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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

At Ford™ we care about our brand. We want people who bought a Ford™ car to have the best experience we prepared for them.

Other fuels may contain additives which make your Ford™ engine seem imperfect. A few misguided people are tempted by the siren call of the independent fuel suppliers to use something other than the Ford™ fuel specially made for your needs. When things go wrong, they spread rumors that Ford™ vehicles suck, when it was simply their misguided fault.

And that's why, as the proud owner of a Ford™ vehicle, you must go to a Ford™ gasoline station to buy Ford™ fuel. That's Ford™ fuel, available from a Ford™ station somewhere in your state.

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Wouldn't car parts be a much more accurate analogy, though? Apple isn't suing anyone for not using Apple-branded electricity to power their phone.

Don't give them ideas.

I don't understand why the geniuses at Apple haven't seen the obvious flaws in our American/European/Asian/etc wall plugs and sockets and created Apple branded proprietary wall plugs and sockets that are totally incompatible with all current American/European/Asian/etc. plugs and sockets. Apple products would all use the proprietary plugs, while 'obsolete' devices with standard plugs would require a $40-100 Apple adapter. The Apple home isn't truly going to be an Apple Home until you can't plug a non-Apple device into a wall socket without forking over money to Apple for an unnecessary adapter.

It's easier to just change the plug on the other end of the power cables every release.

This criticism rings extremely hollow.

The 30-pin connector lasted from the third-gen iPod (2003) through the iPhone 5 (2012), or around nine years. Lightning has remained the connector of choice since then for the past six years.

MagSafe debuted in 2006, was improved to MagSafe 2 in 2012, and is being phased out for USB-C (which is terrible, but I digress) in 2018.

One change in fifteen years for their handheld product lineup and two changes in twelve years for their laptop lineup seems pretty reasonable.

Asian outlets are amazingly versatile: they happily take both European and US plugs. It's a real pleasure not having to bring converter plugs with you. I am still wondering why airports all over the world have not adopted them.

That sounds great. Though, how is the voltage difference handled?

Most power adapters for electronic devices will take any AC input from 100-240v and transform accordingly to the device (which cares more about DC), but definitely check before plugging it in. The Americas and Japan are 100-127v, and the rest of the world is 220-240v with a few discrepancies here and there. They also range from 50hz-60hz AC, so some devices that rely on the frequency for time may slow or speed up depending on what region they were made and where they are used.

>Wouldn't car parts be a much more accurate analogy, though?

Yes. The FCC actually sent out reminders to phone companies two days ago reminding them that use of aftermarket parts cannot void a warranty. This also applies to things like "warranty void if seal removed" stickers etc.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/10/ftc-reminds-phone-m...

It doesn't change your point, but that was the FTC, not the FCC.

It does a little bit. The FCC has teeth when it comes to maintaining their regulations. There's little else you can do to bring suits to your door faster than to operate an unlicensed transmitter. The FTC is not so potent, as indicated by the behavior of all these cell phone manufacturers for the past decade.

No, but they are making it very difficult for anyone to use, for example, non-Apple-branded cloud storage. And they are making it nearly impossible for anyone to use non-Apple-approved apps.

Isn't it nearly impossible to so much as download a file from the Internet on an Apple device, or have they changed that?

No, you can totally do this even on iOS.

Ah but isn’t it true that iPhones have no right click?

Uh, yes. Why is this relevant, though?

Heck even apple approved charging cables sometimes give me the "this accessory might not work correctly on this device". Gives me pause, but it goes away once I retry...

> they are making it very difficult for anyone to use, for example, non-Apple-branded cloud storage

Which is why they added support for arbitrary file providers to integrate with iOS 11's Files app, and why they announced that iWork will support collaborating through Box last month?

I still can’t use whatever SMS app that I want to. I still can’t replace Safari as the browser that opens links from apps. I can’t replace contacts or the phone dialer and I can’t open contact address links in anything but Apple Maps.

Heck, they don’t even let me organize my home screen the way that I want to.

At this point, you are just complaining that iOS is not open source.

Those are pretty basic functions that Apple just locks you into. iOS would not have to be open source for those things to change… At all.

That wasn't my point. My point was that all those requests are feature requests, as opposed to lifting some artificial restrictions. Because iOS is not open source, they would need to be coded by Apple, so it's a perfectly valid business decision on their sise not to invest in them.

Macos is not open source. You can use Firefox as your default browser.

I don't know. Those all seem like valid complaints to me. The os is separate from the applications and everything he listed has its own industry.

Microsoft was reamed over installing IE as the default browser on their OS, so how is not letting you change safari as the default on iOS any different?

Microsoft had a monopoly. Apple doesn't. If you don't like it, go buy an Android phone.

I mean, that's exactly what many of us are doing.

I know. That's my point. People are complaining about decisions made by the company as if they're civil rights violations.

"I can't change the default SMS app on my phone!" This has always been the case with the iPhone since the beginning. Until Apple says that this is now a new part of the OS, pretending like that was some kind of bait and switch or deceptive business practice is completely silly.

> People are complaining about decisions made by the company as if they're civil rights violations.

No they aren't - not here at least. Scanning this thread, it looks like they're just complaining.

> pretending like that was some kind of bait and switch or deceptive business practice is completely silly.

Who did that? Can you point out a specific comment? I certainly didn't and I don't see any other comments that did. I simply pointed out how Apple makes their product difficult to use by being so stingy with the level of access that they allow me to have.

Anyway, there is an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple right now. Since their iPhone does have somewhere around 50% marketshare in the USA I think there's a chance for it to succeed and I hope it does.

>Anyway, there is an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple right now.

And what are the damages claimed against them? Even if they have 50% marketshare, they still have competition with a larger marketshare both domestic and worldwide. There's nothing that can be brought against them because they're not doing anything illegal or immoral.

You can read about it for yourself - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-court/u-s-appeals-c...

Coulda said the same thing with Microsoft, go buy a Mac. Monoply power isn't a binary stat, it's a sliding scale and eventually these companies get enough power to start affecting other industries

A court judgment that a company has abused its monopoly power is a binary stat.

Yes, and Apple might have one of those binary stats coming their way soon. Let's hope, right?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-court/u-s-appeals-c...

I was actually thinking that plain old bolts, also available at the hardware store, imagine if Ford could ban all 8mm bolt import and sales just because they had one in one of their cars

Well, automakers don't literally do that, but they might suggest you use the specific oil, coolant, or brake fluid that the dealer has. Sometimes much cheaper products are perfectly good and sometimes not. I have an old car that requires a particular type of automatic transmission fluid for the power steering system. People who don't research it and use generic "power steering fluid" say it can lead to leaking seals. The wrong type of radiator coolant is said to lead to all sorts of problems too.

The fact that there is a conflict of interest and the manufacturer will charge more doesn't mean that there aren't real issues.

And I as the owner of said car am within my rights to use/do whatever I want to maintain it. I wouldn't expect the manufacturer to fix anything, I screwed up, but if I want to pour sand into the gas tank, I can.

The real world problem is that it can be difficult or well-nigh impossible to trace back the causes of mechanical problems. If we had a foolproof way to do that, it would transform the used car business, as well as warranty claims and other stuff.

This is literally that with many tractor brands. Mahindra will void your warranty if you don't use THEIR oil in a new tractor.

> available from a Ford™ station somewhere in your state

... and at 3x the usual price.

Any reason why you used the ford brand as an example? I don’t like or hate them - just curious why them over others, if there’s any reason at all.

No deep reason. Once upon a time Ford dominated the car industry, and Henry Ford cared deeply about the engineering of Ford cars ("the brand"). I also wanted an industry where people spent a lot of money on an end-user product, such that they would not want to do something which might break a warranty.

It's really more like getting a Ford vs third-party part for your car, which yes, every car manufacturer will recommend. It's not like Apple is trying to sell you Apple electricity.

Regardless, this is a pretty low-effort attempt to make a point.

Car manufacturers may recommend against custom parts, but they probably don't (yet) detect you're using one and work to make your experience worse.

Safety is one thing. Working against your customer another.

Yes they do.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-americ...

My Dell laptop constantly used to tell me I was using a non-Dell battery (falsely). So I think there are probably quite a few instances of electronics having ways of detecting aftermarket parts, and there might well be automotive examples. I suspect printers that detect authentic ink cartridges exist. Wouldn't bet that it hasn't been done in the automotive realm.

Yup. Relatedly, devices on a CAN bus don't authenticate each other, and we're seeing real security & safety problems as a result. Ford—or Tesla and Volvo—will start locking those down this decade, or start seeing more incidents.

Third party parts in car are protected by law.

If only Apple™ users were limited to a special Apple™ version of the internet! :)

That's actually not a bad idea at all. A sanitized, curated version of the Internet would be a great idea for kids, elderly, the developmentally challenged, etc. Something like the web-equivalent of what Disney World is to the Real World.

AOL?

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