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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

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My wife buys a new watch and keeps her iPhone, so now we have 1 useless watch as we only have 1 iPhone in the house. I would use the watch as would my daughter, it's a nice watch, but we have Androids.

You could sell the watch which is useless to you to someone from whom it's useful in exchange for local currency. Next, you could exchange that local currency for an item you do find useful. Problem solved!

The AW is an iPhone accessory. It's a bit like complaining her old iPhone case won't work on your Androids. They aren't made to work together, and I would find it odd to force Apple to make it work.

Its not about being die hard or for the sake of an Apple logo alone.

Apple just often does stuff in such an elegant way that it defines entire product categories. In most cases, Apple products are qualitatively and quantitative better.

Apple Silicon-based laptops, XDR Pro Display, Apple TV, Airpods, etc.

Better for who? People locked-in to the Apple ecosystem. Their laptops aren’t qualitatively better because the CPU is fanless, I can’t run Linux on them without the help of someone cracking the problem for me. That’s qualitatively worse. You can name any set of features that are better and I can name reasons the product is worse, because it’s objective to your personal beliefs about hardware usage.

You can run linux (https://asahilinux.org/) on them, and it actually works pretty well. Apple has also helped out Asahi Linux to some small degree to get it to work (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578).

So we agree that…

> without the help of someone cracking the problem for me

Apple had no plans to support such an endeavor and still don’t regardless of how many pieces of the puzzle they hand the Asahi team. The Asahi effort is marginally above a Hackintosh in terms of Apple sanctioned device usage.

Ehh... you can't use an NVIDIA card without someone cracking the problem for you. Having started using Linux in the late 90's, you couldn't run linux on most systems without someone cracking the problem for you. I certainly can't run FreeBSD on most laptops, regardless of vendor because no one has cracked the problem for me. This is the nature of open source OS's. You absolutely can run Linux on it, because Apple worked with the Asahi linux team to make it possible.

You think Microsoft had any plans to support Linux on a Surface Pro? You think IBM ever planned to support linux on Thinkpads before users did it on their own? This isn't the example of anticompetitive behaviour that you think it is.

That seems like a bold claim that there's no way to compete. I can see the argument that no one can make that better product because of Apple's locked APIs and internal carve outs, but there's a huge third party peripheral market for Apple devices, and even people who are all in on the ecosystem use them. Most people I know have non-Apple cases on their iPhones and use non-Apple wireless charging, specifically because there's better and more diverse products there.

If anything, Apple Watch is the product where they're the most vulnerable to someone else doing it better, and also the one that would most likely have insane sales if it worked well on Android.

> That seems like a bold claim that there's no way to compete. I can see the argument that no one can make that better product because of Apple's locked APIs and internal carve outs

So you agree? Apple does limit the available APIs. Just because a bunch of companies can make charging cables does not prove isn’t being anticompetitive. Cases and cables are the part of the market Apple can’t control.

I agree that Apple can be anti-competitive. I disagree with your assertion that it's because Apple users "never would consider buying non-Apple products". I even know people with iPhones and non-Apple smartwatches and workout tracking peripherals that they're happy with.

Your argument in the now-flagged OP was essentially that the reason no one made another smartwatch was because anyone with an Apple product is incapable of even considering buying anything non-Apple, which is patently untrue.

What is patently untrue is that Fitbit was ever given a fair chance to be as good as a product when paired with an iPhone. That is what my comment was originally pointing out, that there are other consumers out there with agenda to not buy another wrist computer brand. There are dogmatic consumers and non-dogmatic consumers and everyone inbetween but Apple made it impossible to choose another device.

I just thought the article paragraph was a bold take and not true (and obviously 9to5mac is biased), and it resulted in flagging which is unfortunate but not uncommon for any Apple criticism threads.

I'm not sure about that. Buying and wearing watches is what it is. You're only thinking about the basic tech consumer or people on a budget.

The apple watch doesn't replace a fitbit or even a nice mechanical watch in plenty of scenarios.

That may be true, but having customers who want to only use products from one company doesn’t make that company a monopoly, which is the topic sitting behind this article.

So then we agreed that final paragraph is irrelevant to the arguments of a monopoly. It’s misdirection from the fact that no one can build a competing quality product on their locked down platform. It has nothing to do with consumer choice because there is no choice. That is the monopoly, lack of ability to fairly build on their platform.

You act like Android doesn't exist. Consumers have chosen the Apple ecosystem and all that entails.

I’m not sure what Android has to do with consumers that limit themselves to the Apple ecosystem, based on the enforced belief that only Apple products work together. Of course you can switch to the Android ecosystem but how easy is it to do that and transfer everything over? You act like there aren’t huge limitations to what you’re suggesting a consumer should do.

But in many cases people, myself included, swapped to using Apple products because Android and Windows Phone were so much worse and had peripherals that interfaced way worse. I spent most of a decade on Android, paying essentially the same price as I would have on Apple, to get products that worked worse, lasted less time before losing official support, and interoperated worse even within the Google, LG, or Samsung ecosystems.

I ate the cost to swap off of Android (which also doesn't make it easy to get off of it, though maybe better than Apple) because I got value out of it.

And you have freedom to do that from Android. Now try to swap out of Apple, if you thought leaving Android was tough…

I did. I totally abandoned Apple once before, and I moved out of it for laptops in the last two years with no real disruption. I use almost no Apple services on my phone in a way that locks me into them. Most of the apps I use on iOS, I have subscriptions to some apps outside of Apple where they would transfer to Android just fine. I'd have to get a different fitness tracker, but I'd probably just not use one because all the Android ones I've used have been terrible.

By contrast, I still have 4 major Google services from my time in Android that I have yet to work out of my life - Maps, Gmail, Photos, and Calendar.

I got so frustrated with Android Wear being stuck, with no new chips for years, that I switched to an Apple Watch and iPhone in 2019 after having lived the Pixel/Pixelbook/Android Wear train for years. I bought the $1000 Pixelbook, and it remains one of my favorite machines just from a form factor I've ever used.

So I'm not an Apple fanboy and would consider switching back to Android (and have) if I could. Sadly, various apps I've begun to use (not just Apple's, Signal for instance) don't allow you to switch platforms without losing all your data, so I'm stuck. I won't buy a new phone unless it's an iPhone, or I lose years of messaging history and it won't work with my Watch Ultra (which with like 3 days of battery life is extremely excellent and arguably the best smart watch on the market).

But I'd be a lot more likely to switch and buy a new watch and phone on Android if there wasn't this platform lock-in effect.

I mean the level of integration and seamlessness I get by using their products on their ecosystem is not matched by many (if any?). Microsoft has a few things here and there that reach that level, and maybe Google, not sure about Amazon. You can buy every piece of tech from Apple in your life and the experience is insanely seamless from device to device. I can't think of a company that has achieved this in a cross-platform way. Bluetooth is a nightmare, but I dont ever have issues with the Airpods.

Yes but it’s seamless because they lock-down their APIs and hardware, even limiting their available documentation so you can’t build something as seamless. Apple doesn’t let anyone else compete on their platform.

My point being no other platform which has total control of their software has achieved this either.

This reads like you're working backwards from an assumption, and that assumption is that Apple fanboys are dumb? What is this 2012?

What? This reads like you’re working backwards from an assumption, and that assumption is that my comment is out of spite? What is this 2011?

My comment is about Apple not allowing other vendors to even develop products for it’s platform as some sort of argument that the market is in capable of building equivalent products. It has nothing to do with IQ level.

Re-read your comment. Trying to claim it’s anything but “Apple fanboys so dumb, hur hur” isn’t credible. That’s the entire post that you made. Parent read it correctly. You’re trolling.

I never called Apple consumers dumb. You should reread the comment, maybe go for a walk and chill out. You’re trolling by claiming there’s some sort of malicious intent. I’m sure Apple thanks you for your loyal downvotes and agitation at any criticism though.

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