11 ms·

With all their patent trolling and absurd tyrannical control over the app store, I have no idea why so many tech-saavy people still love Apple.

jbeja 13y ago
IMHO, They don't love Apple perse but some of their products. In my case atleast, i don't like Apple but i would like to have a macbook-pro or something of that sort.
- shitlord 13y ago
  I would also like to have a retina MBP. Dat screen resolution and battery... My current POS Dell XPS laptop lasts 2 hours max, has a 17 inch 1080p screen, and weights a ton. Worst of all, the Windows drivers that Dell provides don't even work properly and cause frequent BSODs, so I can't even play games. I would love to have a retina MPB, but unfortunately, I can't afford it.
  - GFischer 13y ago
    That said, not all Windows laptops are that bad :) , I never had such a bad experience (not with Gateway, HP, IBM/Lenovo or Asus), but then again, I never bought a Dell either :P . I'm also willing to wager you paid nowhere near the retina MBP price for the Dell :) (though I guess you are more likely to have a bad experience with a high-priced Windows laptop than with a MBP, complaints about the 2011 batch aside)
    - shitlord 13y ago
      I agree, not all Windows laptops are bad. My sister bought a cheap $700 Dell Inspiron and it's pretty nice. I actually like the Windows operating system, since I'm really productive on it. But I think the vendors need to get their shit together. There are a lot of glaring problems caused by OEM incompetence, like providing the wrong drivers and preinstalling bloatware. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to buy a $1300 laptop before starting college. I really regret making that decision. I probably should have spent a few hundred dollars more for a retina MBP instead.
tomasien 13y ago
We love what Apple did for the industry, we love using their products, we have varying levels of problems with them as a company. Some are very high, some are low, but that's unrelated to what you're perceiving, which is a love of what they did for the industry and the products that we use.
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  > which is a love of what they did for the industry Like promoting useless patent litigations of 'rounded corners', 'slide to unlock' nature?
  - moogleii 13y ago
    I think that was covered by "we have varying levels of problems with them as a company." But way to cherry pick.
    - piyush_soni 13y ago
      I can't speak for what the grandparent commenter meant by his problems with the company, but I think that was one of their 'biggest contributions' and needed to be mentioned. An iPhone developer and a founder of a company passionately argued with me once saying "what if they have found out the 'perfect radius' for their corners where their phone looks the best (say 5.6 mm), which no one else could find before? It definitely deserves to be patented". I was facepalm. Many people just don't think it's a problem, and don't realize how it is ultimately bad for them and their children.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomasien 13y ago
    You can pick one part of my answer and isolate it from the rest if you like, but I made it clear: we have varying problems with what they do as a company, but many of us admire their larger impact. If you think controlling slide to unlock compares to popularizing the personal computer and the touch-screen smartphone, I guess we're just not going to agree. But I'm 99% sure we both agree that their patent litigation is ridiculous.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Because of technical merit? Everything you mentioned is politics. I can see how that's not the most important to most people.
- guspe 13y ago
  There's no pure technological achievement. Politics permeate engineering all the time. I'd rather say I despise Apple's misguided approach to patents than say its techinical merit is "more important". Because given Apple's position, both its techinical merits and its stupid litigations have been shaping the industry.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
I love Apple for OSX, which so far remains at least as open as Windows and more pleasant to use. My phone is an Android, though. OSX and iOS are starting to seem like different companies these days.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I realize you're just trolling but the answer to your question is because people who love Apple don't see those parts of Apple as relevant to their opinion. Sometimes you meet people with outrageous body odor or hard to fathom beliefs, but other than that you love their insights or their willingness to participate, and so you don't think about them in the things you find objectionable, you think about them for the things you admire in them. I suspect that the things that are important to you, and result in your opinion of Apple, are the not the same things that are important to the people who admire Apple.
akhbhaat 13y ago
Love my MBP. Fairly excellent battery life. UNIX underpinnings and command line terminal paired and a well polished, usable GUI. And a trackpad that actually works. Ditched iOS a good while ago.
coldtea 13y ago
>I have no idea why so many tech-saavy people still love Apple. Good hardware offerings (beyond the "my custom built hot-rod has a faster CPU"), and a full blown UNIX desktop OS with a nice interface and access to all kinds of proprietary software and consumer/professional peripherals. Plus "absurd tyrannical control over the app store"? Apple made the whole platform, API and market out of thin air, it's not like people have some inherent god-given right to have their apps featured in it. And still -- there are now over 800,000 apps on it -- if anything it's as lax as it comes for a closed market. Try developing for game consoles some day. As for "patent trolling", I haven't see anything beyond all other companies, from Google to Oracle and MS, do.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  As long as users are not allowed to install their own apps, Apple have "absurd tyrannical control" over iOS apps.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Well, as long as users could not care less, it doesn't count as "absurd tyrannical control" in my books.
    - Touche 13y ago
      Users are mostly unaware. You'd be surprised at how many users think Apple makes all of the apps in the App Store. I think the biggest problem is truth in advertisement. If it were properly regulated, getting an iPhone would be advertised as something more akin to leasing than purchasing.
    - MereInterest 13y ago
      s/users/most users/g If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to jailbreak it. If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to buy a developer's license.
      - 13y ago
psss 13y ago
One of the good illustrations how app stores (itunes, play) limits us: try to find any usable porno app. In contrast with Web where you can find anything you want and nobody cares what are you doing here, in stores we are hardly limitated to "morally acceptable" apps. It looks like digital Pakistan.
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Does your local grocery store sell porn? Just saying, it's a company's store, if they want to have some sense of morale (and tbf, quality), it's their right to deny porn apps.
  - psss 13y ago
    What about if two main ISP in the world will ban porn? All things which designed to be centralized will be totalitarized. Denying "immoral" apps, denying "too simple" apps, denying apps which prevents to profit - it's obvious consequence of centralization. Yes, we can hype isolated cases like Hueman and even reach to bring it back to the store, but it changes nothing, like ask dictators to pardon some prisioners.
  - captainmuon 13y ago
    Actually, yes, grocery stores in Germany may sell porn (if they sell magazines). From more classy stuff like Playboy and FHM to just downright cheap and simple porn magazines. Slightly hidden away so you only see the titles, of course. (And England has the famous "page three girls" in their newspapers.) Of course it's Apple's legal right to deny what they want. That doesn't mean that I think it's right that they have that right. Apple is a quasi-monopoly, and people are dependent on them. There is no second app store for iOS devices really. A more fitting analogy would be when the postal service would decline to transport mail with porn in it. Would that be a good situation? I'm sure if they would take away the porn magazines (even if the grocery stores just use their legal right to stock only whatever products they want), many people would scream bloody murder. But in the digital world, we are so used to clean walled gardens, that nobody cares. It's a bit like the movie Demolition Man...
  - kalleboo 13y ago
sspiff 13y ago
I was a fan of Apple products (in the late PowerPC days), but eventually gave up on them after countless of small roadblocks caused by their business practices. I told myself I'd never vote for them with my wallet again. On of the issues I remember at the time was their refusal to have Sun releasing JVM updates for Apple's platform, while simultaneously not keeping it up to date themselves. As a CS student with a curriculum using Java as a teaching platform, that's pretty annoying.
yaeger 13y ago
And I have no idea why people still flock to Google and their Android clusterfuck. So there. Different strokes.
sytelus 13y ago
The reason is known as "taste". Other day I was in AT&T store to try out new Android phones thinking it must have gotten better now that its 2014. Store didn't had Nexus so I didn't got chance to see it but, boy, latest LG and Samsung models totally sucked. The UX, the experience was outrageously horrible. The icon colors were repulsive. Animations so overdone that it hurt my eyes. If pricing of this crap wasn't so low and saving grace like Google Now and Maps didn't exist, I can't imagine anyone would really want to buy this horrible piece of shit compared to iPhones. The iOS7 has degraded significantly but it's still miles ahead of crap that is known as Android. Overall, it is this taste that outweights Apple's idiosyncrasies around walled garden for some people - your weights may vary.
- veeti 13y ago
  HTC. Sony. Moto. Just ignore Korean trash completely.
  - igravious 13y ago
    Nexus 5 is LG and is hands down the most gorgeous phone I've ever had.
    - veeti 13y ago
      Yeah, sure: that's a Google phone made on contract. If you take a look at LG's other (= own) phone designs you will see that they have absolutely no design sense whatsoever in either hardware nor software. Especially the interface on their phones is a hideous and unusable pile of shit. At least Samsung seems to be making some progress in this department, but I'm not holding my hopes up.
  - mjolk 13y ago
    I bought the Motorola flagship phone[1] of last year and it's just as bad as he's describing, if not worse. Unfortunately, it goes way beyond just small UI and physical design issues: -The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store"). -Even though my phone has multiple cores, the audio output is seemingly competing for resources with events like changes in network or wifi availability (e.g. riding the subway), which leads to issues like choppy/distorted audio. -The workflow/UX for common applications and uses was seemingly designed by someone that didn't use the phone for any extended period of time. Want to call someone? Open the 'Phone' application. Don't know the number? Oh, that's a different application -- close 'Phone' and open the 'People' application. What, you'd expect scrolling through contacts to be a common ask for someone about to make a call? -Bloatware. Remember the days in which you'd buy a Dell and it would come pre-installed with a bunch of crappy applications that you immediately tried to remove? Yeah, it's like that, with the exception that you can't remove the bloatware and you have no control over their use on your data or battery. -Little weird issues: type a text, hit enter, and start typing again too quickly? Sometimes the final word of your previous line will be entered as input on your current message. Interest-based ads from 3rd parties, hooray (I don't even want to start thinking about which local data sources are scanned)! Volume control is context specific -- there's 4 sliders for the simple intent of "I don't want things louder than X." -I miss having a physical button to hook into the OS -- when an app is crashing (which is common), you don't have a "oh crap, close-it" toggle. This makes you interact with touchscreen buttons on an interface that's already decided to stop dealing with users. 1. http://www.motorola.com/us/shop-all-mobile-phones-1/Droid-Razr-Maxx-HD/m-DROID-RAZR-MAXX-HD.html http://www.motorola.com/us/shop-all-mobile-phones-1/Droid-Ra...
jliptzin 13y ago
What's also particularly frustrating is that you have to wait 5-10 days after each one of these rejections (and there could be multiple before you finally get a revision live). So we're finding that for minor feature additions that on other platforms we build, ship, and tweak all within a 24 hour period, on iOS that iteration cycle is extended from hours to weeks (if the feature is even approved, which sometimes it is not). This consistently makes for a poorer experience on iOS than on any other platform. Apple should just make everyone's lives a lot easier (including their own) if they took the innocent until proven guilty approach that Google takes, rather than the guilty until proven innocent stance they currently abide by.
benched 13y ago
Tech people care more about hardware and software than about social behaviors.
pessimizer 13y ago
In my experience: web programmers who are afraid of the inner workings of their own computers (or, of course, iOS programmers and hardcore Mac programmers.) Virtually every web programmer I know uses a MacBook Pro with OS X, but I only know a total of maybe 2 or 3 non-web programmers that do (not counting the 2 or 3 that shoved a Free/OSS unix onto one.) None of them have an OS X MBP as their sole laptop. As a flexible computer-user, I'm frequently called upon to figure out what's wrong with coworkers' Macs. I've never owned a Mac, yet I'm their best hope. That says it all, I think.

jbeja 13y ago

IMHO, They don't love Apple perse but some of their products. In my case atleast, i don't like Apple but i would like to have a macbook-pro or something of that sort.

shitlord 13y ago
I would also like to have a retina MBP. Dat screen resolution and battery... My current POS Dell XPS laptop lasts 2 hours max, has a 17 inch 1080p screen, and weights a ton. Worst of all, the Windows drivers that Dell provides don't even work properly and cause frequent BSODs, so I can't even play games. I would love to have a retina MPB, but unfortunately, I can't afford it.
- GFischer 13y ago
  That said, not all Windows laptops are that bad :) , I never had such a bad experience (not with Gateway, HP, IBM/Lenovo or Asus), but then again, I never bought a Dell either :P . I'm also willing to wager you paid nowhere near the retina MBP price for the Dell :) (though I guess you are more likely to have a bad experience with a high-priced Windows laptop than with a MBP, complaints about the 2011 batch aside)
  - shitlord 13y ago
    I agree, not all Windows laptops are bad. My sister bought a cheap $700 Dell Inspiron and it's pretty nice. I actually like the Windows operating system, since I'm really productive on it. But I think the vendors need to get their shit together. There are a lot of glaring problems caused by OEM incompetence, like providing the wrong drivers and preinstalling bloatware. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to buy a $1300 laptop before starting college. I really regret making that decision. I probably should have spent a few hundred dollars more for a retina MBP instead.

tomasien 13y ago

We love what Apple did for the industry, we love using their products, we have varying levels of problems with them as a company. Some are very high, some are low, but that's unrelated to what you're perceiving, which is a love of what they did for the industry and the products that we use.

piyush_soni 13y ago
> which is a love of what they did for the industry Like promoting useless patent litigations of 'rounded corners', 'slide to unlock' nature?
- moogleii 13y ago
  I think that was covered by "we have varying levels of problems with them as a company." But way to cherry pick.
  - piyush_soni 13y ago
    I can't speak for what the grandparent commenter meant by his problems with the company, but I think that was one of their 'biggest contributions' and needed to be mentioned. An iPhone developer and a founder of a company passionately argued with me once saying "what if they have found out the 'perfect radius' for their corners where their phone looks the best (say 5.6 mm), which no one else could find before? It definitely deserves to be patented". I was facepalm. Many people just don't think it's a problem, and don't realize how it is ultimately bad for them and their children.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tomasien 13y ago
  You can pick one part of my answer and isolate it from the rest if you like, but I made it clear: we have varying problems with what they do as a company, but many of us admire their larger impact. If you think controlling slide to unlock compares to popularizing the personal computer and the touch-screen smartphone, I guess we're just not going to agree. But I'm 99% sure we both agree that their patent litigation is ridiculous.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

Because of technical merit? Everything you mentioned is politics. I can see how that's not the most important to most people.

guspe 13y ago
There's no pure technological achievement. Politics permeate engineering all the time. I'd rather say I despise Apple's misguided approach to patents than say its techinical merit is "more important". Because given Apple's position, both its techinical merits and its stupid litigations have been shaping the industry.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

I love Apple for OSX, which so far remains at least as open as Windows and more pleasant to use. My phone is an Android, though. OSX and iOS are starting to seem like different companies these days.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

I realize you're just trolling but the answer to your question is because people who love Apple don't see those parts of Apple as relevant to their opinion. Sometimes you meet people with outrageous body odor or hard to fathom beliefs, but other than that you love their insights or their willingness to participate, and so you don't think about them in the things you find objectionable, you think about them for the things you admire in them. I suspect that the things that are important to you, and result in your opinion of Apple, are the not the same things that are important to the people who admire Apple.

akhbhaat 13y ago

Love my MBP. Fairly excellent battery life. UNIX underpinnings and command line terminal paired and a well polished, usable GUI. And a trackpad that actually works. Ditched iOS a good while ago.

coldtea 13y ago

>I have no idea why so many tech-saavy people still love Apple. Good hardware offerings (beyond the "my custom built hot-rod has a faster CPU"), and a full blown UNIX desktop OS with a nice interface and access to all kinds of proprietary software and consumer/professional peripherals. Plus "absurd tyrannical control over the app store"? Apple made the whole platform, API and market out of thin air, it's not like people have some inherent god-given right to have their apps featured in it. And still -- there are now over 800,000 apps on it -- if anything it's as lax as it comes for a closed market. Try developing for game consoles some day. As for "patent trolling", I haven't see anything beyond all other companies, from Google to Oracle and MS, do.

lucian1900 13y ago
As long as users are not allowed to install their own apps, Apple have "absurd tyrannical control" over iOS apps.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Well, as long as users could not care less, it doesn't count as "absurd tyrannical control" in my books.
  - Touche 13y ago
    Users are mostly unaware. You'd be surprised at how many users think Apple makes all of the apps in the App Store. I think the biggest problem is truth in advertisement. If it were properly regulated, getting an iPhone would be advertised as something more akin to leasing than purchasing.
  - MereInterest 13y ago
    s/users/most users/g If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to jailbreak it. If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to buy a developer's license.
    - 13y ago

psss 13y ago

One of the good illustrations how app stores (itunes, play) limits us: try to find any usable porno app. In contrast with Web where you can find anything you want and nobody cares what are you doing here, in stores we are hardly limitated to "morally acceptable" apps. It looks like digital Pakistan.

Cthulhu_ 13y ago
Does your local grocery store sell porn? Just saying, it's a company's store, if they want to have some sense of morale (and tbf, quality), it's their right to deny porn apps.
- psss 13y ago
  What about if two main ISP in the world will ban porn? All things which designed to be centralized will be totalitarized. Denying "immoral" apps, denying "too simple" apps, denying apps which prevents to profit - it's obvious consequence of centralization. Yes, we can hype isolated cases like Hueman and even reach to bring it back to the store, but it changes nothing, like ask dictators to pardon some prisioners.
- captainmuon 13y ago
  Actually, yes, grocery stores in Germany may sell porn (if they sell magazines). From more classy stuff like Playboy and FHM to just downright cheap and simple porn magazines. Slightly hidden away so you only see the titles, of course. (And England has the famous "page three girls" in their newspapers.) Of course it's Apple's legal right to deny what they want. That doesn't mean that I think it's right that they have that right. Apple is a quasi-monopoly, and people are dependent on them. There is no second app store for iOS devices really. A more fitting analogy would be when the postal service would decline to transport mail with porn in it. Would that be a good situation? I'm sure if they would take away the porn magazines (even if the grocery stores just use their legal right to stock only whatever products they want), many people would scream bloody murder. But in the digital world, we are so used to clean walled gardens, that nobody cares. It's a bit like the movie Demolition Man...
- kalleboo 13y ago

sspiff 13y ago

I was a fan of Apple products (in the late PowerPC days), but eventually gave up on them after countless of small roadblocks caused by their business practices. I told myself I'd never vote for them with my wallet again. On of the issues I remember at the time was their refusal to have Sun releasing JVM updates for Apple's platform, while simultaneously not keeping it up to date themselves. As a CS student with a curriculum using Java as a teaching platform, that's pretty annoying.

yaeger 13y ago

And I have no idea why people still flock to Google and their Android clusterfuck. So there. Different strokes.

sytelus 13y ago

The reason is known as "taste". Other day I was in AT&T store to try out new Android phones thinking it must have gotten better now that its 2014. Store didn't had Nexus so I didn't got chance to see it but, boy, latest LG and Samsung models totally sucked. The UX, the experience was outrageously horrible. The icon colors were repulsive. Animations so overdone that it hurt my eyes. If pricing of this crap wasn't so low and saving grace like Google Now and Maps didn't exist, I can't imagine anyone would really want to buy this horrible piece of shit compared to iPhones. The iOS7 has degraded significantly but it's still miles ahead of crap that is known as Android. Overall, it is this taste that outweights Apple's idiosyncrasies around walled garden for some people - your weights may vary.

veeti 13y ago
HTC. Sony. Moto. Just ignore Korean trash completely.
- igravious 13y ago
  Nexus 5 is LG and is hands down the most gorgeous phone I've ever had.
  - veeti 13y ago
    Yeah, sure: that's a Google phone made on contract. If you take a look at LG's other (= own) phone designs you will see that they have absolutely no design sense whatsoever in either hardware nor software. Especially the interface on their phones is a hideous and unusable pile of shit. At least Samsung seems to be making some progress in this department, but I'm not holding my hopes up.
- mjolk 13y ago
  I bought the Motorola flagship phone[1] of last year and it's just as bad as he's describing, if not worse. Unfortunately, it goes way beyond just small UI and physical design issues: -The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store"). -Even though my phone has multiple cores, the audio output is seemingly competing for resources with events like changes in network or wifi availability (e.g. riding the subway), which leads to issues like choppy/distorted audio. -The workflow/UX for common applications and uses was seemingly designed by someone that didn't use the phone for any extended period of time. Want to call someone? Open the 'Phone' application. Don't know the number? Oh, that's a different application -- close 'Phone' and open the 'People' application. What, you'd expect scrolling through contacts to be a common ask for someone about to make a call? -Bloatware. Remember the days in which you'd buy a Dell and it would come pre-installed with a bunch of crappy applications that you immediately tried to remove? Yeah, it's like that, with the exception that you can't remove the bloatware and you have no control over their use on your data or battery. -Little weird issues: type a text, hit enter, and start typing again too quickly? Sometimes the final word of your previous line will be entered as input on your current message. Interest-based ads from 3rd parties, hooray (I don't even want to start thinking about which local data sources are scanned)! Volume control is context specific -- there's 4 sliders for the simple intent of "I don't want things louder than X." -I miss having a physical button to hook into the OS -- when an app is crashing (which is common), you don't have a "oh crap, close-it" toggle. This makes you interact with touchscreen buttons on an interface that's already decided to stop dealing with users. 1. http://www.motorola.com/us/shop-all-mobile-phones-1/Droid-Razr-Maxx-HD/m-DROID-RAZR-MAXX-HD.html http://www.motorola.com/us/shop-all-mobile-phones-1/Droid-Ra...

jliptzin 13y ago

What's also particularly frustrating is that you have to wait 5-10 days after each one of these rejections (and there could be multiple before you finally get a revision live). So we're finding that for minor feature additions that on other platforms we build, ship, and tweak all within a 24 hour period, on iOS that iteration cycle is extended from hours to weeks (if the feature is even approved, which sometimes it is not). This consistently makes for a poorer experience on iOS than on any other platform. Apple should just make everyone's lives a lot easier (including their own) if they took the innocent until proven guilty approach that Google takes, rather than the guilty until proven innocent stance they currently abide by.

benched 13y ago

Tech people care more about hardware and software than about social behaviors.

pessimizer 13y ago

In my experience: web programmers who are afraid of the inner workings of their own computers (or, of course, iOS programmers and hardcore Mac programmers.) Virtually every web programmer I know uses a MacBook Pro with OS X, but I only know a total of maybe 2 or 3 non-web programmers that do (not counting the 2 or 3 that shoved a Free/OSS unix onto one.) None of them have an OS X MBP as their sole laptop. As a flexible computer-user, I'm frequently called upon to figure out what's wrong with coworkers' Macs. I've never owned a Mac, yet I'm their best hope. That says it all, I think.