Comment by technoslut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technoslut | Hacker News Reader

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>You're telling me Apple is unresponsive to support requests from their developer ecosystem? Really? GET OUT OF TOWN! I don't believe it.

This isn't something that is exclusive to Apple though this has always been an issue with them even regarding security issues with OS X.

>Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform.

They develop for iOS because that is where the money is though this isn't the issue. It isn't as if the Android browser doesn't have its fair share of bugs.

>Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise.

You're right. Apple puts the interests of their customers first (not trying to be smug here). The developers come second. The only time you do hear complaints that go unanswered for devs it is usually only answered when there's a public (consumer) interest regarding it. A good example of this is Phil Schiller replying to customer's email about the Rogue Amoeba situation.

I'm certainly not defending Apple but this is a problem that has existed for as long as I've been interested in tech.

Wrong, Apple puts money before everything.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4193287

I did click on the link and did read the article though it lacked virtually any detail.

Of course Apple cares about money but they make their money by customers buying their hardware. They put their customers first because that is where they make their money.

As a counterpoint, Apple refuses to pay employees on commission because Jobs didn't want them upselling to consumers because there is a less chance of them being a returning customer.

It's the goal of every business to make money. It's how you go about it that tells the story.

Actually, the goal of a business is to create a customer.

Yeah - customers who spend money.

Is there any other kind?

Only by degrees.

From Apple's standpoint as a publicly traded company, their mandate is to maximize shareholder value.

Their mandate is to do whatever their prospectus says they are going to do.

As for maximizing shareholder value, I think they've done pretty well there. I don't care for their software that much, but in terms of running a publicly-traded corporation, they've done an excellent job.

No, the goal is to make money. If a business can make money without customers, then it's still a successful business. (Though it may be a racket). Making a business with lots of customers, but no money, at best is called a startup... ;)

what that article says is "Even if it Italy(and all UE) the law says the hardware provider must grant 2 years warranty, Apple does not care and gives only one, and asks for money if you want the second." Explain me how this is putting the customers before the money.

Apple shows a nice face to the public but then does only what it's needed to get more money. proved by both this article and how they treat developers.

If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back. But apple doesn't care.

You're pointing to an article that was very short and provided no detail.

I had to go through the HN thread to see that it's more complicated than what you make it out to be but I also read a story by John Paczkowski regarding this:

http://allthingsd.com/20120702/italy-accuses-apple-of-misrep...

I think you're trying to paint a picture from a certain perspective that doesn't contain the whole truth. I'm not saying that Apple isn't greedy as everyone else but I do believe your argument has flaws.

> If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back.

Plus, if it wasn't for jailbreakers and first Cydia not-native apps that Jobs hated and for a long time was against an idea of giving third-parties abilities to build so-called not-native apps, Apple would still not had their App Store and never grew to today's sizes.

Just take a look at the timeline: App Store was probably in the works when Jobs was still talking about web apps. Thinking that Cydia forced Apple to reconsider its policy is very naive.

Cydia certainly did not influence Apple's decision: Cydia itself was a reaction to an ecosystem being left behind by Installer, a program whose maintainer had disappeared. However, I actually am fairly certain that Installer did. The timeline actually works for this rather well, when you take into consideration how much of a rush-job the whole SDK was: they pretty much started designing a "for third parties" API--from scratch, leaving Apple's apps built to an entirely different set of UI classes--for 2.x

Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.

Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).

On the other hand, if the appstore didn't exist then mobile developers would still be begging for crumbs from OEMs.

All companies exist to make money. The subtleties of how they do so is not nearly so black and white as you want to make it.

> On the other hand, if the appstore didn't exist then mobile developers would still be begging for crumbs from OEMs.

Is that in the same imaginary universe where phones before the iPhone had tiny black and white screens? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1519377)

Because in this one there were several third-party mobile application stores and distribution platforms.

Uh no, you would do well not to conflate everyone who you disagree with into one ignorant boogeyman.

Please cite your figures for the pre App Store mobile app economy. I'm genuinely curious.

Which figures are you looking for in particular? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_store is a good place to start. Getjar and Handango/Pocketgear are some of the more recognizable names in the list.

No but it is the universe where lots and lots of people were not aware that there was a way to get more software onto a phone or even a computer. People used to look at me like I had three heads when I told them about those other mobile application stores.

Unless you completely ignore Getjar, Handango, Pocketgear, many other repositories, and direct sales, mobile developers were not begging for crumbs from OEMs regardless of how many people knew you could put software on a computer. To be sure, the market was smaller, there were significantly less developers and less software available overall, but they all had options.

Apple is not offering the warranty mandated by the law, so when the device breaks, the customer has to buy a new one. If that is what you get for paying a premium price for the latest Apple product then I have to say no, thanks.

Apple is pretty well known for helping its customers even after the warranty period is up, from everything I've seen. Certainly not always, but enough so that they get more good press for it than most companies.

So, even if they are as evil and plotting as you claim, they seem to be confused on how to be efficient and effective in implementing their evil plan.

I would hope they are not doing this on purpose. However, then it has to be incompetence or lazyness. I heard some european VP was recently let go by Cook, so perhaps he is already taking care of it.

Anyway, there are some horror stories regarding the defective Nvidia GPUs where Apple denied repairs and said it was another problem - even though Nvidia fully paid the repair because it was their fault.

http://www.seattlerex.com/seattle-rex-vs-apple-the-verdict-i...

I live in France. Every single hardware device out there has one year warranty, with possibly optional paid extension from the reseller. Five second search example [0] shows "Garantie 1 an.". None of their manufacturer get any sort of bash, except Apple.

[0] http://www.fnac.com/Console-Xbox-360-250-Go-Microsoft-Halo-R...

I've had two iPhones, a motherboard on a MacBook Pro (which I spilt coke on, and told them I did) and a replaced keyboard on the White MacBook that cracked all replaced out of the warranty period.

I thought Apple was over priced non-sense years ago, until I bought one thanks to a spending account from my employer. Now I find it hard to justify buying anything but.

Apple is providing the warranty mandated by EU law, it's just that nobody in the EU seems to understand their own laws.

EU law mandates a two year warranty for only those defects present at time of sale. Within the first 6 months of sale, the burden of proof is on Apple to prove that the defect wasn't there at sale. After those 6 months are up, the burden of proof switches to the consumer to prove that it was there at sale.

Apple complies with this law.

Apple also provides a 1 year warranty from time of purchase for defects that develop after the time of sale. This, too, is perfectly in the law, and Applecare extends this post-sale defect coverage to two years.

tl;dr EU law involves two different kinds of warranties (covering present-at-sale and post-sale defects). You've confused them.

Still, making good products is a tactic, not a philosophy. Apple doesn't put the effort into making good products because they want to make people happy, they do it because that's what sells.

Any notion that Apple has altruistic motives is absurd. All companies exist for one reason: to make as much money as possible. Apple is no exception.

Apple wants money. Apple makes nice product I want to buy.

Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.

Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.

Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.

Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.

Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.

In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike

> It isn't as if the Android browser doesn't have its fair share of bugs

Patches welcome

Wouldn't most devs rather tackle their own defect backlog than spend their time repairing Android?

I'd probably spend my time trying to work around the bug rather than submit a fix and wait for it to make it into production.

Difference being though is that you can submit a fix instead of having your report go to a private system in which you can never follow.

Not true at all. Please read through their stance on requirement of antivirus on the machine in response to flashback Trojan [1]. Instead of arguing against or for Antivirus, they are blaming windows.

" Do I need anti-virus software?

Ah! The loaded question. That's up to you. To date, all of the Mac anti-virus software still checks primarily for Windows viruses. The anti-virus companies have literally stopped counting how many Windows viruses there are. The Flashback trojan didn't even qualify to be called a virus. Still, all Windows users run anti-virus software. The only growth opportunities for them are Macintosh and Android. Expect a hard sell. Nothing sells better than fear. My advice? Be fearless!"

For hacker news audience ,who can take care of their own security, antivirus may just be snake oil but for clueless end user it is a big help.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3271

As far as I can tell, that post you're quoting was written by a user totally unaffiliated with Apple. It's a pretty enormous stretch to call this "their stance on requirement of antivirus".

Here is an Apple commercial that cuts strait to their opinion on viruses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQb_Q8WRL_g .

(...from 6 years ago.)

(if you can show me anywhere where Apple has made a public correction, I would find that interesting; otherwise, it is irrelevant when it is from...)

(edit: in offline conversation with comex, he came up with an article from last week that implies a change in Apple's stance on this subject)

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/mac_viruses/

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