

Why the iPhone doesn't have copy+paste - david
http://daringfireball.net/2007/08/clipboard_and_arrows

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dejb
This article's justifications for why the feature is missing typifies
everything I hate about macs and their apologists. It's the whole 'we know
better than you' about what you should be allowed to do. Give me an
environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use and
even viruses/trojans any day over this sterile Mac-world

~~~
palish
I haven't missed copy and paste. I'm glad that they left it out, because it's
another chance to introduce even more bugs into the iPhone (the thing crashes
around once every other day).

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ajju
Yes, it's best not to introduce more features lest they introduce more bugs.
Let's just use white shiny plastic boxes connected with a metal cable then,
shall we?

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palish
I'm not sure what your point is, but I'll take the iPhone the way it is now
rather than chance even more bugs. There's no reason to need copy and paste
except under extremely specific circumstances that don't come up often.

It's not a laptop.

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ajju
Actually there is. I use a blackberry which also has a similar feature - if a
number on a web page looks like a phone number you can just click it and it
will call the number. However I routinely need to copy paste things from one
email to another or from a web page to an email.

You may be happy with your iphone, good for you. My point is that you can't
call a feature extraneous just because you don't need it and that if you have
to reduce features to reduce bugs you have a very serious problem. If your
engineers are prone to writing buggy code, the product will be buggy even if
it has very few features and vice versa.

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extantproject
I use an iPhone daily and there have only been a few times I've missed copy
and paste. Usually it's been when I'm tapping out a reply email or posting on
a site such as YC News and need to quote someone. To route around the lack of
copy and paste my replies end up being similar to using a word you know how to
spell instead of one you don't; I just write what I think rather than writing
about what someone else has written and think nothing of it. There are
certainly cases when this analogy doesn't hold and copy and paste
functionality would be nice, but it's definitely by design that there isn't
one.

Constraining developers and themselves to create simpler ways to do things is
smart of Apple. Emailing photos is the perfect example: I want to email this
photo that is on my screen -- not open my "photo application", copy a photo,
go back to the main screen, open my "email application" and paste the photo.
Most of the copy and paste scenarios can be handled in a similar way: links to
maps, links to phone numbers, links to URLs, and so on.

Maybe there are better ways to perform actions on mobile platforms instead of
following the decades-old clunky mouse way to do them?

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appleVnokia
because is the not the nokia N95

apple repeated the same mistake they made with the mac 20 years ago, thats why
the will never lead the mobile market.

~~~
allenbrunson
oh, man. now there is a bet i would really, really like to take.

i used a motorola razr for a year, then got an iphone as soon as possible. i
wouldn't go back for any reason.

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nanijoe
I think it is retarded that I have to manually re-write stuff that is already
in an email into a text message or vice versa. At least several times every
day I wish my iphone had copy and paste

