The Case Against Apple Is Just As Much A Case For Apple | Hacker News Reader

The Case Against Apple Is Just As Much A Case For Apple

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11 pointsvaksel17 comments

It seems a lot of Apple junkies want to try to justify the failures of "their" platform (as if no one had anything better to do than be an apologist for what is, in the end, another computer manufacturer) by saying that the rest of the stuff that's not being complained about works nicely.

That seems to me like an extremely weak point. Computers may be mostly about appliance functionality but the real value of one lies in its customizable parts, and some things are not, in the opinion of a lot of people, negotiable.

Take iTunes. There was absolutely nothing that prevented Apple from implementing USB syncing, which practically every other music player has gotten right and there's no way in which anyone would claim it's Apple's fault if it doesn't work with a player. I don't see how that dilutes Apple's ability to control its own environment. Oh wait, that means I wouldn't need a crappy iPod and I could instead manage with any one of thousands of USB mass media-based players.

Which goes back to the iPod. Wow, was that an inferior product. Apple did not make a single iPod that was actually a superior player on technical terms until 2004. Before that a huge number of players from iRiver, Cowon, and many other smaller players swept the iPod in terms of capability. Hell, my old iRiver iHP-120 is the only portable DAP I know of that had a digital audio output, and until the appearance of the iPod Shuffle no other Apple player came anywhere close in terms of sound quality.

It's not even about the fact that there are better choices of music players; it's about the fact that a vendor is precluding me from using a component of my own because their proprietary implementation competes with it, even if I might not think that badly of Macs, and it costs them absolutely nothing on their part (save trying to strongarm me into buying their DAP).

By the same token one of the things many people want a phone with the power of an iPhone is to have a replacement to lugging a portable computer. That demands an open platform, and as we have seen, Apple has no intention of letting that happen.

What really surprises me here is the fanboys who can clearly hold the doublethink that is believing Apple control is better when they have shown they have no problem with inhibiting users from getting better software than what they have (Opera, Google Voice, Gutemberg Project, etc.).

I guess Apple is a fine company if you're the sort of complacent, couch-potato consumer who does what he is told even if it's not for his benefit. Just keep shelling out cash and you can keep buying into the illusion that you're part of the computer users who "think different".

Some of these rebuttals are incredibly flimsy, where they actually even manage to form something resembling a rebut.

For example - How on earth is being prevented from using a flash-capable web browser (or any non-Safari browser) a case for using the iPhone?

With apple products, it's more about what you can't do with the products that makes them special.

Not being able to use flash is a feature....somehow.

The reason becomes more clear if you use a Mac. Adobe has only bothered to deliver bare-minimum performance on MacOS X, even on the newer Intel hardware. The thought that they could somehow pull off an ARM runtime that performs with modest battery draw seems extremely unlikely.

Flash for pocketpc seems to work OK. Shouldn't the user be able to decide if they can spare the battery power. Most people would have a charger handy at work so I don't see what the problem is if you do need to recharge anyway.

Flash for desktop windows is ok, too. Maybe Adobe's problem is that they won't allocate the necessary talent to get OSX right. One thing is for certain: if they can't make it fast on desktop OSX they'll not likely deliver on mobile OSX. If I were Apple I'd make Adobe fix their desktop version before I'd let them near my phone.

About giving users enough rope to hang themselves: for every one user like you that could make a conscious tradeoff there are thousands who would never connect the dots between Adobe and battery life.

That's not a business risk I would take if I were Apple. I can take a few ubernerds whining about flash off in some remote corner of the web. I couldn't take Jay Leno making battery jokes in his monologue.

> About giving users enough rope to hang themselves: for every one user like you that could make a conscious tradeoff there are thousands who would never connect the dots between Adobe and battery life.

People are too stupid to be trusted to make decisions for themselves. That's the Apple philosophy for ya.

Restraint is one of the most difficult virtues to practice, and it seems to frustrate and confuse those who don't understand its value. Adding a feature to a product is almost reflexive to most vendors; everybody is mindlessly chasing lists of checkboxes, while ignoring the inherent tradeoffs or pretending they aren't there. It amazes me how the simple act of saying 'no' can send people into such a tizzy.

Centrally imposed restraint is different from self control. We aren't talking them deciding not to add a feature. We are talking about them actively preventing others from being able to do so. That's not restraint. That's totalitarianism.

There is no imposition upon you. You are free to buy any competing phone that strikes a feature-tradeoff balance that is more to your liking.

True platforms that scale are more than just their physical manifestations of phone or computers. They are like ecosystems, marketplaces, economies, even societies. In the end the strength of a platform is the combined efforts of all it's 'citizens'. The systems that govern how those participants relate to each other is much like a government. As such I'm arguing that the iPhone has a poor system of government and will intimately be about as successful as the other large scale totalitarian systems.

Now if you were to argue that the iPhone shouldn't be viewed as a platform then you might have a valid point.

I always wondered what sort of tortured mental gymnastics were required to rationalize a sense of entitlement for flash runtimes. And all this time I thought I was picking up a faint whiff of Marx, and the muffled whimpers of baby-proletariat hungry for mother government to expose her teat.

Thank you, but I'll just vote with my consumer dollar for platform B if I don't like platform A.

Nice sentence structure. Bad Logic. Successful products usually DO fulfil a sense of entitlement for their consumers.

Some structures scale and others don't. Time wasted with a poorly structured system holds things back, just like Marxism did. Think of all those poor soviets with great ideas (for apps?) only for them to be rejected by central control.

I just want good stuff and in the long term, a locked-down system isn't going to deliver.

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Successful products usually fulfill expectations of legal rights or just claims? Really?

It may fulfill some needs or desires, but only rarely a sense of entitlement. If that's what you want a product to do, I suggest that you buy an Android-based phone, and perhaps contribute to the project. After all, if you think that's the recipe for product success, we'll soon see it eclipse the iPhone, right?

Do a search for "sense of entitlement" (quoted). You are the one who used the phrase first so you should at least try to understand what it means.

Not surprising -- MG Siegler has definitely earned a reputation as either a poor or lazy thinker.

The central Thesis of MC Siegler is that one of the key arguments against Apple, that they prevent you from using their platform freely, is actually an Argument FOR Apple - that Apple attempts to maintain a "great" user experience by enforcing consistency of standards, etc... Flash (and any other VM platform) would bypass those controls.

I think that within 2 years, maybe 18 months, we'll look back at this time with amusement, as mobile platforms (MacTablets, descendants of the iPhone, Android) become feature/Power compatible with products like todays NetBooks, and the though of the OS/Cell Provider telling you what application you can or cannot run on your system will seem silly.

And that's because it is.

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