The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is... | Hacker News Reader

The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is...

stevenf.tumblr.com

27 pointstortilla19 comments

The world is unfair. Everybody is stealing my favorite things to hate.

I have been single-handily hating Java since 1996 and never, never took a Java job. It felt so f-ing awesome coding C with Python and laughing at Java groupies up until around 2004 when hating Java became mainstream. Ridiculing Java is so uncool now... everybody is doing it, no need to engage your neocortex in this activity anymore: it's like breathing. Ugh.

Facebook "platform" was awesome to hate but only for a short while: in less than a year everybody stopped loving it and the cave of Facebook haters got too crowded. I don't even remember the name they used for that "platform" anymore.

Then the iPhone came out, a 100% closed and proprietary little cutie. Then the DRM-crippled Kindle! It felt like being a kid in a candy store for a while: those two were awesome gifts to a serial crippled tech hater like me. It's been so awesome not owning these two and bashing them all over internets! And suddenly I'm not alone, the beach is full of fatties and the water is muddy. Hey you're all, get outa here and go zoom some maps with two fingers, dammit!

Ugh... Only Flash is left as the last bullet on my list of things to hate. And the camp of Flash bashers is growing uncomfortably large. It is getting increasingly difficult to find a universally loved crap to loathe. Even not owning a TV, an all-time American love affair, is trendy!

I must be really cool because I hate people that hate everything just to be cool

Don't scare me Mr. Jrockway. If you have read my comment in full, you would have noticed that I don't hate "everything". In fact my 12 year old list is only about 5 positions long. Notice that I only hate Adobe Flash full-time at the moment. It takes a skill, time and dedication to hate a particular technology - just look at my bookshelf.

You, on the other hand, just committed to effortlessly hating a bunch of strangers! May I ask which gym you happen to frequent these days?

I would think that a more proper boycott of Apple's policy in this case would be to jailbreak the iphone. This way, you're boycotting the app store, not the phone itself.

That will really stick it to them--buy their product, pay them cash every month for service, provide advertising by letting people see you use an iPhone, but screw them over by not buying apps.

Its all about the developers (as Ballmer says). You'd be doing your part to channel effort away from this awful system into a third party that does not censor or cripple your hardware's functionality:

Check out this bit from Slashdot yesterday:

"The 4-month-old Cydia store is yielding notably higher sales for a few application developers than Apple's AppStore, and is reportedly running on over 4 million Apple iPhone devices, with perhaps 350,000 connected at any one time. In this store, developers are distributing applications they've written that push the limits of Apple's normal AppStore policies, with software to add file downloads to Safari, trick applications into thinking they're on Wi-Fi (for VoIP), and enhance other types functionality. You'll also find the popular Google Voice application, which was recently rejected by Apple."--http://bit.ly/199gAh

You'll do more to awaken Apple by not using their device at all. Not only is that -1 for them, it's +1 for one of their competitors. Not using the app store deprives them of very little money (even if you spend $100 at the app store they are netting just $30). Not using the device at all is a loss of thousands of dollars (partly AT&T, partly Apple, but both companies will take notice very quickly if people start dropping like flies).

It deprives the developers. If developers see the App Store as less desirable, that will put real pressure on Apple to change its ways. The gold rush has to end.

Agreed, but I'd still think jailbroken is the way to go for the many that are stuck in contracts and can't really afford the $200 to break early.

You'll be able to sell your iPhone for more than $200 and will save money every month if you go to a competitor, so money shouldn't be a problem.

But people enjoy official support and going through the risk of a broken phone is just too much

My friends who have allegedly done this report that restoring the phone to a point where it can get officially serviced has not been a problem. One has allegedly done so multiple times.

And I think if its the type of problem such that you can't even restore it to factory, they're not going to be able to tell either when they fix or replace it.

Everybody was boycotting the (non-existent) app store for the first year of the iPhone's existence. I don't think Steve Jobs was upset about this.

To paraphrase Justice Warren on pornography... you'll know it when you see it.

A lot of people need to step back and realize the sheer absurdity of Apple, a maker of software and consumer gadgets suddenly going into the content censorship business. The Apple App stored seemed rotten to be from the beginning and it's lived up to my expectations.

At the end of the day, there's very few things Apple needs to worry about:

- is the app malicious or hurtful to the system or users?

- does the user have enough info make a decision on whether they want the app or not?

Schiller's reply on Daring Fireball showed that they don't quite get it. They still believe they should be the ones with the final authority, not users.

Not to get off topic, but Warren didn't write that, did he?

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Justice Potter Stewart - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

He missed the most obvious contended to the iPhone, namely the blackberry. In SF at least, you see occasionally Android and Pre's but the overwhelming majority of smart phones are split between iphone and blackberry. Depending on where you are in the city the ration changes, but its obvious that neither the Pre or the Android phones have really made much of a dent on the dominance of those two.

Maybe the next wave of Android phones will help promote that line, and maybe the next version of the Pre with a battery that lasts the whole day will get it into more people's hands, but until then, the world of smartphones is split not into the choices that Steve made.

What the HN community feels about Apple is largely irrelevant to Apple. We're the nerds that buy the early adopter products, Apple appeals to a mass market that doesn't give one hoot about the app approval process, all they want are their games and new shiny things ever summer.

I don't see why people are particularly upset about the Ninjawords dictionary. I mean, you only need to look at the literal universe of scatological, explicit, sexual terms cataloged in a place like wiktionary to understand what was found to be objectionable.

Fuck, shit, dick, cunt, ass, tits, and whatever else the 7 dirty words happen to be this week weren't the problem.

Here, just peruse this list: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Vulgarities

From the article: "What’s odd is this also contradicts the developers’ own claims that the rejection letter they received cited only examples of conventional swear words as objectionable."

Either the developers lied, or their App Store reviewer misled them, or Schiller was not telling the truth when he said that the problem was something other than "conventional swear words".

Anyway. Whatever "unconventional" obscenities it may contain: it's a dictionary. Dictionaries (apart from weirdly bowdlerized ones) contain naughty words, and words that describe Very Nasty Things. A user is only likely to see those if they deliberately go looking for them. It doesn't seem difficult to me to understand why some people might find it odd for those words to require the thing to be given a 17+ rating; real dictionaries (which probably offer more opportunities for people to find "cocksucker" or "genocide" -- and, incidentally, isn't it bizarre to worry more about children finding the former than the latter? -- by accident than electronic ones like Ninjawords) don't generally carry age warnings or restrictions.

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