Is it just me or has Hacker News started to become an echo chamber for debating internet meme's that are largely pointless and contain nothing of substance?
The problem is "Internet Memes" are basically opinion pieces and opinion pieces, by their nature, inspire an emotional response from the reader. That makes the reader more likely to vote and/or comment on an opinion piece. As opposed to what you'd call the "Content Posts" like...for example...a great tutorial.
I hate to be a back seat webmaster but the time might be coming where HN has to split the Internet Memes and the Content Posts just to keep the later from being overrun completely (which is basically where we are now)
As of now this article has received 62 upvotes, so i guess some people liked it enough to upvote it.
I actually liked this article just because it contains more truth than "The case against apple". I don't understand why everybody reacted to "The case against apple" with agreement and now they decide that a counterpost is pointless.
If you didn't like the article, please just ignore it instead of posting a comment like that.
"And which freedoms? The freedom to break Apple’s DRM? The freedom for Palm to violate the USB spec by identifying the Pre with a different vendor ID?"
Palm wasn't actually breaking any DRM, and changing the vendor id was the only way they could make their software inter-operate well. I understand that Palm and Apple are huge competitors, but very rarely do people defend such blatant attempts at platform lock-in. I wouldn't call him a apologist, but it definitely feels reactionary to Calacanis's points.
More drivel. Maybe you can show us two huge competitors, where one has started using the other software? You can not, because it hasn't happened before. Palm have a lot of options, there are lots of free music organisers they can use, they have chosen to use iTunes, which they know they are not allowed to do.
I think it's important to note that the major reason for Palm to use iTunes is not because Palm didn't want to build their own music organizer, but because most people already use iTunes to organize their music, and it's a huge pain in the ass to switch or worse use multiple organizers.
Why is it "important to note that"? Palm obviously have their reasons for preferring iTunes, but that doesn't make faking the vendor ID any more legitimate.
Who are Palm harming and how? Pre end users don't see the vendor ID, so aren't being deceived. iPhone end users keep working. Apple aren't under pressure to support Palm, they can simply say the device is unsupported and to contact Palm for issues.
He seems to be unaware of Apple's pricing scheme in every country other than the USA. In every country in Europe and Asia they're significantly dearer than their competitors for lower spec hardware.
That's an easy one. The apologists are saying they like their product just fine. No problem. They accept the limitations/restrictions. The drama queens are, mostly, unwilling to switch to another product that fits their requirements/political views better. I make this assumption based on the constant repeats of the same story over and over again. Someone who was truly upset would have switched to another platform long ago. What's that? None of the competition is as good? Welcome to the real world. You can rarely get exactly what you want. Accept it or man up, pay the $175 early termination fee, and get another product.
The whole question of alternative web browsers on the iPhone is lacking in reality. FireFox's mobile project is in the alpha/beta stage at best. Google's browser is based on WebKit so not much point there. Microsoft can't even produce a decent version of Mobile IE on their own platform. What does that leave? Opera? When we see real mobile browser competition on open platforms this might be a valid argument but today WebKit is, by far, the best mobile browser out there.
Mobile Safari has shipped on over 40 million devices since mid-2007
It totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it, and that's what's important. Opera's piddling marketshare in terms of actual usage (along with their historically odd JS engine, and mobile reformatting proxy) has meant that major players (like Google) totally ignored their browsers for years.
> [Mobile Safari] totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it.
Saying that Mobile Safari dominates mobile browsing seems a bit self-defeating -- of course Safari is going to dominate if the iPhone is the crowd favourite for mobile web browsing and Apple only allows one browser on the iPhone.
My question is whether or not those mobile-browser statistics would change very much if Apple allowed 3rd-party browsers on the iPhone.* Then we'd get a good idea of how good Mobile Safari is.
* Let's get this out of the way straight-up: Apple doesn't have to allow another browser into the store, but I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario in which they do.
Apple halo is in full effect here obviously. The power of the Apple brand is quite awesome to behold, but it's also very sad to see people trying to tarnish the reputation of competitive products that are, objectively, good.
There's nothing wrong with Opera Mobile, but simultaneously, there's nothing "better than Mobile Safari" about it. Both render HTML/CSS equally well, and both are accessible and usable. It's not that Opera Mobile is worse than Safari, it's that it's not that much better.
Well, the fact is that Apples browser does show up in a significant portion of mobile sites. The stats have been posted all over the place, including here. Can look it up for you if you really don't believe this.
It mostly runs on those devices because it's what's shipped on those devices. I can't install IE/Safari/whatever on my DS or non-smartphone. No offense to Opera, but no one I know (or have heard of) picked a product because it came with Opera (unless it was in a "anything but Mobile IE" sense).
Apple lost the personal computer war (EDIT: of the 1980's) because of its proprietary hardware created under the leadership of Steve Jobs. Not letting anyone else make a computer that would run MacOS was a big mistake for them.
I don't see anything new or shocking in the behavior with the iPhone or ipod, either from Apple, or the user community who has purchased them.
Apple only lost the personal computer war if you assume their goal was high volume/low margin market domination. I would argue it was not then and still is not Apple's goal. The iPhone will almost certainly remain only a small subset of the overall SmartPhone market however it will remain one of the best and make Apple more money than companies with larger market shares of the SmartPhone market. So I'd agree this is a repeat of what has happened in the past but I wouldn't call it a mistake. I think Jobs knows exactly what his company is good at doing.
This video of Jobs talking about NeXT's target customers is interesting here, and I'd say that the target demographic hasn't changed very much since then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY
If we're talking about the '80s and '90s, there can be no real question that Apple screwed up badly. How and why are still legitimate questions, but the only reason Apple lasted until OS X was because Microsoft needed them as a token competitor. They were constantly on Death's doorstep, and I don't doubt that if MS wasn't under anti-trust watch, they could have finished Apple off then.
If we're talking 2000s, then that's a totally different story.
I would not call making record profits in the same quarter when others report loses the lost war. Unless you are talking about market share. Apple indeed does sing the same song, only it is: "we choose profits over market share".
I edited my post to clarify. I was talking about the PC war of the 80's. Apple nearly ceased to exist as a company and Microsoft even gave them some money to keep them alive...
I don't see anything new in the behavior with the iPhone.
Modifying hardware on a desktop is much easier then on a phone. That the hardware is proprietary isn't nearly as big of a deal here. Its all embedded, can't really be upgraded anyway.
Using a different OS isn't that big of a deal either. PreOS won't run on it, Android won't fully support iPhone's features, and why should Apple waste resources making their OS run on hardware they don't support?
Now, if you wanted to complain about the App Store policies being bad, thats a valid complaint. But not proprietary hardware.
The proprietary i'm talking about with respect to the iphone is the app store. Not just anyone can write for the app store, you have to go through Apple.
The point I'm making is that they are control freaks, always have been and it's not new. They want absolute control over their brand.
I'm okay with that. It's their company. But I don't like their closed-ness, so I don't buy their closed products.
I actually did buy a macbook pro though, precisely because it was more open than a PC -- it'll run windows or mac OS and that I like.
Calacanis is an agent provocateur and the people fall each time for it. Just remember a few of the idiotic things he said in the past just to get attention and links:
