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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Hi Rachel. What timing. Just yesterday I realized what I call the "primordial criticism":

    Good products get used.
    Usage creates dependency.
    Dependency is bad.
    Therefore, good products are bad.

Since bad products are bad, and good products are bad, all products are bad! You have just plugged in OSX into the syllogism.

But the syllogism results in a contradiction. So one of our assertions is wrong. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which it is.

P.S. use Picasa on OSX, not iPhoto. And iTunes does indeed suck and I don't understand why someone hasn't written a replacement for it that fits the Sparrow:Mail==X:iPhoto equation. Perhaps I'll take a crack at it.

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>And iTunes does indeed suck and I don't understand why someone hasn't written a replacement for it that fits the Sparrow:Mail==X:iPhoto equation. Perhaps I'll take a crack at it.

I don't think iTunes sucks, but someone has solved the equation you mentioned. It's called Enqueue: http://www.enqueueapp.com

They were fine. They changed.

You can't not upgrade, either, since then you're subject to security holes and other anomalies as the upstream provider decides to leave you behind. My original iPad had this happen to it last year. My Mac will follow soon, I'm sure.

I hear ya. I needed to compile PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova) last week and found that my 'old' version of XCode wouldn't work. I was running Snow Leopard/XCode 3. The new version of XCode requires Mountain Lion. So I had to upgrade the OS, even though I didn't want to. (And it refused to install to a hard drive without a reformat, which was, of course, deeply unpleasant.)

Personally, I really like the idea of Chrome OS but with most of "the cloud" hosted locally, backed by (mostly) straight up files. This cloud only listens on localhost, and so security is less of an issue. Moving to a new machine should be an rsync command.

One can dream.

Apple was always about relentless forward progress and leaving the previous generation out in the cold. I think you have a point that they passed through a certain sweet spot that would be comfortable for data portability geeks, but to assume that they would maintain some status quo would always have been a laughable thought for anybody with a passing familiarity with tech. Your Linux system may be the best bet for long-term maintenance, but it's still tech and you will still face a whole slew of tradeoffs, dead-ends and difficult migrations.

I think where your article puts up a strawman is this idea that you can't use an iPhone or even an Android because of lock-in. That's just silly since these phones are 100 times more useful than a dumb-phone even if you don't put any data in the cloud at all. Put another way, it's easier to set up a system that extracts your photos from an iPhone into your Linux system and just do that regularly than to carry a Nokia and a Canon at all times.

The future of consumer tech may not be what the geeks dreamed of, but as long as there is free software and open hardware we can bend it to our will as we always have.

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