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Comment by brisance | Hacker News Reader

That g+ post is particularly bad because it shows that Linus is opinionated (we knew that already), that he doesn't understand business (predatory pricing) and that he doesn't read very well (the Engadget article clearly explains that in the short-term, lower prices work in favor of the customer). In fact his own post can be considered a trolling piece since at the end he suddenly switches tack and justifies his choice of Nexus phones. Which is due to his own preference of the UI, but similarly ignoring others who may instead prefer iOS.

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It's not about his preference of the UI, it's about his preference of phones that do not appear locked down. He prefers Nexus because of the stock Android UI (nothing to do with iOS UI here!), but even more he prefers nexus phones because Google is fighting the proprietary locked down carrier approach -- the one that makes us slaves to our carriers in order to get a good phone at a decent price. I may get a Nexus 4, and in that situation I can purchase my freedom from my current slavery to Verizon for a paltry $100. I can actually evaluate all the carrier options and determine which phone is the best. If this kind of freedom takes hold, it is likely that carriers will actually have to compete at some point, instead of customers being forced into one carrier their whole life (basically). Then other aspects of carriers will probably improve because they have to compete.

In other words: It's not a preference for one design over another, it's a preference for freedom. You may disagree with the freedom argument, but this is certainly what it's about. This is why Linus is coming out to bat for Android -- not because he likes Google or Google's style, it's a pragmatic decision because he thinks Google is his friend as far in trying to reintroduce competition into the market.

It's kind of funny that the other day he was complaining about low-res screens in laptops... when the degradation/stagnation in laptop screens is in a large part due to the race to the bottom he's arguing is unequivocally a good thing today!

Those things are not mutually exclusive. LCD manufacturers can both 1) make better displays with higher resolutions and 2) reduce the cost of producing said displays.

So, there can be a 'race to the bottom' of high quality products.

How?

Example: I bought a AMD 3-core CPU a few years ago for about $120. The passmark score for that CPU is just under 3,000. Today for $120 I can get an AMD FX-6100 for $120 which gets a passmark score of 5,400. So, nearly twice the computing power at the same price.

In another year that FX-6100 will cost considerably less, thus giving the same horsepower for a lower cost.

Race to the bottom does imply making things cheaper but it not necessarily true that it's also worse. The XBOX 360 is now half the price it was when it was first released and yet more reliable and uses less power.

That's not an example of race to the bottom economics, it's an example of commoditisation.

Cough, $400 Android tablet with that screen. Frankly, I'm betting the Nexus 10 would be something Linus would be happy using if it were in a laptop form instead of a tablet. Super high res, it would be quite small for a laptop. Linux runs quite happily on ARM.

Why are you bringing iOS into this? He never mentioned anything about it.

>Which is due to his own preference of the UI, but similarly ignoring others who may instead prefer iOS.

Projecting much? At best he said he likes Android's UI. He didn't even mention iOS.

You have to read the Google post in its entirety and the context; in this case, the Engadget article was about the different business models of Amazon/Google as compared to Apple, and how they hope to profit not from the hardware but from complementary services. Thus the implicit meaning is that Android is "open", which we all know not to be true.

Getting "carrier lock-in" is more symptomatic of American carriers' way of doing business rather than a universal once, since, as pointed out by many others, Apple sells unlocked iOS devices in many parts of the world.

Thus the implicit meaning is that Android is "open", which we all know not to be true.

I don't know that at all.

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