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Comment by fatdog789 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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