Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Only Apple

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 182 posts

Re: Only Apple

#91

Post by eridius »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #79
coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service. I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP.…

Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes before the iPad thought it was sufficiently buffered to begin playback. That was on my local 5GHz 802.11n backhauled over 100mbps cable. Every time I want to watch something on Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or Google Play they all start more or less instantly. I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at…

> Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes...

That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.

Re: Only Apple

#92

Post by MAGZine »

eridius wrote: post #89
MAGZine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Kindle is a shining example of this. Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

Given that Apple tries to lump all its cloud offerings under the iCloud banner, deliberately dismissing iCloud in order to claim that iTunes is the only "cloud" technology Apple has is extremely disingenuous.

I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage. It doesn't prove apple is any good with making web services that people want to use, just that they're good at sending data, receiving it, storing it for later retrieval.

I'm not handing out praise for being able to run an smtp server. (alright, that's a bit reductionist, but you get the idea)

Re: Only Apple

#93

Post by arrrg »

slm_HN wrote: post #13

Daring Fireball is hard to read because the website is so poorly formatted. I rarely make it past the first paragraph. The font is too small, the margins are too huge and the colors have poor contrast.

The margins are not too huge. That statement makes no sense at all.

There are about 75 character per line, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for characters per line. Going for a few more characters would be ok (120 is a usual guideline for the maximum), but 75 is pretty good. It’s actually pretty much the standard. I learned 60 to 90 characters per line.

Margins are your problem. Your browser is too wide. (I agree that the font is much too small. Also, Verdana is seriously ugly. A better font at a larger size would reduce the size of your margins, even if you are one of those strange fullscreen browser people.)

Re: Only Apple

#94

Post by coldtea »

MAGZine wrote: post #83
coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service. I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP.…

> a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud, and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation. > and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service. But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Goo…

>Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud, and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation.

I don't know how many are those that don't "turn it on". Hundreds of millions DO use it. And it's only getting better (e.g see recent WWDC changes).

Those "annoyed" perhaps don't remember how phones were before iCloud, iTunes Backup. I had Sony and Nokia smartphones and it was dreadful. Even now, there's not much to write home about in the way Android handles backup/sync compared to iCloud.

>But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music, among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.

Except? I think it's enough of a bold move, and surely is not "nothing". Plus, iTunes Radio (which didn't get much love from Apple) already had more people than Spotify (almost twice as much).

>As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than Google or Amazon, as these companies are much more invested in the Web than Apple.

It's not like that it takes anything special to get speed on the web. It's not rocket science. Apple uses Azure for a lot of its services, which is equivalent to AWS/Amazon.

Re: Only Apple

#95

Post by eridius »

MAGZine wrote: post #92
eridius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Apple tries to lump all its cloud offerings under the iCloud banner, deliberately dismissing iCloud in order to claim that iTunes is the only "cloud" technology Apple has is extremely disingenuous.

I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage. It doesn't prove apple is any good with making web services that people want to use, just that they're good at sending data, receiving it, storing it for later retrieval. I'm not handing out praise for being able to run an smtp server. (alright, that's a bit reductionist, but you get the idea)

> I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage.

It's a lot more than that. It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services like Find My iPhone.

There is a lot of stuff Apple is doing with iCloud, but the vast majority of it just silently works, so you aren't even considering that it exists when you talk about iCloud.

I suspect that what you're really trying to say is that Apple has not done much in the arena of building web apps, but even that's not accurate anymore, they have a decent suite of stuff available on icloud.com (including collaborative document editing).

Re: Only Apple

#96

Post by marvy »

slm_HN wrote: post #13

Daring Fireball is hard to read because the website is so poorly formatted. I rarely make it past the first paragraph. The font is too small, the margins are too huge and the colors have poor contrast.

Scroll to the bottom, and click "Display Preferences", and crank the font size to 16 pt, instead of the default 11. At least that's what I did. You may find 16 too big, season to taste :)

Re: Only Apple

#97

Post by vacri »

eridius wrote: post #81
vacri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" the most important company currently in existence " ... " misplaced nerd allegiance " Having the most liquid assets does not mean that the company is the most important company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow, the world would go on without a hiccough. They are glitzy and glamourous and yes, influential, but there are more important companies out there - particularly in transport or essential services. Edit: Updated…

What op said: > the most important company What you said: > the most fundamentally necessary company You just changed the entire argument right there, and yet blithely went on as if your counterpoint had any relevance to the original assertion. "The most important company" could be taken a lot of ways, and I highly doubt op was intending that to mean "fundamentally necessary".

Actually, speaking of changing meanings, the OP said "the most important company in existence", which is a different claim to the one you're trimming it down to. Next time you're admonishing someone for changing the argument, don't do it yourself.

Re: Only Apple

#98

Post by kalleboo »

rayiner wrote: post #82
Todd wrote: post #70

Sorry to disagree with Gruber, but I don't think a set of devices made by one company is the future. It's always been Apple's play, in part because of the consistency of experience that it affords them, but it also let's them off the hook on the hard problems--device interop, working with varied OEMs, etc. Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forwar…

> Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. After a six-month experiment with Android on a Nexus 5, I couldn't disagree more. Separating the folks who make the OS from the folks who make the device just leads to compromises. Apple has the right model. Just look at what they've managed to do, for example, with battery life. Nobody can match the h…

> Just look at what they've managed to do, for example, with battery life. Nobody can match the hours of use per watt-hour of their tightly-integrated stack.

That's not my (anecdotal) experience at all. My friends with similarly-specced phones like the Xperia Z1 Compact have their battery last way longer than my iPhone 5S. The iPhone may have better standby life, but we're heavy users, and as soon as you're using it the iPhone drains it like there's no tomorrow, and Apple arrogantly put a tiny battery in it (1400 mAh vs 2300 mAh for average Android phones).

Androids battery life woes are mainly due to the fact that apps can stay open in the background as much as they want, whereas on iOS Apple have strict limits (which is why stuff like IRC apps can't be done on iOS)

Re: Only Apple

#99

Post by eridius »

vacri wrote: post #97
eridius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What op said: > the most important company What you said: > the most fundamentally necessary company You just changed the entire argument right there, and yet blithely went on as if your counterpoint had any relevance to the original assertion. "The most important company" could be taken a lot of ways, and I highly doubt op was intending that to mean "fundamentally necessary".

Actually, speaking of changing meanings, the OP said "the most important company in existence ", which is a different claim to the one you're trimming it down to. Next time you're admonishing someone for changing the argument, don't do it yourself.

You're just being pedantic. Adding the words "in existence" to my quotation would have changed nothing at all about my argument. I left it off precisely because it wasn't relevant to the point I was making, which was that you were attacking a very obvious straw man.

Re: Only Apple

#100

Post by roberthahn »

Todd wrote: post #70

Sorry to disagree with Gruber, but I don't think a set of devices made by one company is the future. It's always been Apple's play, in part because of the consistency of experience that it affords them, but it also let's them off the hook on the hard problems--device interop, working with varied OEMs, etc. Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forwar…

"I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store."

Me either. Even so, I still believe Apple got the model right. If only we could live in a world where we have a healthy competitive ecosystem of Apple-like companies. Then you would have many options at hand to control your house, car, and life.

Post reply on HN