Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

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"Apple" = "genius" (OP) + prosumers love Apple (above)

Can't we have a bit of cooling down on this Apple fan thing? The first and last Apple computer I booted myself did crash hard and there was no way to recover, go into BIOS, "hack" it if you will. Ok it was 10 years ago but still, when I see an Iphone owner I ask: show me your files, your music and pic files. Don't you /own/ these?

How can you hack something if you don't have access to its files? When I mount my Ipod, I always wonder why tf they did rename all my music to F01.mp3, F02.mp3, etc. And because of this renaming there is a silly upper limit on the number of tracks I can hold on this said wonderful gadget (I use it because it has a 80G sized belly).

We should be hackers here (and defend the positive meaning of this word given by pg, particularly now). I understand why a CEO would love to use a nice looking toy as their phone, even in a tech startup. But I feel any true hacker should/would feel imprisoned with any device that you cannot mount and scp to, right?

Why would I care about files? I want to see a photo, I want to listen to a song, I want to open a document. I why would I want to hack it? I don't want to hack my car, I want to use it. Ok, I am an iPhone programmer, so I need to see below the surface. But the typical user does not. I am sure you know Clarke's law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Do you know what makes it so? Invisible implementation details. File system is an implementation detail. RAM vs. ROM is an implementation detail which exists solely because of the technological limitations. The classics of UX argued about need to hide these details long before iPhone.

Why do you think we see the rise of different "clouds"? Because they hide another layer of details. And yes, they move files you love so much further away from us. For the best, in most cases.

The times when hackers and users were the same people a over. Hackers today must understand, that the users of their products are no longer other hackers (with exceptions, of course) so different rules applies. Normal user will not care about implementation details. They may scare him. What the user want is to pick your product up and just use it. Failing to understand that you fail as a hacker. On the other hand, succeeding to hide implementation from the users is a great hack.

> I why would I want to hack it [document]?

Well, have you never been in need of opening a .doc with a simple text editor like vim and fix some issues? Really?

> The times when hackers and users were the same people a over.

That not my point. I reacted to the false claim that prosumer (ie power users / hackers / hn readers) prefer Apple.

As a matter of fact, most geekest geeks I meet in my job are all having Nexuses. Maybe because I live in China, but it was about the same in France and in Germany.

Interestingly, I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive. Suddenly, a thing that I just want to work (in this case, the music player) requires that I think about how I'm going to put files onto it, what the best way to synchronise those files is going to be, whether or not I have to mount it myself, if I ought to write scripts to manipulate it, the feeling that I need to write scripts to manipulate it, else why have all of these programming skills?

When really what I wanted to do was just listen to music while I'm walking around, and have a limited amount of worrying when it comes to getting music onto the device. (IE, it Just Works territory) My behaviour is now circumscribed in other ways - my attention is split between things I really want to work on and this malaise of I ought to be crafting better tools to work with my music player.

"You can just set up rsync once!" is kind of a non-argument response to this - an Apple gadget, in this case, I set up nonce. Plug it in, it initializes, and syncs everything. Now I can listen to music where-ever I happen to be, and I don't have those circumscriptions to my attention.

If my Apple device annoys me sufficiently that I really want to have that level of control, there's a myriad of devices out there that automount as USB devices, that I could set up all sorts of nifty on-insert rules and script to high-heaven.

"I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive."

This look like an orwellian paradox to me, like "thinking less makes you free". Having low-level access don't mean you /need/ to use this power, it means that you /can/. Not having this power means you gave the keys to someone else. I'd rather keep most of the keys on my side, personaly.

The first time I saw an Ipod, it was at a party, in a friend of mine's hands, looked good, he had nice music, then I asked him to give me a few mp3, and it was "impossible right now". My god...

--> Never bought an Apple product myself (the Ipod I use is my wife's).

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