Apple had a few 'first' moments and make some decent hardware. The problem is that they're much too hung up on making their stuff only work with other Apple products. They cripple their protocols by tying exclusively to Apple products. Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete. We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field. Most 'geeks' I know recommend that people not buy Apple because of the lock-in.
> Most 'geeks' I know recommend that people not buy Apple because of the lock-in.
Most 'geeks' give horrendous advice to non-technical people when it comes to computers/smartphones/etc.
I was guilty of it for many years. You get so entrenched in the technical and philosophical underpinnings of something that you end up lacking basic understanding of the end user's problem.
The fact is that when you take someone who has very little technical understanding, and _no desire_ to _ever_ have a technical understanding of a computer, and put them in front of a Mac or an iPad or an iPhone, they are generally actually able to use the damn thing with very little hand holding.
As someone who has been one of those geeks, every time I see another tech head recommending Linux for their granny, I believe that a small kitten dies somewhere.
> We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field.
What important protocols and standards do you believe that Apple is shying away from? They made a decision in 1997 to drop all of their proprietary networking standards and put their weight onto TCP/IP. They've adopted standards in every field in which there is an obvious need. They contribute well back to the community for products that aren't a core business driver: clang, LLVM, WebKit, back ports to FreeBSD, etc.
One messaging app and one video chatting app being closed because they are profit drivers does not make the company evil, despite what Stallman and co would have us think.
If Apple were pushing their own standards for web content (and not HTML (incidentally they've been on the W3C for a long time now)), or their own standards for email, networking stacks, etc., then you might have an argument, but otherwise it seems to me that you're looking for an excuse.
I believe Apple do a good job in many ways. They also show more responsibility than Microsoft did 15 years ago.
But...
Apple do fail in a number of key ways, and despite your attack on most geeks, I will defend them.
1. Compatibility. Apple really drop the ball here. As one example, they don't support FLAC .. why? No reason at all, except maybe it threatens ALAC. For people with FLAC collections, moving to Apple is a pain in the ass. The same can be said for many other audio and video formats. Apple's support is lousy and is locked in for no good reason. In fact, it forces you to limit the choices you can make ... again, for no reason. If anyone wanted to share my content and they were Apple users, I'd say "sorry, go for an open platform and then we'll talk".
2. Apple excel at the basics, but fail with more complex activities. Some simple examples: iTunes went a little funny at one stage. It was impossible to get any music onto my iPhone because iTunes wouldn't allow it. I used 3rd party tools - which would put the music on, but as soon as I started iTunes, it corrupted those newly copied songs... Now, if I were using Android, i'd just copy the files to my phone - just like i'd copy files from one folder to another ... This is an example of something fundamentally basic being made very, very, VERY hard because ... of ... no good reason. note: since fixed.
3. Apple provides minimal settings. In many ways, this is great, but... at one stage, my iPhone 4s lost the plot with the audio volume for music and videos via the inbuilt speaker. I could not get the audio volume to work using the "physical" switch, nor by adjusting the volume up or down ... it took me M-O-N-T-H-S to solve this ... others reported the same problem, and Apple said "factory reset" or "return the phone, it's a hardware fault". It turned out to be two things... (1) a software bug in IOS, and (2) it was caused when you plugged audio devices into the interface port, but switched the external device off while music was playing. note: since fixed.
The reality is that I have been burnt by 1. 2. and 3. - and I would not have had those problems on Android. I also believe these problems impact geeks and non-geeks alike.
The good news, problems 2. and 3. have been solved. Apple introduced a "reset all settings" option which takes care of "magic settings" ... it fixed my broken keyboard when I updated to IOS7 (as an example).
> Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete.
This is just dogma uncritically repeated by the FOSS crowd. Is it true? No. Unified chat on all Apple devices (via iMessage) is a huge competitive advantage for them. It's already far better than decent, and I really fail to see why opening it up would make it any better. FaceTime also works better than Skype, which is amazing considering how much of a lead Skype had at the outset. In short, I struggle to come up with a single fact which supports your assertion.
I think keeping some things tied to Apple devices makes sense but Facetime and iMessage are two that I think should be open. I want to use iMessage with all of my friends. I can only use it with people who also have iPhone's. This doesn't make them consider getting iPhone's. We just use Viber instead. Facetime is better than Skype - but I can only chat to other iOS/Mac users. This means I talk to most people on Skype as they are on Windows or Android.
I love iMessage and Facetime. But neither is tying my to Apple or convincing my friends to switch to Apple. If they were open I as an Apple customer would use them more and be happier.
FaceTime has convinced pretty much everyone in our globally distributed family to buy iPads (for the most part). These are all people familiar with Skype but the FaceTime experience is a huge win. More recently some of us have tried hangout but in the end it was back to FaceTime.
I would like to see both open, but I can also see why Apple, who do make money on the devices, want to sell more devices.
My friends and I used Kik for a while when they used Blackberry and Anroid phones. I was the only iPhone user at first, but once another friend got an iPhone it became much easier to convince the rest of them how much better it was for all of us to use iPhones. Apple is better off holding out and letting their product sell themselves, and iMessage and Facetime will keep them locked in once they're users.
Rewarding Apple for that kind of behaviour is not good for anyone in the long run. When you're tied to Apple they can charge anything they want, and cripple or remove any features they want. I'd say people are bringing it upon themselves, but at a certain market saturation they're forcing it on everyone.
All corporations do this in one way or another, so this is a generic anti-corporate argument. In the case of Apple, it is clearly irrelevant since they have such a tiny market share.
People are reading this because despite a small market share, Apple is more successful than any other PC, Tablet, or Phone maker.
It's easy to point to rising market share less than one month after an annual product release. If it wasn't rising at that point they'd be in Blackberry territory. Typically, Apple is presented as having a losing strategy, and the current market share in the US is regarded as a anomaly that will quickly be corrected as 'Good Enough' Android phones such as the Nexus series or Galaxy S4 are recognized as being equivalent.
>Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete.
Why? AFAIK, there are already open standards for messaging and for a long time they were supported out of the box for OS X. I'm not trying to excuse Apple's action here, but is it better for Apple to open their implementation, or is it better for the open source community? In other words, are there specific use cases that would benefit many users (not just joe who wants to run iMessage on X) or, does the open source community just want a messaging protocol that is backed by a corporation with a lot of presence?
Is user-to-user messaging such a complex service that the need for Apple to open their implementation that great? When you say "competition" who would Apple be competing against? G Talk? WhatsApp? Kik? and what would they be competing for? Users? if the implementation is really open, the number of users doesn't really matter. Money? Apple already provides the service for free.
In short, I don't really understand the benefits of having Apple open their protocol, but there are already downsides for the user, the strongest being, Apple is no longer a central authority for messages meaning things like simply syncing messages across devices becomes a harder.
> Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete [sic]
And because they do not, they are excellent products.
I met a fellow once who thought I was a fool for using a Macbook Pro. He had an excellent list of reasons why, complete with multiple hyperlinked references for each. But I never got to see it; when he woke up his Thinkpad to show me, all it said was
kernel panic - not syncing: for safety
and by the time he got it all sorted out, I'd had to leave for a client meeting. I'm sure he was right, though.
Meanwhile my Macbook Pro freezes on me regularly (a "hard" freeze requiring a power cycle). Neither my linux laptop nor my windows (7, home premium) desktop freeze on me often enough for it to be remarkable (but they both do crash occasionally). It happens.
Apple's product isn't technology. It's culture. Technology is a marketing tool they invest heavily in and use to sell their real product. That's one of the more brilliant things Jobs ever did (and it is remarkably brilliant; the man can't be admired enough for it, in my opinion, at least from a business perspective).
Apple's technology works well enough, and the appearance aesthetics are bleeding edge (usually, for a while, at least), but the zeal with which those in the culture defend the technology is simply amusing to behold. No technology is worth such zealous defense.
I'm part of that community. We aren't all trying to be High Priests of the One True Technology. I don't think users of Apple products are all part of a Hive Mind, either.
It's a pity you didn't ask him to email you a copy once he did get it working. You know, email - the open protocol that works across different systems?
Your story is basically FUD because you're describing a kernel panic, which is most likely because the guy was intentionally running unstable bleeding edge stuff. If he was running consumer-level linux stuff, it's very unlikely that would have happened.
I'll tell you a secret: that fellow was me, every one of several times over the last half-dozen years that I tried running Ubuntu or Debian, in the latest stable version then available, on various commodity laptops not more than a year or two old.
Oh, I suppose my mistake was in not choosing my hardware according to the recommendations of the assembled gurus at linux-laptop.net, or just not being awesome enough to know what incantation I needed to mumble where, or the precise angle at which to incise the throat of the sacrificial chicken, or some damned thing to which those who haven't yet got bored of sysadmin drudgery are welcome.
Of course, the Linux community being as it is the apotheosis of "blame the user", I'm sure I'll hear all sorts of detailed explanations of what I obviously must have done wrong, none of which does anything to make my Macbook any less preferable as an Emacs substrate.
Or... sometimes computers crash, whether they're linux, windows, or mac. That you saw a linux computer crash once is no more notable than the times I saw a mac crash (and believe me, I have).
Your anecdotal evidence is entirely irrelevant. I've seen kernel panics multiple times on OS X, including when I really needed to use the machine (OTOH, I've had a solid experience running Linux on various ThinkPads for years). Does that mean I should judge it based on that?
How do you quantify if something is a decent product? iMessage does more than 2 billion messages per day [1]. I couldn't find FaceTime metrics but anecdotally for years I could never get my mom to use Skype but now she FaceTime's me all the time. This speaks volumes.
