You would see people doing mental gymnastics trying to defend their closed anti competitive practices, disregard for standards. I would cheer a Sennheiser/Bose more than any version of Airpods, I would rather not have a multi trillion dollar company gobble up other industries through unfair advantages.
Seeing a hacker crowd do this is just beyond bizzare.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think being anti-Google and FB would be more accurate than being pro-Apple.
Also, during the years I've observed the "pro-Apple" gauge changes as the time zones change, ie. it tends to be all-time high when it's noon in California - which is understandable.
There was a thread the other day where some people seemed pretty miffed that Google requires a Pixel to connect to the internet before you can unlock it's bootloader.
Then you go into a thread about third party app stores on iPhones and you see people saying that being blocked from installing software that Apple hasn't blessed is actually a feature.
Different people and all that. But the general sentiment on HN is definitely more forgiving of Apple than others.
Apple has done the wrong thing many times, but audio is not one of them. They offered a legitimate better product, to the point the only headphones I would rather use are IEMs that cost 8 times as much.
Of course, none of those people ever fit the more common definition of hacker for more than a few years, if ever, even if you assume hacker means “good coder” or similar. And they certainly never fit the information security definition.
There's no mental gymnastics involved, no upstanding hacker respects "standards" unless they're better for the user (often they're not). It is a matter of taste and preference. Remember, Microsoft also was for a LONG time an attractor of hackers, until the early-mid 90s when Windows 3.1 became the focus (and it sucked for hackers, who fled to OS/2 briefly, then Linux, then Apple when they got tired of tweaking Linux, now some flowing back to Microsoft or Linux).
The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.
Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.
Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.
History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.
Possibly the most reliable phenomenon I've observed as a mod is that people believe HN is biased against what they like and in favor of what they dislike. This shows up most often with politics - for a recent example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734307 ("HN leans left") followed by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734354 ("HN leans left?") and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734392 ("You're completely delusional if you consider HN to be left leaning"). For an amusing (to me anyway!) set of examples see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
But it works the same way with other things, like $BigCos. Each $BigCo has a fanbase and a foebase. Each fanbase feels like HN is biased against "their" $BigCo and in favor of some other $BigCo.
No doubt the same mechanism makes sports fans feel like the refs are biased against their team. The feelings of a sports fan determine not only the direction of perceived bias (no fan ever thought "the refs are consistently biased in our favor") but also its intensity (the more passionately a fan is devoted to $team, the more strongly they are persuaded about the refs' "bias").
Readers with no particular passion on a topic are less likely to perceive bias or feel much about it either way.
I believe that the way this works is that if we feel strongly about $foo, we're much more likely than the median reader to notice posts about $foo, especially ones we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and to weight them much more heavily. What starts as a feeling in us thereby turns into a perception about the world, often one that is very intensely held and impossible to dissuade.
This is not to say that the community, the refs, the mods, or what have you, aren't biased! Just that the existence or quantity of possible bias can't be decided by this mechanism, which is the mechanism that drives online discussion. In fact, the primary concern of any serious attempt to decide or quantify bias would have to be making sure that it wasn't distorted by this psychological mechanism, which is so powerful.
(This is a bit more than I set out to write about this! it's a hobbyhorse of mine, as it makes moderation moderately more complicated...where by moderately I mean extremely)
I was making the point of the HN users. Specially the characteristic of downvoting and negating criticism in this case.
You are right though, because I strongly feel about the anti competitive issues Apple indulges in, maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them.
Although, I think there is a positive bias as well, which I care less about. Like one of the commenter mentioned that Final Cut Pro being launched on iPad was the top post through large parts of the day.
> maybe I visit those threads more and tend to notice them
You may be the first person who has ever indicated that they've gotten that point!
But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.
Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.
How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.
You ask if that's how you'd like to be treated.
I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.
HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.
You don’t really have to buy AirPods, there are lots of products out in the market that compete in that space. Just because Apple provides a certain product doesn’t mean you are being forced to buy it.
Another example is, no one is forced to buy Apple Music, but for sure it pops up front and center when you buy a iOS device or Mac. In fact, even when I keep removing the application from the Mac, on a version update it comes back again. It has integrations into the system and other core system apps that other products can't get and defaults matter. On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
I don't even want to get started on iCloud etc.
I never noticed, having never bought Apple Music before and just using spotify instead. I guess if I wanted it to run on a HomePod, I would need it?
> On top of this they will give you free subscription for 3/6 months when you buy a new device knowing full well that most customers won't bother cancelling. All of this behavior takes the air out of competitors like Spotify and is extremely anti competitive.
Doesn't Spotify do the same thing?
It is good that you are using Spotify and supporting an independent company, but as I was saying defaults and ease of access matters. Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
> Spotify is not playing in a level field and regulators have failed to ensure that they are able to.
Spotify is still dominating music streaming, more so than Apple Music or Amazon Prime Music (which we used to use since it came free with prime).
Spotify has to pay for these and has to compete for this with other music streaming companies.
Also, comparison with smart speakers is disingenuous. There are a billion iPhone users itself. No non big tech company smart speaker comes even close.
> Spotify is still dominating music streaming
Because of nailing the product early on and being world class in playlists and music recommendations. Even if Apple music comes 80% close, just by holding distribution advantage, they will capture that market.
I like my Apple products but this services thing is truly destroying a lot of the good experiences they can provide.
There are a lot of people that defend the far and few apple negative comments.
The only way to prove this would be by doing some data analysis. Maybe worth it’s own post
It is like people who think they are being hip for either hating or loving X, when lots of people love or hate X already, so it isn't really weird either way.
I care what my options are in the end, a lot more than ideology or something, and Apple worsened my options compared to before. The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
How did AirPods existing ruin your options? You can choose to not buy them, I don't, I like conductive head phones better anyways (non-Apple, before the AirPods came out, and they don't suck, so I don't get what you mean by apple producing the only BT headphones that don't suck?). Or do you mean you want to buy AirPods but you don't want to use an iPhone, or you want to use wired headphones only and don't care for dongles?
> The end result is I don't listen to music from my phone anymore.
Seriously, this is the mental gymnastics I'm talking about. None of this is really stopping you from listening to music on your phone.
Now my choices are:
- AirPods, which I don't want to shell out more money for and deal with charging/caring for them, but otherwise they'd be the best option.
- Non-AirPod BT headphones. I have nice Bose ones from work. These lack Apple's extensions to improve pairing and headset (mic) mode. In headset mode, the earphone quality drops to like worse than early 2000s cellphone. Standard pairing is annoying. It's a bit annoying having to charge them. I also don't want to shell out more money for earbuds (the headphones aren't so portable).
- Dongles, which I tried. Turns out they don't work with inlined mics, don't work with older iPhones (so I can't leave them on a shared car aux), are fragile, and are really easy to lose. Can't charge while using one either, but that's nbd. My car seats ate two and the last one broke. It also just feels stupid having to use these.
- Old iPhone. I kept my 6 until it broke. I still have a spare 5, no longer usable with AT&T, which I use to play music in the car.
Yeah I want to listen to music on my phone, but they've made it sufficiently annoying that I don't anymore. It's a clear regression.
You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone, which I've never seen before but lets go with it. There are dongles that have microphone inputs (Cubilux Lightning to 3.5mm TRS Microphone Adapter with Headphone Jack), but I'm assuming you can't use those because the microphone and headset are sharing the same jack somehow?
Your car doesn't support bluetooth, and you use multiple generations of iPhones so you can't just leave the dongle in the car. This is unrelated to airpods since you can't use those while driving anyways.
AirPods are expensive, I get that, and you aren't satisfied with cheaper non-Apple options on amazon. I'm happy not using airpods, since I hate earbuds anyways, but I guess not everyone is like that. Would the non-existence of AirPods make things better? I haven't had trouble pairing my conductive headphones, I guess I don't notice any distortion because it is going through my bones anyways, and I'm not using mic.
> You have a wired car aux solution that...provides a microphone
No, by mic I mean taking calls and meetings on my earbuds/phones, which is a common requirement. Most earbuds have inlined mics sharing the same jack.
Car aux issue is separate. One of my cars does have BT, but that's even worse because the phones fight over it or the pairing sometimes doesn't happen. Maybe "pass the aux" is not a thing anymore and I'm the only one who wants passengers to play their own music sometimes, but this wasn't a problem before.
That said, I hate BT more and have been using the same Bose QC20 wired earbuds and Belkin adapters for 4+ years. There are semi-decent options out there.
If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
I just use my phone for fewer music-playing situations than I otherwise would, and when I do use it for playing music, it's a mixed bag. Controls on the car console are nice (aside from that the UI sucks and exhibits all kinds of glitches, but that's not Apple's fault), but BT is BT, so, more annoying and less reliable than a cable. My $120 BT headphones are... fine, but I'd rather have better wired headphones for the same price and not have to charge them. Being able to connect to a bluetooth-enabled receiver across the room is handy, but also janky, because of course it is, because it's bluetooth.
If they'd just kept the jack, everyone could be happy. Except Apple, from the somewhat-lower sales of wireless audio devices and especially AirPods.
1. I plug dongle into car aux for my iPhone 12 mini to use.
2. Next day, girlfriend wants to play her own music from her iPhone 6, I say to plug the Lightning in.
3. Dongle doesn't work with iPhone 6 despite being same connector -_- She takes it off to plug into the 3.5mm.
4. Dongle falls beneath car seat and is never seen again. Presumably it's next to the other one that got lost the same way.
Went from "it just works" to screwing up the most basic functionality ever, plugging in the damn aux. And it's while you're driving.
Universals are always wrong of course: we actually used a dongle for the kid's wired iPad headphones. It doesn't suck for us using a dongle, so I'm guessing our experience was really different from yours.
> If it were, then people wouldn't buy AirPods, so Apple would get rid of the dongle like they got rid of the jack :)
Nope, our 6 year old is not getting AirPods anytime soon.