But has completely lost the point of the old nano.
You mean to be a small flash-based iPod?
It requires more button presses to use and forces the user to look at the screen.
Not really. It has volume buttons, and play/pause and track forward/backward are big and easy to hit even without looking at it. You can also use headphones with remote buttons.
Most people seem to use nano's in places like the gym or the car.
That's a fairly strange assertion that seems cherry-picked to make a point rather than something rational.
Adding a touch screen is a disadvantage in those locations.
I don't see why. iPod touches and iPhones get used in those locations. The only thing that seems like even a mild advantage is the ability to pause or skip a track. Everything else requires looking at the old nanos too.
They would have been better off keeping the old nano form factor and increasing the storage.
I doubt their sales figures agree with you.
Likewise the new iPhone 4 seems more what would happen if HTC designed an iPhone. The typical flare for styling present in apple devices doesn't seem to exist in that phone.
Are you serious? iPhone 4 is the most elegant iPhone (or iPod in general) to date.
It's all retinal display, megapixels, video calling, etc..
Those are bad things?
Which would be fine but the new iPhone isn't that impressive when you compare the specifications with other phones.
Storage, screen resolution (strange you omit this as a specification), CPU, RAM, size, materials, internal sensors... The iPhone either leads the pack in these or is at the very least at the high end of the range. I was greatly surprised by the generally lacking storage space of even the most high-end Android handsets.
Then again I dislike apple products for a host of reasons.
Obviously.
But do wonder if I'm right when some of my friends who are fan boys/girls show dislike for the iPad and Nano.
You mean when you ask them leading questions? Like, "wow, don't you think it sucks that they removed the camera from the nano?" or "who's going to buy an iPad? It's just a big iPhone without the phone, right?!". The iPad especially is one of those things where people who say, "all my fanboy friends think it's lame," completely contradicts reality. What's most likely is they ask you something like, "what do you think of the iPad? Is it worth it?" and based on your response they agree. Apple has sold over ten million iPads so far.
If you've seen the iPod nano in person, you'd know why those things don't make much sense. If you want those features, they make the iPod touch. If you want a highly portable music player, that's the nano (and the shuffle if you are on a budget).
When Apple release a mid-range tower to address the gaping hole in their computer lineup
There is no gaping hole from a consumer perspective. For desktops, the Mac mini is the mid-range tower. The iMac is the high-end PC, and the Mac Pro is the high-end workstation. As a consumer, can you give me one compelling reason to go with what would essentially be an iMac tower? Internal ugradability is not something that most consumers ever take advantage of, except maybe RAM, which can be done just fine on the iMac.
Really, the only two markets that the iMac misses by not being a tower are high-end gamers and hobbyists, and both are fairly niche.
I'll be willing to believe they're ready to disrupt their own product lines.
iPod nano, iPad, iPhone are three examples of them doing exactly this. A lot of people even think the 13" MacBook Pro disrupts the MacBook line to some extent, and now the Air is attacking it as well. The thing is, as long as you're buying something from Apple, they are happy. If an xMac would cannibalize the iMac, Mac mini, or maybe even the Mac Pro market, Apple wouldn't care. What they do care about is not selling a product that will frustrate or otherwise be worse for the average consumer than their current offerings, which is exactly what the xMac would do.
No, that's not what he's saying, but he did describe the type of person you are in his post though, the Slashdot user that sees many of Apple's products' features as "objective negatives". It's no surprise that once you negate all the things that makes Apple's products appealing to the vast majority of people, all you can see remaining is a fashion accessory.
To understand his point, you don't have to have to find those negatives as positives for you, but you do have to realize that they are subjective values and for some people, they are positives. Once you do that, it's easy to understand why so many people buy Apple products, and it's nothing to do with them being mindless sheep tricked by shiny baubles. They just have different values than you, just like your choices are based on your values which are different from theirs.
The hardware isn't special, its pretty much the same as anything else
Glass and aluminum is far from common. The batteries in the current notebooks, magsafe, A4 cpu, the new Air's flash drives, glass trackpads, unibody cases, even something as simple as the integrated graphics Apple uses are far from ordinary.
That's not to say some of these things aren't available or won't available from other sources (although some certainly aren't), or that there aren't other products with similar but different features. My point is simply that their hardware is far from "pretty much the same as anything else". Even their motherboards, while PC compatible, are unique.
Apple's hardware stands out just as much as their software. That's why their products are so compelling, they manage the entire system.
In fact, the main reason they sell hardware is to ensure the software works perfectly.
Not really. You could just as easily reverse hardware and software and end up with the same rationale. The reason they sell hardware is because that's where their profits are, but you really can't separate the two at Apple. The hardware benefits from the software and the software benefits from the hardware. Apple is the last true computer systems company in the consumer sphere. That's why they are doing so much better then all of their hardware competition, and have even surpassed Microsoft in revenue (and before that, market cap).
That's also why it's nice to see HP working on the whole widget with the acquisition of Palm. I don't think they'll be able to beat Apple in the tablet space, but it's definitely a move in the right direction. While it would be very hard for a PC manufacturer to create a compelling OS to go along with it (even if they built it atop Linux or *BSD), but in the tablet realm, Windows is dead and everything is starting fresh.
You don't offer BOGO if you can sell both for full price. You mention that Android is selling well. It would seem that BOGO is working for it and is thus a valid tactic.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.
Yeah? Except that's not true.
I understood him to mean things like having a choke, manual transmissions, having to warm it up, be aware of things like various belts and cables, propensity for overheating, etc. Basically, the car analog of defragging your HD or running AV scans. Cars are much more trouble-free and maintenance-free than decades past. Computers are getting better, but the Mac really shines as a PC that requires the least amount of administrative attention.
I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop
This will never, ever happen. They will bring features back from iOS to Mac OS X, and from Mac OS X to iOS (which are ultimately both the same OS at the core. Namely NeXTstep). What won't happen is Apple bringing irrational features from the Mac to iOS (like overlapping windows) or irrational iOS features to Mac OS X (like no CLI).
It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.
Thinking that the Mac App Store indicates that Mac OS X will become closed like iOS is like saying that bringing Pages to iOS indicates they are going to open that system.
In fact, with each new version of Mac OS X, Apple has made the terminal more useful, not less. If they were to take that away, the outcry would dwarf anything has ever faced.
I'm not bashing Mac users here, just pointing out that (with the exception of two people I know who are IT consultants), all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware.
How is this any different on the PC side of things? Do you think most PC owners could even tell you what brand of CPU they have, let alone the line or speed? Do you think they know what graphics chips they have? What the resolution of their displays are? What all the different audio ports on the back are for?
You are bashing Mac users by pretending like they are stupid compared to their oh-so magnificent PC brethren. But the simple fact is most people know very little about their computers, and truthfully they really shouldn't have to.
Please tell me you aren't trying to argue that integrated graphics, a Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of RAM in a cheap plastic case with soldered-in battery for $1000 is anything approaching a good deal.
You mean the best integrated graphics available, a Core2Duo (instead of the shitty CPUs in low-end PCs, the only reason they aren't Core i5's is that Intel screwed Nvidia), a state of the art unibody plastic case, a 10 hour battery that is designed to far outlast standard batteries in terms of load cycles, an LED display, glass multitouch trackpad, in a one inch case, just to name a few?
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak.
External storage. Hard drives are now a bit faster in practice than FW800, and a *lot* faster than USB2. Now, throw in multiple drives for a music or video setup. Which brings me to...
Music and video. FireWire is wildly successful here. As hard drives get faster (and SSDs begin to take hold), Light Peak can potentially replace FireWire, allowing for even *more* simultaneous HD video streams, etc.
(If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
WiFi, USB, FireWire, magsafe, unibody cases, Face Time, iPhone, glass trackpads, iPod, the batteries in the current MacBooks, Bonjour, AirPrint, multitouch... The list of things Apple directly invented, co-invented, or were early adopters of is extensive. The notion that Apple doesn't innovate is way out there. It's extremely difficult to think of a company that innovates more than Apple!
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.
FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).
All of those changes you are bitching about (aside from the method naming scheme) are in order to stay compatible with pure C. And they are fairly silly complaints. You learn the syntax of a language, and as far as such things go, Objective-C is pretty easy to grasp.
On the topic of method names, you can call them whatever you want. Cocoa just happens to have a specific style which is really easy to understand. It's almost self-documenting in its simplicity.
No, it's not particularly difficult to understand, but that's not my point; Objective-C's garbage collection only collects objects whose reference counts are zero.
Um... This is not true. If you use garbage collection, you don't have to retain/release.
It's not that, it's that nothing in Objective-C even works with char*s, other than the one init method on NSString. Want to display a char* in your UI? Hope you don't mind converting it to NSString first!
You're confusing Cocoa and Objective-C.
Cocoa might be a quality framework, I don't know; Xcode is such a failure of an IDE that I'll never be able to tell, and I can't force myself to endure Objective-C long enough to try building an application with Cocoa entirely in code.
Surely you're just trolling here. Xcode isn't even remotely a "failure of an IDE". There are definitely other IDEs out there that some people like better than Xcode, but it's a damn fine IDE. The current beta is even better, albeit too buggy at this time.
No, it isn't. It's like saying we can't know what goes on inside black holes because we don't know how they work.
You're confusing the model with the phenomenon. We can know some things about the inside of a black hole even if our models can't describe them.
Similarly, with the big bang, we can't model the universe backwards through it, but if there's a pattern or structure or otherwise some sort of afterimage in it, we can literally observe through to before the big bang.
fact that the physics we know simply do not work to carry the idea through the singularity.
Exactly. We can't just run our models in reverse, because our models break down. But we can observe past our models. Using your "softball in mid pitch" example, we can't use Newton's laws to tell us how the ball got from the ump to the pitcher's mound, but we can watch video footage and learn from that.
When someone says "I have a perpetual motion machine", we are hugely skeptical; this is for one reason only, and that is because such a thing does not work within our knowledge of physics.
There's a huge difference here. Our understanding of how the universe presently works makes perpetual motion impossible. On the other hand, something existing before the universe isn't impossible, and seeing through the big bang is not impossible. The only thing that's impossible is to rewind our current mathematical models backwards through the big bang with anything remotely approaching confidence.
a modicum of reserve is called for in accepting the idea as anything more than wildly speculative -- at least as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, a modicum. But objective observation should never be dismissed out of hand. What's deemed "impossible" by science is always based, ultimately, on theory, and reality always trumps theory. That's at the very heart of all science. When you let theory trump reality, that's religion.
It will be interesting to see if Apple respond to this and how. My feeling is that they might try and protect their assets and restrict developers' options.
They aren't going to do a damned thing. Not only is there nothing effective for them to do, they have no reason to. Slashdot's anti-Apple paranoia is not an actual reason.
I haven't really thught this through
Clearly.
but I just can't see Apple letting people develop apps for iPads and then recycling ostensibly the same code for some Sony gadget. It is not in their nature.
You do not understand Apple's nature. They want to control the quality of their own products. They generally don't give a shit about other's products and in fact host plenty of open source projects that help the competition.
Objective-C has the most unreadable and unintuitive syntax of any language I've ever worked with
What are you talking about? The example you call insightful is very readable. As for intuitiveness, I don't think any language is truly intuitive, but once you learn it, it's very easy to understand, just like any other language. I suspect you are more of a "get off my lawn" type who thinks things should be done the way you learned them and anything different is to be feared.
to say nothing of its memory management "best practices". What good do reference-counted pointers do me if I still have to manually release everything to avoid memory leaks?
renew/release isn't very difficult to understand, but if you can't keep up, Objective-C has garbage collection.
What good does its ability to mix C in with the Objective-C code do me when just mixing their two string types (NSString and char*) is a good way to make my program misbehave?
Objects != string pointers, and that's a problem for you? Seems like a fairly basic idea to grasp.
I can't help but conclude the language was built by a couple of guys saying "wouldn't it be cool if..."
You're referring to C (and that's not meant as a knock against C). Objective-C is a pretty awesome language, especially when coupled with quality frameworks like Cocoa.
I'm baffled how the summary can claim this is "probably for the better".
There is no shortage of developers who enjoy Objective-C and have had no trouble picking it up. Obj-C + Cocoa is very easy to develop with and leads to results very quickly and easily. This is a very smart move by Sony, and has potentially interesting implications for Linux in general. GNUstep is a pretty neat project.
That's like saying it's absurd to study black holes because we can't fully model them. We don't have to, because viewing them gives us enough information to understand quite a bit about them and use that to adjust our models. For the big bang, we can't tell mathematically what happened before it, but observation can yield data to form more seemingly accurate models.
You're right that there are similar apps in most likely every category, but the best apps are on the App Store, and only some of them make it to the Android Market. All you have to do is look at the top ten in any category to see what I'm talking about.
It's similar to Linux vs Windows and Mac, where The latter have Photoshop and the former has the GIMP. Oh, and the latter have the GIMP too, it's just that they also have the best programs in addition to the lowest common denominators. Same for MS Office vs OpenOffice.org, etc.
err...if you have 50,000 music streaming apps for ipad, and 500 music streaming apps for android, but the top 10 work about the same......then guess what. They're equal. The "music streaming" role has been satisfied. You're not going to be using 50,000 of them at once, anyway.
That's why I said that streaming music apps is the one category where Android is fairly close. This is because streaming audio apps are dead simple to write, and are generally free.
And no, your example numbers of 500 and 50,000 are not equal. You're right that you're not going to be using all 50,000 at once, but if you want to use one of the 50,000 that aren't in the 500, what are you supposed to do?
People like to rip on the App Store because of fart apps (as though they make up the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of apps or something), but in terms of top quality apps, the App Store has the Android Market beat hands down.
I think you just made an, um, bad analogy. The Android market has tons of productivity apps. It has tons of shopping apps. It has tons of fitness apps. The only kinds of apps it's seriously lacking in right now are games. And it actually does have a lot of games, it's just missing a lot of the high profile games that have become popular on iPhone.
The way you described games is pretty much applicable to the other types of apps you listed. I would be amazed if even half of the non-game apps on my iPad or iPhone are available for Android. The only category that I'm aware of where Android is pretty close to iOS in this regard is music streaming apps, and even there it lags, but it at least has most of the main ones that come to mind.
It's funny you claim I'm "hand waving" them away, as you are conveniently "hand waving" them into existence. If you had actual examples in mind, it's suspicious that you wouldn't mention at least one or two.
The only thing that even remotely comes to mind is Oracle suing Google for their proprietary Dalvik VM. This seems pretty similar to when Sun sued MS for their proprietary Java VM, so it's not like Oracle is taking things in a turn for the worst with regards to their Sun acquisition.
Really, as far as I can tell, it's all pretty much "oh no! we're afraid of what Oracle might do!" and nothing more.
Is there still a Java Community left to approve this? I thought Oracle had managed to alienate them all over the past 6 months.
All the fuss I've seen was more along the lines of various "Java Community" members crying "oh no, Oracle!" and making a fuss rather than Oracle actually doing something worthy of such a response.
Now you get people on Slashdot asking strange questions like whether it's a bad time to learn Java, and someone else freaking out because of the Oracle logo on OpenOffice. It's all rather odd.
Slashdot Mirror
But has completely lost the point of the old nano.
You mean to be a small flash-based iPod?
It requires more button presses to use and forces the user to look at the screen.
Not really. It has volume buttons, and play/pause and track forward/backward are big and easy to hit even without looking at it. You can also use headphones with remote buttons.
Most people seem to use nano's in places like the gym or the car.
That's a fairly strange assertion that seems cherry-picked to make a point rather than something rational.
Adding a touch screen is a disadvantage in those locations.
I don't see why. iPod touches and iPhones get used in those locations. The only thing that seems like even a mild advantage is the ability to pause or skip a track. Everything else requires looking at the old nanos too.
They would have been better off keeping the old nano form factor and increasing the storage.
I doubt their sales figures agree with you.
Likewise the new iPhone 4 seems more what would happen if HTC designed an iPhone. The typical flare for styling present in apple devices doesn't seem to exist in that phone.
Are you serious? iPhone 4 is the most elegant iPhone (or iPod in general) to date.
It's all retinal display, megapixels, video calling, etc..
Those are bad things?
Which would be fine but the new iPhone isn't that impressive when you compare the specifications with other phones.
Storage, screen resolution (strange you omit this as a specification), CPU, RAM, size, materials, internal sensors... The iPhone either leads the pack in these or is at the very least at the high end of the range. I was greatly surprised by the generally lacking storage space of even the most high-end Android handsets.
Then again I dislike apple products for a host of reasons.
Obviously.
But do wonder if I'm right when some of my friends who are fan boys/girls show dislike for the iPad and Nano.
You mean when you ask them leading questions? Like, "wow, don't you think it sucks that they removed the camera from the nano?" or "who's going to buy an iPad? It's just a big iPhone without the phone, right?!". The iPad especially is one of those things where people who say, "all my fanboy friends think it's lame," completely contradicts reality. What's most likely is they ask you something like, "what do you think of the iPad? Is it worth it?" and based on your response they agree. Apple has sold over ten million iPads so far.
Such incoherence at this stage of the weekend is a real cause for concern.
He was just continuing the incoherence before him.
If you've seen the iPod nano in person, you'd know why those things don't make much sense. If you want those features, they make the iPod touch. If you want a highly portable music player, that's the nano (and the shuffle if you are on a budget).
When Apple release a mid-range tower to address the gaping hole in their computer lineup
There is no gaping hole from a consumer perspective. For desktops, the Mac mini is the mid-range tower. The iMac is the high-end PC, and the Mac Pro is the high-end workstation. As a consumer, can you give me one compelling reason to go with what would essentially be an iMac tower? Internal ugradability is not something that most consumers ever take advantage of, except maybe RAM, which can be done just fine on the iMac.
Really, the only two markets that the iMac misses by not being a tower are high-end gamers and hobbyists, and both are fairly niche.
I'll be willing to believe they're ready to disrupt their own product lines.
iPod nano, iPad, iPhone are three examples of them doing exactly this. A lot of people even think the 13" MacBook Pro disrupts the MacBook line to some extent, and now the Air is attacking it as well. The thing is, as long as you're buying something from Apple, they are happy. If an xMac would cannibalize the iMac, Mac mini, or maybe even the Mac Pro market, Apple wouldn't care. What they do care about is not selling a product that will frustrate or otherwise be worse for the average consumer than their current offerings, which is exactly what the xMac would do.
No, that's not what he's saying, but he did describe the type of person you are in his post though, the Slashdot user that sees many of Apple's products' features as "objective negatives". It's no surprise that once you negate all the things that makes Apple's products appealing to the vast majority of people, all you can see remaining is a fashion accessory.
To understand his point, you don't have to have to find those negatives as positives for you, but you do have to realize that they are subjective values and for some people, they are positives. Once you do that, it's easy to understand why so many people buy Apple products, and it's nothing to do with them being mindless sheep tricked by shiny baubles. They just have different values than you, just like your choices are based on your values which are different from theirs.
The hardware isn't special, its pretty much the same as anything else
Glass and aluminum is far from common. The batteries in the current notebooks, magsafe, A4 cpu, the new Air's flash drives, glass trackpads, unibody cases, even something as simple as the integrated graphics Apple uses are far from ordinary.
That's not to say some of these things aren't available or won't available from other sources (although some certainly aren't), or that there aren't other products with similar but different features. My point is simply that their hardware is far from "pretty much the same as anything else". Even their motherboards, while PC compatible, are unique.
Apple's hardware stands out just as much as their software. That's why their products are so compelling, they manage the entire system.
In fact, the main reason they sell hardware is to ensure the software works perfectly.
Not really. You could just as easily reverse hardware and software and end up with the same rationale. The reason they sell hardware is because that's where their profits are, but you really can't separate the two at Apple. The hardware benefits from the software and the software benefits from the hardware. Apple is the last true computer systems company in the consumer sphere. That's why they are doing so much better then all of their hardware competition, and have even surpassed Microsoft in revenue (and before that, market cap).
That's also why it's nice to see HP working on the whole widget with the acquisition of Palm. I don't think they'll be able to beat Apple in the tablet space, but it's definitely a move in the right direction. While it would be very hard for a PC manufacturer to create a compelling OS to go along with it (even if they built it atop Linux or *BSD), but in the tablet realm, Windows is dead and everything is starting fresh.
Fragmentation affects the creation and distribution of the patch.
Posting AC then modding your posts Insightful doesn't make them so.
You don't offer BOGO if you can sell both for full price. You mention that Android is selling well. It would seem that BOGO is working for it and is thus a valid tactic.
I couldn't write any response to your post that didn't come off sounding like I was trolling
The preface to your post was spot-on.
I recently happened upon an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1950s. It dealt extensively with automotive topics. It struck me how much people had to know about their car's inner workings to properly maintain it.
Yeah? Except that's not true.
I understood him to mean things like having a choke, manual transmissions, having to warm it up, be aware of things like various belts and cables, propensity for overheating, etc. Basically, the car analog of defragging your HD or running AV scans. Cars are much more trouble-free and maintenance-free than decades past. Computers are getting better, but the Mac really shines as a PC that requires the least amount of administrative attention.
I only wonder, on a tangent, if Apple will eventually replace all of what we know of OSX (incl *nix CLI) with some form of iOS without the *nix for the desktop
This will never, ever happen. They will bring features back from iOS to Mac OS X, and from Mac OS X to iOS (which are ultimately both the same OS at the core. Namely NeXTstep). What won't happen is Apple bringing irrational features from the Mac to iOS (like overlapping windows) or irrational iOS features to Mac OS X (like no CLI).
It seems to be directed this way with the emphasis and plans for the App Store for desktop.
Thinking that the Mac App Store indicates that Mac OS X will become closed like iOS is like saying that bringing Pages to iOS indicates they are going to open that system.
In fact, with each new version of Mac OS X, Apple has made the terminal more useful, not less. If they were to take that away, the outcry would dwarf anything has ever faced.
I'm not bashing Mac users here, just pointing out that (with the exception of two people I know who are IT consultants), all the Mac users I know have little understanding about hardware, nor do they care to know about the hardware.
How is this any different on the PC side of things? Do you think most PC owners could even tell you what brand of CPU they have, let alone the line or speed? Do you think they know what graphics chips they have? What the resolution of their displays are? What all the different audio ports on the back are for?
You are bashing Mac users by pretending like they are stupid compared to their oh-so magnificent PC brethren. But the simple fact is most people know very little about their computers, and truthfully they really shouldn't have to.
Please tell me you aren't trying to argue that integrated graphics, a Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of RAM in a cheap plastic case with soldered-in battery for $1000 is anything approaching a good deal.
You mean the best integrated graphics available, a Core2Duo (instead of the shitty CPUs in low-end PCs, the only reason they aren't Core i5's is that Intel screwed Nvidia), a state of the art unibody plastic case, a 10 hour battery that is designed to far outlast standard batteries in terms of load cycles, an LED display, glass multitouch trackpad, in a one inch case, just to name a few?
The supreme irony is that Apple doesn't actually make anything which will be well suited to utilize Light Peak.
External storage. Hard drives are now a bit faster in practice than FW800, and a *lot* faster than USB2. Now, throw in multiple drives for a music or video setup. Which brings me to...
Music and video. FireWire is wildly successful here. As hard drives get faster (and SSDs begin to take hold), Light Peak can potentially replace FireWire, allowing for even *more* simultaneous HD video streams, etc.
(If anyone wonders why it might be said that Apple doesn't innovate, this is one good example: take something awesome and wrap it in pretty white plastic, doing nothing new with it.)
WiFi, USB, FireWire, magsafe, unibody cases, Face Time, iPhone, glass trackpads, iPod, the batteries in the current MacBooks, Bonjour, AirPrint, multitouch... The list of things Apple directly invented, co-invented, or were early adopters of is extensive. The notion that Apple doesn't innovate is way out there. It's extremely difficult to think of a company that innovates more than Apple!
Talk about a disappointing "gimmick". Hopefully it'll reach mainstream within the next year or two, or it'll likely see an unfortunate demise similar to Firewire (low adoption rates, fringe technology), making Infiniband look all the more attractive.
FireWire has been subject to demise? When exactly did this happen? It's not the dominant external bus, but it's very much alive and well. Apple had nothing to do with it's status of not being the dominant bus, the fact that it's so expensive is why (and that's also why it's such a great bus and is far from dead).
None of these changes from C are for the better.
All of those changes you are bitching about (aside from the method naming scheme) are in order to stay compatible with pure C. And they are fairly silly complaints. You learn the syntax of a language, and as far as such things go, Objective-C is pretty easy to grasp.
On the topic of method names, you can call them whatever you want. Cocoa just happens to have a specific style which is really easy to understand. It's almost self-documenting in its simplicity.
No, it's not particularly difficult to understand, but that's not my point; Objective-C's garbage collection only collects objects whose reference counts are zero.
Um... This is not true. If you use garbage collection, you don't have to retain/release.
It's not that, it's that nothing in Objective-C even works with char*s, other than the one init method on NSString. Want to display a char* in your UI? Hope you don't mind converting it to NSString first!
You're confusing Cocoa and Objective-C.
Cocoa might be a quality framework, I don't know; Xcode is such a failure of an IDE that I'll never be able to tell, and I can't force myself to endure Objective-C long enough to try building an application with Cocoa entirely in code.
Surely you're just trolling here. Xcode isn't even remotely a "failure of an IDE". There are definitely other IDEs out there that some people like better than Xcode, but it's a damn fine IDE. The current beta is even better, albeit too buggy at this time.
No, it isn't. It's like saying we can't know what goes on inside black holes because we don't know how they work.
You're confusing the model with the phenomenon. We can know some things about the inside of a black hole even if our models can't describe them.
Similarly, with the big bang, we can't model the universe backwards through it, but if there's a pattern or structure or otherwise some sort of afterimage in it, we can literally observe through to before the big bang.
fact that the physics we know simply do not work to carry the idea through the singularity.
Exactly. We can't just run our models in reverse, because our models break down. But we can observe past our models. Using your "softball in mid pitch" example, we can't use Newton's laws to tell us how the ball got from the ump to the pitcher's mound, but we can watch video footage and learn from that.
When someone says "I have a perpetual motion machine", we are hugely skeptical; this is for one reason only, and that is because such a thing does not work within our knowledge of physics.
There's a huge difference here. Our understanding of how the universe presently works makes perpetual motion impossible. On the other hand, something existing before the universe isn't impossible, and seeing through the big bang is not impossible. The only thing that's impossible is to rewind our current mathematical models backwards through the big bang with anything remotely approaching confidence.
a modicum of reserve is called for in accepting the idea as anything more than wildly speculative -- at least as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, a modicum. But objective observation should never be dismissed out of hand. What's deemed "impossible" by science is always based, ultimately, on theory, and reality always trumps theory. That's at the very heart of all science. When you let theory trump reality, that's religion.
It will be interesting to see if Apple respond to this and how. My feeling is that they might try and protect their assets and restrict developers' options.
They aren't going to do a damned thing. Not only is there nothing effective for them to do, they have no reason to. Slashdot's anti-Apple paranoia is not an actual reason.
I haven't really thught this through
Clearly.
but I just can't see Apple letting people develop apps for iPads and then recycling ostensibly the same code for some Sony gadget. It is not in their nature.
You do not understand Apple's nature. They want to control the quality of their own products. They generally don't give a shit about other's products and in fact host plenty of open source projects that help the competition.
Funny? More like Insightful :(
Objective-C has the most unreadable and unintuitive syntax of any language I've ever worked with
What are you talking about? The example you call insightful is very readable. As for intuitiveness, I don't think any language is truly intuitive, but once you learn it, it's very easy to understand, just like any other language. I suspect you are more of a "get off my lawn" type who thinks things should be done the way you learned them and anything different is to be feared.
to say nothing of its memory management "best practices". What good do reference-counted pointers do me if I still have to manually release everything to avoid memory leaks?
renew/release isn't very difficult to understand, but if you can't keep up, Objective-C has garbage collection.
What good does its ability to mix C in with the Objective-C code do me when just mixing their two string types (NSString and char*) is a good way to make my program misbehave?
Objects != string pointers, and that's a problem for you? Seems like a fairly basic idea to grasp.
I can't help but conclude the language was built by a couple of guys saying "wouldn't it be cool if..."
You're referring to C (and that's not meant as a knock against C). Objective-C is a pretty awesome language, especially when coupled with quality frameworks like Cocoa.
I'm baffled how the summary can claim this is "probably for the better".
There is no shortage of developers who enjoy Objective-C and have had no trouble picking it up. Obj-C + Cocoa is very easy to develop with and leads to results very quickly and easily. This is a very smart move by Sony, and has potentially interesting implications for Linux in general. GNUstep is a pretty neat project.
That's like saying it's absurd to study black holes because we can't fully model them. We don't have to, because viewing them gives us enough information to understand quite a bit about them and use that to adjust our models. For the big bang, we can't tell mathematically what happened before it, but observation can yield data to form more seemingly accurate models.
All done through science, no religion required.
You're right that there are similar apps in most likely every category, but the best apps are on the App Store, and only some of them make it to the Android Market. All you have to do is look at the top ten in any category to see what I'm talking about.
It's similar to Linux vs Windows and Mac, where The latter have Photoshop and the former has the GIMP. Oh, and the latter have the GIMP too, it's just that they also have the best programs in addition to the lowest common denominators. Same for MS Office vs OpenOffice.org, etc.
err...if you have 50,000 music streaming apps for ipad, and 500 music streaming apps for android, but the top 10 work about the same... ...then guess what. They're equal. The "music streaming" role has been satisfied. You're not going to be using 50,000 of them at once, anyway.
That's why I said that streaming music apps is the one category where Android is fairly close. This is because streaming audio apps are dead simple to write, and are generally free.
And no, your example numbers of 500 and 50,000 are not equal. You're right that you're not going to be using all 50,000 at once, but if you want to use one of the 50,000 that aren't in the 500, what are you supposed to do?
People like to rip on the App Store because of fart apps (as though they make up the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of apps or something), but in terms of top quality apps, the App Store has the Android Market beat hands down.
I think you just made an, um, bad analogy. The Android market has tons of productivity apps. It has tons of shopping apps. It has tons of fitness apps. The only kinds of apps it's seriously lacking in right now are games. And it actually does have a lot of games, it's just missing a lot of the high profile games that have become popular on iPhone.
The way you described games is pretty much applicable to the other types of apps you listed. I would be amazed if even half of the non-game apps on my iPad or iPhone are available for Android. The only category that I'm aware of where Android is pretty close to iOS in this regard is music streaming apps, and even there it lags, but it at least has most of the main ones that come to mind.
It's funny you claim I'm "hand waving" them away, as you are conveniently "hand waving" them into existence. If you had actual examples in mind, it's suspicious that you wouldn't mention at least one or two.
The only thing that even remotely comes to mind is Oracle suing Google for their proprietary Dalvik VM. This seems pretty similar to when Sun sued MS for their proprietary Java VM, so it's not like Oracle is taking things in a turn for the worst with regards to their Sun acquisition.
Really, as far as I can tell, it's all pretty much "oh no! we're afraid of what Oracle might do!" and nothing more.
Is there still a Java Community left to approve this? I thought Oracle had managed to alienate them all over the past 6 months.
All the fuss I've seen was more along the lines of various "Java Community" members crying "oh no, Oracle!" and making a fuss rather than Oracle actually doing something worthy of such a response.
Now you get people on Slashdot asking strange questions like whether it's a bad time to learn Java, and someone else freaking out because of the Oracle logo on OpenOffice. It's all rather odd.