[joebadmo]

This is a truly insightful comment, and really clarifies the distinction, I think, between Apple people and non-Apple people. Though, really, I suppose it's more of a point on a spectrum of how much of your tech decisions you're willing to farm out.

As for me, I fall on the other side of that point. Whenever I use an Apple product, I find that I'm often annoyed at the decisions that have been made for me, but more than that, I'm not allowed to change that decision.

It's interesting, though, that people on either side of line regard the other side's feature as a bug.

[tinotopia]

It's not that I see the greater flexibility of, well, nearly all non-Apple product as being a bug, exactly. There are certainly tremendous advantages to being flexible, adaptable, and extensible. It's just that there are also some advantages to being less flexible; these advantages are subtle and often missed.

The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.

It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.