
Saying Goodbye to Apple - philfreo
http://benjaminthomas.org/2010-03-14/saying-goodbye-to-apple.html
======
stuntmouse
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/>

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.]

~~~
zacharypinter
I'm not so sure that HTML5 adoption, at the cost of all web plugins, is a net
win. I don't care so much about Flash, but it seems that Apple's lack of a
plugin framework is positioning Safari to be the next IE6. Developers will be
limited by the lowest common denominator. Without plugin-based workarounds,
Safari's support for any new technology will dictate what web developers use.
Don't like that Apple has chosen H.264 over VP8 or Theora? tough luck...

clarification: referring to Mobile Safari's lack of plugins

~~~
edd
edit: after clarification by OP this doesn't relate to what they are talking
about.

I don't know quite what you are getting at here? Are you suggesting that you
can't install plugins to manage different kind of embeds with Safari? As this
is just not true: Java, Flash, RealPlayer, QuickTime, Flip4Mac.... these are
all plugins built as standard OSX internet plugins. If you want to develop
your own go ahead.

I think what you are trying to get at is that you want things that are being
natively handled by the browser to be optionally controlled via a plugin. The
fragmented state that is what browsers have natively implemented is quite
shocking but having everything optionally overridden by plugins would cause
even more fragmentation and even more headaches.

~~~
stuntmouse
I assumed that point was about the lack of support for plugins in Mobile
Safari, though I could be mistaken.

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fierarul
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
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.

~~~
ptomato
Skype? You mean like this: <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/> 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.

~~~
Zak
I know how to install software on Mac OS. I didn't know about Sparkle. It
looks nice, but doesn't provide quite what I want; apt lets me have an upgrade
process that's simultaneously automatic and controllable.

I knew about the display inversion. It is most certainly not what I want.

------
kylec
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
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.

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zacharypinter
The site seems to be down. Here's the google cache:

[http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:xQAXZriYJusJ:benjamintho...](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)

~~~
fbu
Has the website been "Hacker News'ed" ? Are we driving this much traffic ?

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hugh3
_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.

~~~
axod
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
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.

~~~
axod
I don't see the incentive within the patent system to implement an idea. The
price of getting a patent is cheap enough that you can just get a few patents,
and wait until someone does the hard work and sue/get licensing payoffs.

I never suggested a world without patents, not at all. I certainly see the
usefulness of patents for areas where you _genuinely_ have to put in years of
R&D, where problems are hard, etc. But software/UI certainly isn't an area
like that.

~~~
GHFigs
_...wait until someone does the hard work and sue/get licensing payoffs._

If someone else thinks it's _worth_ doing that work, that suggests there is a
payoff to implementing it. If you are in the position to implement it, you
probably stand more to gain from doing so yourself than hoping somebody
stumbles into it.

If you're _not_ in the position to implement, or perhaps not on the right
scale, it's in your interests to license it to somebody who does or for them
to buy you out. It would be pointless to just leave it unimplemented and
unlicensed.

That isn't to say patent trolling hasn't worked for some--only that it's a bug
and not a feature. It has more to do with bad patent grants than a lack of
incentive.

 _...where problems are hard, etc. But software/UI certainly isn't an area
like that._

Then why do so many do it so poorly?

~~~
axod
>> "Then why do so many do it so poorly?"

Because IMHO you have to have a talent/practice at it. It's trivial for anyone
skilled in the art.

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jsz0
_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.

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

------
joshuarr
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.

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

