Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

No, it's like I've paid attention to the various posts by Asymco, Daring Fireball, and Marco over the past couple of months. I fully anticipate Gruber will link to Marco's piece, Asymco will add some sort of twisted perversion of data that supports it, and so on.

I read the piece and thought it added nothing that hasn't been debated and discussed countless times before.

Yet, the market has spoken, hasn't it? A year ago such was the argument about why Android could never succeed, with so many confusing choices and options against the iPhone's simplicity. Android has done pretty good for itself in spite of that, I suppose. In fact I thought the current angle was "of course Android would do well with so many handsets and so many options".

View on HN

I agree, it's been pretty amusing watching and reading the re-structuring and re-wording of arguments on the Apple circle-jerk of blogs this past year.

It's similar to the current "browser wars." We're all over-privileged and spoiled to have 4 (soon to be 5) standards-compliant, fast, extend-able browsers to choose from on any platform we want. It's basically just nit-picking and personal preference at this point.

It's the same way with smartphones now. We have dozens of handsets that come in a bunch of different flavors (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) that are for the most part very well designed. We're just as spoiled with them as we are with browsers right now. Isn't it enough that we can all choose our favorite equally-awesome version of a smartphone without having to trash the slightly different competitor and write dissertation after dissertation over-analyzing how the other will fail or is bad (when clearly they are succeeding and a large portion of the market enjoys the product)?

Marco, Gruber, and co: you can stop. We get it, you like Apple. Good for you, not everyone else does. Isn't there something more productive you can be doing with your time?

>Marco, Gruber, and co: you can stop. We get it, you like Apple. Good for you, not everyone else does. Isn't there something more productive you can be doing with your time?

No they don't, and I'm not being facetious. They are all Apple Tech Writers, not Tech Writers. They don't understand or care much about technology beyond Apple, so if they didn't glowing pro-Apple articles, they wouldn't have much to write about.

Yes, all the choices are awesome technically, which is why the debate is about consequences and morals, freedom and openness.

The Apple defenders have to be so strident because Apple rarely has the high ground in these debates, except perhaps for its Flash position.

The Google defenders have to be so strident because freedom and openness are important but invisible attributes.

I fully anticipate Gruber will link to Marco's piece, Asymco will add some sort of twisted perversion of data that supports it, and so on.

Does that make any of them wrong? If that didn't happen would that make any of them right? I'm not really getting the significance here. It's the internet. People link to things. You don't have to pay attention to any of them.

>It's the internet. People link to things.

Absolutely. And of course people who believe the same thing naturally come together. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. It's how it is supposed to work.

However there is a perspective lens when the posts from the same group are widely propagated, reinforced through repeated assertion. It's an opinion bloc more than valuable or interesting insight.

No one cares when a couple of guys at the bar rabble off about their opinions. When they're, say, Glen Beck and his cohorts of a certain sphere, though, the discussion of course changes because their opinion is propagated widely. Stop the presses: Glen Beck and all his cohorts disagree with something the administration does.

I guess what I don't understand is what the significance of pointing to this effect other than to poison any chance of there being a reasonable discussion about the submission.

You were not wrong:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/01/13/hardware-choice-...

Reading Asymco makes my head spin. I can never understand what the hell he's talking about, and I do computational modeling by day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com