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1980: CPM on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardware & software at a higher price. 1990: DOS on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardwa
by edw519 16y ago
1980: CPM on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardware & software at a higher price.
1990: DOS on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardware & software at a higher price.
2000: Windows on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardware & software at a higher price.
2010: Android on your choice of hardware or lock into Apple hardware & software at a higher price.
- macrael 16y agoThe hardware lock in is the much less interesting of the two lock ins you mention. Regardless of which platform you use, you are locking yourself to the software much more than to the hardware.
- wwortiz 16y agoI think it is more of a case of the software locking you to the hardware for apples case which is rather interesting now that the hardware, at least for Macs, is now pretty much standard hardware with regards to processors and such.
- siglesias 16y agoUh, battey tech? Trackpad? Everywhere you look on Apple products (if you are discerning) you'll see them utilizing the crap out of their hardware control. If I'm not mistaken we're about to see Apple turn up the heat on further hardware differentiation on notebooks to take advantage of their multi-touch gesture patent portfolio, perhaps by elongating the glass trackpad. On the iPhone front I'm guessing that Apple's custom silicon will allow them to get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life. Logically this is kind of technology that Google, without control over hardware, is powerless to compete against.
- wwortiz 16y agoDoes apple not support their older notebooks with new OS upgrades like tiger to leopard? If they do support them then I see no real reason why hardware cannot innovate with respect to android in a similar way and still provide support to older hardware styles just as new OS versions do.
- knieveltech 16y agoGoogle powerless to compete? That seems like a fairly strong statement given how deep their pockets are.
- pyre 16y ago> On the iPhone front I'm guessing that Apple's custom silicon will allow them to get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life. Where does this assertion come from. Apple has produced a processor that does a great job at conserving battery life. Nothing that I have seen leads me to believe that Apple has the tech/experience to 'get raw graphics performance while simultaneously preserving battery life.'
- redrobot5050 16y agoIt comes from the iPad. It seems to have an incredible combination of power management, hardware-accelerated video decoding, fast OpenGL (for a handheld) that yields a long-lasting video device. (Despite it being a first generation iPad)
- wolfish 16y agoWhen I bought my first Macbook Pro a few years ago, I purchased it for the hardware and intended to use it to run Windows in Bootcamp. After spending a little time with OS X I came to appreciate it and I now use it exclusively. But my favorite thing about it is the UNIX like underpinning. Which in a sense makes it less locked down than Windows.
- armandososa 16y agoSame here. I bought by Macbook just as a nicer alternative to a Dell and six months later I erased my Win partition.
- apphacker 16y agoHowever I may feel about iPhoneOS, Mac OS X is a beast that nothing else can compare to. At least for a consumer unix experience where everything just works.
- knieveltech 16y agoFor values of "everything just works" that don't include standard developer tools. Getting a new macbook into configuration for (for example) web development is a PITA compared to any distro I've used that came with a decent package installer (apt, yum) out of the box. You have to hack up the damned keyboard settings just to get home and end keys to work.
- apphacker 16y agoInstall xcode + mac ports? True about the terminal settings I guess, especially if you use screen + irssi.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoThat is because you are trying to use your Mac like it's a Linux box. Use the OS X keyboard shortcuts (which happen to be the same as Emacs, Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E respectively) and grab MAMP and you are good to go.
- tvon 16y agoIsn't that a conveniently simplistic way of looking at the past 30 years of Apple?
- yumraj 16y agoRemember Occam's razor: The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
- tvon 16y agoOccam's Razor isn't a proof, it's a rule of thumb to help you find the answers you're looking for.
- hmantiybet 16y agowow i am amazed at lack of knowledge of HNers That guy has abused OR principal, also its not a rule of thumb nor a proof its a Philosophical argument used in philosophy of science. Read about Falsifiability and then you will understand why Occams razor is important and """ Just because some theory is simple, yet it never makes it the correct one!! Its just the first one to be consider for refutation! ""
- Herring 16y agoIt's not even that. It just says unnecessary details are unnecessary. It's better to think of it as a rule for constructing theories than for evaluating theories.
- hmantiybet 16y agoThats a wrong statement! a simpler but less correct theory should not be preferred over a more complex but more correct one. It is this fact which gives the lie to the common misinterpretation of Occam's Razor that "the simplest" one is usually the correct one E.g. in case of 9/11 the simplest explanation would be that planes randomly crashed into twin towers due to some simple mistake but since there is heaps of contradictory evidence it is not the correct one. Just because its simple does not makes it correct.
- 16y ago
- mechanical_fish 16y agoWhat higher price? IPhones cost $100 to $300 new with contracts. The Android phones I've seen cost $100 to $300 with contracts. Most of the cost is in the service plans, which are very similarly priced. I suppose there may be a bunch of crappy Android phones, floating around under my personal radar, available for even less than $100. That sounds like false economy to me. If you're gonna get soaked for $2400 in cellular bills over two years you might as well spend the extra 1-4% and do so in style. Of course, this is a USA perspective. Things are probably very different outside the USA.
- utexaspunk 16y agoCorrect, the price of the phone is about the same and I'd say my Droid Incredible is quite comparable to the iPhone in terms of quality and experience (I had a G1 before, which I loved, but could not quite say was on par with an iPhone). But there's another price- being locked in to AT&T, being locked in to phones made by Apple, being locked out of web sites that use Flash or apps that Lord Jobs has not blessed. The original point still stands, IMHO.
- confuzatron 16y agoHmmm. I got my unlocked HTC Desire for £350, and googling for 'sim free iphone 3gs' shows me prices in the £600 range.
- utexaspunk 16y agoSure, but that's not how 99% of people get their phones, especially here in the US. From the perspective of a typical US phone buyer, who purchases a phone along with a 2-year contract, the prices are about the same.
- confuzatron 16y agoSame in the UK, but looking at the cost of iPhone contracts and HTC desire contracts, the difference in cost does seem to be borne out - iPhone contracts look to be more expensive here.