7 ms·

Only Apple

190 points by dannynemer 12y ago

mantrax5 12y ago
Oh look, it's a Daring Fireball post where Gruber is talking at length about how awesome Apple is.
- alirazaq 12y ago
  This guy really likes to ramble about the most insignificant things.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eridius 12y ago
  Oh look, it's a snarky comment on Hacker News dismissing Gruber for writing an article on the topic of Apple, without even attempting to address any of the contents of the article.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- jvagner 12y ago
  Maybe, but the reason it's long is that it's a series of arguments.. supporting points, etc. At least you COULD engage with it if you wanted, unlike so many other pro/con {insert company/platform}.
hayksaakian 12y ago
Apple is doing well to optimize what the company already has, but has shown little regarding what they plan to do next. Seems like they're playing very safe.
- zyxley 12y ago
  I dunno... Continuity, answering phones on a PC, etc, seems to point pretty strongly at "we are going to make switching between all our devices as seamless as possible" for "what they plan to do next". That's not really "optimizing", considering that Apple is aiming at a range of improvements to the cross-device experience that other companies have only barely touched at (Chrome tab sync, etc).
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    This is especially true because introducing any new 'smart' (=connected) products into your life if you already have computer, smartphone and tablet, is going to be just too much if the issues about being in synch haven't been solved until then. Apple has the right ideas about pushing in this direction - as for me I've essentially given up on trying to keep everything both synched and available for any use case. The main thing Apple's fall updates won't offer that I'd really like is multi-user for iPads. If it weren't for that, iOS 8 / OSX 10.10 are - on paper - pretty close to where I'd want everything to be. That being said, it probably won't solve Apple's software QA issues I've been experiencing lately.
- dous 12y ago
  Announcing (almost final) products once you're sure they will be released seems better than announcing "plans".
- ryanhuff 12y ago
  It seems that Apple prefers to hide their cards.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  For anyone paying attention, the SDK has been specifically modified to allow for: 1) Smaller satellite devices for iPhone (iWatch? I don't know, but something like it. Look for it in the Continuity & notification widget APIs). 2) More varied size devices (higher resolution iPhone? Look for it in the Xcode size "traits" APIs). 3) A hint that Macs may move to ARM in the next couple of years (look for it in the way they're rolling out new graphics APIs like Metal). 4) Apple TV may be getting native apps connected to your iPhone/iPad apps (look for it in the new Extensions APIs). While none of the above are hard promises about where Apple's going, they pretty much have no choice than spill this out in the open, as they need to release the SDK and prepare devs for the changes at least some time ahead. It seems their new strategy is to release software/SDK updates in preparation for new hardware in June during WWDC, then we have a few months padding until developers get their air back, and... starting August/September the new hardware starts coming, just in time for school, and just in time for the winter holiday season. Neat, I think.
sscalia 12y ago
I find it hard to argue with any of the points he makes. I'm sure someone here will, but I found myself doing the mental "gulp of air and raising a finger" then getting silenced again. I really wish Microsoft had pulled off Windows Phone; it arguably had a much better user experience than Android did (and still does) -- and interesting Nokia hardware. I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers. The next 10 years are going to be very interesting indeed.
- markdown 12y ago
  > I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers. You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft? Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.
  - sscalia 12y ago
    Yes, my cash - the end user. Not other companies looking to get my "attention"
    - patrickaljord 12y ago
      The fact that apple apps such as itunes do not work on android only serves apple and their lockin strategy, not you or your cash.
      - gress 12y ago
        No, it just means that Android is not a good environment for companies that want to charge money for what they do. Apple is far from the only company that experiences this.
  - seiji 12y ago
    To march out some old tropes: Apple makes money by delighting users so they will continue to buy products. Google makes money by tracking users, forcefully if necessary, and abusing their advertisers. Microsoft makes money out of legacy ties these days—they don't deserve to continue existing.
markdown 12y ago
I don't get what the significance of this post is, and why it is at the top of HN. Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it. Only this Company. Yeah not that Company. See I figured all this out; see how smart I am? Now and then on a lazy sunday morning with a cuppa in hand and the business news in my lap, I sink into this level of naval grazing. But I'd never have the time or motive to publish my drivel. Thousands of hours are going to be wasted reading this shit, and to what end? Clearly many people gained lots of value from this article, or it wouldn't be at the top of HN. Could one of you please explain what the value was? What did you gain from reading the article?
- sscalia 12y ago
  Did you really post this just now?
- Bud 12y ago
  I don't feel like addressing your question directly, but it is ironic that the criticism of Gruber is coming from a user named "markdown", which is something Gruber invented. :)
  - sscalia 12y ago
    I wanted to point that out too. Heh. hi five
  - markdown 12y ago
    hehe nice! I am Mark, and any accounts I use for things I do in my downtime are called markdown. Work related accounts have the username markup.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  because this is about competing eco-systems and if you make your living writing software that runs in those eco-systems ("apps"), the health and capabilities of said systems is critical. iOS/OSX vs. Android/Chrome vs. Windows8/WP8 if you're just a consumer, then yes, not so interesting, but then this whole forum might not be for you.
leorocky 12y ago
There is always a lot of careful insight in Gruber's posts that I like but it is tainted with a type of enthusiasm that doesn't belong in journalism. Even if he is correct, being a cheerleader with liberal praise isn't analysis. It's opinion, and Gruber often reads like an opinionist. Apple is an amazing position to build all kinds of wonderful technology, and Samsung does come across as a shallow copy cat that throws shit on the wall and sees if it sticks, and it's good someone points that out, but Samsung is also really good at being a copycat, and they make amazing displays and their software is getting better even as they plaster it with more junk apps. It's just not so black and white, and to always frame it in such a way hurts credibility. I've tried in the past to follow Gruber regularly but there is just too much defensive negativity in his posts. I can only check it off and on, reading him every day would make me unhappy.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  he is an apple-centric blogger writing for his own site. where exactly does journalism ever come in play here? don't think gruber ever claimed to be a "journalist".
  - leorocky 12y ago
    "Journalism is a method of inquiry and literary style that aims to provide a service to the public by the dissemination and analysis of news and other information."[1] Is that not what he's doing? Is he just gratifying a need to be heard or something? I don't think so, it looks like he's attempting to perform journalism as described by this paragraph, and he falls short in some ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
    - function_seven 12y ago
      Just because "A is B" doesn't mean that "all B are A." I think it's apparent to most that Gruber isn't a journalist, nor does he pretend to be one.
    - akifbhatti 12y ago
slm_HN 12y ago
Daring Fireball is hard to read because the website is so poorly formatted. I rarely make it past the first paragraph. The font is too small, the margins are too huge and the colors have poor contrast.
- sjwright 12y ago
  Margins are irrelevant; it's the column width that matters. I agree that the font size is too small (I use the NoSquint plug-in to remember a 200% zoom for it) but the column width is bang on with about ten words per line.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Yeah, avant garde doesn't really work for web design as soon as it starts impacing readability.
  - bthomas 12y ago
    It's certainly memorable though, and that must help his personal brand. I don't like it either, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a bad idea from his perspective.
- arrrg 12y ago
  The margins are not too huge. That statement makes no sense at all. There are about 75 character per line, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for characters per line. Going for a few more characters would be ok (120 is a usual guideline for the maximum), but 75 is pretty good. It’s actually pretty much the standard. I learned 60 to 90 characters per line. Margins are your problem. Your browser is too wide. (I agree that the font is much too small. Also, Verdana is seriously ugly. A better font at a larger size would reduce the size of your margins, even if you are one of those strange fullscreen browser people.)
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Gruber waves off the other players' devices or operating systems, but takes Apple's web services / cloud infrastructure as a given. Here in reality, Apple's web services are atrocious. Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services are not a healthy part of the triad that Gruber is proposing.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service. I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP. They're "slow" and "frequently unavailable" compared to what? Is the experience of bying stuff from the Google Play store any better? Is the experience of buying music off of Amazon any better? (I'm not talking about Open vs Close, and other philosophical stuff -- I'm asking about what you claimed here, e.g that it's "slower").
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes before the iPad thought it was sufficiently buffered to begin playback. That was on my local 5GHz 802.11n backhauled over 100mbps cable. Every time I want to watch something on Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or Google Play they all start more or less instantly. I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at least one aspect, that I can use any web browser to install apps onto any of my phones, the usual example being I can install an app on my phone by selecting it in Chrome on my iMac. As for the rest of their cloud, the "frequently unavailable" thing I am referring to is APNS, which seems to suffer from complete unreachability at least quarterly. This seems to have something to do with their flailover from their east coast to their west coast datacenter.
    - eridius 12y ago
      > Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes... That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.
joshfraser 12y ago
Finding your one differentiating feature is incredibly valuable for any company, especially in the context of sales. When customers ask how you compare to competitor A or B, it's awesome to be able to say "we're the only people in the world who offer ______". Having one thing that only you do, allows you to completely reframe the conversation. If the customer cares enough about that feature, you become the obvious choice. A nice side-effect is increased focus on your team because everyone knows the one thing that matters most.
- blahber 12y ago
  /insight Excellent way of putting it ! I think apple is going for the word "seamless-experience" here [1]. I do think microsoft has a word too, which they always strive for, and I hope it continues -- "backwards-compatible". I must be honest, I find compatibility-breaking painful as a developer and as a user. [1] I know, hyphenation is a cheap hack :)
philosophus 12y ago
I guess this might be focused on the consumer end, but if you're looking for this in the enterprise, you can get it from IBM and Oracle. You can buy Oracle (Sun) hardware, Solaris, WebLogic, and Oracle database and never use a non-Oracle product. Same with IBM. And maybe I'm cynical, but "unified ecosystem" sounds a lot like "total vendor lock-in" to me.
- schoen 12y ago
  Another term for the "commoditization" that the essay suggests Apple is successfully challenging might be software portability. Or standardization. Or interoperability.
bla2 12y ago
> It has long been axiomatic that Apple is not the sort of company that could walk and chew gum at the same time. In 2007, they issued a (very Steve Jobs-sounding) press release that stated Mac OS X Leopard would be delayed five months because the iPhone consumed too many resources [...] Last week’s keynote was when we, on the outside, finally saw the results. Apple today is firing on all cylinders. There still haven't been many OS X os kernel-level since then (say, NFS+ is largely unchanged). (But the point seems generally true other than that.)
quadrangle 12y ago
Ubuntu…
asimpletune 12y ago
This is an extremely unbiased, well argued essay. There's really nothing in here to disagree with. I even enjoy the author's flair for nuance. The point they make about the apple then and now is exquisite. Haters gonna hate.
malandrew 12y ago
This is largely true, but it draws the playing field Apple wants you to see. There is a large part of the playing field that is omitted, cloud, the web and the Internet in general. And this playing field alone is as important as all the playing fields Apple is competent in combined. Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple. Yes, they have cloud services, but for the most part, Apple's developer community has been generally unhappy about Apple's iCloud offering. This stems from two causes: (1) first, the competency of Apple's team in this area are not comparable to the competency of Apple's other teams (mainly operating systems devs, app devs, industrial designers, supply chain specialists, etc.). No engineer who is truly competent in these domains (cloud, internet, web) has Apple as top of mind when they think about what company to go work for. (2) second, Apple doe not only not understand the value of decentralization, but they actively fight it. This works fine for "single-player" experiences, but for "multi-player" experiences this is a disaster. I, as an Apple user, cannot dictate the devices and software my friends, family, colleagues, etc. will use, so any experience that is only truly complete when all these other people are also part of Apple's walled garden, will either never truly succeed or will outright fail. So yes, only Apple can compete with Apple on it's home turf, but there are other playing fields than the ones Apple likes to talk about. Lastly, Apple has only succeeded as much as it has with the unified experience, not because it did things better, but because the web (and specifically the browsers and the DOM) have failed to truly acknowledge that the web can't [yet] compete with Apple (and native in general), is that we don't have a feature complete and performant browser-based alternative for the building blocks you actually need to build apps, namely retain-mode scene graphs. Browsers need to give some really deep thought to creating the equivalent APIs to things like qt, kde, gnome, Core Animation, etc. The DOM just does not cut it. FWIW, it's exactly what we're working on at Famo.us, and we're hoping others take note and some of the ideas we're exploring become co-opted by the browsers for inclusion as an alternative to the DOM, but that still plays nicely with the DOM. Further proof that Apple has succeeded only because others have stumbled can be seen by comparing iOS to Android as well. Apple was a much better experience for a while before Android caught up. Some of this was because of Apple's big head start, but some of it was due to one technical/product decision made by Android early on, that when reversed made all the difference in Android's ability to compete with Apple: Early on Android settled on immediate mode graphics. This was the main reason Android user experience and performance just felt wrong for a while when Apple's felt right. Once Android embraced retain mode graphics fully, the Android experienced improved dramatically, so much so that I would say that Android, with its developer community, can also do anything Apple can do. [0] http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ [1] http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/ http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/
song 12y ago
> Apple has proceeded from being OK at walking and chewing gum to being good at it. That may be so but honestly the last release of OS X that really worked for me was snow leopard. Just as a quick list of common well known issues with Mavericks that I have and I'm not the only one to have... - Sometimes when I plug in my headphone, there's a bug and audio stops working instead of switching to the headphone. The only fix I found is to restart the computer. - I'm using a macbook pro retina with 16GB of ram and mission control slows the system to a crawl whenever I want to use it. Expose just worked on a computer with 4 times less ram and vastly less powerful. - Sometimes when I connect an external screen, the computer just crashes completely. Honestly, I just wish Apple would start actually doing some QA and fix those issues... The machine itself is great and powerful but it's really a pain to have to deal with all the bugs. And I say that not as an apple hater (all of my computers are from them except my server).
- Glide 12y ago
  Btw, I have a coworker that has the external screen problem and he's had it crash 4 times in a day. He had to take it to the Apple store because it's a hardware issue.
  - song 12y ago
    Thanks, that's something I'll look into. For me it started happening often with the latest update so that's why I ascribed the issue to software but could be just a coincidence...
steele 12y ago
lol Only Gruber. Google is closest to the goal and Satya Nadella's new-guard at Microsoft is taking risks to get there as well. Among them Apple is doing the least to play nicely across platforms. So customers with 1-2 hardware touchpoints in the Apple ecosystem have to rely on Apple's competitor software and services. When I think of the line of Apple products, I definitely don't think 'seamless'.
Todd 12y ago
Sorry to disagree with Gruber, but I don't think a set of devices made by one company is the future. It's always been Apple's play, in part because of the consistency of experience that it affords them, but it also let's them off the hook on the hard problems--device interop, working with varied OEMs, etc. Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some choices. So far, there's been no mention here of the developer experience. Gruber only mentioned developers, but not the 'developer experience.' It's like it doesn't matter anymore. Apple is finally doing interesting things in the developer area with Swift. However, here, they're playing catch up with Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Google. Their language at 1.0 is similar to Windows Phone 7--very late to the game. In addition, you're still left with much of the less than desirable developer toolset. Microsoft developed C# and Visual Studio more than 10 years ago now. They're way ahead here. They also open source much of their developer stack now (the new C# compiler, TypeScript, web stack, etc.). Gruber doesn't even mention this aspect. I guess it's not important to end users, but it does make a difference with the people building for their platforms, devices, and services. I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose (nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA, Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on. This world makes the Internet and the Web seem like a rare anomaly. Tesla's opening of the patent portfolio in an attempt to stave off incompatible fuel stations is apropos to this.
- IBM 12y ago
  >Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some choices. Platforms that run on multiple OEMs might be good, but you haven't proven that. Those choices would be good if they actually delivered a better experience than Apple's vertical integration. It doesn't matter to me (or any other end user) that its harder for Google or Microsoft to deliver a good experience with their strategy. That's their problem and something of their own choosing, so they don't get any points for that.
mantrax5 12y ago
This thread is 50 shades of gray, damn.
cromwellian 12y ago
Disneyland can be a more pleasant town experience than a real American main street. But not everyone can afford to live in Disneyland, and not everyone likes the controlled environment. BTW, Gruber's article claims Apple makes most of their stuff, but as far as I can tell, they only make the CPU. Everything else is licensed ip: camera modules/sensors, GPU (PowerVR), etc.
prawn 12y ago
Samsung dropped the ball with their smart TVs. Smart Hub is atrocious when it could've been an awesome experience for developers that let the Plex's of the world really shine. Instead we have horrible EPGs, sluggish interfaces and no flexibility or hackability.
pistle 12y ago
Since when does Foxconn not make anything for anybody else? This article reads a bit too much like PR+. A main point is trying to argue that Apple is genius at framing "conversations" to manage how their brand is emotionally considered. It does this by applying similar techniques like throwing the "Apple does their own CPUs!" and their stack is so unique, but that's not true enough and pervasive across all products, subsystems, etc. The battery is another place where story has nuance to it, but we sure aren't going to get any of that here. Crap. I've been post-baited.
mariodiana 12y ago
"What we saw last week at WWDC 2014 would not have happened under Steve Jobs." I watched the keynote from the WWDC, and I was struck by the very positive, upbeat, and friendly vibe that seemed to come from it. I'm a big Steve Jobs fan, and I hate to agree with a statement like the above, but my thoughts after watching the keynote were that Apple is done mourning the passing of their founder and former CEO and, if anything, seems stronger now. "Mercurial" isn't a compliment by anyone's standards, and it isn't easy working under someone like that. Perhaps Apple will thrive in its new era. Watching the keynote, it seemed like the people up on stage were pumped up in a very real way.

Only Apple

190 points by dannynemer 12y ago

mantrax5 12y ago

Oh look, it's a Daring Fireball post where Gruber is talking at length about how awesome Apple is.

alirazaq 12y ago
This guy really likes to ramble about the most insignificant things.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
eridius 12y ago
Oh look, it's a snarky comment on Hacker News dismissing Gruber for writing an article on the topic of Apple, without even attempting to address any of the contents of the article.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jvagner 12y ago
Maybe, but the reason it's long is that it's a series of arguments.. supporting points, etc. At least you COULD engage with it if you wanted, unlike so many other pro/con {insert company/platform}.

hayksaakian 12y ago

Apple is doing well to optimize what the company already has, but has shown little regarding what they plan to do next. Seems like they're playing very safe.

zyxley 12y ago
I dunno... Continuity, answering phones on a PC, etc, seems to point pretty strongly at "we are going to make switching between all our devices as seamless as possible" for "what they plan to do next". That's not really "optimizing", considering that Apple is aiming at a range of improvements to the cross-device experience that other companies have only barely touched at (Chrome tab sync, etc).
- m_mueller 12y ago
  This is especially true because introducing any new 'smart' (=connected) products into your life if you already have computer, smartphone and tablet, is going to be just too much if the issues about being in synch haven't been solved until then. Apple has the right ideas about pushing in this direction - as for me I've essentially given up on trying to keep everything both synched and available for any use case. The main thing Apple's fall updates won't offer that I'd really like is multi-user for iPads. If it weren't for that, iOS 8 / OSX 10.10 are - on paper - pretty close to where I'd want everything to be. That being said, it probably won't solve Apple's software QA issues I've been experiencing lately.
dous 12y ago
Announcing (almost final) products once you're sure they will be released seems better than announcing "plans".
ryanhuff 12y ago
It seems that Apple prefers to hide their cards.
mantrax5 12y ago
For anyone paying attention, the SDK has been specifically modified to allow for: 1) Smaller satellite devices for iPhone (iWatch? I don't know, but something like it. Look for it in the Continuity & notification widget APIs). 2) More varied size devices (higher resolution iPhone? Look for it in the Xcode size "traits" APIs). 3) A hint that Macs may move to ARM in the next couple of years (look for it in the way they're rolling out new graphics APIs like Metal). 4) Apple TV may be getting native apps connected to your iPhone/iPad apps (look for it in the new Extensions APIs). While none of the above are hard promises about where Apple's going, they pretty much have no choice than spill this out in the open, as they need to release the SDK and prepare devs for the changes at least some time ahead. It seems their new strategy is to release software/SDK updates in preparation for new hardware in June during WWDC, then we have a few months padding until developers get their air back, and... starting August/September the new hardware starts coming, just in time for school, and just in time for the winter holiday season. Neat, I think.

sscalia 12y ago

I find it hard to argue with any of the points he makes. I'm sure someone here will, but I found myself doing the mental "gulp of air and raising a finger" then getting silenced again. I really wish Microsoft had pulled off Windows Phone; it arguably had a much better user experience than Android did (and still does) -- and interesting Nokia hardware. I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers. The next 10 years are going to be very interesting indeed.

markdown 12y ago
> I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers. You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft? Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.
- sscalia 12y ago
  Yes, my cash - the end user. Not other companies looking to get my "attention"
  - patrickaljord 12y ago
    The fact that apple apps such as itunes do not work on android only serves apple and their lockin strategy, not you or your cash.
    - gress 12y ago
      No, it just means that Android is not a good environment for companies that want to charge money for what they do. Apple is far from the only company that experiences this.
- seiji 12y ago
  To march out some old tropes: Apple makes money by delighting users so they will continue to buy products. Google makes money by tracking users, forcefully if necessary, and abusing their advertisers. Microsoft makes money out of legacy ties these days—they don't deserve to continue existing.

markdown 12y ago

I don't get what the significance of this post is, and why it is at the top of HN. Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it. Only this Company. Yeah not that Company. See I figured all this out; see how smart I am? Now and then on a lazy sunday morning with a cuppa in hand and the business news in my lap, I sink into this level of naval grazing. But I'd never have the time or motive to publish my drivel. Thousands of hours are going to be wasted reading this shit, and to what end? Clearly many people gained lots of value from this article, or it wouldn't be at the top of HN. Could one of you please explain what the value was? What did you gain from reading the article?

sscalia 12y ago
Did you really post this just now?
Bud 12y ago
I don't feel like addressing your question directly, but it is ironic that the criticism of Gruber is coming from a user named "markdown", which is something Gruber invented. :)
- sscalia 12y ago
  I wanted to point that out too. Heh. hi five
- markdown 12y ago
  hehe nice! I am Mark, and any accounts I use for things I do in my downtime are called markdown. Work related accounts have the username markup.
pinaceae 12y ago
because this is about competing eco-systems and if you make your living writing software that runs in those eco-systems ("apps"), the health and capabilities of said systems is critical. iOS/OSX vs. Android/Chrome vs. Windows8/WP8 if you're just a consumer, then yes, not so interesting, but then this whole forum might not be for you.

leorocky 12y ago

There is always a lot of careful insight in Gruber's posts that I like but it is tainted with a type of enthusiasm that doesn't belong in journalism. Even if he is correct, being a cheerleader with liberal praise isn't analysis. It's opinion, and Gruber often reads like an opinionist. Apple is an amazing position to build all kinds of wonderful technology, and Samsung does come across as a shallow copy cat that throws shit on the wall and sees if it sticks, and it's good someone points that out, but Samsung is also really good at being a copycat, and they make amazing displays and their software is getting better even as they plaster it with more junk apps. It's just not so black and white, and to always frame it in such a way hurts credibility. I've tried in the past to follow Gruber regularly but there is just too much defensive negativity in his posts. I can only check it off and on, reading him every day would make me unhappy.

pinaceae 12y ago
he is an apple-centric blogger writing for his own site. where exactly does journalism ever come in play here? don't think gruber ever claimed to be a "journalist".
- leorocky 12y ago
  "Journalism is a method of inquiry and literary style that aims to provide a service to the public by the dissemination and analysis of news and other information."[1] Is that not what he's doing? Is he just gratifying a need to be heard or something? I don't think so, it looks like he's attempting to perform journalism as described by this paragraph, and he falls short in some ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
  - function_seven 12y ago
    Just because "A is B" doesn't mean that "all B are A." I think it's apparent to most that Gruber isn't a journalist, nor does he pretend to be one.
  - akifbhatti 12y ago

slm_HN 12y ago

Daring Fireball is hard to read because the website is so poorly formatted. I rarely make it past the first paragraph. The font is too small, the margins are too huge and the colors have poor contrast.

sjwright 12y ago
Margins are irrelevant; it's the column width that matters. I agree that the font size is too small (I use the NoSquint plug-in to remember a 200% zoom for it) but the column width is bang on with about ten words per line.
yzzxy 12y ago
Yeah, avant garde doesn't really work for web design as soon as it starts impacing readability.
- bthomas 12y ago
  It's certainly memorable though, and that must help his personal brand. I don't like it either, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a bad idea from his perspective.
arrrg 12y ago
The margins are not too huge. That statement makes no sense at all. There are about 75 character per line, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for characters per line. Going for a few more characters would be ok (120 is a usual guideline for the maximum), but 75 is pretty good. It’s actually pretty much the standard. I learned 60 to 90 characters per line. Margins are your problem. Your browser is too wide. (I agree that the font is much too small. Also, Verdana is seriously ugly. A better font at a larger size would reduce the size of your margins, even if you are one of those strange fullscreen browser people.)

thrownaway2424 12y ago

Gruber waves off the other players' devices or operating systems, but takes Apple's web services / cloud infrastructure as a given. Here in reality, Apple's web services are atrocious. Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services are not a healthy part of the triad that Gruber is proposing.

coldtea 12y ago
>Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service. I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP. They're "slow" and "frequently unavailable" compared to what? Is the experience of bying stuff from the Google Play store any better? Is the experience of buying music off of Amazon any better? (I'm not talking about Open vs Close, and other philosophical stuff -- I'm asking about what you claimed here, e.g that it's "slower").
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes before the iPad thought it was sufficiently buffered to begin playback. That was on my local 5GHz 802.11n backhauled over 100mbps cable. Every time I want to watch something on Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or Google Play they all start more or less instantly. I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at least one aspect, that I can use any web browser to install apps onto any of my phones, the usual example being I can install an app on my phone by selecting it in Chrome on my iMac. As for the rest of their cloud, the "frequently unavailable" thing I am referring to is APNS, which seems to suffer from complete unreachability at least quarterly. This seems to have something to do with their flailover from their east coast to their west coast datacenter.
  - eridius 12y ago
    > Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes... That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.

joshfraser 12y ago

Finding your one differentiating feature is incredibly valuable for any company, especially in the context of sales. When customers ask how you compare to competitor A or B, it's awesome to be able to say "we're the only people in the world who offer ______". Having one thing that only you do, allows you to completely reframe the conversation. If the customer cares enough about that feature, you become the obvious choice. A nice side-effect is increased focus on your team because everyone knows the one thing that matters most.

blahber 12y ago
/insight Excellent way of putting it ! I think apple is going for the word "seamless-experience" here [1]. I do think microsoft has a word too, which they always strive for, and I hope it continues -- "backwards-compatible". I must be honest, I find compatibility-breaking painful as a developer and as a user. [1] I know, hyphenation is a cheap hack :)

philosophus 12y ago

I guess this might be focused on the consumer end, but if you're looking for this in the enterprise, you can get it from IBM and Oracle. You can buy Oracle (Sun) hardware, Solaris, WebLogic, and Oracle database and never use a non-Oracle product. Same with IBM. And maybe I'm cynical, but "unified ecosystem" sounds a lot like "total vendor lock-in" to me.

schoen 12y ago
Another term for the "commoditization" that the essay suggests Apple is successfully challenging might be software portability. Or standardization. Or interoperability.

bla2 12y ago

> It has long been axiomatic that Apple is not the sort of company that could walk and chew gum at the same time. In 2007, they issued a (very Steve Jobs-sounding) press release that stated Mac OS X Leopard would be delayed five months because the iPhone consumed too many resources [...] Last week’s keynote was when we, on the outside, finally saw the results. Apple today is firing on all cylinders. There still haven't been many OS X os kernel-level since then (say, NFS+ is largely unchanged). (But the point seems generally true other than that.)

quadrangle 12y ago

Ubuntu…

asimpletune 12y ago

This is an extremely unbiased, well argued essay. There's really nothing in here to disagree with. I even enjoy the author's flair for nuance. The point they make about the apple then and now is exquisite. Haters gonna hate.

malandrew 12y ago

This is largely true, but it draws the playing field Apple wants you to see. There is a large part of the playing field that is omitted, cloud, the web and the Internet in general. And this playing field alone is as important as all the playing fields Apple is competent in combined. Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple. Yes, they have cloud services, but for the most part, Apple's developer community has been generally unhappy about Apple's iCloud offering. This stems from two causes: (1) first, the competency of Apple's team in this area are not comparable to the competency of Apple's other teams (mainly operating systems devs, app devs, industrial designers, supply chain specialists, etc.). No engineer who is truly competent in these domains (cloud, internet, web) has Apple as top of mind when they think about what company to go work for. (2) second, Apple doe not only not understand the value of decentralization, but they actively fight it. This works fine for "single-player" experiences, but for "multi-player" experiences this is a disaster. I, as an Apple user, cannot dictate the devices and software my friends, family, colleagues, etc. will use, so any experience that is only truly complete when all these other people are also part of Apple's walled garden, will either never truly succeed or will outright fail. So yes, only Apple can compete with Apple on it's home turf, but there are other playing fields than the ones Apple likes to talk about. Lastly, Apple has only succeeded as much as it has with the unified experience, not because it did things better, but because the web (and specifically the browsers and the DOM) have failed to truly acknowledge that the web can't [yet] compete with Apple (and native in general), is that we don't have a feature complete and performant browser-based alternative for the building blocks you actually need to build apps, namely retain-mode scene graphs. Browsers need to give some really deep thought to creating the equivalent APIs to things like qt, kde, gnome, Core Animation, etc. The DOM just does not cut it. FWIW, it's exactly what we're working on at Famo.us, and we're hoping others take note and some of the ideas we're exploring become co-opted by the browsers for inclusion as an alternative to the DOM, but that still plays nicely with the DOM. Further proof that Apple has succeeded only because others have stumbled can be seen by comparing iOS to Android as well. Apple was a much better experience for a while before Android caught up. Some of this was because of Apple's big head start, but some of it was due to one technical/product decision made by Android early on, that when reversed made all the difference in Android's ability to compete with Apple: Early on Android settled on immediate mode graphics. This was the main reason Android user experience and performance just felt wrong for a while when Apple's felt right. Once Android embraced retain mode graphics fully, the Android experienced improved dramatically, so much so that I would say that Android, with its developer community, can also do anything Apple can do. [0] http://famo.us/ http://famo.us/ [1] http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/ http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/

song 12y ago

> Apple has proceeded from being OK at walking and chewing gum to being good at it. That may be so but honestly the last release of OS X that really worked for me was snow leopard. Just as a quick list of common well known issues with Mavericks that I have and I'm not the only one to have... - Sometimes when I plug in my headphone, there's a bug and audio stops working instead of switching to the headphone. The only fix I found is to restart the computer. - I'm using a macbook pro retina with 16GB of ram and mission control slows the system to a crawl whenever I want to use it. Expose just worked on a computer with 4 times less ram and vastly less powerful. - Sometimes when I connect an external screen, the computer just crashes completely. Honestly, I just wish Apple would start actually doing some QA and fix those issues... The machine itself is great and powerful but it's really a pain to have to deal with all the bugs. And I say that not as an apple hater (all of my computers are from them except my server).

Glide 12y ago
Btw, I have a coworker that has the external screen problem and he's had it crash 4 times in a day. He had to take it to the Apple store because it's a hardware issue.
- song 12y ago
  Thanks, that's something I'll look into. For me it started happening often with the latest update so that's why I ascribed the issue to software but could be just a coincidence...

steele 12y ago

lol Only Gruber. Google is closest to the goal and Satya Nadella's new-guard at Microsoft is taking risks to get there as well. Among them Apple is doing the least to play nicely across platforms. So customers with 1-2 hardware touchpoints in the Apple ecosystem have to rely on Apple's competitor software and services. When I think of the line of Apple products, I definitely don't think 'seamless'.

Todd 12y ago

Sorry to disagree with Gruber, but I don't think a set of devices made by one company is the future. It's always been Apple's play, in part because of the consistency of experience that it affords them, but it also let's them off the hook on the hard problems--device interop, working with varied OEMs, etc. Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some choices. So far, there's been no mention here of the developer experience. Gruber only mentioned developers, but not the 'developer experience.' It's like it doesn't matter anymore. Apple is finally doing interesting things in the developer area with Swift. However, here, they're playing catch up with Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Google. Their language at 1.0 is similar to Windows Phone 7--very late to the game. In addition, you're still left with much of the less than desirable developer toolset. Microsoft developed C# and Visual Studio more than 10 years ago now. They're way ahead here. They also open source much of their developer stack now (the new C# compiler, TypeScript, web stack, etc.). Gruber doesn't even mention this aspect. I guess it's not important to end users, but it does make a difference with the people building for their platforms, devices, and services. I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose (nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA, Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on. This world makes the Internet and the Web seem like a rare anomaly. Tesla's opening of the patent portfolio in an attempt to stave off incompatible fuel stations is apropos to this.

IBM 12y ago
>Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some choices. Platforms that run on multiple OEMs might be good, but you haven't proven that. Those choices would be good if they actually delivered a better experience than Apple's vertical integration. It doesn't matter to me (or any other end user) that its harder for Google or Microsoft to deliver a good experience with their strategy. That's their problem and something of their own choosing, so they don't get any points for that.

mantrax5 12y ago

This thread is 50 shades of gray, damn.

cromwellian 12y ago

Disneyland can be a more pleasant town experience than a real American main street. But not everyone can afford to live in Disneyland, and not everyone likes the controlled environment. BTW, Gruber's article claims Apple makes most of their stuff, but as far as I can tell, they only make the CPU. Everything else is licensed ip: camera modules/sensors, GPU (PowerVR), etc.

prawn 12y ago

Samsung dropped the ball with their smart TVs. Smart Hub is atrocious when it could've been an awesome experience for developers that let the Plex's of the world really shine. Instead we have horrible EPGs, sluggish interfaces and no flexibility or hackability.

pistle 12y ago

Since when does Foxconn not make anything for anybody else? This article reads a bit too much like PR+. A main point is trying to argue that Apple is genius at framing "conversations" to manage how their brand is emotionally considered. It does this by applying similar techniques like throwing the "Apple does their own CPUs!" and their stack is so unique, but that's not true enough and pervasive across all products, subsystems, etc. The battery is another place where story has nuance to it, but we sure aren't going to get any of that here. Crap. I've been post-baited.

mariodiana 12y ago

"What we saw last week at WWDC 2014 would not have happened under Steve Jobs." I watched the keynote from the WWDC, and I was struck by the very positive, upbeat, and friendly vibe that seemed to come from it. I'm a big Steve Jobs fan, and I hate to agree with a statement like the above, but my thoughts after watching the keynote were that Apple is done mourning the passing of their founder and former CEO and, if anything, seems stronger now. "Mercurial" isn't a compliment by anyone's standards, and it isn't easy working under someone like that. Perhaps Apple will thrive in its new era. Watching the keynote, it seemed like the people up on stage were pumped up in a very real way.