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Techrights Recommends An Apple Boycott
walterbyrd writes with a quote from an article at Techrights: "Given the latest actions from Apple we cannot help recommending that people buy nothing from Apple. Boycott the company for being a threat to the IT landscape and also to common sense."
More from the article: "...Apple has been working hard to embargo — not just sue — the competition. Apple disregards the notion of fair competition..."
Are boycotts ever really effective anymore? There's too much clout huge companies carry with their flashy advertising to reach consumers that are willing to break principle. People are not principled enough to rigourously hold to boycotts. I tell people not to bother with them, and focus on positive buying instead of negative buying. Don't avoid buying what you don't want to support, try to actively spend your available spending money with people and companies who support your vision of the world.
Oh You POS
The purpose for patents is not to protect the invention any more. It's to protect against ANY invention. And that's not what patents are for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't use apple products because I don't believe in their "walled garden" philosophy. I was a big fan of apple back in the old hypercard and basic days when apple wanted to bring their users CLOSER to the computing experience and really make their users more powerful.
But apple has done a complete 180 on that and won't ever come back to it. so for that reason, I won't buy their products. It isn't a boycott.
People need to stop thinking anyone gives a damn what they think about anything. Because the reality is that in the real world people just don't care. Corporations don't care. Politicians don't care. Your next door neighbor doesn't care. And they have every right to not care.
That said, you have the same right. So rather then trying to get some frothy public action thing together with promises to buy again if they change their ways. Just quietly buy what you believe in and let the marketing people figure out why sales dropped. Nothing preachy or pretentious. Just buy what you believe.
Apple products make lots of people happy. Good for them. They're welcome to it. I won't be one of them and wish one and all well.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
DRM
Funny as Apple/Jobs pushed music labels to release their music DRM free
Locking hardware to software
They also do that with a reason and not the "evil" they want to rape our babies kind of thing. With Apple they are so obsessed with user experience (and they don't suck at it) that they want to control every aspect. And hate that vertical approach but it works for them. If I look how different the experience is between my android smarthphone and iPad I find it hard to criticize them.
Pushing of proprietary standards
Hilarious. You are aware of the fact that they favored pushing HTML5 instead of the proprietary stuff like Flash. You are aware they are on of the driving force like open standard as OpenCL.
Being the middle-man
Because bandwidth, processing cost, support are all free.
Being secretive about developer revenues
Can you tell me where apple advertises with the fact that IOS is as lucrative. Can I tell you something as a developer who also built mobile applications and also have android devices. If the IOS market is so bad, you don't want to know which graveyard the Android market is.
As someone calling bullshit on the fact that Samsung didn't copy icons or look and feel. Look at KIES, look at the use of sunflower as an icon for the photo picture. Not like the telephone symbol as a photographer I never seen the sunflower as a mental model for a photograph.
For me people may buy and boycott what they want but damn there is so much FUD these days on sites like slashdot it isn't even funny anymore.
Actually it is (check out Darwin sometime).
Darwin != iOS. Please point me to build instructions so I can make a new ROM for an iDevice which does NOT contain the iCal application. Hm?
Unlike Andorid the shell of a CarrierIQ system that shipped with iOS was never enabled, and did not contain ... (snip)
How do you know? Were you legally able to investigate this? Or did Steve whisper this into your ears?
FWIW, the cydia thing is totally uncomparable to the Android custom ROM scene. You obviously haven't looked into it and hence you are talking out of your buttocks.
When you stop and think about it it's pretty dumb to have to install a custom ROM
When you stop and think about it it's pretty dumb to make uninformed remarks about things you have demonstrated to have no knowledge on.
I suppose that's why it's awesome that iOS is open-source
Actually it is (check out Darwin sometime).
Most of iOS is not open source. The versions of Darwin atop which particular Mac OS X releases are built are; the versions of Darwin atop which particular iOS releases aren't - maybe a particular Darwin release is "close enough" to the Darwin in a particular iOS release, but, even then, it doesn't include the low-level ARM support isn't there in xnu, and a lot of the higher-level stuff isn't open source even in Mac OS X (good luck finding the source to Foundation - not Core Foundation, but Foundation - or AppKit or UIKit).
Calling bullshit on that. It looks like the background decor, not the samsung stand, in a larger store. In one place, in sicily.
Not to mention, there are also three icons for McDonald and three icons for Google TV.
Thankfully, there are not too many fanboys of McDonald/Google TV on here, otherwise we'd be hearing conspiracy theories about how Samsung wants to go into the cheap silicon-based fast food business in Italy using the super popular Google TV logo.
I hate Apple because they have ruined software for me.
On my desktops or servers download Windows freeware or open source software and get good quality software that does not necessarily track or spy on me.
On my desktop (well, laptop, really) I can download Mac OS X freeware or open-source software and get good quality software that does not necessarily track or spy on me.
I can install whatever I want.
Same here.
I can develop on it for free, I don't have to pay anyone to start programming. On an Apple product I have to pay Apple for this right to write code for my own device.
OK, so what you really mean is "...because they have ruined smartphone and tablet software for me". I can and do develop, on my Mac, for free, software that runs on Mac OS X.
And here's me all this time thinking it was because mac users werent safe to be left unsupervised with sharp corners.
Nothing is created in a vacuum, there is always inspiration drawn from what already exists. Bizarrely companies think that they shouldn't have to acknowledge this but at the same time retain full and exclusive rights to their stuff and prevent anyone from doing something similar. The degree to which this is enforced varies from not at all in fashion to a sometimes in music (unless you actually sample someone else) to in any way at all with corporate branding.
The brightly lit white Apple stores look like the similarly minimal and bright shops they have had in Japan for ages. In fact Steve Job's trademark polo neck clothing came about because he visited a factory in Japan where the workers wore uniforms. He wanted Apple employees to do the same but they resisted, so he decided to just do it himself and asked a Japanese designer to come up with one for him. She sent him 100 black polo neck tops.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here in Australia, they're marketing it as "The tablet that Apple tried to stop".
Please stop perpetuating this myth. There was no mad rush to change Android after the iPhone was announced. Feel free to look up Dianne Hackborn yourself; her word should carry a lot more weight than a picture carefully crafted by some Apple apologist.
Oh God, please stop repeating Jobs tiring drivel. It serves no purpose, and only make you look like a tool. Let Apple do their own dirty marketing. Apple has no noble agenda, they're fighting increasingly dirty to protect their bottom-line, abusing the patent system to hinder competition, attempting to subvert the work of W3C threatening the very openness of the web.
Their actions are hurting the industry. Yet, you can still find people on a technical forum like this feeling the need to support their actions, modded +5 Insightful no less. I'm appalled.
Yes, by your own words, you can always tell... their exaggerations and lies.
You do know that Apple hasn't ONLY sued or otherwise sought to block Samsung right? HTC and Motorola are among those sued or attacked by Apple as well. And you have to realize that either others will follow or others have already done back-room settlements with Apple already.
I'm not going to say that "...all others are angels in the business while Apple is the devil" because that just wouldn't be true. There are no innocents here. However, when you see any given party simply going TOO FAR, you have to stand up and say something about it. Apple simply goes too far. If it were Samsung doing this (and not just defensively to give Apple a taste of its own medicine) I have little doubt the majority here would be rallying behind a boycott of Samsung.
I own Apple gear. I like it. I don't like what the company is doing, however. It's as simple as that. I won't own an iPhone or an iPad, though -- I have less use for them as I get more out of an Android device.
(Here's where I get modded down) Thankfully, Steve Jobs is gone. It's a chance for Apple to become something else. Some might say something betters... others might say something worse, but definitely something different. Personally, I hope they attempt to conquer the business enterprise. Getting something with some *NIX in the kernel on the business desktop might finally result in some interesting things. Then again, it'd also make it the large target for viruses and malware that it never really has been before. (Malware has been extremely targeted these days. If Lockheed switched to Apple, the next break-in will focus on Apple gear and OSes.) This would suck for Apple and for Microsoft but it would be good for all the rest of us.