Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

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Apple knows this; in fact, I'd say it's their core business strategy. They did this before with the iTunes Music Store, and they will continue doing it as long as they exist.

Apple focuses on the mass consumer as their sole and perpetual customer. This allows them to maintain laser focus on solving the problems of the end users rather than solving the problems of an advertiser and forcing the solution on end users.

Apple's refusal to "innovate" on its business model has actually put them where they are today. Most other tech companies have other motives in making mobile devices: Amazon wants to sell you content, Facebook and Google want to show you ads, while Apple just wants to make the best damn phone out there and sell it at a very high price.

If the market definition of "best damn phone out there" starts to include "protects your privacy", Apple doesn't have the conflicts of interest that Google or Facebook do. I'm sure everyone else will eventually follow suit, but Apple is the only one with the capability to take the lead on privacy.

Oh spare me. Apple is waaay in bed with rightsholders when it comes to DRM. It's all wine and roses as long as you're 100% bought in to their ecosystem. Try playing your iTunes purchase on a non-Apple product and you're SOL. I fail to see how this solves "the problems of the end users."

You have it backwards. The rights holders forced the DRM requirements on Apple - Apple never sought it out.

> Try playing your iTunes purchase on a non-Apple product and you're SOL

What are you talking about? Did iTunes add back DRM? Around 2009 or so Apple made all of iTunes DRM-free and were, I believe, the first major online music store to do so. It was a huge deal; Apple published an open letter from Jobs on their home page and everything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/companies/07app...

"iTunes Plus refers to songs and some music videos* in high-quality AAC format that don't have Digital Rights Management (DRM). All songs now for sale in the iTunes Store are iTunes Plus."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201616

and, as of 2014, you could kill DRM on DRM-ed iTunes purchases made before 2009 https://www.wired.com/2014/03/kill-itunes-drm/

Movies are still generally protected with DRM. Do you know if you can play iTunes movies with a third party player (like VLC).

Who sells DRM free movies?

gog.com

Plus, not all DRM schemes are equal. One that is exclusive to Apple is worse (IMHO) than one that isn't. For example, I can go to a store and buy a DVD or BluRay disk that has DRM yet I am very sure that I can play it on every player I own.

As big of a fan of gog as I am and as much as I dislike itunes I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare their movie store to itunes. They have 56 movies on their store and I don't think any of them could be considered mainstream.

Oh I agree with you.

I was originally responding to the person that said the iTunes store doesn't sell DRM'd stuff. The movies definitely are but I don't know if the DRM restricts the movie to being played on an Apple device or if it uses some non-Apple DRM making it playable elsewhere.

Even at risk of adding unnecessary comments, I feel compelled to tell you that this is the most insightful comment I have read all week.

My response to this is: But they DON'T make the best damn phone out there. They DO sell it at a very high price. Samsung phones are light years ahead on features and being the best damn phone out there.

This is somewhat subjective and misses the point that hardware isn't the only determining factor. If I was on the fence about which platform I wanted, the one with better privacy and a more secure app store is appealing.

I'd have to agree their hardware and software is lacking tremendously for tech users looking to use their phone exactly as they wish. This really isn't true for 99% of their userbase however. That being the case their ecosystem is very secure and their app store is slightly less of a dumpster fire than google play.

Ultimately if you have the money for a premium phone and just need it to make phone calls, browse the web etc (the basics) then the iPhone really is the best option as it's more secure at the moment.

The place where the iPhone doesn't sell to someone like me is the hand holding babysitting it does preventing you from manipulating the device as I wish. Again this is a non-issue to them.

It can be frustrating to see someone overpaying for what you consider an inferior product but they're not using it like you are.

If I want to manipulate a device, I'll buy a raspberry pi. My phone isn't a playtoy; it's something I need to just work transparently.

Really though; there's very little you can't do with an iPhone as long as you're willing to pay $99/yr and write some code...

I think this is true to some extent - they do suit many users more than more flexible, but as a result more complicated, Android - but the iOS ecosystem is more restrictive than it needs to be, and more restrictive than is ideal, for many more than 1% of users.

Personally, I think more than 50% of users would benefit for more flexibility than iOS offers, even at the cost of less ease of use. I don't think it has to cost that much ease of use though. I think the ideal for most people is somewhere in between Android and iOS, but probably closer to Android. Android is not that hard to use. It is also not impossible to have a highly curated app store like Apple's, and allow apps from other sources at the same time of people want to install them. Ideally we'd have more diversity in OS implementations I think, based on one or a small number of actual OSs. Android based OSs that are more heavily modified to be easier to use etc. This would be easier I think if phones were more like PCs in that you could install your own OS and get the drivers for your hardware. I think Android is somewhat moving in that direction so there is hope for that in future.

Phones are very much unlike PCs in a lot of important ways.

First, is that phone users value weight and size above all else. Regardless of what that means to each individual user, it does mean that any design compromises will need to come out favorably for weight/size considerations. Modular phones have been released, but they largely failed because they provided very little benefit for the added weight/size. Phones absolutely must be integrated devices as a result (i.e. no modular components, making them impossible to repair).

Second is that because of the above, basically every chip in a phone is a custom SoC. So not only do you have to support many flavors of devices, you also have to support different flavors of SoCs, often used in different ways in different devices. This isn't insurmountable with the right driver repository structure, but good luck getting vendors to update those drivers.

Third, I don't exactly know what benefits a less restrictive OS ecosystem would provide. Apple's App Store rules are not insane (there are so many bad actors out there, the curation is a huge benefit to users); and if you ever want to run programs that aren't "blessed" by Apple, you can buy a $99 developer license, sign the binaries yourself and sideload them through XCode. Could it be easier? Sure, it could. But it's realistically an edge case, and Apple is focused on the main use cases.

Samsung phones does have a lot more features. But iPhone is generally more polished and well thought out for general use cases imo. But "best" is highly subjective. Objectively, iPhones have faster processors and likely smoother animations overall, while Android is more flexibile.

Could you elaborate or give some links on the better features of Samsung phones compared to (equivalent) Apple phones? I'm honestly curious, because I haven't bothered looking outside the Apple ecosystem but last time around my experience was really good, until around the iPhone 5S (I went for the Nexus 4, I think).

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