Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

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Even though this is the Haus of Gruber (why, exactly, does everything he post get FPd here? Confirmation bias, perhaps?), I'll take my downvote suffering-

>In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone

Except multitasking in apps. Actually, scratch that, except apps altogether. Two major shifts in direction.

Of course Gruber led into that talking about hardware. There you can look at the fact that the iPhone pre-4 had a worst-in-class DPI, but now with the 4 it's all about the Retina display. DPI is suddenly where everything is.

The original iPhones were about feminine curves. The new iPhone is about kick-you-in-the-face masculine squares.

And then the front-facing camera (a common complaint on the original iPhone). The volume buttons. And on and on. Original perfection indeed.

The iPhone 4 is a brilliant phone. I'm morally against Apple's dominance of mobile, yet it's hard to gather the strength to argue when a friend talks about possibly getting an iPhone 4: It's a hard choice to argue with.

Yet Gruber's salacious, disturbing love of all things Apple; his automatic justification of everything Apple does; is very tough to stomach.

As a somewhat unrelated aside, one thing that really strikes me about the iPhone is the large amount of wasted space. It's interesting seeing it near >=4" phones and they barely eclipse the iPhone in size, the huge bezel (esp. on the bottom) of the iPhone making a small screen in a large phone.

His quote makes a lot more sense in context:

* In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn’t really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in increasingly sharper focus.*

Insofar as the automatic justification how does that explain his questions on the durability of the glass back? Missing italics which he urges people to bring to Apple's attention? His statement that the antenna issue is, worse case, a fatal design flaw? Seems like you're kind of spinning the article a bit to me by omission.

If you read something with the sure belief that someone is biased you are liable to read all sorts of stuff into what someone is writing. I think that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Maybe I’m naive but I really do think that way too many people read way too many things into what Gruber is writing – things he never actually said.

The only part of his comments that really amounts to negative criticism is about the glass back.

He isn't hard on Apple about the missing italic face in the same way he is about e.g. Microsoft's errors (he basically treats it as a regression for Apple to fix), and it's a gross distortion to characterize his verdict on the antenna as "This could be a fatal design flaw." Almost every mention of the antenna issue is cushioned with soothing positivity. He repeatedly states his belief that reception only drops when your reception is lousy to begin with, and overall he seems to think it's likely that the issue will be helped by a software patch, or maybe a small hardware fix. The "fatal design flaw" angle is brought up very briefly, immediately said to be unlikely, and then further softened by reiterating his belief that the issue doesn't affect your reception that much anyway.

I mean, I like Gruber. He's a good writer and has a lot of interesting insights and I actually value his opinion, but you'd have to be stark raving mad to read his blog and think, "Wow, this guy is kind of hard on Apple."

To put my two cents in on the antenna issue, I believe that Gruber is just saying it how it is in this case. I have an iPhone 4, and nearly everyone that sees it asks me about reception issues. I've talked on it for a total of probably 4 hours now, in various locations with various signal strength and have had no issues with dropped calls or reduced reception of any sort. During many of the longer calls, I've tried holding the phone upside down, bridging all the metal gaps, left handed, right handed, etc... and it made no difference.

So call him "optimistic" in his analysis, but if his experience is anything like mine, he is right to be wary of all the reports of the "death grip" as much as I am.

He does this a lot. I've called him out on before but he seems to have such an irrational hate (hinted at in his post with the "moral objection" bit) that he doesn't even realize it.

I agree with you that fanboy fawning makes one queasy.

I do want to point something out about bezels on iDevices, though. They make accidental touches with the base of your thumb rarer when you're using the device one-handed. With only one hand, and holding the device in your palm, your thumb becomes your primary way of interacting. But that means that the base of your thumb is pushed against the edge of the device, and slightly touching the front of the device. This turns into either spurious touches, or spurious multi-touches (think: drag turns into zoom) if the very edge of the device is sensitive to touch.

The solution is to have a little bit of a dead zone there. This is the one area of my Nexus One which annoys me - the N1 seems to have a comparable bezel, but it's actually sensitive very close to the edge. Consequently I often have to hold the N1 not securely in my palm, but resting on my fingers, so that the base of my thumb is nowhere near the edge of the device.

I agree with some of what you say but I don't think you can say Apple changed on including apps. They didn't include apps from the first gen due to the huge engineering effort required to successfully support 3rd parties and have the mechanisms in place to distribute apps. Launching a v1 product and including a ton of 3rd party support for an unproven phone would have been a big gamble. Coming out with it a year later isn't waffling, it's a smart business move.

Except that when iPhone launched, they didn't say "we're still working on supporting 3rd party apps"; instead the official line from Apple was "if you want to develop for iPhone, write web apps." Even Gruber called it ludicrous at the time.

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