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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

What Apple wants and what I want seems to intersect about 95% of the time, at least in terms of phones and laptops.

Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else.

I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer.

I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.

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In my experience, Apple customers mostly just convince themselves that they must want whatever it is Apple chooses to offer at the moment. This is most easily seen whenever the new version of an Apple product arrives, lacking a feature they had relied on. They immediately set to work persuading themselves they can make do without that.

This seems dismissive, especially when you're talking to other devs who have a lot of experience with different OS's. I'm sure some people just accept whatever Apple pushes because they want to have an iPhone for the status signal, but there are a decent number of tech-informed people who prefer MacOS for reasonable reasons.

The easiest person to fool has always been yourself. Apple didn't bring that about, but they absolutely rely on it.

How can I reply to this?

If I agree with you that Apple sucks, then you were right that Apple sucks.

If I say most of Apple's design and philosophy decisions are the best option for someone like me, then you were right Apple sucks because I'm trying to convince myself otherwise.

The only version of my experience you'd believe is the one you believed already: that Apple sucks.

Well, you're right, as far as that goes. But there's the old T-shirt slogan, "If you can't change your mind, are you sure you still have one?" The processes by which Apple arrives at its feature set and design necessarily differ radically from the process that determines what features any individual needs. So, any overlap (insofar as that differs from what everybody else does) must be largely fortuitous, unless in fact your process is to look at what they offer and choose to want just that. Or, you are just one of the tiny minority where they happen to match by accident.

Clearly almost all Apple fans have to be in the former group. It is just possible you are in the latter, instead.

It is the same, BTW, for political parties.

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