> 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).
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.