[mrshoe]

I'm not a huge fan of the iPhone's closed nature, but I think most of what you said above could be considered arguments in favor of it.

For example: yell at the hardware manufacturer instead of the software developer; yell at the app developers; if you need that functionality, go buy a 3rd party app; it's slow because of OS implementation details; it doesn't work as you'd expect it because of implementation details; Google's own apps work relatively well.

Users don't care about why something is slow or broken (from their perspective). They shouldn't have to care. They don't want to go find an app in the Market for basic functionality, and they don't want to write a Perl script, either. Apple gets this. I hope Google and their partners will some day.

Users don't want answers to these questions. The list of questions you replied to was a rhetorical way of saying this: the iPhone user experience is far superior.

[jrockway]

Users don't care about why something is slow or broken (from their perspective).

This cuts both ways. An iPhone user doesn't care why Apple rejects good apps from the app store. An iPhone user doesn't care why his phone can't vibrate when someone uses his name in a tweet or pings him on IRC or talks to him via GTalk. An iPhone user doesn't care why his phone can't turn its ringer off during appointments, and set it to "ultra loud" when he is in his house.

Sure, Apple has technical explanations for all these things, but it doesn't make them go away.

It is all a matter, right now, of trading one set of problems for another. "Is iTunes sync worth not having Google Voice?", and so on.

Nobody is claiming Android is perfect, but it is important the keep in mind that Apple is not either.

[unalone]

Nobody thinks Apple is perfect. The people John Gruber named are all people who are huge in the Apple world but quit the iPhone in protest. John Gruber himself blasts Apple harder and more accurately than most Apple critics.

This whole "Apple is perfect" thing is a straw man that I've seen many times before. The argument isn't that Apple's perfect. The argument's that Apple is really, really, really good, and that its competitors' products aren't as polished as its own products. Android's advantages, as you highlight here, are certainly appealing to some people, but not to mass consumers, who care more about smooth than they do about extensible.

[andreyf]

Agree about hardware, but when it comes to the app store, I think the market is a better decider than Apple is re: what works well and what's broken. The one Hard Problem there is to make sure users can make informed decisions about their apps - for example, which app is using extraneous processing/battery.