[terminus]

Ye, Gods. Yet another Apple story.

They are a for profit (and quite a lot of it) corporation that makes shiny gadgets.

Why do we keep talking about them incessantly? If we are not talking about what Apple is doing now, then we are talking about what somebody said about Apple 20 years ago.

I'm of course making the problem worse or meta-worse, if you will, by talking about talking about Apple, but I just don't understand this whole deification of a profit making entity.

[PhasmaFelis]

Apple is one of the most important and influential tech companies in the world right now. There's a lot of Apple articles for the same reason there's a lot of Google/Amazon/Facebook articles.

They also have a lot of pretty devoted fans, but don't confuse ponderings on the industry with fanboyism.

[terminus]

> Apple is one of the most important and influential tech companies in the world right now.

No. You are confusing admired with influential.

[PhasmaFelis]

No, I really don't think I am. Apple essentially created the modern smartphone market. Android was Google saying "We've got to get in on that." You're going to accuse me of fanboying now, but I've never owned an iOS device; I think Android is better and I wouldn't use anything else. But without the iPhone, Android as we know it would not exist.

You don't like Apple or Apple products, and that's fine and fair, but you are confusing your personal opinion with the actual state of the market. Quality and influence aren't always related, much as we might wish it were otherwise.

[terminus]

This is not about Android or iPhone. Or Google or whoever. I'll happily acknowledge that Apple sells well thought out products.

I stand by what I said earlier. There's too much of a cult of personality associated with Apple. Why do we shrink our worldview to gossipy discussions of a corporation. Tell me something interesting, something edifying that came up in this discussion?

[PhasmaFelis]

> This is not about Android or iPhone. Or Google or whoever. I'll happily acknowledge that Apple sells well thought out products.

You specifically said that I was wrong to call them influential. I think Android demonstrates that they are. That makes it relevant.

> I stand by what I said earlier. There's too much of a cult of personality associated with Apple. Why do we shrink our worldview to gossipy discussions of a corporation. Tell me something interesting, something edifying that came up in this discussion?

Past predictions about the future of the industry have always had currency on Hacker News, from pre-electronic sci-fi like Wells' World Brain to Engelbart's 1968 "mother of all demos" to mid-'90s attempt to get a handle on the internet, and so on and so forth. Apple wasn't terribly relevant in the mid-'90s, but they _had been_ relevant (the Apple II, bringing Xerox's GUI ideas to the home desktop), and as it turned out they would be relevant again. This particular article is not exactly a giant of the genre, but it's a window into the conditions of the time and what people cared about and anticipated.

[terminus]

You are right about Android and Xerox's GUI. (There were others who were thinking in a similar direction (Openmoko for one), and I would argue that both of these things would have happened anyway. But Apple definitely moved the state of the world forward.)

However, my larger point is that Apple produces things of only one color -- things that you can exchange over the counter against money. Black box objects that are essentially consumer electronics -- things that die in 2, 4, 7, whatever years.

Contrast that with most other tech companies. Even if I don't care a whit about what they sell (witness IBM, Microsoft, Facebook -- I don't use any of their products directly) -- I (and the world) profit from their research and that gives them greater longevity than Apple.

So to correct what I said -- admired but not long term influential.