[throwlaplace]

lol at the accusatory and indignant tone.

1. apple is a hardware company not a software company. to wit: they do not sell mac os and if they did i might buy it.

2. i don't care a lick about any other features or "stability" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845629). i simply said that i appreciated the workspaces feature. can i buy this feature ala carte? i would gladly. can i pay the devs that built it for their work? i would gladly.

3. i maintain my cognitive dissonance the same way you do when paying a 2x markup for commodity hardware.

edit: man every day i can't help but feel more and more that people in tech (at least as this site reflects) are some of the most self-righteous.

[mwcampbell]

I'm with doteka on this. I think techie entitlement is a bigger problem than self-righteousness. As Kyle Mitchell (kemitchell on HN) put it recently in his essay "No Thanks" [1]:

> From outside software looking in, “software freedom” walks and talks a lot more like “coder entitlement” or “coder privilege”. In short, a hacker on a tear should never hear the word “no”. Not when breaking into offices to steal parts for a train set. Not when contending with a printer they didn’t develop or pay for. Not when building the next hot web or mobile app … again. Not when building a war cloud or optimizing a baby-photo reinforcement schedule for grandma.

Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?

And no, I've never done a hackintosh, either virtual or physical.

[1]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/04/17/No-Thanks.html

[Wowfunhappy]

I read the full essay. I don't think his points are wrong, but I think his conclusion is. It's not that "techies" are entitled, just that most of the world isn't going to understand the benefits "software freedom". That doesn't mean they shouldn't care.

A few months ago, I read Cory Doctorow's short story "Unauthorized Bread"[1]. It's an exceptionally preachy story about a refugee in near-future America, but the point it gets across is this: closed computer systems are a tool for the powerful to control the powerless, and the consequences will be felt by both tech-enthusiasts and technophobes alike.

Personally, what I want is for more people to become adept at using their computers, so they become capable of taking advantage of open platforms, and with it, agency over their lives. That's one reason I was volunteering at Girls Who Code before the Coronavirus shut everything down. I don't necessarily expect all the 10 year olds I work with to grow up to become programmers, but if they're comfortable making quick edits to a python script in order to better accomplish a mundane task, that's a really powerful skill!

---

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

[throwlaplace]

>Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?

jesus christ what are you talking about. i should feel morally obligated to a corporation? or maybe tim cook himself? this isn't a moral quandary or question and never will be. you people have deeply internalized a relationship to money and corporations that is perverse. like any good business person would say: it's not personal it's business - if they want to prevent me from using their software in a way that violates the EULA or whatever then cool they can try to stop me (note: they have in the past and will continue into the future and so the world will turn).

re those poor poor apple engineers: apple's market cap is 1.24T (that's a capital T for trillion). oh no will someone please think of them and their margins! i'm (100-epsilon)% sure that not a single apple engineer will ever suffer any hardship from a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of their customer/user base building hackintoshes.

[Wowfunhappy]

Apple definitely isn't hurting right now.

But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line? Is pirating Photoshop okay? What about Affinity Photo? What about Omnigroup, which makes fantastic software, but also has to charge a lot of money for it, and was forced to do a round of layoffs recently?

What if the app is made by a single developer, but you don't like his or her politics? Or what if it's a single developer charging too much? How do you determine what "too much" is, and are you really able to be a fair judge, given that you have a personal financial stake in the outcome?

As a Hackintosh user, I don't have all the answers. I tell myself Hackintosh is okay because I used a real Mac to download the installer, but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially. I do try to avoid pirating all forms of digital media, though, even when it means there are products I simply cannot use due to lack of finances.

[throwlaplace]

> But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line?

this has already been hashed out during the late 90s and early 00s in the context of media piracy: software and media are non-rivalrous goods. me pirating the good does not prevent anyone else from purchasing. it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.

> but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially

there are zero moral issues implicated here. property is outside of morality.

[Wowfunhappy]

> it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.

How do you know that you were "never going to purchase it in the first place"? There are lots of products where I initially looked at the price tag, thought "that's ridiculous", and walked away—but eventually came back and bought it, sometimes kicking and screaming.

Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake in convincing myself one way. And I don't think anyone else can actually do it either.

[throwlaplace]

> Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake

i'm at a loss for to how parse this let alone how to respond to it. who else but you "can make a fair judgement" about whether you'll buy something?

i don't have shifting perspectives on whether i'll buy something - i either decide to buy something or i decide not to buy it. if i decide to buy something but i don't have money for it i save money and buy it eventually.

to drive home the point: i pirate movies instead of going to theaters. if some movie that i was interested in seeing never gets released on some torrent site i do not buy that movie i simply do not watch it. on the other hand i do buy books even though i could pirate them easily.

[doteka]

You can pay these devs by purchasing one of the machines the software comes bundled with, that’s what pays their salary.

Apple is an integrator, they are not in the business of selling you just commodity hardware. People who buy their products do so in large part because the experience is better than what they would get buying the same hardware from random Chinese OEM 274.

But if you’re on the commodity hardware spiel: I challenge you to match the specs of any laptop Apple sells in a laptop by another manufacturer (and actually match, not replacing NVMe ssds with some random SATA part etc) and come anywhere near 50% or even 70% of the price.

[throwlaplace]

>not replacing NVMe ssds with some random SATA part etc) and come anywhere near 50% or even 70% of the price.

this has been done over and over again. i'm not going to go through the tedious process just to have you ultimately declare victory anyway when i can't source their superduper proprietary butterfly/centipede/tarantula keyboard or their retina/cornea/myopia display.

[spockz]

I used to use Desktops[1] when I still used Windows. I’m not sure whether windows supports full screen apps these days so it will be slightly different experience.

[1]: https://superuser.com/a/177046