Why are you so paranoid about losing network transparency, when I can do that with an X display manager on my Mac, WIndows, etc. that never even had a native X11 server to start with?
A real Bluetooth keyboard, even with the stylish aluminium "Apple tax" is $75 in Australia, so probably half that in the US (I kid). And you're still not dealing with annual anti-virus subscriptions, backups (iCloud),etc.
Sure. And then they need to buy a computer. But if I wasn't such a tech nerd, I could quite easily get away without one for generic normal person home use.
Why is this considered acceptable? Get physical access to my iPhone (for example - Android is probably the same?), good luck getting in.
Sure, with a PC there's a few things that are a lot more difficult to secure (e.g., the boot process) but throwing hands up in the air and giving up because of physical access is a cop out.
X11 no longer does one thing, and it certainly doesn't do it well. It needs to be refactored and split into smaller subsystems built with modern computing requirements in mind.
"merely add a function to the X11 API" is the problem. X11 is ancient, full of bloat that no one uses any more and not designed with core concepts in mind that are desirable in a modern operating system. Really, look up some youtube presentations from the Wayland guys - who actually work on X11 and listen to what they have to say regarding the complexity and brain damage in X11. It works, but sometimes, even the guys who maintain it don't know exactly why.
The X11 display server is a liability and needs to die. It should have been taken out behind the shed and shot about a couple of decades ago. That doesn't mean that "oh noes i will lose my remoting!", that can be implemented in it's replacement via a shim, the same way any X display server works for Windows or Mac.
If you have an appleTV you just redirect the output to the TV when you get home, without even stopping the video. Unless you have a 4k display or other similarly really high res screen, reading is better on an iPad also because the text is just way clearer - you can also take it with you more easily if you need to refer to it when doing a task.
I have a surface pro 3 for work and I was also a big downer on the surface devices as a tablet. as a laptop, if you consider them as that they're great. but there's nothing useful i want to run on it that is in metro. Which means continually running classic windows apps, and the classic UI is just abysmal for touch. Even with a pen...
I think MS has a long way go go to catch up with the functionality provided by Cocoa touch.
What makes you say that? I've been an iphone/mac user since 2007, just upgraded to the iPhone 6 (from a 4s) and I'm still pretty happy with things. TouchID actually works, and rocks for my password manager... the battery life is better than before, voice calls from my mac through it is neat, etc.
Do you actually own one? I have a surface pro 3 (as well as an iPad 4 and iPad mini), and sorry, but it makes a shitty tablet. As an ultra portable laptop, it is great, but I have regular issues with the metro apps falling over and not updating until i reboot the device, it is heavy, it has fans that make quite a bit of noise when it starts working hard, the battery life is way worse, it needs ant-malware, regular windows updates, etc. The Surface Pro 3 is doing well now because it is cannibalising laptop sales not because it's a great tablet experience. It's a small form factor laptop with a touchscreen, and has all the legacy windows baggage that incurs.
Newsflash: you haven't needed iTunes for about 4 years now. The vast majority of illegal content is available in h.264 anyway. People using tablets for stuff an iPad can not do are a tiny, tiny minority.
For many casual computer users, the iPad is enough - they do not need a computer. It does video calls, it does email, it does internet banking. With home kit, it will be able to control things in your house. It can do minor photo cropping and effects, basic shopping lists, inventory, and with a keyboard be used for basic documents.
For many people (Not tech nerds), this is all they want a personal computer for. Thus, the iPad (or any other tablet type device) can replace it. A smartphone is simply too small to be convenient for a lot of those things.
The flip-side to the things it can not do is the lack of malware, great battery life and silent operation.
.... = smart phone with bigger screen and bigger battery. better for reading on, better for browsing on, better for video calls, just less portable. Can slashdot please try harder at the apple trolling?
Maybe it is not possible to offer all of those things, and do R&D at the scale apple does at 10% less?
Why isn't Google doing it? Why not Microsoft? They are both companies of similar size, and only 10 years ago Apple was very, very far away from the size they are today. They succeeded because of one major reason: they care about end user experience. Microsoft? Not so much.
What is this "dictated on how you use it", you speak of?
Seriously, i want to know what you think I am unable to do with my devices - or rather, what tasks you think i am unable to perform with them?
There are a few things I know i can't do with iOS, but I'm keen to see what your concerns are, and if they are anything more than petty "in theory" things.
No. They sell a solution to a problem. You buy an iOS device, and a Mac, and you get the benefits of tight integration between the products to get things done with a minimum of fucking around. Transparent sync between them. Transparent phone backups to either the cloud or your machine. Transparent voice calls from your laptop via your phone. Application state shared between devices. Transparent, out of the box encryption. No one else in the market place offers such things without manual fucking about to get it to work.
That is what Apple sells. And a lot of techies will argue "blah i can do that with my Android + Chrome + Linux box just fine!". Good for you. How many hours did you spend setting it up?
Setting all of that up in the Apple ecosystem is merely logging into your AppleID on all your devices. Job done. Move onto something more important.
The free market does work. What you, and a lot of others don't seem to understand is that things like after-sales support, firmware update, cloud services and tight integration with your other devices are worth real money to people. None of those things would exist if apple was operating on the same margins as their competitors.
25% mark up for an OEM is pretty envious, especially in the electronic market where usual retail markup is less than 10%!
And that argument conveniently sidesteps the fact that apple make no claims to operate on lower profit margins. Running on 10% margin means that the company you buy from can not do as much R&D and can not provide the level of support or absorb things like the Nvidia GPU disaster on the MacBooks from a few years back (offering people replacement/repaired hardware well beyond the warranty period - 4+ years), etc.
You get what you pay for. Buy from a company operating on razor thin margins, don't expect them to do you any favours. Apple support is second to none in both the computer and phone markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you so paranoid about losing network transparency, when I can do that with an X display manager on my Mac, WIndows, etc. that never even had a native X11 server to start with?
... and this will still be preferable to running full fat X11.
Perhaps I should have clarified: attempt to get my data out of it. Of course you can use DFU mode.
You're not going to get any of my data that way, which is what is actually important.
A real Bluetooth keyboard, even with the stylish aluminium "Apple tax" is $75 in Australia, so probably half that in the US (I kid). And you're still not dealing with annual anti-virus subscriptions, backups (iCloud),etc.
Sure. And then they need to buy a computer. But if I wasn't such a tech nerd, I could quite easily get away without one for generic normal person home use.
Why is this considered acceptable? Get physical access to my iPhone (for example - Android is probably the same?), good luck getting in.
Sure, with a PC there's a few things that are a lot more difficult to secure (e.g., the boot process) but throwing hands up in the air and giving up because of physical access is a cop out.
X11 no longer does one thing, and it certainly doesn't do it well. It needs to be refactored and split into smaller subsystems built with modern computing requirements in mind.
"merely add a function to the X11 API" is the problem. X11 is ancient, full of bloat that no one uses any more and not designed with core concepts in mind that are desirable in a modern operating system. Really, look up some youtube presentations from the Wayland guys - who actually work on X11 and listen to what they have to say regarding the complexity and brain damage in X11. It works, but sometimes, even the guys who maintain it don't know exactly why.
The X11 display server is a liability and needs to die. It should have been taken out behind the shed and shot about a couple of decades ago. That doesn't mean that "oh noes i will lose my remoting!", that can be implemented in it's replacement via a shim, the same way any X display server works for Windows or Mac.
If you have an appleTV you just redirect the output to the TV when you get home, without even stopping the video. Unless you have a 4k display or other similarly really high res screen, reading is better on an iPad also because the text is just way clearer - you can also take it with you more easily if you need to refer to it when doing a task.
here here!
I have a surface pro 3 for work and I was also a big downer on the surface devices as a tablet. as a laptop, if you consider them as that they're great. but there's nothing useful i want to run on it that is in metro. Which means continually running classic windows apps, and the classic UI is just abysmal for touch. Even with a pen...
I think MS has a long way go go to catch up with the functionality provided by Cocoa touch.
What makes you say that? I've been an iphone/mac user since 2007, just upgraded to the iPhone 6 (from a 4s) and I'm still pretty happy with things. TouchID actually works, and rocks for my password manager... the battery life is better than before, voice calls from my mac through it is neat, etc.
Do you actually own one? I have a surface pro 3 (as well as an iPad 4 and iPad mini), and sorry, but it makes a shitty tablet. As an ultra portable laptop, it is great, but I have regular issues with the metro apps falling over and not updating until i reboot the device, it is heavy, it has fans that make quite a bit of noise when it starts working hard, the battery life is way worse, it needs ant-malware, regular windows updates, etc. The Surface Pro 3 is doing well now because it is cannibalising laptop sales not because it's a great tablet experience. It's a small form factor laptop with a touchscreen, and has all the legacy windows baggage that incurs.
Newsflash: you haven't needed iTunes for about 4 years now. The vast majority of illegal content is available in h.264 anyway. People using tablets for stuff an iPad can not do are a tiny, tiny minority.
For many casual computer users, the iPad is enough - they do not need a computer. It does video calls, it does email, it does internet banking. With home kit, it will be able to control things in your house. It can do minor photo cropping and effects, basic shopping lists, inventory, and with a keyboard be used for basic documents.
For many people (Not tech nerds), this is all they want a personal computer for. Thus, the iPad (or any other tablet type device) can replace it. A smartphone is simply too small to be convenient for a lot of those things.
The flip-side to the things it can not do is the lack of malware, great battery life and silent operation.
.... = smart phone with bigger screen and bigger battery. better for reading on, better for browsing on, better for video calls, just less portable. Can slashdot please try harder at the apple trolling?
Where do you live? I have had zero issues with Apple support, and I have used it via telephone on a few occasions. I am in Australia.
Maybe it is not possible to offer all of those things, and do R&D at the scale apple does at 10% less?
Why isn't Google doing it? Why not Microsoft? They are both companies of similar size, and only 10 years ago Apple was very, very far away from the size they are today. They succeeded because of one major reason: they care about end user experience. Microsoft? Not so much.
What is this "dictated on how you use it", you speak of?
Seriously, i want to know what you think I am unable to do with my devices - or rather, what tasks you think i am unable to perform with them?
There are a few things I know i can't do with iOS, but I'm keen to see what your concerns are, and if they are anything more than petty "in theory" things.
No. They sell a solution to a problem. You buy an iOS device, and a Mac, and you get the benefits of tight integration between the products to get things done with a minimum of fucking around. Transparent sync between them. Transparent phone backups to either the cloud or your machine. Transparent voice calls from your laptop via your phone. Application state shared between devices. Transparent, out of the box encryption. No one else in the market place offers such things without manual fucking about to get it to work.
That is what Apple sells. And a lot of techies will argue "blah i can do that with my Android + Chrome + Linux box just fine!". Good for you. How many hours did you spend setting it up?
Setting all of that up in the Apple ecosystem is merely logging into your AppleID on all your devices. Job done. Move onto something more important.
Also: I just replaced my iPhone 4s. It lasted me 4 years.
Perhaps you should have a whinge about the workers who are manufacturing things for Samsung, Dell, Lenovo, etc.
The free market does work. What you, and a lot of others don't seem to understand is that things like after-sales support, firmware update, cloud services and tight integration with your other devices are worth real money to people. None of those things would exist if apple was operating on the same margins as their competitors.
25% mark up for an OEM is pretty envious, especially in the electronic market where usual retail markup is less than 10%!
And that argument conveniently sidesteps the fact that apple make no claims to operate on lower profit margins. Running on 10% margin means that the company you buy from can not do as much R&D and can not provide the level of support or absorb things like the Nvidia GPU disaster on the MacBooks from a few years back (offering people replacement/repaired hardware well beyond the warranty period - 4+ years), etc.
You get what you pay for. Buy from a company operating on razor thin margins, don't expect them to do you any favours. Apple support is second to none in both the computer and phone markets.
Actually, they're not. You can claim expenses on your tax return if they were incurred to perform your duties at work.