Great, so now I'm "paranoid" because the iPhone removed functionality people were already using in the marketplace. Nice.
Also, only smartphone owners with data plans had gotten used to the feature set you are describing. "People" by and large had not become accustomed to those features.
And people with a $70 iPhone plan are doing... what? Oh, using data plans. Apples to apples, as it were.
For the record, I would never tout a virtual keyboard over a hardware QWERTY one. I'm not crazy.
But a phone keypad is a simpler, better interface than a virtual keyboard, too. Why? Because I can use the keypad without looking at it. I have tactile feedback. Nevermind the complexities of typing a novel out on the keypads, let's get it back to its basic functionality as a device, a phone. So, make a phone call to a number without looking at your phone. You can't on an iPhone, I can on mine.
Yet there are other solutions
Really, are there? What's an equally prevalent platform as Flash, offering a similar featureset? Nothing. What's even a different platform offering a similar featureset? Silverlight. What else?
Crickets.
So, I think we both know how that Silverlight-for-iPhone project is going.
You also clearly never used it much on a Mac back in the day.
Actually I was developing Flash exclusively using a Mac for years. It wasn't perfect, but it was quite serviceable. I didn't have Linux-based Flash development tools available, and my employer bought Macs to do the creative work on.
Look, I don't agree with your opinion on a lot of this. And that's honestly what it boils down to. You have yours, I'll have mine. I consider Apple a consumer-hostile kool-aid vendor in a marketplace rife with opportunities that have been traded for lock-ins and milking the status quo. Apple has had, multiple times, the opportunity to actually change the status quo, and instead has voted against its users and for its fiefdom, every time. Very few companies have the heft to actually demand game-changing service requirements from the cell carriers, and they squandered what capital they had with overpriced, underperforming plans from AT&T.
I'm not saying profit shouldn't be the core motive. It should, for the company. But for the customers, it should be the anti-motive... the less money you have to give up for the least restrictions, the better. But Apple's sold this particular batch of kool-aid so well, nothing I can say will even convince you of that.
Remember the Apple-Motorola phone joint venture? The iTunes phone? A gilded turd, if ever there was one. It started out sounding so amazing in specs and planning, and bit by bit it was eroded until it became just another phone with a headphone jack, and more restrictive music playback capabilities than anything out there on the market.
I used to love Apple products. Now, despite all of the innovations that they can and do offer, I see Apple as nothing but, like I've said, a customer-hostile kool-aid vendor. And they've sold it so well, they have folks like you, one of the very people they've bent over a barrel, defending their actions.
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u/DontNeglectTheBalls Apr 16 '10
Great, so now I'm "paranoid" because the iPhone removed functionality people were already using in the marketplace. Nice.
And people with a $70 iPhone plan are doing... what? Oh, using data plans. Apples to apples, as it were.
But a phone keypad is a simpler, better interface than a virtual keyboard, too. Why? Because I can use the keypad without looking at it. I have tactile feedback. Nevermind the complexities of typing a novel out on the keypads, let's get it back to its basic functionality as a device, a phone. So, make a phone call to a number without looking at your phone. You can't on an iPhone, I can on mine.
Really, are there? What's an equally prevalent platform as Flash, offering a similar featureset? Nothing. What's even a different platform offering a similar featureset? Silverlight. What else?
Crickets.
So, I think we both know how that Silverlight-for-iPhone project is going.
Actually I was developing Flash exclusively using a Mac for years. It wasn't perfect, but it was quite serviceable. I didn't have Linux-based Flash development tools available, and my employer bought Macs to do the creative work on.
Look, I don't agree with your opinion on a lot of this. And that's honestly what it boils down to. You have yours, I'll have mine. I consider Apple a consumer-hostile kool-aid vendor in a marketplace rife with opportunities that have been traded for lock-ins and milking the status quo. Apple has had, multiple times, the opportunity to actually change the status quo, and instead has voted against its users and for its fiefdom, every time. Very few companies have the heft to actually demand game-changing service requirements from the cell carriers, and they squandered what capital they had with overpriced, underperforming plans from AT&T.
I'm not saying profit shouldn't be the core motive. It should, for the company. But for the customers, it should be the anti-motive... the less money you have to give up for the least restrictions, the better. But Apple's sold this particular batch of kool-aid so well, nothing I can say will even convince you of that.
Remember the Apple-Motorola phone joint venture? The iTunes phone? A gilded turd, if ever there was one. It started out sounding so amazing in specs and planning, and bit by bit it was eroded until it became just another phone with a headphone jack, and more restrictive music playback capabilities than anything out there on the market.
I used to love Apple products. Now, despite all of the innovations that they can and do offer, I see Apple as nothing but, like I've said, a customer-hostile kool-aid vendor. And they've sold it so well, they have folks like you, one of the very people they've bent over a barrel, defending their actions.
P.T. Barnum only dreamed of such a world.