The Tim Cook memo: line by line • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#301

Post by wissler » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

MrScruff wrote: post #271

wissler wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually engineers don't get to decide where major resources are applied. That's the call of the increasingly non-technically savvy CEO. (HP is typical of this trend -- founded by engineers who were the cause of its greatness, over time degrading and being run by MBA's instead). "Why did Google's Android team develop an operating system that resembled a Blackberry" Irrelevant. The trend toward a more powerful OS as co…

Engineers don't often build great products on their own. You also need great industrial design, great user interface design etc. In some ways I can relate to your view - as a software engineer myself I often fall into the trap of thinking everything I do is 'obvious' and that any other right thinking engineer would have probably made the same decisions. For any one decision this might even be true, but for large, com…

I don't dismiss Apple's contribution. On the contrary, I think Apple dismisses the contributions of scientists and engineers that allowed them to build their iPhone. They want to take all the credit, when in fact, only a relatively minuscule amount of credit properly goes to Apple. Do they deserve this minuscule credit? Sure. I don't dismiss that. But the contribution by those who created the technology that go into the iPhone is far greater.

It's as if someone created the most cool looking web page on the planet, and then wanted to claim they invented the Internet. That's how I see Apple. They merely rearranged existing technology in a nifty way, they didn't create all of it. They deserve credit for what they did, not more.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#302

Post by MrScruff » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 6:53 PM UTC

wissler wrote: post #301

MrScruff wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers don't often build great products on their own. You also need great industrial design, great user interface design etc. In some ways I can relate to your view - as a software engineer myself I often fall into the trap of thinking everything I do is 'obvious' and that any other right thinking engineer would have probably made the same decisions. For any one decision this might even be true, but for large, com…

I don't dismiss Apple's contribution. On the contrary, I think Apple dismisses the contributions of scientists and engineers that allowed them to build their iPhone. They want to take all the credit, when in fact, only a relatively minuscule amount of credit properly goes to Apple. Do they deserve this minuscule credit? Sure. I don't dismiss that. But the contribution by those who created the technology that go into…

No, I don't think Apple is claiming to have invented lcd displays, multitouch, capacitive touch screens, solid state storage, 3G or any of the other core technologies used in an iPhone. I don't know why you think they are.

They're claiming that they introduced what has now become the new standard way of interacting with a mobile device, and are seeking to protect aspects of that design from another large corporation that seeks to profit by emulating their work. I'm mystified as to why people find this surprising or worthy of criticism.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#303

Post by zmonkeyz » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 8:37 PM UTC

buster wrote: post #109

sjwright wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone. Oh, and Apple's vendor lock-in is still a damn sight better than the telco lock-in it replaced (in the US).

I guess you misread my comment. I was criticizing the comparison of feature phones with the iPhone not comparing iPhones with smartphones. It's a big difference. If the iPhone would have been the first smartphone you could probably call it revolutionary. But you can't. Evolution ok, Better as the competition at the time of release ok. I'll grant you that already. Still a big difference. The first iPhone didn't even s…

Yeah initially it wasnt made to support 3rd party apps he expected everyone to innovate on the web. That's why they concentrated so much on making Safari great. All the developers wanted native apps and eventually it brought the app store to life.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#304

Post by CamperBob2 » Sun, Aug 26, 2012, 10:11 PM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #299

CamperBob2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already. (Shrug) A $100 bill lying on the ground will be picked up very quickly, by the original owner if no one else. That means that if you see $100 on the ground, chances are that it's not real. It might be a $1 or $10 bill that you've mistaken at first for $100. It might be cou…

> The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed. It's impressive how you try and own the very fallacy you're using. It doesn't change the result but gives the superficial impression that you've addressed the criticism. > The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often…

Oh.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#305

Post by wpietri » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 12:01 PM UTC

nemesisj wrote: post #292

wpietri wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I was using a Palm Treo smartphone four years before the iPhone came out. A solid phone, the Internet in my pocket, email on the go, and plenty of apps. The Palm app market went back to 1997, when the PalmPilot first came out. So as far as features and utility went, the iPhone looked kinda weak to me at launch. I think the iPhone's main novelty in the market was that Apple invested heavily in consumer-friendly d…

This is a joke, right? Having used three different models of the Palm Treo and the Wince Treo, I can assure you I was desperate to use the iPhone because it just worked. Sure the Treo exceeded the original iphone on many different features, but none of them worked. The software was awful, it crashed all the time, you couldn't receive calls b/c the software would crash, none of the apps worked well, and the internet w…

I think you're judging pioneers by the standards of later arrivals. It would seem terrible now, but compared to the options then, I was very happy. Internet! In my pocket!

I do think the PalmOS was showing its age at the time, and a bad app or extension could cause a lot of trouble. But having used PalmOS for years, getting things reasonably stable wasn't hard for me. And as a nerd, I'm pretty tolerant of crashes.

So no, it's not a joke. The Treo was a solid nerd smartphone for me.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#306

Post by sterlingwes » Mon, Aug 27, 2012, 3:34 PM UTC

This is the ultimate in hypocrisy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#307

Post by DiabloD3 » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 12:15 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #59

DiabloD3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the company be worth $600b? I haven't seen them do anything that I can't buy from another company cheaper, or in some cases, years before Apple "invented" it (ex: the iPad was a decade late to the tablet market). I'm not trying to be snarky here, but what is it that Apple can actually sell me that no one else can?

To answer your question: a sturdy, forged aluminum computer with a powerful unix-like OS with the most polished interfaces around and the greatest collection of software of all systems? With a 200dpi+ display? With wireless, seamless, video/audio streaming to other devices? Bluetooth 4? The best multitouch trackpad? The only decent power cord on earth?

None of those are particularly interesting to me... not at double the product cost. Maybe I'm just in the minority and don't get it.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#308

Post by nemesisj » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 8:25 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #305

nemesisj wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a joke, right? Having used three different models of the Palm Treo and the Wince Treo, I can assure you I was desperate to use the iPhone because it just worked. Sure the Treo exceeded the original iphone on many different features, but none of them worked. The software was awful, it crashed all the time, you couldn't receive calls b/c the software would crash, none of the apps worked well, and the internet w…

I think you're judging pioneers by the standards of later arrivals. It would seem terrible now , but compared to the options then , I was very happy. Internet! In my pocket! I do think the PalmOS was showing its age at the time, and a bad app or extension could cause a lot of trouble. But having used PalmOS for years, getting things reasonably stable wasn't hard for me. And as a nerd, I'm pretty tolerant of crashes.…

Yeah fair enough, I just know that I could never get the internet to be useful. The email in my pocket was OK, but the Blackberry did it much better. The Apps were trying, but they just couldn't quite get there. I remember the whole frustration of the experience was because the Treo was so close to being a nice phone and yet literally so far away from being there. I was also an original Handspring user, so very familiar with the PalmOS, but that was another major annoyance - nothing had changed since my Handspring in 2001! Sigh.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#309

Post by sapuser » Thu, Aug 30, 2012, 11:41 PM UTC

The idea behind patents is a _sound_ one; it provides incentive to innovate by guaranteeing profits for a certain period of time. Those who don't care about profits can freely give away patents or not bother getting one!

The details are probably up for a fair debate -- 20 years of loyalty that can be trivially extended by trivial process changes (e.g. Pharma companies) is undesirable.

For the argument that someone else can come up with an idea, that is an interesting point. If you can see how something works, it is not that difficult to reverse engineer it. But, in the true spirit of innovation, the innovators should be thinking about _outdoing_ what they see. Merely copying someone else is not innovation. And, that is the case with so many software features: both genuine and trivial ones are considered equal.

If there's a way to hide the secret sauce, people would easily do that (and that was historically done for so many things like the spices etc). The only way to achieving that in modern day is to (i) manufacture each important component by self and (ii) create a product that can't be taken apart. Imagine an Iphone that can't be un-assembled without destroying it. In this context, patents would speed up innovation (see the development of alternative compression algorithms) by allowing to examine the details of current implementation and improve upon it.

Samsung (and others) have been making un-wieldly phones for decades. I wonder why they decided to make "rectangular phones with rounded corners" after runaway success of iPhone.

And, this comes from someone who hasn't owned an iPhone :-)