Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimacs2 | Hacker News Reader

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I never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives.

However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand.

It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.

Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.

Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.

> Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.

This is entirely subjective and I disagree. As do many other people. Some people want chonky 17 inch gaming laptops and other people want 12 inch macbooks and some people want something inbetween. Some people want products in form factors that don't even exist. I personally want a macbook with an ergonomic keyboard built in! But that's just me talking about what I want. The market for laptops is large enough to sustain a huge degree of choice, but you are insisting that there is an absolute limit on form factors as decided by... you? If not by you, then by what? The government? A standards committee?

> Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7.

No one is "locked" into the Apple ecosystem. Not even remotely. You're right, if you want a headphone jack on an iPhone you'll have to live with using an iPhone 6s or earlier. It's fine to want a headphone jack on your modern iPhone, but that is entirely different from you not having a choice. There are markets where people don't realistically have a choice, but smartphones and laptops definitely aren't those markets.

> Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.

The entire premise of your argument is that consumers need to be protected from manufacturers. Sometimes, I would absolutely agree with that. But with laptop form factors? Or not having a headphone jack on every single smart phone that's out there? That's absurd. If someone buys a Samsung phone and finds out only after buying it that it doesn't have a headphone jack, there's plenty of actions they can take post-purchase if they find that aspect of their new device untenable.

> Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive.

Is it actually blatantly unpopular? Are you sure this isn't just the false consensus effect coming into play for you? As I previously mentioned, for things like the headphone jack there are a ton of options with top of the line specs out there. Purchasing decisions are always about compromise and not every niche is always going to be accommodated by the market. My ergonomic keyboard laptop still doesn't exist, despite me very much wanting it to. I have plenty of fancy headphones I can't use with my phone without an additional external DAC. I guess that sucks, but given how I use my phone, it has had almost zero impact on my life. For people that find that feature indispensable though, then they will probably also have to think about their purchase and will rightly be upset that one of the features they valued in the lineup of phones they've been buying isn't there anymore. I encourage those people to be loud about it, just as you are. That's part of this whole market thing, and there's plenty of cases where people's voices have absolutely made a big impact on the decisions made by shortsighted companies. Just don't expect everyone to fall in line with you.

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