Not to mention that a lot of the phone companies charge an arm and leg for data plans, even if it is small MP3 file that "free music" ends up being expensive fast.
Thats the whole reason though we have standard formats for hardware, you know that its going to work, for sure. A CD that is Compact Disk certified will play in any CD player, from the oldest ones to the newest ones, with Blu-Ray though this just adds uncertainty that those that have the Blu-Ray label on them won't play in some Blu-Ray drives and this story will only make people stick with DVD.
Hmm? Much of the reviews come from sources that are paid by MS or have strong ties to MS and hesitate to say bad reviews of it, so yes it would be damage control for Vista. Even though it is an old story remember that MS was handing out laptops for favorable reviews of Vista http://slashdot.org/articles/06/12/27/1423234.shtml and It wouldn't surprise me if the reason they are trying to keep Vista SP1 away from the customer is for favorable press because when Joe MS-User sees that SP1 is coming out they might buy it if there aren't any overly negative reviews in the mainstream press.
What I was referring to, was there are little utilities available to help a script kiddy attack Firefox reliably compared to attacking IE or similar browsers.
The only thing which needs protecting in this country is job losses to anti-competitive nations like China and Japan.
Anti-Competitive? You only need to watch the news for about a minute to see why people are outsourcing jobs, Americans don't want to work. The classic example, the writers strike, now when an entire job class of people just quit their jobs because they don't think they are paid enough, we have a problem. When TV shows try to run without writers and write their own stuff and get fined because of that we have a problem. That attitude along with software patents that China and Japan don't have much of and the DMCA is why China and Japan are ahead of the US. The US has just about 0 technical innovation due to software patents and the DMCA, most innovation is coming from Japan and China and the EU not the US due to our congress's stupidity to not look beyond what MS and the *AA are telling them. In the US anytime you come up with something of interest that you want to market that is a technical product you have to wade through patent after patent that you are trying not to violate and these aren't specific patents, these are patents like "one click shopping" and such, as technology is the way of the future, its only natural that Japan and China have much better economies then the US and it's bureaucratic nonsense and a congress that is swayed by every breath of which ever lobbyist has enough money. The only thing which needs protecting in this country is job losses to anti-competitive nations like China and Japan.
Also, one thing that I have noticed about OSS bugs is that those severe enough to cause execution of code, there are very very few utilities to easily attack systems unlike their MS counterparts. Most OSS flaws are rarely exploited in the wild. The only thing that annoys me about them is that someone will surely come up to me on Monday stating how bad Firefox is because of this while blissfully ignoring all the flaws that Windows/IE has had for years.
I think the problem is, we have too much moderates. If we have a totally liberal government, everything would improve, same if we had a totally conservative government, when we get them mixed... we have a poor economy and nation. If we have a totally liberal government, most people would work for the government, therefore we deal with unemployment, because we increase taxes, we have more projects for government employees to work on, they spend their money on private businesses and they then pay taxes to pay for the workers. If we have a totally conservative government, the government would employ very few people and most public projects (schools, roads, Etc.) would fall into private hands and because there are few government projects save say defense, the economy grows because people have more money to spend on the private businesses. Either way, we would have a decent economy. Now when we have a moderate political system it takes the worst of both.
Google is reliant on the web and the web is basically what is killing MS. With high-speed internet MS is just about obsolete, in a few hours you can download a Linux OS that offers just as much if not more then what MS offers not to mention if you know where to look you can download XP/Vista and get a serial code to work with it. As for Office, Open Office has become the office suite of choice for those who see no need to spend $99 on a single program. Google also is cross-platform, most software works on Windows, Linux and Mac and naturally Google search works on any browser on any platform without proprietary addons. Google is just a natural product of the web which is what is killing MS more then any software, more then Linux is, more then Apple can ever hope to. MS represents the 80s to early 90s model of software, software that is bought and sold by companies, Google is a service and most softwiare is free to all (as in beer) and because they figured out how to make internet advertising successful, they don't annoy the users by displaying pop-ups and too much Flash.
Furthermore it tends to keep new customers who would download a lot away from the company...It's effectively win:win for Comcast and there simply isn't anything you can do about it.
But really, when Comcast is trying to get the best download speeds available, who else would it attract then people who download a lot? When it is more expensive then dial-up and DSL service that takes out most casual customers there and it leaves those who have a need for speed such as people who download a lot. So no, it is eating into Comcast's customer base and makes more people less likely to get Comcast service, not a win:win, its a lose:lose situation.
Well chances are the US government has the source to Windows so I bet that they know all the back-doors (they would be foolish to use it without full source) and other governments have less copyright laws so with enough resources they can extract the source so I bet every government by now has easy access to Windows source.
No, someone will have a "better" way of doing it. Just how it was for Dial-Up you got charged for the hour, now that broadband is doing the same thing, there is going to be another better way of connecting (fiber anyone?) that won't suffer from this attack of freedom.
Weatherbug? I have had users protest switching from IE because they liked the hijacked browser homepage because it had news and weather on it! However they let me replace it when I showed them customized Google.
Hmm? I highly doubt that any computer maker will lock you into hardware/software it just is bad business. Think of Dell, Vista failed, people started to not buy computers so they switched to letting people use XP, enough people wrote in and now they offer Linux, the hardware companies just want to sell hardware, if they can get that by offering Vista they will, if enough people request Linux they will offer that. Most hardware manufacturers want their product to be used as much as possible, if that means using standards they will (and mostly have) use it to get people to buy it. We are far away from computers (laptop and desktops not PDAs and Cell Phones and such) that have hardware/software lockin and the only one to have done it was Apple however now they let even Windows boot on Macs. The fact is, hardware manufacturers don't care about locking you into software, they just want money, if they can get that by offering MS, Linux, or whatever they will so lockin is a bad choice for them.
While the reasoning is sound and yes XP does use up more resources then 2000, in reality it wasn't correct. 2000 was marketed to businesses, and as such few home users actually used it, around the same time Windows ME came out and as everyone knows, failed miserably, after that MS abandoned separate home and business OS series, XP came out. So in the home OS, XP was the clear winner because it broke the old grey/blue look of the 9X series and looked new, and offered the NT kernel which was much better then the DOS based ones which had never been offered to home users.
This is pure misdirection and nothing else. If Joe Customer buys a Hi-Def movie and windows can't play it, he's going to point straight at Microsoft with the finger of blame - even though the fault lies with the manufacturer of the disc. By including DRM to allow these movies to be played, Windows can trivially become a home entertainment center. You can even use it to play your non-DRM'd media! How about that!
And that would be different then XP not playing DVDs normally how? Playing HD content should not require DRM and if MS had opposed I am sure that it would be dropped or downplayed in the way CSS was. Including DRM is a huge flaw when it is embedded in the OS because it adds an extra layer of failure much as WGA does. In an OS that is to be used by governments as well as the home user, adding DRM adds numerous flaws that can be security risks. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135814-c,windowsbugs/article.html not to mention that different hardware changes can cause WGA or DRM failures. Remember the Sony Rootkit? That is more or less the level of insecurity you get when you build an OS around DRM because DRM by nature must be secret and closed. If MS really wants to be evil and include DRM the least they could do is embed it in an application rather then the entire OS (IE: having Windows Explorer not being able to copy DRMed files and WMP not being able to play them) it would be more secure and the OS might not break (as much). As for Vista being a media center, I really don't see how that works, when you have to pay $700+ for a computer that runs Vista and it isn't as sluggish along with silent that's a large amount of money for a computer when you can get a $300 rig for XP/Linux to do the exact same thing, not to mention due to DRM you need a better video card to play "protected content". XP or Linux can do the same job with less resources and with Linux can be controlled remotely (XP/Vista probably can too with an addon). The only thing about Linux is having to installed "restricted" packages which if you choose your distro carefully, many of them can already be enabled with the company paying for them all for a price cheaper then XP. As for the DOS problem, if you can just not run them in full-screen I don't see how security comes into play with this, that would be a reason if they wouldn't play but just not enabling full screen, that's just a flaw.
The reason that the pay subscription model is not insanely popular is probably because it is competing against the "free subscription" model, where you get all the same music, but for free.
Not to mention its DRMed and may not work on your devices. When someone offers a subscription model DRM free service that works on Windows/Linux/Mac in whatever encoding you want FLAC/MP3/OGG I will sign up until then its again the "pirates" offer a better product on more then just price and if this continues I don't see how digital music will survive.
Never noticed it. Doesn't affect me one iota. And hey, if I do want to watch a DRM'd movie, guess what? I can! You ire should be directed at the movie studios that wanted MS to add the DRM in the first place.
DRM results in far more then a lack of freedom, it results in higher hardware requirements which boost the requirements even more then it already needs to be and I am sure that you have noticed it, not just in not being able to copy but in slower performance and higher hardware costs. As for the movie studios, where else are they going to turn if MS doesn't include DRM? Apple still has minority share and loses many of it's fans if it goes mainstream, no one running Linux is going to want DRM and what does that leave? Some Unix systems? Really if MS had said no where else would the studios turn and it really isn't that MS doesn't have enough marketshare/money to defend themselves there a monopoly, they make it seem like "everyone else made us do it" when it is a design flaw by them.
Hmm, never had much issue with this either and I do play quite a few old games. You could always try installing DOS into a virtual machine. I believe that VMWare is free now, although I personally use Microsoft Virtual PC and find that it works wonderfully. Also, IIRC you can even download DR-DOS for free to install into your free VM!
Really though, that's not still a good reason to break it just because there are other options, it seems to be highlighting one of the major flaws of Vista breaking things for no good reason even though there are ways around it it still is a stupid flaw.
I have used Vista before and I have to say that it is by far the worst OS I have ever used (No I haven't used ME) its slow, bloated and DRMed, just because you don't have a problem with it doesn't mean that millions of others (if there are millions using Vista) don't have problems with it.
Re:More Fuel For The Nvidia CPU Fire.
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NVIDIA To Buy AGEIA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't really think that all this will be better in the long run. While faster GPUs and better cards mean faster games, with all the DRM that Vista has it makes them more expensive and have poorer performance. Linux lacks in games to really test the cards out and getting drivers for ATI/Nvidia is a pain to say the least, and OS X really doesn't support non-apple internal hardware very well so that's not a test. Technology wise in the hardware department we are making leaps and bounds every day, however with the lack of a decent OS to test the new cards on, their true potential will be lost in DRM/Vista/Driver issues.
I bet that this was done for the possible buyout of Yahoo by MS. Even though the US DoJ will surely let it through, the EU will be less certain, by stripping Yahoo down it can make it seem that all MS is buying is the Yahoo search engine and that is going to make it seem less like MS is trying to get an internet monopoly, not to mention that there probably is an exchange of cash somewhere and if MS gets Yahoo they get that cash.
Seems like to me Yahoo really wants those billions MS is offering and will do anything to get EU approval, or this is just coincidence that it happened with the proposed buyout.
First off, I appologize if this seems like flamebait, however there are just so many things that are just plain wrong in this post.
To be absolutely clear--the whole REASON why there's such demand for Apple products is because, unlike many tech companies, they DO care about the entire user experience. It makes using the product simple, easy, convenient. Would people buy Apple products if they WEREN'T easy to use, if that end-to-end experience WASN'T designed? It frustrates me to no end to hear people gripe about "user choice and freedom" but at the same time they covet the simplicity and elegance of Apple's design approach, not realizing that their interfaces and hardware are what they are precisely because it doesn't allow you to customize the crap out of it and ultimately break it in a million ways.
I actually think that the reason that Apple gets such a demand isn't that they are so easy to use necessarily its because they are one of the few tech companies that seems to have innovated and has the money to market them. For example, look back a year or two and see if there were any major phones with a touch-screen interface similar to the iPhone and I bet you there were few, then look at those and see how many had Wi-Fi, a camera, browser and YouTube video viewer (or Flash on the browser) and the number would be tiny, then take those who are easily available in the US and that would chances are be non-existent. Why do you think most people on/. like Apple products? It isn't because they are easy to use, it is because they seem to have innovated more then most other companies and the products they make are easily available.
Taking out choices does not equal easy to use, that is advocating a remote that has one button to make it easier to change channels because you know that a "guide" button just confuses people as is having 2 buttons to change the channel up and down and if you want to change the volume you can buy the iVolume accessory that changes that with one button! If that sounds far-fetched that is exactly what you are saying, that we should make computers more like toys to make them easier to use and take out functionality and then the ideal computer will be a text editor and a browser, nothing more, and no mouse either and while were at it lets take out some keys on the keyboard such as Caps-Lock as those confuse people.
I still don't get though how the iPhone couldn't be unlocked and still be easier to use, unless you say that because a carrier is a choice and those confuse people so we should get rid of all choice!
I am not sitting around with my old crappy UNLOCKED Motorola V3x with an indecipherable interface, whining about how the choices presented to me are not the choices I want.
What you think is indecipherable is to someone else, exactly what they want. For example just look at Unix, to some people the power of Unix/Linux is the reason they like it alone, the customizable interfaces, and choice is why they use a *Nix OS, for some people they panic if they can't see a C: drive on their computer and like not making any decisions content to let some company be it MS or Apple take away all choice and will gladly open up their wallets to them.
I don't know about anyone else but I want hardware/software not an "experience" from Apple. For example the iPhone/Mac are innovative, they have good hardware that looks nice and you can get good support from them and a decent OS that you don't feel like you want to either install something else or make it usable (like what you almost have to do with a new computer with Windows on it) however why does the service have to be part of the product? When I buy a land-line phone all I have to do is plug it into the phone jack and it will work just as fine on *insert phone company here* as *insert phone company here* not to mention when I switch phone companies I can use the same phone. Activating at home is in my opinion a stupid move to bring an "experience" to the product, it would be ideal had it been web-based that you only had to navigate your browser to a page but when it is an application to install (not one that is cross-platform either) it is nothing more then a hassle when your obviously in the store buying the phone another 10 minutes to sign some papers and get the phone to work isn't going to kill you.
Or perhaps they don't want customers of their phones to have to wade through a sea of bizarre contracts and options?
That's exactly what I hate about Apple's "experience" is the lack of options, sure to someone a remote with one button makes it easier to switch channels however it would be terribly inefficient and not ideal for everybody. It is always a bad idea to try to make something easier by taking out options it only makes it more complex to get what you want. AT&T has decent enough coverage around the US however they have sky-high prices, other cell providers may only work in a few cities, but if you only travel a bit and they can save you $200 a year it would be foolish to take AT&T just like Apple is suggesting to remove options to make it easier.
Overall, I just want hardware/software that works right, the iPhone is innovative and I would get it but as with all of Apple's products you can't just get the thing you have to suffer with Steve Job's "experience" to get a decent phone and even then you can't use it on the network you want.
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Not to mention that a lot of the phone companies charge an arm and leg for data plans, even if it is small MP3 file that "free music" ends up being expensive fast.
How is this news? The Ubuntu project came up with Upstart and therefore they are going to use it? Whats next Debian using apt-get rather then RPM?
Thats the whole reason though we have standard formats for hardware, you know that its going to work, for sure. A CD that is Compact Disk certified will play in any CD player, from the oldest ones to the newest ones, with Blu-Ray though this just adds uncertainty that those that have the Blu-Ray label on them won't play in some Blu-Ray drives and this story will only make people stick with DVD.
Hmm? Much of the reviews come from sources that are paid by MS or have strong ties to MS and hesitate to say bad reviews of it, so yes it would be damage control for Vista. Even though it is an old story remember that MS was handing out laptops for favorable reviews of Vista http://slashdot.org/articles/06/12/27/1423234.shtml and It wouldn't surprise me if the reason they are trying to keep Vista SP1 away from the customer is for favorable press because when Joe MS-User sees that SP1 is coming out they might buy it if there aren't any overly negative reviews in the mainstream press.
Nope, I did too, and I was wondering... does this mean that Norton won't crash and slow down Windows computers more then most spyware/viruses?
Am I the only one that wondered why Tor (the anonymity network) was giving away free ebooks?
What I was referring to, was there are little utilities available to help a script kiddy attack Firefox reliably compared to attacking IE or similar browsers.
Anti-Competitive? You only need to watch the news for about a minute to see why people are outsourcing jobs, Americans don't want to work. The classic example, the writers strike, now when an entire job class of people just quit their jobs because they don't think they are paid enough, we have a problem. When TV shows try to run without writers and write their own stuff and get fined because of that we have a problem. That attitude along with software patents that China and Japan don't have much of and the DMCA is why China and Japan are ahead of the US. The US has just about 0 technical innovation due to software patents and the DMCA, most innovation is coming from Japan and China and the EU not the US due to our congress's stupidity to not look beyond what MS and the *AA are telling them. In the US anytime you come up with something of interest that you want to market that is a technical product you have to wade through patent after patent that you are trying not to violate and these aren't specific patents, these are patents like "one click shopping" and such, as technology is the way of the future, its only natural that Japan and China have much better economies then the US and it's bureaucratic nonsense and a congress that is swayed by every breath of which ever lobbyist has enough money. The only thing which needs protecting in this country is job losses to anti-competitive nations like China and Japan.
Also, one thing that I have noticed about OSS bugs is that those severe enough to cause execution of code, there are very very few utilities to easily attack systems unlike their MS counterparts. Most OSS flaws are rarely exploited in the wild. The only thing that annoys me about them is that someone will surely come up to me on Monday stating how bad Firefox is because of this while blissfully ignoring all the flaws that Windows/IE has had for years.
I think the problem is, we have too much moderates. If we have a totally liberal government, everything would improve, same if we had a totally conservative government, when we get them mixed... we have a poor economy and nation. If we have a totally liberal government, most people would work for the government, therefore we deal with unemployment, because we increase taxes, we have more projects for government employees to work on, they spend their money on private businesses and they then pay taxes to pay for the workers. If we have a totally conservative government, the government would employ very few people and most public projects (schools, roads, Etc.) would fall into private hands and because there are few government projects save say defense, the economy grows because people have more money to spend on the private businesses. Either way, we would have a decent economy. Now when we have a moderate political system it takes the worst of both.
Google is reliant on the web and the web is basically what is killing MS. With high-speed internet MS is just about obsolete, in a few hours you can download a Linux OS that offers just as much if not more then what MS offers not to mention if you know where to look you can download XP/Vista and get a serial code to work with it. As for Office, Open Office has become the office suite of choice for those who see no need to spend $99 on a single program. Google also is cross-platform, most software works on Windows, Linux and Mac and naturally Google search works on any browser on any platform without proprietary addons. Google is just a natural product of the web which is what is killing MS more then any software, more then Linux is, more then Apple can ever hope to. MS represents the 80s to early 90s model of software, software that is bought and sold by companies, Google is a service and most softwiare is free to all (as in beer) and because they figured out how to make internet advertising successful, they don't annoy the users by displaying pop-ups and too much Flash.
But really, when Comcast is trying to get the best download speeds available, who else would it attract then people who download a lot? When it is more expensive then dial-up and DSL service that takes out most casual customers there and it leaves those who have a need for speed such as people who download a lot. So no, it is eating into Comcast's customer base and makes more people less likely to get Comcast service, not a win:win, its a lose:lose situation.
Well chances are the US government has the source to Windows so I bet that they know all the back-doors (they would be foolish to use it without full source) and other governments have less copyright laws so with enough resources they can extract the source so I bet every government by now has easy access to Windows source.
No, someone will have a "better" way of doing it. Just how it was for Dial-Up you got charged for the hour, now that broadband is doing the same thing, there is going to be another better way of connecting (fiber anyone?) that won't suffer from this attack of freedom.
Weatherbug? I have had users protest switching from IE because they liked the hijacked browser homepage because it had news and weather on it! However they let me replace it when I showed them customized Google.
Hmm? I highly doubt that any computer maker will lock you into hardware/software it just is bad business. Think of Dell, Vista failed, people started to not buy computers so they switched to letting people use XP, enough people wrote in and now they offer Linux, the hardware companies just want to sell hardware, if they can get that by offering Vista they will, if enough people request Linux they will offer that. Most hardware manufacturers want their product to be used as much as possible, if that means using standards they will (and mostly have) use it to get people to buy it. We are far away from computers (laptop and desktops not PDAs and Cell Phones and such) that have hardware/software lockin and the only one to have done it was Apple however now they let even Windows boot on Macs. The fact is, hardware manufacturers don't care about locking you into software, they just want money, if they can get that by offering MS, Linux, or whatever they will so lockin is a bad choice for them.
While the reasoning is sound and yes XP does use up more resources then 2000, in reality it wasn't correct. 2000 was marketed to businesses, and as such few home users actually used it, around the same time Windows ME came out and as everyone knows, failed miserably, after that MS abandoned separate home and business OS series, XP came out. So in the home OS, XP was the clear winner because it broke the old grey/blue look of the 9X series and looked new, and offered the NT kernel which was much better then the DOS based ones which had never been offered to home users.
And that would be different then XP not playing DVDs normally how? Playing HD content should not require DRM and if MS had opposed I am sure that it would be dropped or downplayed in the way CSS was. Including DRM is a huge flaw when it is embedded in the OS because it adds an extra layer of failure much as WGA does. In an OS that is to be used by governments as well as the home user, adding DRM adds numerous flaws that can be security risks. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135814-c,windowsbugs/article.html not to mention that different hardware changes can cause WGA or DRM failures. Remember the Sony Rootkit? That is more or less the level of insecurity you get when you build an OS around DRM because DRM by nature must be secret and closed. If MS really wants to be evil and include DRM the least they could do is embed it in an application rather then the entire OS (IE: having Windows Explorer not being able to copy DRMed files and WMP not being able to play them) it would be more secure and the OS might not break (as much). As for Vista being a media center, I really don't see how that works, when you have to pay $700+ for a computer that runs Vista and it isn't as sluggish along with silent that's a large amount of money for a computer when you can get a $300 rig for XP/Linux to do the exact same thing, not to mention due to DRM you need a better video card to play "protected content". XP or Linux can do the same job with less resources and with Linux can be controlled remotely (XP/Vista probably can too with an addon). The only thing about Linux is having to installed "restricted" packages which if you choose your distro carefully, many of them can already be enabled with the company paying for them all for a price cheaper then XP. As for the DOS problem, if you can just not run them in full-screen I don't see how security comes into play with this, that would be a reason if they wouldn't play but just not enabling full screen, that's just a flaw.
Not to mention its DRMed and may not work on your devices. When someone offers a subscription model DRM free service that works on Windows/Linux/Mac in whatever encoding you want FLAC/MP3/OGG I will sign up until then its again the "pirates" offer a better product on more then just price and if this continues I don't see how digital music will survive.
DRM results in far more then a lack of freedom, it results in higher hardware requirements which boost the requirements even more then it already needs to be and I am sure that you have noticed it, not just in not being able to copy but in slower performance and higher hardware costs. As for the movie studios, where else are they going to turn if MS doesn't include DRM? Apple still has minority share and loses many of it's fans if it goes mainstream, no one running Linux is going to want DRM and what does that leave? Some Unix systems? Really if MS had said no where else would the studios turn and it really isn't that MS doesn't have enough marketshare/money to defend themselves there a monopoly, they make it seem like "everyone else made us do it" when it is a design flaw by them.
Hmm, never had much issue with this either and I do play quite a few old games. You could always try installing DOS into a virtual machine. I believe that VMWare is free now, although I personally use Microsoft Virtual PC and find that it works wonderfully. Also, IIRC you can even download DR-DOS for free to install into your free VM!
Really though, that's not still a good reason to break it just because there are other options, it seems to be highlighting one of the major flaws of Vista breaking things for no good reason even though there are ways around it it still is a stupid flaw.
I have used Vista before and I have to say that it is by far the worst OS I have ever used (No I haven't used ME) its slow, bloated and DRMed, just because you don't have a problem with it doesn't mean that millions of others (if there are millions using Vista) don't have problems with it.
I don't really think that all this will be better in the long run. While faster GPUs and better cards mean faster games, with all the DRM that Vista has it makes them more expensive and have poorer performance. Linux lacks in games to really test the cards out and getting drivers for ATI/Nvidia is a pain to say the least, and OS X really doesn't support non-apple internal hardware very well so that's not a test. Technology wise in the hardware department we are making leaps and bounds every day, however with the lack of a decent OS to test the new cards on, their true potential will be lost in DRM/Vista/Driver issues.
I bet that this was done for the possible buyout of Yahoo by MS. Even though the US DoJ will surely let it through, the EU will be less certain, by stripping Yahoo down it can make it seem that all MS is buying is the Yahoo search engine and that is going to make it seem less like MS is trying to get an internet monopoly, not to mention that there probably is an exchange of cash somewhere and if MS gets Yahoo they get that cash.
Seems like to me Yahoo really wants those billions MS is offering and will do anything to get EU approval, or this is just coincidence that it happened with the proposed buyout.
My favorite is when you say to kill an application "Windows is checking for a solution for this problem".
To be absolutely clear--the whole REASON why there's such demand for Apple products is because, unlike many tech companies, they DO care about the entire user experience. It makes using the product simple, easy, convenient. Would people buy Apple products if they WEREN'T easy to use, if that end-to-end experience WASN'T designed? It frustrates me to no end to hear people gripe about "user choice and freedom" but at the same time they covet the simplicity and elegance of Apple's design approach, not realizing that their interfaces and hardware are what they are precisely because it doesn't allow you to customize the crap out of it and ultimately break it in a million ways.
I actually think that the reason that Apple gets such a demand isn't that they are so easy to use necessarily its because they are one of the few tech companies that seems to have innovated and has the money to market them. For example, look back a year or two and see if there were any major phones with a touch-screen interface similar to the iPhone and I bet you there were few, then look at those and see how many had Wi-Fi, a camera, browser and YouTube video viewer (or Flash on the browser) and the number would be tiny, then take those who are easily available in the US and that would chances are be non-existent. Why do you think most people on
Taking out choices does not equal easy to use, that is advocating a remote that has one button to make it easier to change channels because you know that a "guide" button just confuses people as is having 2 buttons to change the channel up and down and if you want to change the volume you can buy the iVolume accessory that changes that with one button! If that sounds far-fetched that is exactly what you are saying, that we should make computers more like toys to make them easier to use and take out functionality and then the ideal computer will be a text editor and a browser, nothing more, and no mouse either and while were at it lets take out some keys on the keyboard such as Caps-Lock as those confuse people.
I still don't get though how the iPhone couldn't be unlocked and still be easier to use, unless you say that because a carrier is a choice and those confuse people so we should get rid of all choice! I am not sitting around with my old crappy UNLOCKED Motorola V3x with an indecipherable interface, whining about how the choices presented to me are not the choices I want.
What you think is indecipherable is to someone else, exactly what they want. For example just look at Unix, to some people the power of Unix/Linux is the reason they like it alone, the customizable interfaces, and choice is why they use a *Nix OS, for some people they panic if they can't see a C: drive on their computer and like not making any decisions content to let some company be it MS or Apple take away all choice and will gladly open up their wallets to them.
Or perhaps they don't want customers of their phones to have to wade through a sea of bizarre contracts and options?
That's exactly what I hate about Apple's "experience" is the lack of options, sure to someone a remote with one button makes it easier to switch channels however it would be terribly inefficient and not ideal for everybody. It is always a bad idea to try to make something easier by taking out options it only makes it more complex to get what you want. AT&T has decent enough coverage around the US however they have sky-high prices, other cell providers may only work in a few cities, but if you only travel a bit and they can save you $200 a year it would be foolish to take AT&T just like Apple is suggesting to remove options to make it easier.
Overall, I just want hardware/software that works right, the iPhone is innovative and I would get it but as with all of Apple's products you can't just get the thing you have to suffer with Steve Job's "experience" to get a decent phone and even then you can't use it on the network you want.