Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

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It's not just about emotion or loyalty. It's about built-up knowledge and the difficulty of switching.

When you're a long time user, you know how to do everything with what you're using - whether that's an operating system, a programming language, or something else.

The latest product isn't good and your suggestion is "don't buy it." OK, what do I do instead? Buy a Windows or Linux laptop where I have to re-learn a decade's worth of knowing-how-everything-works? Build up my natural flow in a new OS? Find whatever are the Windows alternatives for all the little things that I do on my Mac?

I'm not saying that companies owe things to their customers, but I think it's really simplistic to say that it's just an emotional investment and misplaced loyalty. People have a tool and then a company makes that tool worse. There are other tools, but it takes time to learn them, figure out their differences and how to get everything done with them, etc. Pretending that there's zero cost to switching is disingenuous.

For example: if you're a software engineer and someone made your main programming language bad, there's a high cost to switching to a new language. Even if you're excellent at learning new languages, you don't know which libraries are good, you don't know what various functions are named, you don't know what warts are in the build system (and how to avoid them), etc.

It's not just some emotional response or misplaced loyalty. It's that you've built up skills over many years that are tied to that thing.

Companies owe their livelihoods to their customers. If they do stupid shit and annoy those customers they lose money and potentially kill the business.

There is a long list of companies which have done themselves serious financial harm, or even slit their own throats by failing to understand how Customer World works.

No one is too big to fail. Especially in computing. There's also a long list of companies which looked like permanent fixtures for a while and were dead a few years later.

As for Apple - I have a busy lock screen, and I can no longer read the time because the big numbers are too thin and the refraction effect makes them impossible to read.

Rookie, stupid error. Just embarrassing.

Fwiw, if you go into settings -> Wallpaper on iOS, you can change the font and the font size of the time on the lockscreen, if that's your beef.

Yes and that's the big issue with Apple business model. Ultimately it only ends bad for the consumer, Apple has unbounded control/power.

In the hardware side they can set price how they see fit because you are literally trapped. They only optimise what they think is their revenue maximizing position. For this reason, they keep coming up with software that impacts hardware in a big way and forces you to spend more than you would elsewhere. And often they don't even bother supporting or making the hardware that you may want/need.

On the software side they have a rather short obsolescence window for OSs that is very much compounded by the requirement of much of their software (and often 3rd party too, via libraries/frameworks churn) to only be backward compatible a few versions at best.

This creates an environment where you are extremely dependent on whatever Apple decides to do. Not only does this create anxiety it also instills a sensation of powerlessness where whatever you want really doesn't matter at all. It's not surprising to me because I believe Apple is the personification of an abusive authoritarian narcistic asshole.

As long as Apple keeps doing stuff that seems aligned with your needs, the requirements/constraints don't feel that bad but the moment they drift off too far it becomes a major and constant annoyance. In order to make more money Apple has increased its potential target consumer to be almost anyone. This creates tension because they can't focus on a particular set of needs/users.

Which is why I believe Apple stuff is becoming increasingly pointless. They don't focus enough on particular use cases (or type of person or lifestyle) which makes their stuff just another option among others, just more expensive and way more locked down.

This is what those people feel. After having invested so much more money than would have been necessary elsewhere, spent so much time learning the stuff, often spent as much time evangelizing the stuff for free and many other compromises; Apple gives zero shit and just keep chasing increasing amounts of money without delivering a whole lot of value in return. Of course, it was previsible, but it's not something that you can necessarily understand/intuit when you are younger and once you have made your choice/investment you are kind of trapped for reasons mentioned before.

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