[programminggeek]

He's right and certainly more levelheaded about these kinds of issues than most, but what most don't realize is that many of the software platforms we love have had worse policies for years. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Sega all have/had extremely rigorous review process that was even worse than Apple's if you want to be on their game platform. Phone companies had all these build processes if you wanted to write Java ME apps to work on feature phones. And so on and so forth.

The problem is, as devs we are spoiled by the web, where you can just push out new code that says or does whatever you want it to without any consequence because the web is a "relatively" safe runtime, so nobody cares.

We are like children who grew up with a silver spoon in our mouth and we've been asked to endure plastic. Sure, it's still a spoon, but it's not silver and that pisses us off.

[gbog]

> Phone companies had all these build processes

Well, yes, and that's why we had crappy phones for years before iPhone and Android arrived, as noted by Jeff Atwood. I think it shows again that, not unlike the first PCs and their open slots for third-party cards, openness is the right move.

Many people here seem to renounce to this, mostly because Apple's walled garden is currently at a pinnacle, but in my opinion it is an accident. Apple's products manage to grasp most of the attention around for emotional reasons, and some forget that the future is not built on closed formats, closed markets, etc. I am surprised that it is not so obvious, especially for US citizens. The Web builds on open protocols. The PC-era built on the fact that you could open the box and plug things of your doing in it. Wikipedia, which everyone uses constantly and forget, is an open community task.

My two years-old kid is learning a lot, but it is not linear, he sometimes go backward a bit. I think we are in this backward pulse, with everyone suddenly dissmissing the possibility to open, change, modify softwares, in exchange of a (temporary) slightly better user experience.

To the Apple lover crowd: please feel free to downvote, and check my past comments to downvotes them also if you didn't already. I'm used to it now, I don't care about my karma. Anyway, I'll loose some more re-upvoting all those perfectly acceptable comments I find grayed in some threads, apparently because they are not respectful enough to the King.

Oh, and I like Apple, I learnt computing on an Apple ][, I applauded to the very smart Unix move for MacOS, many of my colleagues and friend own a MPB or A, but none would be enough of a zealots to try to hide out comments expressing concerns about walled gardens.

[raganwald]

Your comment would read better without the argumentative side-excursion in the second-last paragraph. You make this great point, then instead of resting on it, you distract me from thinking about what you're trying to say and ask me to start thinking about whether everyone who down votes you is an Apple lover. Wy make me work to re-read your comment to remind myself what you actually came here to say?

[gbog]

You are right, I should have split it in two probably.

[chc]

You should have stuck to the matters of substance. It is not necessary to go throwing nerd politics into every discussion, even if you believe someone else will.

[rhizome]

Drawing attention to downvoting never results in much of anything. It's always pointless to waste keystrokes on it.

[ajross]

That's pretty much my intuition too. The iPhone is still the best device, but the smartphone market is commoditizing rapidly. Android units aren't very far behind at all and are improving rapidly. And Apple is losing market share to Android, not the reverse.

Apple is milking their success right now, because developers have iPhones and they want to support their favorite hardware. But every story like this drives off a handful of developers. And every week the simple economies look more and more favorable to the competing platform.

Really, the Apple ][ analogy is very good. That platform too ultimately killed itself not for technical reasons, but because Apple refused to give up its margins in the face of the C64 and PC markets and assumed that its stocked developer mindshare would save it. It didn't.

[cageface]

some forget that the future is not built on closed formats, closed markets, etc

We are still in the early history of popular computing. It may be that openness tends to win in the end but I think this is far from established as fact at this point. I think you put this in unnecessarily black and white terms too. The future may favor hybrids of open data models and closed, native clients.

[Gormo]

Apple is in the same place with the iOS platform as it was with the Mac in the second half of the '80s.

Back then, they had a huge lead over other platforms due to the then-revolutionary GUI environment on the Mac. Then Jobs was forced out of Apple, and their marketing and product design couldn't keep up with what was being developed in the more open and more chaotic corners of the industry. It's no coincidence that the most open hardware architecture won, and that the company that developed the most successful OS for that platform became the dominant software company for over a decade.

Android is to iOS in 2011 what Windows was to MacOS in 1990, and in 2025, Apple will probably look a lot like it did in 1995.

[VMG]

If you really didn't care about karma, you wouldn't have the need to mention it.

[gbog]

I don't care about karma. You are free to not believe me, I don't care about that either.

However, I care a lot about HN, and the possibility to have reasonable discussions here. I am not the only one to have sensed the impact of a the Apple lover crowd trying to bury down other thoughts or any slight criticism. Gosh, even the respected and respectable Fred Wilson did notice this issue on his blog (avc.com).

[VMG]

My only point is I prefer HN without meta-talk about karma and comment scores. Your disclaimer paragraphs probably do nothing to soothe the apple fanboys and can be annoying to those who actually agree with you. (Enough with the meta from my part)

Edit: brainfart

[kstenerud]

The problem is that downvotes make the text lighter colored and harder to read, which is a huge motivator for partisans to censor things they don't like or find inconvenient.

[mcantelon]

>We are like children who grew up with a silver spoon in our mouth and we've been asked to endure plastic. Sure, it's still a spoon, but it's not silver and that pisses us off.

No, we're like adults used to being able to do what we want with our own hardware. Being able to do what you want with hardware is the historical computing norm (gaming consoles being the exception). Android-based devices carry on this tradition so I use them, rather than paying Apple $99/year for the privilege of putting applications I've written on my own hardware.

[Derbasti]

Really, you are paying for the privilege to be listed in the App Store and to be distributed to customers.

[mcantelon]

Unless you jailbreak, you can't even make your own app and have it run on your own phone without paying $99/year.

And as far as paying for the privilege of being including in the App Store, seems like the 30% cut Apple takes should more than cover that.

[caf]

Long before the web, coding for Plain Old DesktopS also had the property that you could push out new code without a gatekeeper between you and your users.