Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilduck | Hacker News Reader

Apple's cut is the same as Xbox, Playstation and the Switch and you _do_ have to use their stores and their physical media sales also gets a cut. The Switch can already be hacked to run Android and play other games from other stores, the latest Xbox and Playstation are essentially just blessed configurations of PC hardware, but everyone is totally cool with that situation and those devices being locked down and restricted. Why is nobody up in arms about those?

The standard being asked for and the outrage only being applied to Apple seems... fake.

View on HN

> Why is nobody up in arms about those?

This made me think about why I'm more and more OK with hardware being limited to "blessed" activities.

The older I get, the more time I like to spend doing activities, as opposed to spending time configuring software and hardware to do activities. I don't value getting things working as its own endeavor anymore.

As such, and after spending several decades fighting Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to play videogames on my PC, I value a console's focus on playing games as their core competency.

I like that I can turn on my playstation, pick a game, and not have to figure out the optimal settings for my graphics card, installation options, or wonder if my drivers are properly updated for this game.

Sure, it's not perfect, but it's also no longer my job to perfect.

I still use a computer to do general computing tasks, but it's only doing the tasks I can't do elsewhere. And those tasks are few in number, though great in importance to my hobbies.

Apple sells many times more iphones than Nintendo sells switch consoles, so even if you consider those as equivalent products it makes more sense to complain about Apple since they are a dominant force on the market while Nintendo is tiny in the handheld space in comparison.

Apple's devices are personal computing devices, not video game consoles.

Not really. They're general computing devices which perform "blessed" activities. They simply have a broader (though, not that much broader these days - you can do a surprising amount on a console) range of blessed activities.

Consoles still play games as a core competency, but they can also also run a broad array of apps. I can, for example, watch YouTube and Hulu, and browse the web, on my Switch.

Please explain how the Xbox isn’t then. It has storage, runs applications, has a web browser, standard PC input peripherals and hard drives work for it. The hardware is essentially just PC hardware. It seems like marketing difference more than anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com