> I think it's a little harsh to say that I "completely missed the point" of this article. I get it -- Apple products are very polished and carefully designed a

> I think it's a little harsh to say that I "completely missed the point" of this article. I get it -- Apple products are very polished and carefully designed and the Android lacks that polish but is feature rich. Is that an accurate description, or did I completely miss something else? What you are missing is that what you are calling "polish" is 90% of the quality of a product to a consumer. It's not about gradients or drop shadows. It's about saying no in the development process, and making sure everything just works. To give a counter-example of polish, here is a problem I had on my work machine. It was recently upgraded to Fedora Core 11, a seemingly sensible choice. When I first logged in, the volume control mumbled something about having been deleted. I had a look for another one, only to discover that there is no simple volume control. For some development reason, which I don't give a shit about, someone has removed the existing volume control, and some other subsystem is meant to provide one, but they haven't gotten around to it yet. That is why Linux on the desktop is dead, and as long as Linux is developed in the bazaar, it will always be dead (but great for geeks!)