Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

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Seigler's articles usually enrage me, but this one isn't so bad. He makes a mix of valid points and (IMO) less valid ones. If the Store crashes as much as he says it does, that's a huge failure. On the other hand, complaining about the alert box the Flash Player popped up struck me as particularly funny- of course that wouldn't have appeared on an iPad. It doesn't have Flash.

I think the MS tablets (and they are tablets, despite Seigler saying they aren't because they're the "wrong shape") are between a rock and a hard place. On one side, the locked-down, user-friendly world of Apple. On the other, the free, tweaking, custom ROMing world of Android. It's trying to sit somewhere between the two and I'm not entirely convinced that it can.

>On the other hand, complaining about the alert box the Flash Player popped up struck me as particularly funny- of course that wouldn't have appeared on an iPad. It doesn't have Flash.

I think that's kind of the point. Using the iPad is just a cleaner, nicer experience because it's not bogged down with a lot of the desktop cruft.

Right- and that's sort of the point I was trying to make in the second paragraph- not everyone is willing to pay the price for a cleaner, nicer experience. There is a market for a less locked down but more feature-capable device. I just think that Android may already be there.

There is a trade-off between features and complexity, but Siegler doesn't try to evaluate that once in the article.

I've been using Windows 8 as my primary OS for nearly a year and a Surface RT (which has successfully replaced my iPad and MacBook Air, so far) for a little over three weeks now. I've only had trouble with the Store app once, and that wasn't even on the Surface. I also haven't had any trouble with apps downloading slowly or not at all, like he was talking about. I came away from his article really not understanding how he could have legitimately had some of the experiences he wrote about.

I honestly find that reading his articles (and Techcrunch in general) are like banging my head against the wall. Did he say anything good about it at all?

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