[strogonoff]

Companies do not innovate for fun. The point of innovation is getting to be able to profit from it.

Apple has built the touchscreen smartphone that the world to date still could not move on from, and it still leads in that category. By working both hardware and software fronts, they have grinded out an ecosystem that was compelling and money-making to small developers (handling legal and tax logistics pretty much worldwide for you) and to the end users.

Apple Pay is yet another example: you’d think somebody would have come up with a way to conveniently and securely pay with, say, a phone, and yet everybody needed for the teacher to do it first and only then jumped on copying the feature with barely enough creativity to call it “%SOME_BRAND_NAME% Pay” and put their logo on it. Now it’s incredibly convenient, it’s everywhere online, and it basically turns every shop out there into Amazon’s patented “one-click purchase” experience.

Saying they should not be able to profit from their innovation because they just did too good of a job intuitively seems like the opposite of American values. This is not some rusty ISP monopoly with a geographically captive market, sitting on decades old software as secure as Swiss cheese, doing mostly nothing. People switch between ecosystems all the time, there are no strong lock-ins; you have to be on top of it to stay competitive, and Apple generally is. This is one of the rare cases where a company keeps generating and implementing (pretty well) idea after idea in multiple areas with a valuation, contrary to trends, built not on empty future promises but on a concrete, sound business model that provides real value to people who are willing to pay for it, despite having a lot of choice.

[horsawlarway]

Eh... get outta here. Profit is fine, rent seeking is not.

I don't care if they're "rusty" or or not. Sell a good hammer, make money selling the hammer: Everything is fine.

Sell a good hammer, double dip with rent seeking and charge for every nail the user drives? Fuck off. Happy to see them get wrecked in the court system.

[strogonoff]

If you want to live in a world where the pinnacle of innovation is another hammer, be my guest, I’m sure the Amish will welcome you.

If you like this one, with all the futuristic tech it brings, don’t get on a high horse whenever those who dare to innovate also dare to make money from it. Have the brains and the balls to do it yourself and be as flush as they are.

This isn’t “rent”—landlords don’t have to incessantly innovate.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> If you want to live in a world where the pinnacle of innovation is another hammer, be my guest

I'm less interested in a future where hammer manufacturers charge rent for every nail the user drives. I don't consider that "innovation" to be good for humankind.

[strogonoff]

You are free to abandon iPhones and live under a rock. Just, please:

0) don’t speak for all humankind,

1) when there is no extractive behavior—defined as taking a fee without producing even remotely proportionate value in return—do not misuse the word “rent” (as I said: landlords don’t innovate), and

2) when innovation is actually innovation, don’t put it in quotes.

Unless your hammer comes with a team of security engineers that work round the clock pushing security updates against zero-day vulnerabilities, or a selection of millions of expansions that expand its functionality in various ways, etc., no amount of mental gymnastics would make your hammer anything like a supercomputer that fits in the palm of your hand. The analogy you decided to repeat works against you; the fact that such a supercomputer costs only 20x more than a really good hammer costs today is amazing.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> You are free to abandon iPhones and live under a rock.

This seems like a disingenuous and fallacious response. Would you like to try replying in a more good faith manner? It might convince others to keep reading, rather than stopping at the first sentence.

It certainly did not seem to convince anyone that a hammer manufacturer which charges rent for every nail the user drives (in addition to charging for the hammer) is better than a regular hammer pricing model, and I still don't consider that rent-seeking "innovation" to be good for humankind.

[strogonoff]

Even though I pointed out that hammer is not a suitable metaphor (I think “disingenuous” and “fallacious” is fitting) and explained in detail why you are incorrect, you keep using that metaphor, do not address any of my points specifically, and then you call my response not “good faith”.

I am the one trying to maintain a constructive argument here. It is not coincidental that people upholding the other side very rarely do.