6 ms·

Saying Goodbye to Apple

27 points by philfreo 17y ago

joshuarr 17y ago
Though I feel the same for the most part as the author, I just decided to not buy an iPad - not ditch the OS. But then again, I'm a designer not a developer, and too afraid of the jungle to leave my big cats behind.
hugh3 17y ago
As a quick aside, I’m not completely sure what this means for my opinions on patents in general, but I am pretty sure that I think the whole patent system should be abolished. You shouldn’t be able to own ideas. I think people who are opposed to patents could benefit from thinking about them in a different way. Instead of seeing them as "ownership of ideas" think of them as a bounty on ideas. The generation of new ideas benefits us all, so when somebody thinks up a new idea the government pays the inventor a bounty in the form of an exclusive right to make commercial use of that idea for a certain number of years. The great thing about paying it in the form of an exclusive right is that the value of the bounty automatically winds up being proportional to the value of the idea. Now if you're a strict libertarian you can quite sensibly oppose the payment of bounties by the government, but if you're a more modest libertarian like myself or a non-libertarian then I think it starts to look pretty sensible.
- fierarul 17y ago
  I don't think the patents itself are wrong but the broken patent system which accepts obvious ideas (1 click patent ?), limits itself to the big boys and then grants large patent terms. Also, the patent shouldn't be on the idea, but on the exploitation of an idea. If a given entity makes more money from a patent by licensing it compared to actually using it, it's a pretty good sign that the society didn't benefit from the patent but actually granted a temporary monopoly on something and that's actually slowing down progress.
- credo 17y ago
  >> if you're a more modest libertarian like myself Almost everyone is a "modest libertarian". They all want the govt to intervene in some areas, but not in some others.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    Logically, the only alternatives to that are people who want the govt to intervene in all areas (totalitarians) and people who want the government to intervene in nothing at all, even violent crime (anarchists). If your definition of "modest libertarian" is "neither totalitarian nor anarchist", I have to say you picked a rather confusing term for it.
- axod 17y ago
  The problem, especially in the software world, UI, etc is that having the idea is often trivial. We could all sit down and think up thousands of cool ideas, patent them, and wait for people to do the hard work in implementing them. But that's pretty uncool. For example, having a touchscreen that makes things zoom by pinching. How else would anyone do that? It's trivial, obvious, and there actually isn't any other useful way you could do it. I'm all for bounties on things that are actually difficult, but having ideas, and making software, isn't hard.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    But the whole point of the patent system is that having ideas is easy but implementing them is hard. Patents are there to encourage people to implement ideas as soon as they are widely known, rather than let them wait around for decades for some government, or charity, or perhaps even nobody at all, to pay for their development. The problem with implementing stuff is that it's a lot harder to build something the first time than the second. It's easy to sit around in a chair and imagine the UI from Minority Report. It is a ton of work to actually design and build that interface, because for every feature and tweak you include in the final product you must test and discard dozens of others. (Unless your business is willing to produce poorly-designed crap, of course.) Unfortunately, a designed product is much easier to copy than to produce in the first place, so every piece of R&D you do is also R&D for your competitors. The patent system tries to rectify this. You complain that patents let people have an idea and then sit around charging others money. And this is true, but - importantly! - it is only true for the life of the patent, which is something like 14 or 17 years. That's the whole point. Once someone has has a brilliant idea they must either build it, or license someone else to build it, or within less than two decades the idea will be worthless. (You can also pray that nobody else has the same idea. This is usually a bad bet: ideas arise when their time is right, and lots of things are invented simultaneously by half a dozen people at once.) In a world without patents, nobody has any incentive to be the first to implement anything bold - your competitors will freeload on your R&D and outcompete you. So you're reduced to tiny incremental improvements with low risk and obvious value (so that they can be sold immediately in high volume, to take advantage of the tiny time window when the innovation is exclusive to your product.) The problem with software patents is not that patents are useless or don't work in general. It's that they don't work well for software, which has many degrees of freedom and is hard to understand. It's that the standards of review are broken; far too many obvious patents are issued. The adjudication is broken: by rubber-stamping patent applications and leaving it to courts to adjudicate them, the Patent Office turns IP into a shakedown racket where the team with the largest legal budget wins. And the whole idea is just too new. If software patents had existed in 1968 Doug Engelbart would have patented everything we use today, those patents would have expired in the eighties and we wouldn't be worried about them anymore.
- rauljara 17y ago
  I'm not at all opposed to a bounty on awesome ideas. But I think the nature of the bounty needs to change to something that still encourages innovation. The whole, "no one can do anything with this cool idea but me" thing really stifles the spread of technology.
  - hugh3 17y ago
    Any suggestions as to how else it could work? I suppose you could have a bureaucratic body which tries to determine the value of that idea and then pays a bounty in cash, but that sounds like a terrible idea in all sorts of ways.
    - rauljara 17y ago
      I guess you could have a system where you were required to pay the patent holder if you made money off of their patent, but the patent holder couldn't outright prevent you from using it. You could also set some upper limit as to what they could charge, so that the patent holder couldn't set the fee to some prohibitively high level. Maybe some ratio relative to the cost of production and documented cost of development? It would bureaucratic and annoying for patent holders, no doubt, but at least this way the people who develop technology could be rewarded for it while not squelching other innovation.
bittersweet 17y ago
I love the border-left on the paragraph, I usually select text I'm reading but this approach works pretty good as well!
zacharypinter 17y ago
The site seems to be down. Here's the google cache: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:xQAXZriYJusJ:benjaminthomas.org/2010-03-14/saying-goodbye-to-apple.html+http://benjaminthomas.org/2010-03-14/saying-goodbye-to-apple.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:xQAXZriYJusJ:benjamintho...
- jsyedidia 17y ago
  You might need to click on "text-only version"
- fbu 17y ago
  Has the website been "Hacker News'ed" ? Are we driving this much traffic ?
fierarul 17y ago
I think this is the kind of blogpost someone writes when they are angry, but not necessarily assertive. He's just installing Ubuntu on his Apple laptop, that's all! And pretty soon he'll miss something from OSX and then -- dual boot. Next thing you know Apple does something nice again and the Ubuntu partition is just erased. I experienced something similar when Apple wouldn't release Java 6 for OSX. I had a second partition with Ubuntu on it which I used for my Java 6 work and I was mad at Apple, but as soon as Apple released Java 6 I couldn't erase that partition fast enough ! Actually -- I didn't even wait for Apple to release Java 6. A smart guy (Landon Fuller) released a Java 6 openjdk port which was using X11 and it was enough for me to erase Ubuntu and use OSX instead. This is how much worse it was on Linux! My number one gripe were the Linux fonts but there were many other issues. I remember Ubuntu launched some nice project called "100 paper cuts" to fix those small but annoying bugs in Ubuntu. This is how using Linux feels after OSX: like bumping not into large issues but all these small points of friction that ruin your flow.
- Zak 17y ago
  To provide a counterpoint, when my laptop was stolen a few months ago, I spent about three weeks using a borrowed Mac Pro. I had a similar experience - a hundred little things drove me nuts. Among them were: The lack of a package manager. Sure, I installed Macports, but it wasn't integrated in to the system, and there weren't ports of popular cost-free commercial applications like Skype. No way to change the focus/raise model. I want a click inside a window to focus it, but not raise it. I want a click on the title bar or boarder to raise it. It didn't properly detect when something was plugged in to the headphone jack (that may have been hardware). Customization of the visual appearance is very limited. I want light on dark for most things. I really don't understand why it seems that most people prefer to stare at the equivalent of a light bulb. I'm sure I could think of more. I'd expect OS X to be a nicer experience for most users, but it isn't for me.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - ptomato 17y ago
    Skype? You mean like this: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/ http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/ In general also mac applications don't need a package manager. Download, drag application to Applications directory, done. If you want to get rid of it, delete it from there, it's gone. Updating, http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ is used in the vast majority of non-Apple software these days. Focus/raise model yeah, there's no way to change it that I know of, and personally my biggest annoyance with OS X is the inability to change window management in general. The headphone jack thing is almost certainly a problem with hardware, it works just fine on every Mac I own/have used. You can invert the display to use white-on-black with Ctrl-Alt-Command-8, or via System Preferences -> Universal Access, though that's probably not exactly what you're looking for.
qjz 17y ago
I don’t think Linux is at the stage where non-computer people can use it enjoyably. I've found Linux Mint to be comparable to OS X in power and ease of use. I even used it to set up a computer for a 5-year-old, and he took right to it without any training. Perhaps the meme that Linux is for hackers only should be put to rest.
- gamble 17y ago
  Wait until an update breaks something. Desktop Linux is better than it was, but the user-friendliness is still only an inch thick.
stuntmouse 17y ago
This is something I'm struggling with right now. Setting aside iPad and iPhone for a second... Counterpoint in favor of Apple: Contributions to an open web: Open source development of Webkit and now Webkit2, HTML5 Canvas, Adverserial stance towards Flash in favor of HTML5 [iPad, iPhone] Contributions to open-source tools: LLVM and CLang, MacRuby support, launchd, Cocoa bindings from other languages [possibly phased out?] Contributions to open-source operating systems: OpenDarwin http://www.opensource.apple.com/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/ Developer ease: Nice set of installed developer applications, Development environment based on standard opensource toolchain, Compiling command-line tools from Linux/BSDs is sane and easy, Compiling X11 dependent apps is possible Multi-platform support: BootCamp, The only system capable of running the three major desktop operating systems easily and legally. High quality, hackable GUI environment and applications: Cocoa applications are generally built to a far higher standard than Linux GUI applications IMO, Cocoa applications are imminently hackable (see SIMBL) Hardware innovation and quality: Forward thinking innovation in hardware: Mac Air, for example, gets rid of even ethernet!, MacBook Pro line widely acknowledged as top-tier development machine [Disclosure: I have no stake in Apple.]
- asolove 17y ago
  Consider also the wider moral questions. Apple sources their components more carefully than other vendors when it comes to child labor, fair trade, and environmental degradation. Not as well as one might like, but certainly much better than their competitors. I was originally thinking of not buying Apple products because of the iPad announcement and the broad moral qualms I have about open systems. But then I realized that the moral importance of abusing other human beings, animals and ecosystems outweighed the moral importance of open/closed technology platforms.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Apple sources their components more carefully than other vendors when it comes to child labor, fair trade, and environmental degradation. Documentation? Especially, consideration recent revelations about abuse of Chinese workers at an Apple subcontractor. http://www.tgdaily.com/consumer-electronics-opinion/43340-iphone-suicide-is-a-phone-worth-dying-for http://www.tgdaily.com/consumer-electronics-opinion/43340-ip... Apple sometimes stopping the use of child on their own shows that they are better than the very worst they could be. It doesn't show they are better than their competitors. Since none of these companies is allowing any independent verification of good or bad behavior, a few press release don't matter either way. See link to Apple child labor use: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/apple-admits-using-child-labour-20100301-pbzz.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/apple-admits-usin...
kylec 17y ago
I, too, hate the decisions Apple has made regarding the iPhone platform. I've already made up my mind that I won't buy an(other) iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad until there's a way for developers to distribute their apps directly to me without the need to be approved by Apple. Granted, this likely means that I won't ever buy one of those devices, but I want to leave at least the possibility of them changing their software and/or policies. Still, when I needed a new laptop, I purchased a recently-refreshed MacBook Pro. Though boycotting the company completely might have been more effective, I still think that my decision to get the MacBook over the iPad (or over nothing at all) sends a message that customers still appreciate the openness of the Mac platform. And it is open - the author of the article talks about installing Linux on his MacBook. If the Mac line were not open, this wouldn't even be possible - just look at how little progress has been made on getting Linux/Android on the iPhone hardware. And on Mac OS X there's also a complete lack of an app review process - I can install any app no matter if it's interpreted or compiled, written in Objective-C or not, and whether or not Apple personally approves of it. It's important to let Apple know what they're doing right in addition to admonishing them for what they're doing wrong.
- biafra 17y ago
  I am with you on this one. No iPhone/iPad for me and I try talk anyone out of it if I think they do not know yet what the AppStore-necessity means for customers and developers. But I would still recommend Macs until Apple decides to make an AppStore mandatory for them too. When that happens I will have to switch (probably to Linux). That makes me sad.
- blasdel 17y ago
  > boycotting the company completely might have been more effective Effective at what? Making you less productive? They don't give a shit about whatever "message" you're trying to send them. No company actually listens to the histrionics of their customers like that, least of all Apple.
artparker 17y ago
HN: a festival of broken links for the past few weeks.
jsz0 17y ago
I don’t like rules Doesn't the GPL have quite a few rules too? I think using software with a BSD license would probably make more sense.

27 points by philfreo 17y ago

Though I feel the same for the most part as the author, I just decided to not buy an iPad - not ditch the OS. But then again, I'm a designer not a developer, and too afraid of the jungle to leave my big cats behind.

hugh3 17y ago

As a quick aside, I’m not completely sure what this means for my opinions on patents in general, but I am pretty sure that I think the whole patent system should be abolished. You shouldn’t be able to own ideas. I think people who are opposed to patents could benefit from thinking about them in a different way. Instead of seeing them as "ownership of ideas" think of them as a bounty on ideas. The generation of new ideas benefits us all, so when somebody thinks up a new idea the government pays the inventor a bounty in the form of an exclusive right to make commercial use of that idea for a certain number of years. The great thing about paying it in the form of an exclusive right is that the value of the bounty automatically winds up being proportional to the value of the idea. Now if you're a strict libertarian you can quite sensibly oppose the payment of bounties by the government, but if you're a more modest libertarian like myself or a non-libertarian then I think it starts to look pretty sensible.

fierarul 17y ago
I don't think the patents itself are wrong but the broken patent system which accepts obvious ideas (1 click patent ?), limits itself to the big boys and then grants large patent terms. Also, the patent shouldn't be on the idea, but on the exploitation of an idea. If a given entity makes more money from a patent by licensing it compared to actually using it, it's a pretty good sign that the society didn't benefit from the patent but actually granted a temporary monopoly on something and that's actually slowing down progress.
credo 17y ago
>> if you're a more modest libertarian like myself Almost everyone is a "modest libertarian". They all want the govt to intervene in some areas, but not in some others.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Logically, the only alternatives to that are people who want the govt to intervene in all areas (totalitarians) and people who want the government to intervene in nothing at all, even violent crime (anarchists). If your definition of "modest libertarian" is "neither totalitarian nor anarchist", I have to say you picked a rather confusing term for it.
axod 17y ago
The problem, especially in the software world, UI, etc is that having the idea is often trivial. We could all sit down and think up thousands of cool ideas, patent them, and wait for people to do the hard work in implementing them. But that's pretty uncool. For example, having a touchscreen that makes things zoom by pinching. How else would anyone do that? It's trivial, obvious, and there actually isn't any other useful way you could do it. I'm all for bounties on things that are actually difficult, but having ideas, and making software, isn't hard.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  But the whole point of the patent system is that having ideas is easy but implementing them is hard. Patents are there to encourage people to implement ideas as soon as they are widely known, rather than let them wait around for decades for some government, or charity, or perhaps even nobody at all, to pay for their development. The problem with implementing stuff is that it's a lot harder to build something the first time than the second. It's easy to sit around in a chair and imagine the UI from Minority Report. It is a ton of work to actually design and build that interface, because for every feature and tweak you include in the final product you must test and discard dozens of others. (Unless your business is willing to produce poorly-designed crap, of course.) Unfortunately, a designed product is much easier to copy than to produce in the first place, so every piece of R&D you do is also R&D for your competitors. The patent system tries to rectify this. You complain that patents let people have an idea and then sit around charging others money. And this is true, but - importantly! - it is only true for the life of the patent, which is something like 14 or 17 years. That's the whole point. Once someone has has a brilliant idea they must either build it, or license someone else to build it, or within less than two decades the idea will be worthless. (You can also pray that nobody else has the same idea. This is usually a bad bet: ideas arise when their time is right, and lots of things are invented simultaneously by half a dozen people at once.) In a world without patents, nobody has any incentive to be the first to implement anything bold - your competitors will freeload on your R&D and outcompete you. So you're reduced to tiny incremental improvements with low risk and obvious value (so that they can be sold immediately in high volume, to take advantage of the tiny time window when the innovation is exclusive to your product.) The problem with software patents is not that patents are useless or don't work in general. It's that they don't work well for software, which has many degrees of freedom and is hard to understand. It's that the standards of review are broken; far too many obvious patents are issued. The adjudication is broken: by rubber-stamping patent applications and leaving it to courts to adjudicate them, the Patent Office turns IP into a shakedown racket where the team with the largest legal budget wins. And the whole idea is just too new. If software patents had existed in 1968 Doug Engelbart would have patented everything we use today, those patents would have expired in the eighties and we wouldn't be worried about them anymore.
rauljara 17y ago
I'm not at all opposed to a bounty on awesome ideas. But I think the nature of the bounty needs to change to something that still encourages innovation. The whole, "no one can do anything with this cool idea but me" thing really stifles the spread of technology.
- hugh3 17y ago
  Any suggestions as to how else it could work? I suppose you could have a bureaucratic body which tries to determine the value of that idea and then pays a bounty in cash, but that sounds like a terrible idea in all sorts of ways.
  - rauljara 17y ago
    I guess you could have a system where you were required to pay the patent holder if you made money off of their patent, but the patent holder couldn't outright prevent you from using it. You could also set some upper limit as to what they could charge, so that the patent holder couldn't set the fee to some prohibitively high level. Maybe some ratio relative to the cost of production and documented cost of development? It would bureaucratic and annoying for patent holders, no doubt, but at least this way the people who develop technology could be rewarded for it while not squelching other innovation.

bittersweet 17y ago

I love the border-left on the paragraph, I usually select text I'm reading but this approach works pretty good as well!

zacharypinter 17y ago

The site seems to be down. Here's the google cache: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:xQAXZriYJusJ:benjaminthomas.org/2010-03-14/saying-goodbye-to-apple.html+http://benjaminthomas.org/2010-03-14/saying-goodbye-to-apple.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:xQAXZriYJusJ:benjamintho...

jsyedidia 17y ago
You might need to click on "text-only version"
fbu 17y ago
Has the website been "Hacker News'ed" ? Are we driving this much traffic ?

fierarul 17y ago

I think this is the kind of blogpost someone writes when they are angry, but not necessarily assertive. He's just installing Ubuntu on his Apple laptop, that's all! And pretty soon he'll miss something from OSX and then -- dual boot. Next thing you know Apple does something nice again and the Ubuntu partition is just erased. I experienced something similar when Apple wouldn't release Java 6 for OSX. I had a second partition with Ubuntu on it which I used for my Java 6 work and I was mad at Apple, but as soon as Apple released Java 6 I couldn't erase that partition fast enough ! Actually -- I didn't even wait for Apple to release Java 6. A smart guy (Landon Fuller) released a Java 6 openjdk port which was using X11 and it was enough for me to erase Ubuntu and use OSX instead. This is how much worse it was on Linux! My number one gripe were the Linux fonts but there were many other issues. I remember Ubuntu launched some nice project called "100 paper cuts" to fix those small but annoying bugs in Ubuntu. This is how using Linux feels after OSX: like bumping not into large issues but all these small points of friction that ruin your flow.

Zak 17y ago
To provide a counterpoint, when my laptop was stolen a few months ago, I spent about three weeks using a borrowed Mac Pro. I had a similar experience - a hundred little things drove me nuts. Among them were: The lack of a package manager. Sure, I installed Macports, but it wasn't integrated in to the system, and there weren't ports of popular cost-free commercial applications like Skype. No way to change the focus/raise model. I want a click inside a window to focus it, but not raise it. I want a click on the title bar or boarder to raise it. It didn't properly detect when something was plugged in to the headphone jack (that may have been hardware). Customization of the visual appearance is very limited. I want light on dark for most things. I really don't understand why it seems that most people prefer to stare at the equivalent of a light bulb. I'm sure I could think of more. I'd expect OS X to be a nicer experience for most users, but it isn't for me.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- ptomato 17y ago
  Skype? You mean like this: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/ http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/ In general also mac applications don't need a package manager. Download, drag application to Applications directory, done. If you want to get rid of it, delete it from there, it's gone. Updating, http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ is used in the vast majority of non-Apple software these days. Focus/raise model yeah, there's no way to change it that I know of, and personally my biggest annoyance with OS X is the inability to change window management in general. The headphone jack thing is almost certainly a problem with hardware, it works just fine on every Mac I own/have used. You can invert the display to use white-on-black with Ctrl-Alt-Command-8, or via System Preferences -> Universal Access, though that's probably not exactly what you're looking for.

qjz 17y ago

I don’t think Linux is at the stage where non-computer people can use it enjoyably. I've found Linux Mint to be comparable to OS X in power and ease of use. I even used it to set up a computer for a 5-year-old, and he took right to it without any training. Perhaps the meme that Linux is for hackers only should be put to rest.

gamble 17y ago
Wait until an update breaks something. Desktop Linux is better than it was, but the user-friendliness is still only an inch thick.

stuntmouse 17y ago

This is something I'm struggling with right now. Setting aside iPad and iPhone for a second... Counterpoint in favor of Apple: Contributions to an open web: Open source development of Webkit and now Webkit2, HTML5 Canvas, Adverserial stance towards Flash in favor of HTML5 [iPad, iPhone] Contributions to open-source tools: LLVM and CLang, MacRuby support, launchd, Cocoa bindings from other languages [possibly phased out?] Contributions to open-source operating systems: OpenDarwin http://www.opensource.apple.com/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/ Developer ease: Nice set of installed developer applications, Development environment based on standard opensource toolchain, Compiling command-line tools from Linux/BSDs is sane and easy, Compiling X11 dependent apps is possible Multi-platform support: BootCamp, The only system capable of running the three major desktop operating systems easily and legally. High quality, hackable GUI environment and applications: Cocoa applications are generally built to a far higher standard than Linux GUI applications IMO, Cocoa applications are imminently hackable (see SIMBL) Hardware innovation and quality: Forward thinking innovation in hardware: Mac Air, for example, gets rid of even ethernet!, MacBook Pro line widely acknowledged as top-tier development machine [Disclosure: I have no stake in Apple.]

asolove 17y ago
Consider also the wider moral questions. Apple sources their components more carefully than other vendors when it comes to child labor, fair trade, and environmental degradation. Not as well as one might like, but certainly much better than their competitors. I was originally thinking of not buying Apple products because of the iPad announcement and the broad moral qualms I have about open systems. But then I realized that the moral importance of abusing other human beings, animals and ecosystems outweighed the moral importance of open/closed technology platforms.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Apple sources their components more carefully than other vendors when it comes to child labor, fair trade, and environmental degradation. Documentation? Especially, consideration recent revelations about abuse of Chinese workers at an Apple subcontractor. http://www.tgdaily.com/consumer-electronics-opinion/43340-iphone-suicide-is-a-phone-worth-dying-for http://www.tgdaily.com/consumer-electronics-opinion/43340-ip... Apple sometimes stopping the use of child on their own shows that they are better than the very worst they could be. It doesn't show they are better than their competitors. Since none of these companies is allowing any independent verification of good or bad behavior, a few press release don't matter either way. See link to Apple child labor use: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/apple-admits-using-child-labour-20100301-pbzz.html http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/apple-admits-usin...

kylec 17y ago

I, too, hate the decisions Apple has made regarding the iPhone platform. I've already made up my mind that I won't buy an(other) iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad until there's a way for developers to distribute their apps directly to me without the need to be approved by Apple. Granted, this likely means that I won't ever buy one of those devices, but I want to leave at least the possibility of them changing their software and/or policies. Still, when I needed a new laptop, I purchased a recently-refreshed MacBook Pro. Though boycotting the company completely might have been more effective, I still think that my decision to get the MacBook over the iPad (or over nothing at all) sends a message that customers still appreciate the openness of the Mac platform. And it is open - the author of the article talks about installing Linux on his MacBook. If the Mac line were not open, this wouldn't even be possible - just look at how little progress has been made on getting Linux/Android on the iPhone hardware. And on Mac OS X there's also a complete lack of an app review process - I can install any app no matter if it's interpreted or compiled, written in Objective-C or not, and whether or not Apple personally approves of it. It's important to let Apple know what they're doing right in addition to admonishing them for what they're doing wrong.

biafra 17y ago
I am with you on this one. No iPhone/iPad for me and I try talk anyone out of it if I think they do not know yet what the AppStore-necessity means for customers and developers. But I would still recommend Macs until Apple decides to make an AppStore mandatory for them too. When that happens I will have to switch (probably to Linux). That makes me sad.
blasdel 17y ago
> boycotting the company completely might have been more effective Effective at what? Making you less productive? They don't give a shit about whatever "message" you're trying to send them. No company actually listens to the histrionics of their customers like that, least of all Apple.

artparker 17y ago

HN: a festival of broken links for the past few weeks.

jsz0 17y ago

I don’t like rules Doesn't the GPL have quite a few rules too? I think using software with a BSD license would probably make more sense.