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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the Sony:Apple comparison at all.

If anything, Sony is Japan's Microsoft: Do a gazillion things, many of them poorly, to such a unfocused extent that some of your divisions actually end up competition with each other.

Like in Sony's case, how they've had internal battles for decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on everything)

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Sony is older than Apple and was one of Steve Jobs' main inspirations. He even wanted to make everyone wear uniforms (which Sony and Nintendo still did then) - that's where his same outfit every day habit came from.

They weren't focused back then, but neither was Apple.

Sony is older than Apple...

Unrelated to your point, but Nintendo is older than Sony and Apple combined.

  Apple 45 years
  Sony 75 years
  Nintendo 132 years

Yea it's crazy. My dad has a classic Gameboy that his great grandfather purchased during the first world war. That Gameboy saw a couple more wars after that too, including 5 years up my grandads ass in a POW camp, and 2 more inside another soldier who brought it back for us.

Can confirm it tastes bad.

I know you're trying to make the point that Nintendo revolutionized itself and is a foundationally different company than it was in the 1910's, but not really.

Trading cards (cutting edge color printing) -> Mechanical toys (cutting edge machining) -> Basic games like Game and Watch -> Video Games.

Nintendo just makes complex toys using cutting edge tech and always has.

Didn't Jobs also offer Sony to make laptops that ran OS X?

Also, random thing, but both Orbis (Playstation operating system) and OS X are based on FreeBSD.

Apparently they even made an official Sony VAIO Hackintosh.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5380832/sony-vaio-apple-os...

Pretty sure OS X is based on the Mach/XNU kernel and Darwin, not FreeBSD.

It's a bit of an amalgam, and it honestly depends on which version of OSX you're talking about. Mach itself was designed as an improvement over BSD, and it was more or less a microkernel developed around BSD concepts with binary compatibility. My understanding is that as time went on, performance issues and security concerns forced Apple to poach more and more BSD code onto Mach, which leaves us with the pretty messy codebase they use today. Supposedly (?) a lot of the zombie code is being cleaned up internally, but it's been an ongoing, multi-year process for Apple, probably made even more difficult with their bonafide UNIX certification.

Thank you for the clear and concise explanation (: It was very informative.

I thought there was _some_ influence on the kernel from FreeBSD, even if not that much. I am aware the kernel is not the FreeBSD one, though.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da... seems to have information on this.

The kernel shares some pieces with FreeBSD/NetBSD, but they're mostly very old and have developed separately since then.

The userland and libc are actually a lot more similar and some pieces are even up to date with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100 but System7

> make everyone wear uniforms (which Sony and Nintendo still did then)

Nintendo still requires uniforms. They're pretty casual about it and you can just throw the factory-style short sleeve shirt or the jacket over whatever you're wearing, but everyone except the suits does wear it.

I dont know if you can say that Sony is doing stuff “poorly”. Most of the hardware they make is very solid. Think about their speakers, headphones, the consoles, etc. But yes i agree, they are a huge company with a lot of divisions where sometimes the decisions are at odds. Which parts do you think are doing poorly?

Which parts do you think are doing poorly?

The names of their products. How do you keep anything straight when the name of each product is UUID?

That's easy, UUIDs are unique, so it's easy to tell them apart, although it's hard to group them. Much better than deciding what the heck 'new iPad' means or if you want a new old 3ds or a used new 3ds, or if updating iOS means your phone or your router.

Just because Apple has had some bad names doesn't make Sony's names better. Don't compare Sony's naming conventions with iPad, compare them with iPhone, which is significantly easier.

Q: Which iPhone do you have A: iPhone 12 Pro Max (I choose this one because it's one of the longer iPhone names)

Q: Which Sony headphones do you have A: MX 4 or something like that. Let me check my Amazon order history. Oh yeah, here it is. The WH-1000XM4

I'd much prefer the iPhone naming convention to what Sony does, and Apple having screwed up the iPad naming doesn't really excuse Sony here.

Naming things is still one of the harder problems in computer science. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is descriptive, but doesn't say everything. How much storage it has, how many sim slots (there are dual-nano-sim iPhones in special regions) it has, the modem and antenna configuration, the color. From Apple's POV, the plebs don't need to know the difference between A2342, A2410, A2411, and A2412 versions of the iPhone 12 Pro Max and it's not clear that they're wrong.

My favorite new naming scheme they've decided on is the new Xperia phones. Apparently they're now on the Xperia 1 III.

I once replaced a Motorola Moto G5 with a Motorola Moto G 5G.

To be fair, Cisco IOS and Apple iOS are not from the same company and aren't really in the same field.

Sure, but Apple had to buy the rights to the trademark for iOS from the same company they had to buy the rights for the trademark for iPhone.

Hardware is generally great but their software and UI are often crap.

I think the problem for this is they have separate divisions often developing the bits and bolts behind their consumer/business hardware who are doing very high quality and innovative engineering and then the separate company developing the actual devices that use that hardware is more of an afterthought. They just want to sell the bits and bolts to everyone else as well.

>Do a gazillion things, many of them poorly

What does Sony do poorly? Sony has the same dysfunction Apple has - everything has to be invented in house. If you told me that a company invented an high end camera that 20% more than the competitors and used proprietary connectors and memory cards, I wouldn't be surprised if that was Apple.

>decades between the device side (that wants to make devices that are useful) and the content side (that wants DRM out the ass on everything)

Remember FairPlay?

> Remember FairPlay?

Was FairPlay the name of the rootkit they'd install if you tried to play one of their audio CDs in a Windows PC?

FairPlay is Apple's DRM.

Aibo?

The Qualia fiasco?

PSPgo?

It's not entirely about the business structure or its fundamental revenue sources. Don't think like an accountant here, it's about the brand. In terms of being the top-tier tech and hardware firm of your nation, Sony is Japan's Apple. It's a strong household name too, regardless of their conglomerate style being close to Microsoft.

It took them twenty years to give up trying to push Memory Stick, a product that was made irrelevant in barely four years by SD cards.

I pin the failure of the Vita (a system designed around downloadable games with hardware buttons) on the need to use proprietary memory. Yes, Sony made more off of the proprietary memory than off of SD/uSD cards, but handicapped the system and made the downloadable games that should have been its bread and butter an expensive proposition for users.

I would say Panasonic is actually the Apple of Japan but with more of a focus on business to business in addition to consumer. They make a gazillion things but generally they are all damn good.

Sony is like a fancier Microsoft

Who knows with Nintendo

Panasonic mainly makes boring good products (though some are nice). It's apparently not like Apple.

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