing is that what you are calling "polish" is 90% of the quality of a product to a consumer.
It's not about gradients or drop shadows. It's about saying no in the development process, and making sure everything just works.
To give a counter-example of polish, here is a problem I had on my work machine. It was recently upgraded to Fedora Core 11, a seemingly sensible choice. When I first logged in, the volume control mumbled something about having been deleted. I had a look for another one, only to discover that there is no simple volume control. For some development reason, which I don't give a shit about, someone has removed the existing volume control, and some other subsystem is meant to provide one, but they haven't gotten around to it yet.
That is why Linux on the desktop is dead, and as long as Linux is developed in the bazaar, it will always be dead (but great for geeks!)
You can put people into two camps about most anything -- enthusiasts, and everyone else.
This applies to cooking. Cars. Television. Sports. Video games. Interior design. Phones. Music. Architecture. Computers. Gardening. Reading... and I'm running out of objects by looking about my apartment, but the crux is that some people give objects and activities a large amount of attention when compared to the vast majority of the population - that doesn't give a rat's tail about anything beyond the most basic functionality.
Many developers, or at least the ones that frequent forums on computing topics, are just that - enthusiasts. They are very savvy, very passionate, and sometimes considerably out of touch with everyone who doesn't care nearly as much. There's a distinct difference between someone who waits months and months for a specific type of TV to come out, pays 4x as much for it compared to other TVs for its size, and can take advantage of all the features they paid for. This isn't surprising as they've become a bit of a domain expert on the points that relate to their needs. However most people just want the biggest, flattest TV they can buy for the lowest price.
Would I like random mass storage on the iPhone? Sure, why not. My mom? My mother after 17 years still doesn't know what directories her files end up in (Profile\My Documents or \Profile). She has my father assist her in getting her music on her iPod. Recently I said, "Mom, you use a computer every day. You need to remember where (Windows, OS X) puts your files" in which she retorted, "No, I just want to send Lorraine some photos. I don't care how it works."
And that's it. Most people want to just get something done on a computer. Most people just want to drive to the store. Most people just want to have fun with a video game and don't care how critically acclaimed it is. Most people just want a roof over their head that looks familiar when compared to other homes they've been in. Most people just want mustard to put on their hot dog and aren't espousing the qualities of some mustard on online forums. And so forth.
Everyone else is an anorak. And that's fine as there's a market that caters to them, whereas the rest of the population is still plumbing the first 10% of depth. Everyone is passionate about different things. And most people aren't passionate about most things.
VIM is indeed a powerful editor. It gives you a lot of tools for quickly editing text. The problems I face, usually aren't related to typing. It's in figuring out what to type in the first place, and where to type it. When dealing with a large code base, the things I need most are code navigation capabilities. What is this? Where is it used? What does the call graph look like? Etc. Is VIM the most powerful tool for code navigation? No. It's far from it. One of the best is a tool called source insight. It's simple, fast and easy to use.
No one will ever tell you are cool for learning how to use it, because you don't have to learn how to use it. It just works. There's no sense of mastery involved. It just works. It brings the information to you, when you need it, in the context it's needed in. That makes it VERRY powerful.
You can say the same thing about a phone. Bringing you information in a way that is efortless and enjoyable is powerful.
It may not be "cool" with the same ubergeek street cred you get from learning VI. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful. Far from it.
you can do the same thing on a mac, in a elegant way, so what's the advantage to do it on linux ?
I use vim
you can also use vim in a elegant mac terminal, what's the point here ?
And stop comparing its competition negatively
who was doing that ?
I'm loving my Nexus One here, which has just been updated to 2.2 :) Different ringtones (Anything you like) for sms/email/facebook, tethering, portable hotspot! Flash? Simply in a different league than iPhone. The early Android hardware sucked, but the N1 is pretty solid.
>> The Android ecosystem doesn’t seem capable of producing devices that are great on day one. Yet Apple consistently pulls it off.
IDK, I've heard some things about the iPhone 4...
I had an iPhone for 3 years or so. It was a great device for what it did, but the whole hassle of having to use iTunes. No removable storage. Can't just stuff mp3's on it and use as ringtones. Can't just copy photos off it unless you go through the right software. It's just a PITA. Not to mention the mass of features that are just lacking on the iPhone but you take for granted on Android.
Exactly. Mobile doesn't mean you can copy your stuff onto something portable. It means you've got a window to your stuff in your pocket. Google's information-centric approach makes a lot more sense than Apple's device-centric approach.
I agree, I like copying over mp3s and photos, finding out what folder they need to go in, if they have filename restrictions, that sort of thing. I have done that for a long time. I understand that, and find it easy.
What I have a problem with is people who think that everybody wants it that way. Do you not understand that the majority are not like us, do not understand computers, need point and click interfaces? Why does this always come up?
The only reason I have to manually copy music and video is bandwidth so it's likely that at some point in the near future those will also be handled for me.
Plug it in to a windows pc, it appears as a read only drive with your pictures / videos on it for 'just' copying off.
* I don't have windows
* Read only? lame
Once upon time I was trying to get data out of iPhone, that was paired to iTunes on a harddrive that went into the big bucket in the sky. To my surprise, connecting it to the Ubuntu box allowed me to copy out all the data I cared for, without any wonky iTunes.
But I agree with you, having microSD or at least USB mass storage is much better.
No removable storage - not an issue for me. My brother has often misplaced his microSD card for his Samsung phone though, so I'm not sure if this is something I'd like.
MP3s: http://www.ehow.com/how_2111958_convert-itunes-mp-mp.html
Copying photos: http://www.macroplant.com/index.php (granted, this feature should be there by default)
The iPhone is a great phone once you jailbreak & unlock it, IMO ;-)
EDIT: Great smartphone comparison chart:
http://lifehacker.com/5575317/smartphone-comparison-chart-di...
Personally it was a stupid thing to do, and I wish I never bothered buying the iPhone. I now have an HTC Desire.
While article is a depressingly one-sided article (marco's prerogative, totally fine with me), he misses a very big point, that for the sake of full disclosure should at least be expounded upon beyond a dry-wit analogy to Desktop Linux.
Android and iOS are moving in two different directions, and have benefits for two different crowds. While they both enjoy their share of people who play by the party lines, and will gladly pull out their iPhone or Android Phone the minute the opportunity to use an application presents itself, it doesn't stray away from the fact that the two platforms should not be compared to one another.
Where the iPhone shines in brilliance, quality, and polish, Android reigns supreme when it comes down to making the phone do what you want to the core. That is not, however in the least bit to say that hacking the Android platform is inherent to its very existence. I'm not going to beat the "one is open the other is not" horse, because it's already dead, but it's very hard to ignore the obvious that Android is a pragmatic platform that prides itself on the berth of UX centric platform evolution where the iPhone gives users features, and expects them to work with those features withdrawn from the scope of downloading Apps.
Apple's approach has often been "we'll tell you what's good for you". That's how we got iMacs only available in Steve Jobs's favorite shade of blue (later more colors were added) the green "resize this window to Apple approved dimensions" button in Mac OS X, and now the one-size-fits-all iPhone.
I certainly have no problem with people liking the Apple Way (typing this on a 13" MBP, charging my iPad in the other room), but I find it endlessly annoying when someone feels incredulous that someone else might want something outside the strictly-defined Apple bounds.
Something about the design of the Droid keyboard - the flat keys, the squishy response, odd placements of some keys - makes it much harder to type on accurately than my Nokia E71 whose keyboard is nearly half the size. And the fairly decent predictive / autocorrect functionality of the Droid's virtual keyboard gets deactivated when you're using the physical keyboard, so there's nothing to rescue from typos.
It's actually faster to use the virtual keyboard, so you really do wonder why the physical keyboard is there.
No-one who's used a Blackberry for a while will be in any doubt of the value of a good physical keyboard.
Great points, Sam.
The Nexus One was a quite a nice device from day one, and in my opinion better than the iPhone 3GS.
But this is apples to oranges. The way a device is from day one is less relevant when the race is long. What was important in competing with Apple's first move was being first to a viable second place, which then iterates rapidly in a "aim, fire, ready" style. If Google had waited until they had a perfect second place, they'd still be starting with a tiny marketshare (hence lack of apps etc.), and perhaps Palm wouldn't have failed as it did. But Google didn't wait, and they're solidly in second place, and gaining.
I can take a photo/video and share it via email/youtube/facebook etc.
I can use any mp3 as a ringtone
I can have different ringtones for different things - sms/email/facebook
The browsers handling of windows is better - js doesn't stop running on background windows.
The level of detail in things like settings - battery usage is awesome. The other day my battery ran out in an hour, and I checked and found it was the facebook app using it all.
Tethering / wifi hotspot is awesome - I'll be using it when I'm on holiday.
Also syncing with contacts / calendars is great. Maybe you can do that on the iPhone easy enough, but it didn't seem like it. Now my wife just adds things to our shared calendar and it shows up on my phone.
As with everything though it's probably best to just try one for a week and see if you prefer it. I sold my iPhone 3G after I'd tried android for a day.
My previous phone was Dopod with Windows Mobile 5 since 2005 (very long time huh). And during my first month using iPhone 3GS, I've been struggling using it (and iTunes). There are times when I want to use back my old phone.
I see this sort of thing from reviews a lot. The Droid's keyboard is there because there are customers who want it. There are plenty of Android phones without them as well. It's perfectly reasonable that some people want a smaller and more sturdy phone, but I won't buy a smartphone without a real keyboard. The trackball is good for positioning the cursor when editing text. It's faster than arrow keys and much more precise than the touch screen. I am disappointed that they are rapidly disappearing, sometimes replaced by an optical trackpad.
Android is about power and choice. The iPhone is about a great implementation of a specific vision. Both are doing very well in the marketplace. The idea that one is wrong and the other right is almost certainly mistaken.
The new Android devices (EVO and Samsung Galaxy in particular) are just as good, if not better in some respects than the iPhone. Froyo as an OS is better and worse than iOS4. And from what I've heard about Gingerbread,I think Android will again take a lead against the iPhone.
I think the real difference between Android and Apple is that Apple is good at finding a market and coming out with a compelling product. That's in their DNA. But what is also in their DNA is their ability to lose that market due to slow innovation after day one. The only real exception here is the iPod. And they won that battle on fashion as much as technology and UX.
If I were Apple I'd be really worried about Android. I think it's conceivable that iPhone sales could plummet in a given year. I plan on getting a Galaxy phone as my next one.
Pure desktop Linux never took off, for various reasons (at least some of them non-software related at all). It doesn't matter, the desktop is no longer the main way we use an OS.
I've always thought the whole "year of the linux desktop" was a meme mostly kept alive by people who never have and would never use Linux anyway. People who actually use Linux don't think it's going to suddenly take over. On the other hand, most think it is actually a good system today.
Graphics, sound, built-in wireless, usb 3G modem, built-in webcam ... all of them worked out of the box.
The experience is great, although I'm still not recommending it to non-technical users ... once the Linux desktop is good enough, you still have the problem of apps running on top, and unfortunately the environment is not really friendly to proprietary software.
Pretty much the entire appeal of Mac is a) no viruses/spyware (because nobody writes viruses or spyware for Mac because its userbase is too insignificant to target) and b) big icons and prettier colors, making it "easier" to use.
Windows is an institution. It doesn't just give way once something becomes objectively superior; many systems have been superior to the their Microsoft contemporary and Windows didn't magically crumble. It's about installed base.
I have tried using physical keyboard on Blackberry and I felt pretty comfortable. I bet other manufacturers would come out with better physical keyboards. My flatmate has a Thinkpad with a trackball. Initially it was pretty tough to control it. Trackball and physical keyboard isn't bad just because I think it's bad.
So much from a Tumblr lead dev! I expected better.
This post was brought to you by Thinkpad, with trackpoint as a sole pointing device ;).
It should be obvious that shipping with a broken copy-past is miles better than shipping with none at all.
The iPhone wasn't good, because it only shipped with great features - it was medicore, because it shipped without many of the features (flash, copy-past, the ability to run multiple programs at the same time) that are needed.
It is much like homework - if you give a great title and fantastic abstract, but zero content you should not get an A.
The problem with shipping broken features is that there is no pressure to fix them. It's much easier to add new features than to fix existing features. Every time there's an update to Android, there's a huge list of neat new things in that release. On the other hand, I've never seen a list of things that didn't work quite well in earlier versions or were a bit janky or a bit confusing or inconsistent or user-unfriendly or complicated, but are now fixed.
Google tries to improve Android by constantly adding new stuff. That's exciting to people like us, but it will never turn Android into something that is as consistent and polished as iOS. The things that bothered me in Android 1.6 are still mostly there in 2.2.
Longer down the road I think Android will have a much larger market share (just like Windows) - - while iOS will provide a better and more streamlined experience (just like Mac OS).
Guess what folks, there are many various differences! Personally I choose Android because I value the various dimensions on which it scores highly over those where the iPhone scores highly. But don't try and pretend there is only one dimension to this.
I didn't had these problems (No need using the iTunes in the first place)with the G1, Motorola Droid, even my old N95.
So what is so great?
Because you can't just get an Android phone and use it and be happy with it. There's always some hipster or yuppie or desperate-to-be-cool nerd that'll start going on and on and on about how amazingly great their iPhone is, was and always will be and how they have taste which you, as a non-Jobs product buyer, obviously don't. A lot of people like me switched from the iPhone to Android because we like it better, get over it. Also, there'll be more people that like and use Android than iOS, get over that as well.
And since we're reaching for snarky old jokes (ie desktop linux), how about this one: What can Android users do that iPhone users can't? Shut the fuck up.
Also, I've yet to meet my first 'Android fanboy', but I've met plenty of Iphone fanboys in real life.
I'm sure they exist but either not around here or they're not as much 'in your face' about it.
I've met a lot of people who've switched to Android (mostly by buying the Nexus One) and sold it within a week to go back to their iPhones though. I've met a few people who bought non-Nexus-One phones but didn't like them and wanted to switch.
It seems like in Vancouver, everyone either has a feature phone, a Blackberry, or an iPhone, except that one kid I saw on the bus with a Palm Pre.
This should only be a problem if your happiness completely depends on seeking validation from others.
Because you can't just get an iPhone and use it and be happy with it. There's always some hipster or yuppie or desperate-to-be-cool nerd that'll start going on and on and on about how amazingly great their Android is, was and always will be and how they have features which you, as a Jobs product buyer, obviously don't. A lot of people like me switched from the Android to iPhone because we like it better, get over it. Also, there'll be more people that like and use iOS than Android, get over that as well.
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Transcribes quite nice to iPhone too, don't you think? What you have explained is the concept of fanboy, which I believe both exists in the iPhone and Android community.
I had the original iPhone and every feature just worked from day one; I didn't need any updates or anything. And yes, I could live without cut and paste.
I now have Nexus One, and although I love and do not plan on going back to an iPhone at any point, I still think the iPhone is just a more complete, more polished phone. It's a perfect mass market device because 99% of the consumers do not care about tweaking their device or changing ROMs.
I had Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron, but I have gotten my MBP back from a friend. MBP is better. Things work together better, and I don't need to tweak a million things or change themes. I just want to do my work.
Apple makes great phones and great computers but saying that everything they create is great from day one has gone too far on the fanboy dark side.
But MS is getting better each year too, like Apple.
The main difference is that MS and Apple improve he overall user experience while Linux and Android center themselves on geeks. Witch is great, for geeks, but not as good for other people.
On Linux I can easily record any sound-video a program plays-displays , I can't do it on windows or Mac because of DRM. It's great for me, normal people don't care.
People care about being able to easily classify their weeding photos using face recognition tech like iphoto does. Linux could do it in complex( and more powerful) ways that my mom can't use.
As far as linux desktop goes, it's more of an OEM problem. Ubuntu is getting really close to being consumer friendly. Even if it WERE 110% consumer friendly, there isn't even one OEM who produces a great linux machine. I'm not talking Dell loading it on one random machine or other guys like system76. Someone needs to step up and be the "apple of ubuntu/linux" (don't charge the high high premium though).
Other than that though, his use of 'copy and paste' as an example is something that really depends on perspective. He argues that 'copy and paste' is a single isolated feature, and that Apple waited until they could make it great since day one. However, if you looked at 'copy and paste' as merely an element of a larger system, then launching that system without one of it's key features makes it not so 'great since day one'.
Not true. I did all my updates with my computer.
That is, like Apple. Vertical integration.
Unfortunately the Linux kernel itself breaks binary compatibility quite often, so you can't distribute binary blobs if you want to keep up-to-date (and you want that, since newer kernel versions have more hardware drivers). Linux distributions in general have a bad history on maintaining backwards-compatibility.
And without third-party proprietary applications being distributed for this "commercially supported" OS, it's not going to make any inroads.
Actually, if you really care, you can still run a.out and glibc5 ELF userland binaries on Linux. On the other side, any m68k or ppc for classic apps are no-go on OSX, as well as some ppc-for-osx. Also for third party drivers, you need version for specific OSX point release, they are not generally very compatible.
There are also entire classes of hardware that are unusable on OSX, period. (I remember wasting particularly lot of time on trying to get IrDA run on OSX with a little bit more than just IRCOMM. On Linux, it worked out of the box.)
Great at Day One or not, the customer will eventually select freedom of choice and this is where Apple will lose.
Throughout history we've been struggling with the Google/iOS problem, but the debate took on different forms: totalitarian versus democratic government, planned economy versus "free" economy, big government versus small government. The question is: should certain kinds of decisions affecting a state be centralized or dispersed? In theory, dispersed power (among citizens, or users) should win the day, IF NOT for inevitable market inefficiencies (information asymmetries, NOISE, emotional human irrationality) and malicious private agents who prey on the uninformed. There is an argument to be made that computing platforms fall under this debate. I would argue that Google's open platform also makes it vulnerable to far too many exploits: viruses, buggy, crashing, battery-draining software, and adware that might indiscriminately display pornography. All for certain powers of customizability that I (and many others) find trivial. Like choosing system fonts and having video wallpaper.
If everybody in the world had the means to discriminate between spam software and non, then I would think that a system under which anybody could post software targeting any part of the system would be an excellent thing. But they can't. WE, as hackers can. Maybe. But for a majority of the people, they must enter into a "social contract" with a curator wherein decisions of quality and security are made for them in exchange for a price premium equal to or less than the value of time saved in "not worrying" about malicious code. Beautifully, this space is evolving to a cycle of two year hardware refreshes (less than that for hardcore users), and these serve as market voting mechanisms for the job or efficacy of the curator (in this case, Apple and Google).
In the United States (which some would argue is the apotheosis of enlightenment thinking of the government problem) we have deferred legislative power to a body that we pay to do the thinking for us. We cycle through this body periodically democratically (as we can in mobile). We certainly don't have time to ponder over the minutiae of certain articles of legislation. In the same way, I would argue, I don't have time to discriminate between one piece of software for compatibility, reliability, security and quality, and another making nearly identical claims to functionality. Maybe you do, and that's why you choose Android. Meanwhile, I'll trade certain features for peace of mind.
I lean towards Android when I think about how cool it is to modify the OS to make it do cool things.
But when I think about what product I would recommend to family, I have to recommend the iPhone over Android.
They don't care if its open. They care that someone is ultimately responsible for making sure that its going to work now and that it has a future.
The choices they need to make when they buy an Apple product are few and clear. When I've had problems with an Apple product, Apple Care takes care it.
If there were an Android store, it would be on the back of a semi and would move to a different mall parking lot each week.
iPhone's big plus is providing value for long period of time. Still today original iPhone is useful device and except 3d games most of new apps can be used too. Which is great in fast changing market.
1. great since day 1. Well no copy and paste for 2 years? and great since day 1. Contradictory?
2. Hold Different? Great since day 1?
3. Needs iTunes desktop software.
4. No external storage options.
5. No background (until pseudo support in os4, clearly not day 1)
6. no open app store.
the list is never ending really. i sure hope the poster realizes despite these significant shortcomings, he thinks the iphone is great since day 1
The original iPhone had a mediocre display, a forgettable design, zero apps (and, contrary to the revisionism that is now the rage, had zero plans on every having apps at inception. Apple and AT&T saw apps as a unnecessary risk, and web apps were the only solution), a terrible back-facing camera (and no front facing camera, which in those early days was considered an egregious oversight), and it was strangely 2G in a world that had already moved to 3G.
It succeeded because it was Apple. To say that it was "Great since day one" should embarrass the speaker, and if Nokia, or Motorola, or anyone else released that phone it would have been panned.
The latest iPhone needs to be cocooned inside a case lest you shatter the good-looking-but-bad-engineering glass back or touch the untouchable antenna. Great since day one?
It has a video chat application that inexplicably only works between iPhone 4 users on WiFi, which to most other companies wouldn't even classify as "beta". Great since day one?
It has a notification system that is horribly crippled by the most generous evaluation. Great since day one?
The iPhone is a gorgeous, gorgeous phone. It is the new trendsetter. It is not without many flaws however, though it sits in that remarkable favored area where flaws are glossed over. Indeed, it's telling that Apple's flaws only become obvious to the faithful once the replacement is available. Suddenly, you'll note, every Apple-head is talking about how the iPhone 3GS is dated, feels plasticy and cheap, etc (Hey, I was saying that since it came out, but of course as the deliverance from Apple it was impossible that could be true, until the next deliverance).
These sorts of cult-religious screeds are an embarrassment to technology.
I mentioned Gruber earlier because this Marco guy is stealing his schtick.
And when it borrows from Android's notification system, replacing the terrible system it has now (they're already hiring in this space), at release people like Gruber and Marco will say "See, this is what makes Apple great: It's great since day one!"
When you can look at the world like that, defining "day one" to be when the product is no longer second-rate, it's easy to say that.
Android is "great since day one", so long as you ignore everything prior to 2.2.
They didn't have a use for a front facing camera, or could make it easy enough to use, so they didn't include one. Now they have one because they were finally able to implement video chat in an easy to use way (Face Time).
They didn't have copy and paste until they figured out how to make it as elegant and easy to use as it is.
They didn't include 3G in the original iPhone because it would have affected battery life too much.
They only introduced the SDK once the API was in a usable state and they got the necessary documentation and infrastructure in place to support 3rd party developers.
Face Time currently only works on WiFi, but from what I read about it it actually works for Joe Average. On other phones you have to be a geek to figure out which software to install and how to set it up.
For some people it is certainly valuable to have barely working bleeding edge features on the phone, but for the 99% of users out there who're not interested in tinkering with their phone Apple's approach makes a lot more sense, IMO.
What? No you don't.
>They only introduced the SDK once the API was in a usable state and they got the necessary documentation and infrastructure in place to support 3rd party developers.
I have an acquaintance who has this bizarre tic that when he can't afford or obtain something, and strangely feels defensive about it, he rationalizes his self-perceived inadequacy by claiming that he was intentionally putting off getting whatever he didn't have (girlfriend, BMW, leather couch...the list was endless) until he could have perfection. It is doubly effective, in his mind, because it also subtly denigrate people who did have what he didn't, insinuating that they settle for second best.
Everyone, but apparently him, saw right through it, but it kept him feeling good I guess.
I see this same rationalization with Apple. It essentially opines that if Apple isn't doing something, it isn't because Apple is behind the ball/lacking, it's somehow because everyone else is lacking.