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Comment by Doches | Hacker News Reader

This article reads like an uneducated rant in so, so many ways. Apple rolling over its sleep and squashing Patreon isn't 'enshittification', it's just textbook monopoly abuse. And if you want to rail about the nuance of Apple's business practices you can at least not typo the name of two of their flagship products ("Iphone and Ipad").

> The fact that it's a felony to get your Iphone apps from anyone except Apple means that whatever policies Apple makes for the app store have the force of law.

The EC and US DOJ would like a word, please.

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> you can at least not typo the name of two of their flagship products ("Iphone and Ipad")

Why not? Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

> Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

He should go the whole hog in this radical stance of civil disobedience and just spell the names entirely wrong!

It can certainly be obnoxious (I remember everyone calling Microsoft, M$ in the early 2000s), but if the goal is communicating an idea to an audience spelling it iPhone vs IPhone vs iphone vs Iphone doesn't make a difference.

What I don't get is advocating for radical civil obedience to a company's preferred trademark names.

Heh... I hereby submit:

¥phone , ¥pad

Calling any of this "radical" is rather dramatic and framing it as "obedience" misses the point.

If someone says "My name is spelled e. e. cummings" then writing it "E. E. Cummings" is weird. It feels either uninformed or a deliberate, though tiny, mark of disrespect.

It would also be weird to spell the Motorola "Razr" phone's name as "Razor" as that's not the spelling Motorola gave it.

It isn't about "obeying" the poet nor the corporation but rather following social norms to spell things as the named person (or the namer of the item) prefers it to be spelled. And if you don't follow this convention then... oh well, most people will probably forget about it seconds after they notice it as they have other things to think about.

I remember many years ago representatives of Photoshop® visiting forums to tell us that we must always add the registered trademark symbol whenever we mention Photoshop® - sorry, Adobe Photoshop® - and that we mustn't use the verb "photoshopped" but must instead say "digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop® software". And we told them to fuck off. But as you say it all depends on social norms and conventions ... which are not homogenous, so these things are always being tacitly fought over.

just as a side note, cummings spelt his name in uppercase

https://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps.htm

> Why not? Are we all beholden to the Apple marketing department style guide?

Aren't they proper nouns?

If so, then Ipad and Iphone (or perhaps IPad and IPhone) are more grammatically correct: https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/proper-noun-capitali...

Not if the name of the products are iPhone® and iPad®.

* https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

There's a fellow who did a bunch of stuff with computers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

You would not write "Von Neumann architecture", but rather "von Neumann architecture":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/von_Neumann_architecture

Cites:

* https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/02/do-i-capitalize-t...

* https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/when-to-capitalize-words... § 5

If the word is at the beginning of a sentence it may be capitalized, but mid-sentence it should follow its proper name:

> Rawashdeh says that before generative AI, eBay had billions of signals about what consumers bought and sold, and the feedback that they’d share with eBay about their experience on the site. […]

> EBay is agnostic about who it will work with for generative AI. It partners with Microsoft for GitHub and buys AI data center infrastructure from Nvidia, for example. […]

* https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-uses-generative-ai-em...

excuse me? it's called HIG (Human Interface Guidelines)

> Apple rolling over its sleep and squashing Patreon isn't 'enshittification', it's just textbook monopoly abuse.

Isn't it both? Enshittification is a form of monopoly abuse in my mind.

Also note that you're arguing against the person who coined the term "enshittification".

Enshittification does not require a monopoly; merely captive consumers. You can enshittify cereal boxes, even though you don't have a monopoly.

True. I guess it's more accurate to say that enshittification is not mutually exclusive from monopolisation. But if anything becomes easier with a monopoly.

This is the guy who invented the word enshittification. He, of all people, is using it correctly.

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