
The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is... - tortilla
http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/158213384/the-problem-with-my-self-imposed-iphone-boycott-is
======
old-gregg
The world is unfair. Everybody is stealing my favorite things to hate.

I have been single-handily hating Java since 1996 and never, never took a Java
job. It felt so f-ing awesome coding C with Python and laughing at Java
groupies up until around 2004 when hating Java became mainstream. Ridiculing
Java is so uncool now... everybody is doing it, no need to engage your
neocortex in this activity anymore: it's like breathing. Ugh.

Facebook "platform" was awesome to hate but only for a short while: in less
than a year everybody stopped loving it and the cave of Facebook haters got
too crowded. I don't even remember the name they used for that "platform"
anymore.

Then the iPhone came out, a 100% closed and proprietary little cutie. Then the
DRM-crippled Kindle! It felt like being a kid in a candy store for a while:
those two were awesome gifts to a serial crippled tech hater like me. It's
been so awesome not owning these two and bashing them all over internets! And
suddenly I'm not alone, the beach is full of fatties and the water is muddy.
Hey you're all, get outa here and go zoom some maps with two fingers, dammit!

Ugh... Only Flash is left as the last bullet on my list of things to hate. And
the camp of Flash bashers is growing uncomfortably large. It is getting
increasingly difficult to find a universally loved crap to loathe. Even not
owning a TV, an all-time American love affair, is trendy!

~~~
jrockway
I must be really cool because I hate people that hate everything just to be
cool

~~~
old-gregg
Don't scare me Mr. Jrockway. If you have read my comment in full, you would
have noticed that I don't hate "everything". In fact my 12 year old list is
only about 5 positions long. Notice that I only hate Adobe Flash full-time at
the moment. It takes a skill, time and dedication to hate a particular
technology - just look at my bookshelf.

You, on the other hand, just committed to effortlessly hating a bunch of
strangers! May I ask which gym you happen to frequent these days?

:P

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htsh
I would think that a more proper boycott of Apple's policy in this case would
be to jailbreak the iphone. This way, you're boycotting the app store, not the
phone itself.

~~~
jonknee
That will really stick it to them--buy their product, pay them cash every
month for service, provide advertising by letting people see you use an
iPhone, but screw them over by not buying apps.

~~~
htsh
Its all about the developers (as Ballmer says). You'd be doing your part to
channel effort away from this awful system into a third party that does not
censor or cripple your hardware's functionality:

Check out this bit from Slashdot yesterday:

"The 4-month-old Cydia store is yielding notably higher sales for a few
application developers than Apple's AppStore, and is reportedly running on
over 4 million Apple iPhone devices, with perhaps 350,000 connected at any one
time. In this store, developers are distributing applications they've written
that push the limits of Apple's normal AppStore policies, with software to add
file downloads to Safari, trick applications into thinking they're on Wi-Fi
(for VoIP), and enhance other types functionality. You'll also find the
popular Google Voice application, which was recently rejected by
Apple."--<http://bit.ly/199gAh>

~~~
jonknee
You'll do more to awaken Apple by not using their device at all. Not only is
that -1 for them, it's +1 for one of their competitors. Not using the app
store deprives them of very little money (even if you spend $100 at the app
store they are netting just $30). Not using the device at all is a loss of
thousands of dollars (partly AT&T, partly Apple, but both companies will take
notice very quickly if people start dropping like flies).

~~~
htsh
Agreed, but I'd still think jailbroken is the way to go for the many that are
stuck in contracts and can't really afford the $200 to break early.

~~~
jonknee
You'll be able to sell your iPhone for more than $200 and will save money
every month if you go to a competitor, so money shouldn't be a problem.

------
martythemaniak
To paraphrase Justice Warren on pornography... you'll know it when you see it.

A lot of people need to step back and realize the sheer absurdity of Apple, a
maker of software and consumer gadgets suddenly going into the content
censorship business. The Apple App stored seemed rotten to be from the
beginning and it's lived up to my expectations.

At the end of the day, there's very few things Apple needs to worry about:

\- is the app malicious or hurtful to the system or users?

\- does the user have enough info make a decision on whether they want the app
or not?

Schiller's reply on Daring Fireball showed that they don't quite get it. They
still believe they should be the ones with the final authority, not users.

~~~
eds
Not to get off topic, but Warren didn't write that, did he?

~~~
hexis
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I
understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I
could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and
the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Justice Potter Stewart
- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

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sfphotoarts
He missed the most obvious contended to the iPhone, namely the blackberry. In
SF at least, you see occasionally Android and Pre's but the overwhelming
majority of smart phones are split between iphone and blackberry. Depending on
where you are in the city the ration changes, but its obvious that neither the
Pre or the Android phones have really made much of a dent on the dominance of
those two.

Maybe the next wave of Android phones will help promote that line, and maybe
the next version of the Pre with a battery that lasts the whole day will get
it into more people's hands, but until then, the world of smartphones is split
not into the choices that Steve made.

What the HN community feels about Apple is largely irrelevant to Apple. We're
the nerds that buy the early adopter products, Apple appeals to a mass market
that doesn't give one hoot about the app approval process, all they want are
their games and new shiny things ever summer.

------
DannoHung
I don't see why people are particularly upset about the Ninjawords dictionary.
I mean, you only need to look at the literal universe of scatological,
explicit, sexual terms cataloged in a place like wiktionary to understand what
was found to be objectionable.

Fuck, shit, dick, cunt, ass, tits, and whatever else the 7 dirty words happen
to be this week weren't the problem.

Here, just peruse this list:
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Vulgarities>

~~~
gjm11
From the article: "What’s odd is this also contradicts the developers’ own
claims that the rejection letter they received cited only examples of
conventional swear words as objectionable."

Either the developers lied, or their App Store reviewer misled them, or
Schiller was not telling the truth when he said that the problem was something
other than "conventional swear words".

Anyway. Whatever "unconventional" obscenities it may contain: _it's a
dictionary_. Dictionaries (apart from weirdly bowdlerized ones) contain
naughty words, and words that describe Very Nasty Things. A user is only
likely to see those if they deliberately go looking for them. It doesn't seem
difficult to me to understand why some people might find it odd for those
words to require the thing to be given a 17+ rating; real dictionaries (which
probably offer more opportunities for people to find "cocksucker" or
"genocide" -- and, incidentally, isn't it bizarre to worry more about children
finding the former than the latter? -- by accident than electronic ones like
Ninjawords) don't generally carry age warnings or restrictions.

