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Comment by realize | Hacker News Reader

This is a common response, attacking the people who write nice things about Apple as "evangelists" rather than refuting their specific arguments. Perhaps they write nice things about Apple because Apple have been making really great products for a few years now. And if you actually read them you'll know that they do criticise Apple when they don't perform or do bad things.

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A lot of people write nice things about Apple (I even think they've executed exceptionally well with great products). Walt Mossberg, for example (even Josh Topolsky is generally 90% positive on Apple -- but also likes Android). But there are many evangelists who write almost exclusively positive things about Apple and furthermore attack things that threaten Apple.

These evangelists maybe cordial to WP or WebOS, because they're no threat, but ICS -- they'll save their best faith-based sermons for it.

I dont think its because they think it threatens Apple (let's be honest, Apple is going from strength to strength).

I think it's because they've been making this same criticism since Android first came out, and its UI is still laggy and stutters. It's starting to look like that is just a permanent feature of Android, rather than something which should be fixed "soon".

All their criticism boils down to this one thing: that Android doesn't have the same level of quality when it comes to UI interaction. They readily say nice things about the features, but the interaction model is still broken, and they keep pointing it out because its important to them. Its important to lots of people, and thats probably why the iphone is selling so well.

Its obviously not important to people who prefer android, and thats fine. But since its not important to them they don't understand the criticism and ascribe people's love of the iphone to "faith" and "evangelism".

I think that's unfair. While WP7 obviously is derived from the 'physics based touch screen phone' category that the iPhone defined, it's also true that Microsoft took it in a different direction that genuinely looks different to iOS. They bet the farm on new design.

A lot of the criticism Apple followers have of Android is that it feels like a 'good enough' iOS alternative designed primarily to prevent Apple achieving dominance. Having lived through the 80s, many tech enthusiasts are keen to see a competitive industry with a focus on quality, design and innovation. Google facilitating Samsung producing iPhone knock-offs doesn't seem to contribute to that.

Except in their cases it's been shown time and time again that these evangelists constantly push a pro-Apple and anti-Google agenda. It's equivalent to the naysayers who fundamentally believe that Fox News is a fair and balanced network.

That's not to say that Apple never makes a good product or Google can do no wrong. They both have their fair share of successes and failures.

You can't argue that Josh is the more mature one here. MG lives to say controversial/sensational things and get 200+ comments on his posts. And I haven't been following him in a long time, but I know some of his posts on his personal blog, have been much more bitter against Google than his usual posts on TechCruch. He sounded very defensive about Apple, even though there wasn't a reason to do that in that specific case. It was just his latest general attitude towards Google.

By "argue that", did you mean "argue against the point that"?

Sorry to sound nitpicky, but I was confused by the rest of your post after reading the first sentence.

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